Peter Ashmun Ames (June 10, 1888 - November 21, 1920) was an American British Army intelligence officer and member of the Cairo Gang who was assassinated by the Irish Republican Army.
Peter Ashmun Ames was born on June 10, 1888, in Titusville, Pennsylvania, the son of Elias Hurlbut Ames (1851-1891) and Eleanor Gray Bushnell (1855-1946). Both Ames' father and maternal grandfather, Joseph Bushnell (1831-1918), came from old New England families and became wealthy during the Pennsylvania Oil Rush. Ames' great-grandfather was the Pittsburgh industrialist Daniel Bushnell. After Elias Ames' death in 1891 at age 39, Peter's mother moved the family to Morristown, New Jersey, where her children had a privileged upbringing in the town that was then known as an "inland Newport.". Ames attended the Stevens Institute of Technology, graduating in 1911.
In 1912, Ames moved to London to take a position with a firm in the city. In 1917, he joined the elite Grenadier Guards of the British Army and fought in France during the First World War.
In June 1920, at the height of the Irish War of Independence, Ames moved to Dublin, Ireland on assignment from the British military intelligence, serving as an undercover agent for the MI5. Along with the other members of the Cairo Gang spy ring, Ames worked to track the operations of Irish Republican Army militants and maintain British control in Dublin.
The activities of the Cairo Gang were soon detected by Irish Republican Army leaders, however, who formulated a plot, led by Michael Collins, to eliminate the covert group. On the morning of Sunday, November 21, 1920, IRA gunmen stormed into the house at 38 Upper Mount Street where Ames and another agent were staying. Ames attempted to reach for the .45-caliber Colt pistol he had hidden beneath his pillow, but was held down by the gunmen before he could get to his weapon. After being made to stand facing the wall of his bedroom, Ames was shot six times in the back and killed.
One of the assassins, Vinny Byrne, wrote an account of the murders:
The report delivered to the House of Lords on the murders of Bloody Sunday described the events at 38 Upper Mount as well:
Peter Ashmun Ames was engaged to marry Millicent Orr-Ewing, a niece of the Duke of Roxburghe and a close friend of Barbara Cartland, at the time of his death. Their engagement was announced in The New York Times the same day that Ames was assassinated. Ames' brother, Joseph Bushnell Ames, was a prolific novelist, and his aunt, Alice Alden Bushnell, married a son of the lawyer George Goelet Kip. The philanthropist Mary Warden Harkness, wife of Charles W. Harkness, was the first cousin of Ames' mother Eleanor.
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