The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames
Kai Bird, 2014
Crown Publishing
448 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780307889751
Summary
The Good Spy is Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Kai Bird’s compelling portrait of the remarkable life and death of one of the most important operatives in CIA history—a man who, had he lived, might have helped heal the rift between Arabs and the West.
On April 18, 1983, a bomb exploded outside the American Embassy in Beirut, killing 63 people. The attack was a geopolitical turning point. It marked the beginning of Hezbollah as a political force, but even more important, it eliminated America’s most influential and effective intelligence officer in the Middle East – CIA operative Robert Ames.
What set Ames apart from his peers was his extraordinary ability to form deep, meaningful connections with key Arab intelligence figures. Some operatives relied on threats and subterfuge, but Ames worked by building friendships and emphasizing shared values—never more notably than with Yasir Arafat’s charismatic intelligence chief and heir apparent Ali Hassan Salameh (aka “The Red Prince”). Ames’ deepening relationship with Salameh held the potential for a lasting peace. Within a few years, though, both men were killed by assassins, and America’s relations with the Arab world began heading down a path that culminated in 9/11, the War on Terror, and the current fog of mistrust.
Bird, who as a child lived in the Beirut Embassy and knew Ames as a neighbor when he was twelve years old, spent years researching The Good Spy. Not only does the book draw on hours of interviews with Ames’ widow, and quotes from hundreds of Ames’ private letters, it’s woven from interviews with scores of current and former American, Israeli, and Palestinian intelligence officers as well as other players in the Middle East “Great Game.”
What emerges is a masterpiece-level narrative of the making of a CIA officer, a uniquely insightful history of twentieth-century conflict in the Middle East, and an absorbing hour-by-hour account of the Beirut Embassy bombing. Even more impressive, Bird draws on his reporter’s skills to deliver a full dossier on the bombers and expose the shocking truth of where the attack’s mastermind resides today. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—1951
• Where— Eugene, Oregon, USA
• Education—B.A., Carleton College; M.S., Northwestern University
• Awards—Pulitizer Prize; National Book Critics Circle Award
• Currently—lives in Miami Beach, Florida and/or Lima, Peru
Kai Bird is an American Pulitzer Prize-winning author and columnist, best known for his biographies of political figures.
Kai Bird was born in Eugene, Oregon. His father was a U.S. Foreign Service officer, and he spent his childhood in Jerusalem, Beirut, Dhahran, Cairo and Mumbai. He finished high school in 1969 at Kodaikanal International School in Tamil Nadu, South India. He received his BA from Carleton College in 1973 and a M.S. in Journalism from Northwestern University in 1975. Bird is married to Susan Goldmark, country director of the World Bank. They have a son.
Literary career
After graduation from Carleton, Bird received a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship, which enables students to do a year of independent study outside the United States. He used the fellowship to do a photojournalism project in Yemen. Two years later, Goldmark was also awarded a Watson fellowship and the two of them spent 15 months as freelance journalists traveling through Bangladesh, India, and Pakistan. "We filed weekly stories with papers like the Christian Science Monitor and Hong Kong’s Far Eastern Economic Review," Bird says. "We hardly made any money, but we enjoyed what we were doing." Bird was an associate editor of The Nation magazine from 1978–82 and then a Nation columnist.
Published works
Bird's biographical works include The Color of Truth: McGeorge Bundy and William Bundy, Brothers in Arms (1998), The Chairman: John J. McCloy and the Making of the American Establishment (1992) and Hiroshima's Shadow: Writings on the Denial of History and the Smithsonian Controversy (1998), which he co-edited with Lawrence Lifschultz.
In April 2010, his Crossing Mandelbaum Gate: Coming of Age Between the Arabs and Israelis, 1956–1978, was released by Scribner. It is a meld of memoir and history, fusing his early life in the Arab world with an account of the American experience in the Middle East.
The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames was released in 2014.
Recognition
Bird is a recipient of a Thomas J. Watson Fellowship (1973), an Alicia Patterson Journalism Fellowship (1981), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1982), and a John D. & Catherine T. MacArthur Grant for Research and Writing (1993–95). In 2001-2002 he was a Fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars. Bird and co-author Martin J. Sherwin won the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in biography for American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005). He and Sherwin also won the 2005 National Book Critics Circle Award for their biography of Oppenheimer. In 2008, they also won the Duff Cooper Prize.
Crossing Mandelbaum Gate was a finalist for the 2010 National Book Critics Circle Award in the "Autobiography" category. (From Wikipedia. Retrieved 5/12/14.)
Book Reviews
(Starred review.) [E]xciting...Bird recreates the life of C.I.A. superspy Robert Ames, an operative with a skill for appreciating the turns and twists of Mideast politics.... Bird’s meticulous account of Ames’s career amid an ongoing Mideast climate of caution and suspicion is one of the best books on American intelligence community.
Publishers Weekly
(Starred review.) This is a moving biography within a balanced presentation of the complex diplomacy over the Palestinian quest for statehood and the Israeli need for security, complicated by a disintegrating Lebanon and a revolutionary Iran. Bird's view of a CIA committed to analysis and policy development contrasts with the agency depicted in Hugh Wilford's recent America's Great Game. —Elizabeth Hayford, formerly with Associated Coll. of the Midwest, Evanston, IL
Library Journal
A poignant tribute to a CIA Middle East operative who helped get the Palestinians and Israelis to talk to each other—and died for it. Accomplished, wide-ranging author Bird...has great sympathy for Philadelphia native Robert Ames (1934-1983).... A low-key, respectful life of a decent American officer whose quietly significant work helped lead to the Oslo Accords.
Kirkus Reviews
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