Why the Spy Who Might Have Forged Peace in the Middle East was Assassinated
Thursday, August 21, 2014
Play
00:00 / 00:00
Bob Ames in Saudi Arabia, Christmas 1964, with his
daughters, Catherine and Adrienne. Ames was becoming fluent in Arabic.
“He was one of the best spooks I ever met,” recalled a colleague.
(Courtesy of Nancy Ames Hanlon/Courtesy of the publisher)
On April 18, 1983, a bomb exploded outside the American
Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people, including CIA operative Robert
Ames. The attack was a geopolitical turning point that America’s
relations with the Arab world. Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird
talks about Ames’s work in the Middle East and how his friendships and
emphasis on shared values with Yasir Arafat’s intelligence chief Ali
Hassan Salameh (“The Red Prince”), who was also killed by an assassin,
made Ames the most influential and effective intelligence officer in the
Middle East. Bird’s biography The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames
is a portrait of the remarkable life and death of one of the most
important operatives in CIA history who, had he lived, might have helped
heal the rift between Arabs and the West.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Please leave a comment-- or suggestions, particularly of topics and places you'd like to see covered