Kai Bird has chosen a clever title for this book. Robert Ames, a cia agent killed in the 1983 bombing of the American embassy in Beirut, was both morally sound, as a faithful husband and doting father of six, and, according to Mr Bird's impressive sources, very good at his job. The job took him first to a two-man cia posting in Dhahran, in Saudi Arabia (where the 11-year-old Mr Bird, whose father was a non-cia foreign-service officer, lived across the street), and finally to a senior role in Washington, dc. Having spent years living both in the Arab world and Iran, by the time of his last fateful visit to Beirut, he had become, as Mr Bird puts it, "the cia's 'Mr Middle East' in the Reagan administration".
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