Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  Woodward gave further details on the method of effecting the payments in material that he prepared but ultimately dropped from his book Veil: The Secret Wars of the CIA 1981–1987. This account was placed at the disposal of a fellow journalist, Philip Geyelin, who wrote the following in a sadly unfinished and unpublished book manuscript: ‘So the payments took the form of Jordanian dinars delivered in a plain envelope, never handed directly to Hussein. Rather it was unostentatiously placed on his desk in the course of a visit by the CIA station chief posted to the embassy. Any conventional transfer of funds to the Finance Ministry, or to any government department controlled by opposition appointees, would have been certain to expose Hussein to devastating charges of secret collaboration with the wicked imperialists; even a personal check would have left a paper trail, widening the risk of disclosure; any covert connection with Jordan had to be handled personally with Hussein, without formalities, in cash.’37 Ready cash was what the king needed and what the CIA provided. The acronym CIA stood for the Central Intelligence Agency, but in this case, as in so many others, it could equally have stood for Cash In Advance.

  Bob Woodward’s version of the Hussein–CIA relationship was challenged by a former CIA official who gave an altogether more benign account of the origins and nature of the relationship. The official stressed that in the early years of his reign, Hussein had no intelligence service. He used to pay people from his own pocket to tell him what was going on. CIA officials therefore decided to help the king to set up an intelligence service; they encouraged him, and provided training and a modest grant of 5,000 dinars a month as pocket money. This did not mean, claimed the official, that they were buying the king. The purpose of the payments was to help him gain information, especially on the army and the loyalty of its officers. Problems began when Hussein and his second wife Muna were divorced, and she brought her children to the US. Although the secret service protected them at home, it had no resources to do so when they were at school. The State Department was reluctant to tell the king that they could not protect his children round the clock. So the CIA was persuaded to pick up the bill. It hired a private security company to protect Hussein’s children at a cost of $700,000–800,000 p.a. Then Congress heard about the payments without knowing the background. There was an outcry, and the congressional committee cut off the funding.38

  In Jordan too the press revelations excited intense interest and controversy. One of the most outspoken critics of the king and the American connection was Mreiwad al-Tall, a senior civil servant who worked in the palace in the early 1970s and strongly disliked what he saw there at first-hand, especially the corruption. Tall was a great admirer of Glubb Pasha and the British tradition of public service that he represented, giving him credit for building up an efficient administration in Jordan, for training a professional and disciplined army, for going to great lengths to educate the Bedouin recruits into the army and for being an honest, decent, incorruptible and faithful servant to Jordan. Hussein used to boast that it was he who had removed Glubb and to argue that only then did Jordan become a truly independent state. Tall claims that he told the king to his face that he did not buy this line and that he knew it was the Americans who were behind Glubb’s removal. Hussein allegedly just smiled, neither confirming nor denying the irreverent suggestion put to him.

  Tall’s version of Jordan’s transition from British to American tutelage goes as follows:

  Abrogating Jordan’s treaty with Britain in 1956 under the Nabulsi government meant the exit of the British and the entry of the Americans. The main slogan of the Ba’thists, communists and Nasserites was to finish with the treaty. When Nabulsi delivered his speech in parliament announcing that his policy was to end the treaty, Britain readily agreed. The Americans immediately stepped in, replaced Britain and recruited Hussein. His code name was Big Beef. Part of the agreement with the Americans was that Hussein would allow the CIA to recruit any Jordanian to work for them. The CIA gave the king personally $3 million a year. The CIA station chief in Amman used to come with a briefcase to the palace once a month and hand over the money to Hussein. In total, the Americans provided Jordan with $21 million a year. The Americans bought the country. Jordan became a CIA asset until Jimmy Carter put an end to it in 1977, to the CIA payments to Hussein.

  Tall bitterly regretted the departure of the British and what he saw as the takeover of his country by the crude and uncouth Americans. The British were efficient, reliable and dedicated to their protégé. ‘By contrast, the Americans played fast and loose with Jordan. Everything they touched here, they spoiled. They deliberately corrupted the country, making it easy for economic aid to find its way into private pockets. They not only tolerated but encouraged corruption. The Americans bought many officials and politicians in Jordan. If people were making money out of the system, they could hardly insist on high standards of public service or accountability. They became the clients of America. Hussein himself received money from the CIA starting in 1957. He set the example.’39

  The two main strands of Hussein’s policy in the aftermath of the April crisis were repression at home and realignment abroad. The Americans enthusiastically approved of the former and actively supported the latter. The imposition of martial law on 24/25 April was a momentous step that transformed the entire political landscape, abruptly terminating the liberal experiment and blocking the road to democracy. Trade unions were disbanded, freedom of speech was curtailed, leftist publications were banned and the press was subjected to the most intrusive forms of supervision. The king destroyed all the checks and balances that had began to emerge and concentrated all the power into his own hands. He ruled the country with the support of the army after a thorough purge of radicals and Arab nationalist officers. A Royal Guards regiment, with the best equipment and the most loyal elements in the army, was formed under the command of Sharif Nasser, and it was stationed in and around Amman. The cabinet was accountable to the king, not to parliament. Parliament was completely marginalized. It is therefore no exaggeration to speak, as Robert Satloff has done, of a ‘Hashemite restoration’. ‘In the years after 1957,’ Satloff has rightly recorded,

  neither government nor army was ever permitted to slide into opposition to the regime. Similarly, not parliament, democracy, or even some abstract and well-meaning notion of constitutionalism was ever again permitted to conflict with the royal ‘we’… In sum, after 1957, the contours of Hussein’s monarchy bore a strong resemblance to the regime built up by Abdullah, Kirkbride, and Glubb in the years before the 1948 war. There were, of course, important differences… But the two eras of Hashemite history, pre-1948 and post-1957, were built on similar foundations and sustained on similar principles.40

  Democracy was certainly not one of the principles of this Hashemite restoration. But before rushing to condemn Hussein for killing democracy in Jordan, we ought to place the events and the actors in the 1957 drama in their proper historical perspective. A number of questions suggest themselves to which there are no clear-cut answers even half a century later. Were Nabulsi and his colleagues responsible politicians with a sound programme for tackling the country’s social and economic problems? Their supporters thought that they were, but their critics, not entirely without reason, saw them as a bunch of demagogues and loose cannons. What did the people of Jordan want above all at that time? This question is very difficult to answer. Some yearned for democracy and freedom; others placed security and stability above these values. If the monarchy had been overthrown, what would have replaced it? Again, it is impossible to say with any certainty except to note that the prevailing model in the Arab world at the time was not liberal democracy but military dictatorship. Egypt and Syria were military dictatorships and Iraq would become one following the Free Officers’ Revolution in 1958. A coup staged by the Free Officers in Jordan would have in all probability followed the same pattern.

  To be sure, Hussein was an autocratic ruler, and his triumph over the opposition consolidated his auto
cracy. But he was more tolerant and more benign than most of the rulers who captured power in the Arab world in later years, especially in Syria and Iraq. His method of dealing with political opposition was not to cede power but to defend his prerogatives, to stand his ground and, whenever possible, to co-opt his opponents. All the officers who conspired against him in 1957 were subsequently forgiven, and allowed back to Jordan from their places in exile; they became loyal servants of the monarchy. The list included Ali Abu Nuwar, Ma’an Abu Nuwar, Ali Hiyari and Natheer Rasheed. Some of these men became plus royaliste que le roi. Forgiving and co-opting opponents became an enduring part of Jordan’s political culture.

  In foreign policy the main trend in the second half of 1957 was a realignment of forces in the Arab world, with Jordan drawing closer to the three pro-Western Arab states – Iraq, Saudi Arabia and Lebanon. Hussein kept in close contact with his fellow monarchs. In early June, King Saud visited Amman and later in the month Hussein led a ministerial delegation on a visit to Baghdad. One Saudi brigade remained in Jordan after the withdrawal of all the other foreign forces, as a token of Saudi Arabia’s political and moral support for Hussein. Relations with Iraq also improved, despite the usual squabbles about the size of its subvention to Jordan. A conservative coalition began to emerge in the region as a counterweight to the Egyptian-led coalition. In November, Hussein began to float the idea of a confederation between Jordan and the neighbouring monarchies. He was vague about the details because this was essentially a political gesture ‘to steal the Arab unity bandwagon away from Egypt and Syria’.41

  Internal and external policies were closely interconnected. Having outmanoeuvred the internal opposition to his regime, Hussein was emboldened to embark on a more assertive regional policy. As we shall see, success in surviving the successive challenges to the monarchy at home rekindled old Hashemite ambitions of dominance in the Arab world. The British ambassador designated 1957 as the year of King Hussein. His Majesty, he wrote, knew where he was going:

  It is significant that in his speeches he seldom refers to his grandfather, King Abdullah, but constantly to his great-grandfather, King Hussein of the Hijaz. He clearly sees himself as the heir, not of the Transjordanian Amir, but of the leader of the Arab Revolt. Despite the consolidation of his own power in Jordan, he envisages himself not as a static local sovereign, but as the dynamic leader of Arab unification. Unfortunately his impoverished Kingdom is ill-equipped to lead a movement in favour of Arab unity. True, it has certain affiliations with the Kingdom of Prussia in the period before German unification: the primitive virtues, the martial tradition, the unnaturally inflated army, the sandy wastes. But the sandbox of Europe had advantages which so far at least are lacking to the sandbox of the Levant: notably the strong state-structure, and the position of relative power among its neighbours.42

  There was one other major impediment to the realization of Hussein’s grandiose Hashemite ambition: his junior status as a client of Western imperialism, which undermined his legitimacy in the Arab world. Swapping a British patron for an American one did not resolve this underlying problem, to which in fact there was no solution. The Amirate of Transjordan had been created by Western imperialism, and it could not survive in a hostile environment without continuing Western support. King Hussein was fundamentally and structurally a client-king. The Arab Revolt was an illustrious Hashemite achievement, but for all practical purposes the Hashemite legacy that Hussein had inherited from his grandfather was one of continuing dependence on the West. Hussein had little prospect of holding on to his throne without outside help. That was why he took the precaution of lining up an American patron before his government ended the treaty relationship with Britain: he realized that even a short interval unaided could be fatal. There was thus never any real prospect of establishing for Jordan the kind of regional dominance to which Hussein began to aspire in the latter part of 1957. Events in Iraq in the following year were to reveal in the cruellest fashion the full extent of Jordan’s weakness, vulnerability and dependence on Western protection. And it was only with great difficulty that Hussein himself managed to cling to his throne following the defenestration of the royal family in Baghdad.

  8

  The Year of Revolution

  In 1958 a revolutionary tide was unleashed by pan-Arabism throughout the Middle East, and it seemed all but unstoppable, threatening to engulf pro-Western regimes like those of Iraq, Lebanon and Jordan. If in 1957 King Hussein concentrated on fending off internal challenges to his regime, in 1958 he desperately struggled for survival against much more powerful external challenges. On 1 February of that year the United Arab Republic (UAR) was established by the merger of Syria and Egypt. On 14 July a bloody military coup destroyed the monarchy in Iraq and transformed the country into a radical republic, which was expected to join the UAR. Jordan and Lebanon teetered on the brink of collapse. For a moment the enemies of Arab nationalism seemed to be on the run. Many observers thought that the countries allied to the West were about to fall one after the other. It was a revolutionary moment in the Middle East but in the end the revolution did not spread. With hindsight, 1958 had the potential to be a great turning point in Middle Eastern history, but history failed to turn.

  The unification of Egypt and Syria into the UAR had two major effects. In the first place, it escalated the ‘Arab cold war’, the contest that pitted the ‘revolutionary’, pro-Soviet states of Egypt and Syria against the ‘reactionary’, pro-Western states of Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Iraq and Jordan.1 Second, the birth of the union inspired great hopes among radicals that it would herald the realization of the pan-Arab dream. The conventional version assumes that the union was directed primarily against Israel, that it was forced on a reluctant Nasser by Syrian officers of the Ba’th Party in a move to head off their communist rivals, and that the United States was opposed to it, fearing it would strengthen the pro-Soviet camp in the Arab as well as the global cold wars.

  Recent scholarship, however, has called all these assumptions into question. Elie Podeh, an Israeli historian, wrote a comprehensive and well-documented revisionist account of the rise and fall of the United Arab Republic that challenges the received wisdom on at least three crucial counts. He shows that the Israeli threat played a negligible role in the process that led to the formation of the union. In addition, he rejects the notion that Nasser was compelled to enter the union by his Syrian allies, arguing that Nasser intervened in Syria to gain a stronger foothold against the Hashemites in Iraq and Jordan and that he initiated secret contacts with America in order to secure its backing for his move. In a message to John Foster Dulles, Nasser said that he had become too deeply involved with the USSR and that he desired ‘true neutrality’.He also dangled the danger of a communist takeover in Syria in order to justify his intervention in its domestic politics. Even more arresting is Podeh’s discovery that Dulles gave Nasser the ‘green light’ to operate in Syria and that he welcomed Egyptian action designed to impede communist penetration there, provided it did not harm American interests.2

  The merger between Egypt and Syria gave Nasser a foothold in the Fertile Crescent and a new base for the pursuit of his subversive activities. Not surprisingly, it caused great consternation in Baghdad and Amman. Policy-makers in the two capitals saw the merger as a dire threat to their interests and were disappointed by the American reaction. Crown Prince Abd al-Ilah’s attempt to enlist American support for an Iraqi operation in Syria was politely rejected. Hussein feared that nearby Damascus would replace faraway Cairo as the main centre of pan-Arab agitation. Both men were unaware that the formation of the UAR dovetailed with America’s regional interests and more specifically with its desire to counter the communist danger in Syria.3

  Hussein assumed the lead in organizing the Hashemite response to the UAR challenge. This took the form of the short-lived union between Jordan and Iraq. The idea was to pit a Hashemite model of unity against the Nasserist model. Hussein had been exploring for some time avenues of c
ooperation with other Arab countries that were opposed to communism. The British ambassador observed that Hussein had an idealistic attachment to the cause of Arab unity as such: ‘He saw himself as the principal heir of his great-grandfather, Hussein Ibn Ali, who initiated the Arab Revolt against the Turks. King Hussein was indeed quite possessive about the ideal of Arab unity; he regarded it as a sort of Hashemite heirloom; and within the Hashemite family he seemed to regard himself as the one pre-destined to carry on the task of his namesake.’4

  Hussein had hoped to attract Saudi Arabia into a tripartite union with Jordan and Iraq. Iraq supported Hussein’s bid both in order to strengthen the anti-Nasser camp and in the hope that Saudi Arabia would share the burden of economic aid to Jordan. King Saud, however, was leery of a constitutional link with Iraq while it was a member of the Baghdad Pact. He also told the Jordanians that he was not in a position to pay them the £ 5,000,000 subsidy for 1958/9 that he had promised in signing the Arab solidarity agreement. With this rebuff from Riyadh, Hussein was forced to scale down his ambitions to a union between the two branches of the Hashemite family.

  Baghdad’s response to Hussein’s urgent appeal was mixed. His cousin King Faisal II was nominally head of state, but real power lay in the hands of Nuri as-Said and Prince Abd al-Ilah, and both men had reservations. Said felt that Jordan would be an economic burden and a military liability in the event of a war with Israel. Abd al-Ilah regarded Jordan’s large Palestinian population as a cause of instability that might spill over into Iraq. He said that ‘Hussein’s trouble stemmed from the fact that 70 per cent of his subjects were Palestinians with no loyalty to the throne; the balance of 30 per cent were tribesmen who would sell their swords to the highest bidder.’5