Lansdale was hardly the first or last covert operative to run up against this prejudice. So did, among others, Robert Ames, the CIA’s premier Middle East case officer in the 1970s and 1980s. Ames established an invaluable friendship with the Palestine Liberation Organization’s Ali Hassan Salameh, who served as an informal American conduit to the PLO leader Yasser Arafat. Yet, as the historian Kai Bird has shown, CIA colleagues repeatedly sabotaged the relationship and almost drove Salameh away by demanding, over Ames’s protests, that he sign a contract to become a controlled agency
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