by Avi Shlaim
Two days after Hiyari left for Damascus, the political opposition in Jordan made a final bid for power. A National Congress of all the left-wing parties met in Nablus, including 23 lower house deputies and 200 opposition delegates. After a day of deliberations, the delegates adopted a breathtakingly bold anti-monarchist programme. The delegates demanded: (1) that the Khalidi government be replaced by a ‘popular government’; (2) that Sharif Nasser and Bahjat Talhouni be dismissed, and US Ambassador Lester Mallory and Military Attaché James Sweeney be expelled; (3) that all ‘nationalist officers’ arrested in Zarqa be reinstated; (4) that Jordan unite with Egypt and Syria; and (5) that Jordan reject the Eisenhower Doctrine.22 The ‘Patriotic Congress’ reinforced its resolutions by calling for nationwide strikes and demonstrations. Demonstrations against the Eisenhower Doctrine and the Khalidi government took place the following day.
On being presented with this list of demands, Khalidi realized that his government did not command the support of parliament, and he went to the palace to tender his resignation. The departure of the loyalist government left the field to the king and the powerful opposition. One historian has argued that constitutionalism in Jordan was brought to an end not by the Zarqa Affair but by the Nationalist Congress. This congress is said to have convinced Hussein that ‘nothing but brute force applied at once – with minimal time allowed for preparation – could save him and the Hashemite state from disaster.’23 Hussein knew instinctively that he had to resist the Congress, but before doing so he sought explicit assurances of US backing. The American ambassador had predicted that if the Khalidi government fell, the alternatives would rapidly narrow down to a choice by the king of military rule or abdication, unless he was assassinated first. The king chose military government. On 24 April he sent an urgent message to John Foster Dulles through intelligence channels in which he said he proposed to take a strong line in Jordan, including martial law on the West Bank, suspension of constitutional rights, and a firm statement against Egyptian and Syrian activities in Jordan. In his message Hussein asked if he could count on United States support if Israel or the Soviet Union intervened in the situation.
Dulles thought that America’s interests would best be served by Hussein winning this fight. He immediately contacted President Eisenhower and told him that Hussein ‘has a program which is a good tough program and if it works it will be wonderful for us’. The president agreed, and Dulles sent a message to Hussein, promising to warn Israel against any intervention, stating that an overt intervention by the Soviet Union would be viewed as a challenge under the Eisenhower Doctrine, and that, if requested by Jordan, they would intervene militarily. Eisenhower’s press secretary announced that both the president and the secretary of state regarded ‘the independence and integrity of Jordan as vital’.24 This statement gave Jordan the distinction of being the first Middle Eastern country to receive support under the terms of the Eisenhower Doctrine and signalled America’s commitment to underwrite the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. The following day the US Sixth Fleet, with marines aboard, was ordered to set sail for the eastern Mediterranean as a show of force to deter any outside intervention in Jordan.
On the night of 24/25 April, Hussein delivered his counter-stroke against the opposition. First, he convened in the palace a conclave of nearly all the Hashemite loyalists who had served his grandfather and held the kingdom together after the murder at the mosque. Queen Zain later told Charles Johnston that that night was almost the worst of the whole crisis. The king’s men were reluctant to assume the responsibilities of office and recommended instead the formation of a military government. Queen Zain reportedly rounded on them and suggested that the ministers-to-be should not be allowed to leave the palace until they had taken the oath of office. ‘It was on this not altogether encouraging basis that the new government was eventually formed.’25 Once again, as in the pre-Nabulsi era, the palace was the main locus of decision-making in Jordan
The new government was headed by Ibrahim Hashim, the elder statesman and staunch supporter of the dynasty, with Samir Rifa’i, the strong man of the right, as deputy prime minister and minister of foreign affairs. Abdel Monem Rifa’i, Samir’s brother, was reappointed ambassador to the US. Akif al-Fayez became minister for agriculture. It was the first time in the nation’s history that a Bedouin was appointed to a cabinet post. Akif was the son of the chief of the Bani Sakhr ‘northern’ tribes and was appointed in recognition of the role that the Bedouin community had played over the past few weeks.26 Hussein emerged from the long night as the sole effective ruler of the country. The government was fervently royalist, pro-Saudi and pro-American. During the same night it banned political parties, declared martial law and imposed a nationwide curfew. Overnight Jordan was transformed into a police state. Troops were deployed in the early hours to prevent the crowds from assembling and demonstrating as they had done against the Baghdad Pact. The result was described by the British ambassador: ‘On the morning of April 25th the streets of Amman were deserted except for large forces of troops and police. A number of the troops were Bedouin with blackened faces, a traditional measure designed to prevent recognition and family feuds in the event of bloodshed.’27 In a radio broadcast to the nation, Hussein went on the offensive. He accused the Nabulsi government of being soft on Israel and recalled that Nabulsi had prevented him from attacking Israel during its invasion of Egypt the previous year. Hussein denounced ‘international communism’ as the root of Jordan’s problems and charged that ‘the Communist Party here are the brothers of the Communist Party in Israel and receive instructions from them.’
By defeating the challenge to the monarchy, Hussein gave the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan a chance to survive. Before the royal coup Jordan was just a remnant of the age of European colonialism that was likely to be swept away by the nationalist tide sweeping through the region. But the crisis ended in such a way as to remove the question mark hanging over the country. The British ambassador was full of admiration for Hussein, describing his counter-stroke as decisive. In his annual report on 1957 the ambassador placed Hussein’s actions in a longer-term historical perspective that stressed his debt to Britain:
The King’s victory was complete. Seen in retrospect, it represents something which no one could have foreseen. The ramshackle Jordanian state, haphazardly formed by the union of two post-war vacuums – the ‘Transjordan’ of 1918 and the ‘West Bank’ of 1948 – suddenly felt itself an entity and affirmed its will to live. The conspirators had wished it to be merged in a left-wing Syrian Republic. In defeating them, King Hussein had given ‘The Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan’ for the first time a real meaning. For his victory he had to thank his British-trained army, and especially those elements in it from the Bedouin tribes whose loyalty to the Throne had been so laboriously won by Glubb Pasha in the 1930s. For the consolidation of his victory King Hussein had to thank a Government composed almost entirely of statesmen and administrators trained in the school of King Abdullah and the British Mandate.28
In his memoirs Charles Johnston wrote that King Hussein’s determination saved him and his country three times in the course of a month: in the ‘armoured-car incident’ of 8 April, in the Zarqa mutiny of 13 April and when threatened by the Syrian military on 14 April. Johnston added that, only just in time, the king struck a blow against the forces of extremism that was to prove decisive. As a result, Jordan felt a firm hand, which it had not known since the days of King Abdullah. At the end of the long night of 24/25 April, Hussein said to the chief of the royal court that he was exhausted and thought he would go to bed. Bahjat Talhouni replied respectfully that there was one more thing that His Majesty should do: he should kneel down, recite a verse of the Koran and give thanks to Allah for his grandfather, since without King Abdullah’s training there would have been no ministers to carry on the government. The king did as Talhouni suggested and then retired and slept until late in the evening.29>
Johnston, like most Western policy-makers, looked at even
ts in Jordan from a cold war perspective. Watching their performance, he thought that the contest between America and Russia was like a bad game of lawn tennis, in which the only points scored were from the double faults of the other side. In this particular game, America made some initial mistakes but then wisely allowed the Russians to serve. The real winner was Jordan. The cold war rescued a country on the verge of bankruptcy: ‘It had produced out of nowhere an American paymaster to replace the British one who had said goodbye and the Arab one whose cheque had bounced. A year before, Jordan had been taking British money and Egyptian advice. By now she was taking American money and was not far from a disposition to take British advice once more.’ In their relationship to Jordan, Britain and the United States changed places: ‘It was now the US which bore the main burden of supporting this unviable country, and which was accordingly exposed to the full blast of Arab ingratitude.’30
The Americans had no hesitation in assuming the burden that Britain had relinquished. John Foster Dulles, the arch cold warrior, regarded non-alignment in the cold war as an obsolete, immoral and impractical concept. He insisted that in the struggle between the forces of light against those of darkness every country should proclaim its allegiance, and that if you were not with them, you were against them. Hussein made a bold stand on the side of America against the Soviet Union and international communism, and thus qualified in Dulles’s eyes for support under the Eisenhower Doctrine. President Eisenhower told Dulles that the young king was certainly showing spunk and that he admired him for it. ‘Let’s invite him over one of these days,’ said Eisenhower, ‘when the situation is less tense.’31
Eisenhower’s avuncular attitude ensured a prompt response to the young king’s desperate appeal for aid. On 29 April the Eisenhower administration agreed to extend to Jordan $10 million in economic assistance to assure its ‘freedom’ and to maintain its ‘economic and political stability’. The speed with which the grant was made was without precedent. In late June this was followed by $10 million in military aid and $10 million in economic assistance. By now the total sum of American aid exceeded the annual British subsidy, and the American paymasters were much less strict about the way that their money was to be used than the British nanny had been. American aid was advanced with virtually no conditions attached. Moreover, to a far greater degree than the former paymaster, the Americans equated Jordan’s security with the security of the king. America’s toehold in Jordan depended from the beginning on the mortal existence of one man – Hussein. Yet the shift in American foreign policy was highly significant. The view of Jordan as an unviable state yielded to the assessment that it might survive against all the odds thanks to the courage and tenacity of its ruler. Jordan came to be seen for the first time as a strategic ally for America in the Middle East, but everything from that point hinged on the stability of the regime and the survival of the ruler.
Most observers assumed that American aid for Jordan began only after the withdrawal of British aid. In his annual survey of Jordan for 1957 Charles Johnston wrote: ‘Historically speaking the most important event of the year was the adoption of the Jordanian commitment by the United States. The termination of the Anglo/Jordanian Treaty in March, followed by King Hussein’s courageous stand against Communism, seems to have forced the hand of the United States Government and left it with no alternative. American support, moral as well as financial, was an essential factor behind the regime’s successes in stabilizing the situation.’32 As far as the State Department and the White House were concerned, this was indeed the true sequence of events. But CIA support for the king had begun before the termination of the treaty and even before the sacking of Glubb Pasha.
It is not possible to give a precise date for the first contact between Hussein and the CIA. Nor do we know which of them made the initial approach. The best guess is that the king took the initiative. However, some interesting details about the origins of the relationship emerge from a book by former CIA officer Wilbur Crane Eveland, Ropes of Sand: America’s Failure in the Middle East. Eveland, whose patch covered Syria and Lebanon, went to help the CIA station in Amman after the dismissal of Glubb and his replacement with Ali Abu Nuwar. Eveland’s main task was to assess the new army commander’s attitude to the West. At that time the CIA had a young officer named Fred Latrash in contact with the king. Abu Nuwar requested a private chat with Eveland after he was introduced to him by an American journalist. Abu Nuwar’s message was short and simple: he sought American help in freeing Jordan from dependence on British arms. When Eveland said he would report the request to Ambassador Lester Mallory, the general insisted that Mallory was too close to the British ambassador. The general urged Eveland to discuss this matter personally with the king, who was planning to visit Lebanon to drive in a sports-car rally. Eveland realized that Abu Nuwar was unaware of the CIA-Hussein liaison through Fred Latrash.33
A couple of months later Hussein arrived in a sleek silver Mercedes sports car to compete in the race in the Lebanese mountains. Abu Said, a Jordanian stringer for Time magazine, approached Eveland in the Saint George Hotel bar with an offer to arrange a meeting for him with the royal racing driver during his visit. That evening the concierge in Eveland’s hotel greeted him with unusual formality. He handed the 37-year-old spook an envelope bearing the crest of the Jordanian Embassy and addressed to ‘His Excellency Mr Wilbur Crane Eveland’. Within there was a handwritten note advising him that the king would receive him in his suite at nine the next morning. There was a quality about the royal person that struck a chord with most Americans. Eveland’s first impression was entirely favourable: ‘Hussein’s erect bearing reflected both pride and the British military training he’d had before he’d been thrust onto the throne. Radio Cairo’s appellation for him, “Dwarf King”, bore no relation to Hussein’s actual appearance. As for courage, few monarchs had been so tested. He’d been a boy when he saw his grandfather King Abdullah shot down, and later his father had cracked under mental pressure and been institutionalized in Turkey. Finally, the odds on Hussein’s survival were growing less attractive every day.’ Eveland opened the conversation by saying that in the past he had been involved in US military aid planning. Using the royal ‘we’, Hussein expressed his own interest in obtaining the best equipment for his army, without regard to its source. ‘We expect soon to discuss this with your people,’ said Hussein, before turning to the Syrian situation, on which he was very well informed.34
In his report on the conversation, Eveland offered to serve as a channel of communications for the king during his frequent visits to Lebanon. Eveland’s superiors, however, decided to put someone more senior on the case. The CIA was usually given ‘terminal cases’ and told to do something about them. Jordan was not a terminal case, but there were doubts about its chances of survival. The choice fell on Kermit (‘Kim’) Roosevelt, the grandson of Theodore, who had achieved fame by organizing a coup in Iran in 1953 to overthrow the Mossadeq government and restore the shah. Roosevelt came up with a plan to bolster Hussein personally while the British continued to handle arms supplies. This was the start of a major programme to ‘beef up’ Hussein and Jordan. Under the CIA’s system of pseudonyms and cryptonyms, the first two letters designated the country in which the operation was located: ‘NO’ stood for Jordan and ‘NORMAN’ for King Hussein. Kim Roosevelt chose the code ‘NOBEEF’ to stand for the programme to subsidize the king personally. For years this name covered what Eveland described as ‘the multi-million dollar payments’ until someone stumbled on to the cryptonym and exposed it in the press.35
The exposure came in a sensational article by Bob Woodward stretched across the front page of the Washington Post on 18 February 1977 under the headline cia paid millions to jordan’s king hussein. The funnelling of the money to this Arab head of state was one of the most closely held and sensitive of all CIA covert operations, so the political class and the wider public were astonished. Woodward reported that for twenty years the CIA had made secret annual
payments to King Hussein totalling millions of dollars, starting in 1957 under the Eisenhower administration. The initial payments apparently ran to millions of dollars, but they were sharply curtailed to $750,000 in 1976. Made under the codeword project name of ‘NO BEEF’, they were usually delivered in cash to the king by the CIA station chief in Amman.
The CIA, reported Woodward, justified the direct cash payments by claiming that Hussein allowed the US intelligence agencies to operate freely in his strategically placed country. Hussein himself provided intelligence to the CIA and used its funds to make payments to other government officials who provided intelligence or cooperated with the CIA. Nevertheless, some CIA officials considered the payments no more than ‘bribes’ and reported the matter to the Intelligence Oversight Board. Hussein himself, according to Woodward’s sources, considered the payments simply as another form of US assistance. Within the CIA, ‘NO BEEF’ was rated as one of its most successful operations, giving the United States great leverage and unusual access to the leader of a sovereign state.
Woodward told his readers that Hussein was only twenty-one when he first became a beneficiary of CIA funds: ‘It was a time when Jordan was virtually a ward of the United States and Hussein had little money to support his lifestyle, which earned him the reputation as a “playboy prince”. Hussein has a well-publicized taste for sports cars and airplanes. As once previously reported, the CIA has provided Hussein with female companions. The agency also provided bodyguards for Hussein’s children when they were abroad in school.’36 What the article implied was that Hussein was on the private payroll of the CIA; what it actually said was that the CIA was, in effect, running its own aid programme to Jordan free from any bureaucratic controls or congressional supervision. It also underlined the point that the money was given not to the Jordanian government but to the king, and in cash.
