Book keeps memory of Robert Ames alive

IT'S BEEN 31 years since Robert Ames was one of 63 people killed in a suicide attack on the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, but he's far from forgotten.

Ames, who grew up in Roxborough, remains a hero to some in Philadelphia. A 1956 La Salle graduate, he was on the university's NCAA basketball championship team in 1954.

But he might be better known around the world for his work as a CIA operative specializing in the Middle East and assisting in the development of President Ronald Reagan's Middle East peace plan.

Kai Bird's The Good Spy: The Life and Death of Robert Ames, released in May by Crown, has been taking some of Ames' family, friends and co-workers on a trip down memory lane.

"If you can imagine, being together for four years, you're buddies, you're friends," said Frank Blatcher, 85, who attended La Salle with Ames and was also on the championship basketball team with him. "You see each other on the court, in classes, before a game - I don't know if you could get much closer."

Blatcher said that Ames was a team player, on and off the court. In college, he was a good student with a hearty work ethic but never showed any signs of what he'd go on to accomplish - becoming one of the most influential CIA intelligence officers in his region, according to Bird's book.

Blatcher said that it wasn't until after reading the book that he began to really think about the years he spent with Ames.

"When we graduated, I'll never forget his comment to me: 'Tough as nails, hard as bricks, we're the class of '56,' " Blatcher said. "And did that apply to this guy. I tear up when I think about it. How prophetic can you be?"

His classmate didn't even know about his extensive work in the CIA and alongside Reagan until a 25-year reunion for the championship team.

"I said, 'Bob, what are you doing?' and he said, 'I'm doing stuff for the government.' Like what? He said, 'Analytical stuff.' Like what? 'Stuff for the president,' " Blatcher reminisced.

One man who was with Ames in the U.S. intelligence community and who wished to remain anonymous called him "legendary." He said that Ames mastered Arabic and had a "tremendous sense for what was happening."

Blatcher, and Bird's book, hint that relations between the Middle East and the West might have been much different had Ames lived.

But Ames' nephew, Gary Gubicza, 58, remembers him simply as a loving uncle who took him down to the Roxborough YMCA to shoot hoops. "Along with my father, he was one of my early heroes," Gubicza said.