The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames Read Online Free

Wilson, a young man from Oklahoma, were assigned to a supply company responsible for keeping track of spare parts for the transmitters and receivers.
    Ames had first met Wilson in a signal-supply classroom at an army base in Georgia. The classroom instructor announced that Private Wilson would be the squad leader for their group. Ames promptly shot his arm in the air; he wanted to know why Wilson had been chosen. The instructor replied that Wilson had scored the highest on the aptitude test. Afterward, the instructor called Wilson and Ames to the front of the class and explained that Ames had scored only two points lower. Ames was clearly ambitious, but he and Wilson nevertheless became close friends.
    At Kagnew, they lived in a second-story squad room with ten other soldiers. Ames and Wilson had facing lower bunks. “Ames was closer to me than either of my two brothers,” Wilson later said. Their daily routine was spent entirely together. They showered at the same time, walked together to the mess hall, and worked at their desks facing each other. Ames, the city boy from Philadelphia, enjoyed reading thenewspapers Wilson received through the mail from his small town in Oklahoma. Their work was not onerous. And life in the barracks was simple and easy. Tending each squad of a dozen men were two Eritrean “houseboys” who made the beds and cleaned up after the Americans and shined their boots.
    Kagnew was equipped like a summer camp in the midst of Eritrea’s dirt-poor villages. It boasted a chapel, commissary, snack bar, and post office. The mess hall—“Mom’s Place”—served mediocre food, but when the men were off-duty they could buy ten-cent beers at the Oasis Club. The 320-seat Roosevelt Theater showed decent movies. There was a bowling alley, a softball field, and an indoor pool. The men sometimes took day trips down to the Red Sea beaches. Ames was once again the star of the basketball court, winning a trophy in the autumn of 1957 for being the post’s leading scorer. “Ames played every game like it was the most important thing going,” recalled Wilson. Ames may have had the opportunity to visit Arabia a second time because Kagnew’s basketball teams were occasionally invited to compete with teams at the U.S. air base at Dhahran.
    The social life at Kagnew was intense. The young, crew-cut men worked long shifts—they called them “tricks”—and they played hard as well. But while others spent their off-duty hours in Asmara’s bars drinking beer and paying for the services of local women, Ames abstained. Wilson remembers how Bob preferred to stay in the barracks, reading books or working out in the gym. “Ames spent a lot of time in the gym working out with weights,” Wilson recalled. He was never much of a drinker. Neither did he play poker like many of the men.
    Bob Ames was a serious young man—far more serious than most army recruits. Kagnew Station changed him in many ways. He met a Catholic priest, probably one of the army chaplains, who persuaded him to convert to Catholicism. Back home in Roxborough, Bob’s sister Nancy remembered being told by their mother that her brother had become a Catholic. Nancy was surprised—though later in life both she and her sister, Pat, also converted. The Church was in the family’s ancestry. Bob knew that his mother, Helen, had been raiseda Catholic—and he knew that his Italian-born grandfather, Vittorio Amoroso, and his Irish-born grandmother, Agnes Egan, had been Catholics. So it was in the blood. But the Church also suited Ames’s personality—and it suited his future profession.
    During his occasional trips to downtown Asmara, Ames made a point of visiting St. Joseph’s Cathedral, an ornate Romanesque-style church built by the Italians in 1922. Wilson would wait for him while he spent a few minutes in the confessional booth.
    Many of the men at Kagnew Station worked out of uniform. It was a very informal army post. But Ames was different. “Ames