Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  A period of turmoil and instability ensued at home, with the National Socialists, Nabulsi’s followers, torpedoing the king’s attempts to form a new government under a moderate prime minister. On 13 April a confused and complicated sequence of events took place that most writers have treated as an abortive military coup. In Jordan’s collective memory ‘The Zarqa Affair’ conjures up conflicting images of disloyalty and treason, plots and conspiracies, royal courage and Bedouin bravery. It remains a highly contentious and controversial subject down to the present day. Every claim about this affair is hotly contested by one side or the other.

  The official version of events maintains that Ali Abu Nuwar and the Free Officers, with the support of the Nabulsi faction, planned a military coup against the monarchy, but that the plot was foiled by loyalist elements in the army who tipped off the king and by the courage of the king in confronting the rebels head-on in Zarqa and suppressing the mutiny. This version is recounted in Hussein’s autobiography in the chapter entitled ‘Zerka – The Final Round’. According to this account, the first series of events unfolded on 8 April, when the First Armoured Car Regiment surrounded the capital. Just before Nabulsi resigned on 10 April, an open cable from Nasser was intercepted, urging the prime minister not to give in and to stay in his position. The second began on 13 April, when Hussein commissioned Said al-Mufti to form a royalist government after two other candidates had failed. Later in the day, however, Abu Nuwar and two of his colleagues summoned Mufti to the military barracks at Zarqa, half an hour’s drive from Amman, and delivered through him an ultimatum to the king – appoint an acceptable government or the army would rebel. Abu Nuwar then drove to the palace and himself delivered the ultimatum. At this juncture a group of loyal officers arrived from Zarqa and warned the king that the units commanded by Natheer Rasheed and by Ma’an Abu Nuwar, a distant cousin of the chief of staff, would soon be ordered to move to Amman to surround the royal palace and arrest him. The informants pledged their loyalty to the king and returned to base. Another report reached Hussein that the troops in Zarqa were out of control, that there were rumours that he was dead, and that only his immediate presence could save the situation. Hussein and his uncle went to Zarqa at once, taking Ali Abu Nuwar with them. At Zarqa the loyalist troops kissed and mobbed the king, shouting, ‘Down with communism! Death to Abu Nuwar and all the traitors!’ The evening ended with Ali Abu Nuwar breaking down, crying and begging for his life. The king allowed him to go to Damascus with his family and appointed General Ali al-Hiyari in his place.11

  Ali Abu Nuwar always denied the charges of treachery. He claimed that he was the king’s man all along, that his political rivals wanted to discredit him in the eyes of the king, and that, indeed, they tried to frame him. By his own account he was the ‘fall guy’, the victim rather than the villain of the events of that day. He insisted that there was never any attempt at a coup against the king; it was the king who overreacted to rumours of a plot and staged a pre-emptive coup himself. Ma’an Abu Nuwar, the commander of the predominantly Bedouin Princess Alia Brigade, denied with equal vehemence that he played any part in the alleged plot against the king. Ma’an Abu Nuwar’s explanation was that he was mistakenly suspected because of his distant kinship with the chief of staff. Hiyari, the deputy chief of staff, denied altogether that there was any plot against the king, but he admitted that he and many other young officers had high-spirited ideas about Arab unity.12 On the army side, Ali Abu Nuwar was clearly the key figure, and most observers continued to contest both his credibility and his competence. Miles Copeland, the CIA man who operated in the Middle East, wrote in his colourful book that Abu Nuwar ‘planned and actually attempted a coup which held the prize for the clumsiest in modern history until the cup was passed on to King Constantine of Greece in 1968’.13

  Natheer Rasheed, another officer who was involved in the alleged plot, fled to Syria and was later pardoned by the king. He returned to Jordan in 1958, rejoined the army and was promoted to major-general and director of intelligence in 1970. He too denied the official version of the plan for a military coup and even went so far as to claim that what really took place was a royal coup against the Free Officers. Rasheed’s testimony is full of previously undisclosed and fascinating details, and is therefore worth quoting at some length:

  After the British left, I commanded the First Armoured Car Regiment. The role of that regiment was reconnaissance, and it was made up of mostly Bedouin elements who could hardly read and write.

  On 13 April 1957 I decided to conduct a simple exercise around Amman to count the military hardware of that regiment. I was in the army headquarters receiving information from the squadron commanders. Bahjat Talhouni was chief of the royal court and he phoned His Majesty, informing him that a coup was taking place and that an armoured regiment was surrounding Amman. He asked His Majesty whether he knew anything about the situation. The king replied that he did not. The authorization had come from the army, which informed the minister of the interior, Abd al-Halim Nimr, who also came from Salt. But Nimr did not inform the prime minister [Said al-Mufti], and the prime minister did not inform His Majesty. The prime minister said to His Majesty, ‘If you do not want me, you just have to tell me and I will resign. You do not have to use armoured cars against me.’ The king and the prime minister called in Ali Abu Nuwar. I knew nothing about what he was to tell the king. Ali Abu Nuwar told His Majesty that the army was angry, out of control, and unhappy with the director of the public security, Bahjat Tabbara. He suggested replacing him with a Ba’thi friend of his, Mahmud Ma’ayta. The king agreed.

  I was called to the royal palace by Ali Abu Nuwar’s assistant, Ali Hiyari. He told me to pull back my regiment because His Majesty had agreed to replace the director of public security. I was surprised and refused to pull back my regiment. I told him that I was conducting a simple and agreed-upon exercise that I was going to complete. I told him that I was not interested in the nonsense that he and Ali Abu Nuwar were undertaking and never to mention my name in relation to it.

  His Majesty then took a great step and made the coup against us. We were pushed out of the country… He and Zaid bin Shaker went to the infantry brigade in Khaw so he could get them to attack Zarqa, which is where we were located. A minor battle took place in Zarqa and a few soldiers were killed. His Majesty then toured the whole regiment and in no time they swore their allegiance to him… In April 1957, the king and Sharif Nasser stood together. Our royal family is not large in number. They all joined the king when he came to Zarqa and Khaw.

  The king knew that the Free Officers were misbehaving, and he was right. He therefore took the initiative on 13 April to strike back. Ali Abu Nuwar did not have a plan for a coup. But he was an opportunistic and selfish man. He knew how to present himself and he spoke well, but he was a coward. I never respected him.

  The whole episode took place because of the military exercise in April, the misinterpretation of the exercise by Ali Abu Nuwar and his men, and the ignorance of the prime minister for not informing His Majesty that the exercise was authorized by the army and agreed upon by the minister of the interior.

  Following the episode, we were scattered. Some of us went to Syria and others to Egypt. A month after my arrival in Syria, I realized that the Ba’this in Jordan were well connected to the Ba’this in Syria. Akram Hourani, Salah Bitar and Michel Aflaq hosted a dinner for us in Damascus. They told us that we had made a mistake. We should have given His Majesty half a million Syrian liras and allowed him to flee Jordan. We knew from this meeting that there was a connection between them and Jordanian Ba’this. But the link between the Syrians and the Jordanian Free Officers was kept undercover, it was never announced in the open. We were the majority. Those who took Glubb Pasha from his house to the airport were from our side; they were not Ba’this. Adnan and Osama Kasim were with us. They were also dismissed from the army and we lived together in Syria in the same house.14

  What emerges clearly from Natheer Rasheed’
s account is that the so-called conspirators were not united and had no agreed plan of action; that their moves were confused and ill coordinated; that the chief of staff was ineffectual, unreliable and pusillanimous; that the Syrian Ba’thists tried to use their secret allies in the Jordanian Army in order to topple the monarchy; and that the king exploited the crisis to stage a coup of his own to purge his opponents. What these various testimonies reveal in their different ways is a sorry tale of bungling and confusion, of miscommunication and misrepresentation – in short, a tragicomedy of errors. In a perceptive report to Whitehall, the British ambassador explained that Zarka ‘was no case of plot and counter-plot by two well-knit teams led respectively by masterminds. On the contrary, it was a confused triangular affair, a game of blind-man’s-bluff with three contestants [Hussein, Nabulsi and Abu Nuwar] bumping into each other in the dark and none knowing clearly what was happening or what he ought to do next.’ In the ambassador’s view, Hussein won because Abu Nuwar ‘proved himself still an amateur conspirator, while the king was moving towards professional status’.15

  No sooner had Hussein pre-empted and banished the nationalist officers who were charged with treason than an external threat began to loom on the horizon. On 14 April a brigade of some 3,000 Syrian troops that had been stationed in northern Jordan since the Suez crisis began to move towards Zarqa and Amman, apparently in support of the rebels. Hussein immediately moved troops to head off the Syrians. He also called President Shukri al-Quwatli to demand that the Syrian troops be withdrawn and to warn that any thrust south would be met by force. Quwatli promised to look into the matter, and shortly afterwards the troops were withdrawn and the threat subsided. During the crisis, King Saud ibn Abd al-Aziz came forward with an offer of help; for him the lesson of Suez was that Nasser was a greater danger to his kingdom than the Hashemites. King Saud placed the two Saudi brigades encamped in the Jordan Valley at the disposal of Hussein, who contacted them with a view to leading them against the Syrians if necessary. King Saud also offered an immediate payment of £5 million as the Saudi share of the Arab subsidy that had been promised in January. With Hussein’s agreement, Iraq began to reinforce its troops on the border with Jordan.

  The Iraqi troop movements reassured Hussein but worried the Israelis. Here America played a part. America’s policy was to give Hussein the most effective support possible in his efforts to maintain the independence and territorial integrity of Jordan without giving substance to the charges that he was acting at its instigation. In accordance with this policy, America urged King Saud to render every assistance to Hussein and to work effectively with the Iraqis. It also asked Israel to take no action that might exacerbate the situation or hinder Hussein’s efforts to strengthen his position. Iraq gave assurances that its troop movements were solely for the purpose of supporting Hussein. America passed on these assurances, at Iraq’s request, to the Israelis. Israel had mobilized its troops along the border in order to be prepared to take advantage of a possible break-up of the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. But in conversations with the Americans, the Israelis took the view that the best chance for stability in the area lay in maintaining things in Jordan as they were. A kind of regional balance was thus created in favour of the status quo. Each of the neighbouring states worked to preserve the kingdom lest it might lose in the division of the spoils.16

  The official version of the Zarqa Affair does not stand up to critical scrutiny – not only because it is at odds with some of the facts that have come to light since then but, more crucially, because it completely ignores the role that the United States played behind the scenes. An alternative interpretation sees the Zarqa Affair not as an attempt to depose the king but as a royal coup, with strong American backing, against a radical group of soldiers and politicians. One of the first writers to advance this theory was Erskine Childers, an Irish journalist and novelist who reported his findings in the Spectator in 1959. According to Childers, it was the king himself, aided and abetted by the Americans, who instigated the Zarqa rising through loyal Bedouin officers in order to discredit the nationalists without ruining his own standing. Childers dismisses the view, widely believed in the West at the time, that the April crisis was masterminded in Cairo and implemented by Cairo Radio propaganda to support the plotters.

  President Nasser told Childers that he wrote a letter to Nabulsi pleading with him ‘not to split Jordan between people and King’ and that at the first sign of trouble he ordered Radio Cairo not to say a word against Hussein. This order was relaxed only after the king started to attack Egypt. At first Childers could scarcely credit what Nasser told him, but careful study of radio broadcasts confirmed it. The study also revealed that the ‘indirect aggression by radio’ came from the West’s ‘friends’ during the whole month of April. Radio Baghdad kept up its attacks on Nabulsi throughout the crisis and alleged a connection between him and the Soviet ambassador in Israel. The day after Nabulsi’s resignation, ‘indirect aggression’ against Jordan came from Kol Israel’s Arabic broadcast. The broadcast alleged that Nabulsi had been ‘assisted to power by Egyptian agents’ and that he had wanted to turn Jordan into a Soviet base.17

  The revisionist interpretation of the April crisis has been buttressed by further scholarly research. Lawrence Tal, in an exhaustive study of the relevant Arabic sources as well as recently declassified American and British documents, found substantial evidence of careful royalist planning for a coup against the radicals in the months before the April showdown. Tal also notes: that the military tribunals conducted later in the year failed to establish satisfactorily the guilt of the plotters; that no link was established between Abu Nuwar and Nabulsi; and that the plotters received only light sentences for their alleged crimes. Had the conspiracy cut as deeply as Hussein claimed, the plotters would have surely been dealt with more harshly and not rehabilitated so quickly by the regime. Finally, few of the former Jordanian officials (including royalists) interviewed by Tal believed the official version.18 We may therefore confidently conclude that what took place on 13 April 1957 was not a military coup against the monarchy but the coup de palais that the American ambassador had predicted – and helped to engineer.

  Zarqa was a defining episode in the personal story of Hussein bin Talal. It was the first serious test of his leadership because it involved not only anti-royalist politicians but the army – the mainstay of the regime. Many factors enabled Hussein to emerge on top but two were of paramount importance: his own personality and the loyalty of the Bedouin element in the army. At Zarqa he demonstrated the personal courage that was to be his hallmark for the rest of his reign. He acted swiftly and decisively to re-establish his authority despite the dangers involved in going to Zarqa in person. ‘By all accounts, the king did indeed risk his life by wading into the pandemonium… His bold action heartened loyalists and broke the spirit of any lingering rebels.’19 The other factor that worked to Hussein’s advantage was the loyalty of the Bedouin soldiers and officers who formed the backbone of the mobile ground forces – infantry and armour – and tended to mistrust the townspeople who held the senior administrative posts and got involved in politics.20 Hussein had been close to the Free Officers and they helped him to oust Glubb Pasha, but now they had outlived their usefulness and even posed a threat to the monarchy by their alignment with Nabulsi and his party. In the contest between the government and the palace, what mattered ultimately was not popularity in the country but control of the army. Sensing that he was beginning to lose that control to the Free Officers led by his erstwhile friend, Hussein staged his coup in order to purge the radical officers and make himself again master of his own troops.

  A new government was successfully formed on 15 April by the independent, pro-Western Palestinian physician Dr Hussein Fakhri al-Khalidi. Khalidi’s cabinet consisted of royalist ‘notables’ with the exception of Nabulsi, who agreed to join as minister for foreign affairs. Nabulsi’s inclusion represented some sort of a reconciliation between his party and the palace
. But the truce lasted just over a week. Two crises followed in rapid succession. On 20 April, after only four days in the post of chief of staff, Hiyari defected to Syria. In a press conference held in Damascus on the following day, he accused the king and palace officials of conspiring with ‘foreign military attacheés’, meaning American and British, against the independence of Jordan, its sovereignty and its ties with sister Arab countries. The 32-year-old officer, who had been a Hussein favourite, also claimed that the royalist officials had fabricated the story of a military coup in order to oust their competitors from power, that the United States was behind a plan to discredit Nabulsi and his supporters, and that he himself had been ordered to ‘prepare the army against the people’. General Hiyari’s charges were countered with a curt official statement that he, like his predecessor, had ‘turned traitor to his king’ and, in his turn, fled to Damascus.21