Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  Throughout the 1980s America and Britain used Hussein and his generals to arm Saddam Hussein covertly. The Jordanian monarch not only provided facilities for transferring arms for Iraq; he also acted as a lobbyist for Saddam’s unsavoury regime in the West. In March 1982 Hussein seized on intelligence reports to Washington, suggesting that the Iraqi Army was in serious trouble militarily, to urge swift action to forestall the possibility of its defeat at the hands of Iran. Jordan was the perfect front for covert American operations, whether they involved intelligence sharing or the supply of arms: Jordan had a long and open border with Iraq, and arms shipments could arrive by way of the Red Sea to the port of Aqaba and from there travel overland to Baghdad. Jordan’s pro-Iraqi generals, supine bureaucracy and corrupt army of middlemen also made it the ideal staging ground for arms trafficking. The CIA station in Amman played a part in promoting these clandestine arms shipments to Baghdad. In June 1982, when an Iranian victory seemed imminent, the White House was persuaded to share some of America’s most sensitive photographic intelligence with Saddam. The person chosen to hand-carry the satellite photographs to Baghdad was no spy, no courier and no special agent, but the Jordanian monarch himself. Later, as intelligence sharing became more frequent, arrangements were made for trusted Iraqi agents to pick up the sensitive data in Amman.32

  The financial rewards of the alliance with Iraq were very considerable for Jordan’s business community, as well as for the king personally. The Iran–Iraq War ushered in a new era of close economic cooperation. Iraqi purchases of Jordanian products grew steadily throughout the 1980s. Jordanian exports to Iraq increased from $168 million in 1985 to $212.3 million in 1989. By the end of the decade the Iraqi market accounted for nearly a quarter of all Jordanian exports.33 Iraq was a very wealthy oil-producing country, and Saddam was a very big spender. No figures are available on the financial support that Saddam extended to the king because this was treated as a private matter between them, but the sums involved were probably very large.34 Iraqi largesse helped to liberate the king from his financial dependence on the Gulf states. Hussein always felt uneasy about his relationship with some of the Gulf shaikhdoms, especially Saudi Arabia and Kuwait. He felt that the rulers of these countries did not always treat him with the respect he deserved. For a proud man it could be a humiliating experience to have to go to these rulers again and again to beg for money for his country. The aid he received helped to keep Jordan afloat but was not sufficient to fund major development projects. Saddam, by contrast, always treated Hussein as an equal partner and as a valued friend, and the help he gave was on a much more generous scale.35

  Throughout his reign Hussein prided himself on his Pan-Arabism and on his services to the cause of Arab unity. In the mid 1980s he made a dramatic but little-known attempt to heal the rift between his giant neighbours to the north, Iraq and Syria. The main purpose of this attempt was to bring to an end Syrian support for Iran and to rally the entire Arab world behind Iraq. In April 1986, after reaching his own rapprochement with President Asad, Hussein shuttled between Baghdad and Damascus in an effort to bring about a similar reconciliation between the rival Ba’th regimes. His efforts bore fruit, and he succeeded in persuading first Saddam and then Asad to meet secretly under his auspices in Jordan.

  The meeting took place at the Jafar Air Base in the eastern desert near Ma’an. One of the little houses on the base was prepared for the occasion. The king went into the house with his guests and stayed with them for an hour and then withdrew to let them talk privately. Saddam Hussein and Asad worked continuously for eighteen hours with some breaks: Saddam would go for a walk round the base with his bodyguards; Asad would go to his chalet to sit down and talk with Abdel Halim Khaddam, his vice-president. The king was slightly worried that his guests were taking so long. Saddam told him afterwards that he had spoken for half an hour and that Asad had spoken for the other seventeen and a half hours. Asad was extremely shrewd and decisive but notoriously long-winded. When Saddam and Asad said they had finished, Hussein rejoined them in the little house. They told him that the talks had failed to close the gap between them. Asad wanted the announcement of a union between Iraq and Syria before anything else could happen, and Saddam rejected this condition. Asad was uncompromising throughout and unrepentant about his support for Iran; Saddam struck the posture of an Arab nationalist. An Arab country like Syria, he said, should not help a non-Arab country against a fellow Arab country. The fact that Asad and Saddam were Ba’thists who subscribed to the same ideology made no real difference. Each was entrenched in his own worldview and each was single-minded in the pursuit of his own interests. The irony of this abortive exercise in peacemaking was that a Hashemite king had tried to mediate between two Ba’thists in the interests of Arab unity.36

  21

  The London Agreement

  After his break with the PLO, Hussein pursued a very assertive policy of building up support for his leadership of the Palestinian cause on the West Bank. In a speech at the opening of parliament on 1 November 1986, he stated that the Palestine question remained Jordan’s central concern, and that the Jordanian and the Palestinian people would continue to swim together in the same historical current.1 Hussein also placed renewed emphasis on the now ageing idea of an international conference as a vehicle for solving the Palestine problem. A separate peace with Israel on the Camp David model was out of the question. A conference was needed in order to give negotiations with Israel international legitimacy and to base them on UN resolutions. As always, Hussein also needed some Arab cover for dealing directly with Israel, and the break with the PLO made it all the more necessary to coordinate his moves with Syria. The Syrians had had a phobia about bilateral deals ever since Sadat signed the Camp David Accords. They wanted an international conference in order to balance the weight of Israel and its superpower sponsor. The traditional Syrian position was that peace talks would be meaningful only when the Arabs achieved some sort of strategic parity with Israel, but that was at best a very distant prospect. For the time being an international conference provided them with an incentive to go along with Hussein’s diplomatic efforts. The problem was not Syria but Israel, or rather the deep division within the national unity government between Likud and the Labour Party. In October 1986, as pre-arranged, Shamir and Peres swapped places: Shamir became prime minister and Peres stepped down to become foreign minister. Abba Eban aptly described the change as ‘ushering in the tunnel at the end of the light’.

  Once Shamir had rotated into the top job, he was as indefatigable in resisting diplomatic initiatives to change the status quo as Peres had been in promoting them. But demotion in no way weakened Peres’s urgent sense that the Jordanian opening had to be pursued with vigour and determination. The Jordanians would proceed to bilateral negotiations with Israel only under the cover of an international conference but Shamir flatly rejected the idea. ‘As long as I am prime minister,’ Shamir declared in the Knesset, ‘there will be no international conference.’ The Americans too remained cool towards the idea of convening an international conference because they wanted to keep the Soviet Union out of Middle Eastern diplomacy. As the official diplomatic channels produced no movement, Peres tried to reach a breakthrough by means of a secret summit. He accepted with alacrity the offer of his old friend Lord Mishcon to set up a meeting. As we have seen, Mishcon had often liaised between Peres and Hussein, and he enjoyed the complete trust of both. He carried messages back and forth across the bridge on the River Jordan and succeeded in arranging a meeting. The time and place were fixed for Saturday, 11 April 1987, at Mishcon’s flat in central London. Peres told Shamir about the meeting and received his grudging consent. To Peres’s aide Shamir remarked that he was pleased about this channel to Jordan: it would not bring peace but talking helped to prevent war. On Friday, Peres took off for London aboard a small executive jet, accompanied by Dr Yossi Beilin, the political director-general of the Foreign Ministry, and Efraim Halevy, the deputy-director of the Mossa
d. During the flight Peres and Beilin jotted down some notes that later helped with the drafting of what became known as the London Agreement.2

  Hussein came to the meeting in Hyde Park Gardens with Zaid Rifa’i, still his prime minister and confidant. The domestic staff had been given the day off, and Lady Mishcon cooked and served a delicious meal herself. The king was in sparkling form, weaving amusing anecdotes into his pithy political assessments. He made people laugh by recounting that Ronald Reagan once asked him about fishing in the Dead Sea. Rifa’i told an amusing anecdote of his own about a sleepy guard at a government guest house in Cairo who only let him in one night when he pretended to be Shimon Peres. After lunch the politicians settled down to serious business. Their discussion was to continue for seven hours. It began with a survey of the events of the previous year. The conversation flowed smoothly and pleasantly, and gradually turned to the real issues.

  Hussein thought that the Reagan administration was thoroughly confused as to what it was trying to achieve in their region, but he reserved his sharpest comments for the PLO. They were ambiguous in their basic political positions, he said, and this ambiguity, far from being constructive, simply reflected their vague and indeterminate political thinking. The PLO continued to engage in terror and effectively rejected all openings for productive negotiations. The king stressed that his vision of an international conference did not embrace the PLO as long as it continued to reject resolutions 242 and 338. But the Palestinians would not want to be left out altogether, so they were likely to agree to a joint delegation with Jordan and to put forward representatives who would be acceptable to Israel. Hussein also predicted that in the long term the PLO would lose the support of the main players in the Arab world. Peres agreed that neither Israel nor Jordan could regard the PLO, committed by its charter to seek the destruction of Israel, as a partner for peace. Israel certainly did not want to see Arafat ruling Amman, he added in what amounted to a reaffirmation of the Labour Party’s traditional policy of support for the House of Hashem. Peres reported that a Soviet envoy turned up at a Socialist International meeting in Rome specifically to see him and that his message was that Moscow accepted the concept of a ‘non-coercive’ international conference. The king observed that Soviet policy-making was undergoing very real and positive changes, even though many of the officials remained the same.

  The two leaders found themselves in agreement on many, though not all, of the key issues. They agreed that the time was ripe to move towards a resolution of the conflict. They also agreed that an international conference should be convened to launch the process, but that it should not have the power to impose solutions. Their idea was that the conference should assemble once and that every subsequent session would require the prior consent of all the parties. They agreed too that there should be a joint Jordanian–Palestinian delegation that would not include avowed members of the PLO. Finally, they agreed that after the opening session, negotiations would be carried out face to face in bilateral committees consisting of Israelis and their Arab opponents. According to Peres, ‘The King spoke enthusiastically of this agenda. He stressed the urgency of reaching a comprehensive settlement. His commitment to the peace process was clear and unequivocal, he said. “This is a holy challenge for me,” he declared, “a religious duty.” He explained that he understood Israel’s reservations about an international conference, “But the goal is peace, not a conference.” ’ Zaid Rifa’i said that he too agreed with the key points that Peres had articulated. ‘Well, then,’ said Peres, ‘why don’t we try to write down our agreement?’ The king said he could not do this, as he had another engagement that would take him one hour. He suggested that in the meantime the Israelis draft two documents: one detailing the principles and procedures of the proposed international conference, and the other setting out the agreements and understandings between Israel and Jordan. The king and Rifa’i left, and the Israelis quickly got down to work. Lord Mishcon, a distinguished lawyer and a skilled draftsman, helped them to write the text. By the time the king and Rifa’i returned, the two papers were ready. They read them carefully, and Rifa’i started to suggest changes, but Hussein stopped him, saying the two drafts accurately reflected the agreements they had reached. They decided, finally, to transmit the paper to the Americans and to ask them to present it as an American paper. The meeting ended on a note of high hope. Both leaders were deeply gratified with the results of the day’s work.3 For Peres the document represented a major achievement. There had been countless clandestine meetings with the king of Jordan, but this was the first meeting that produced an agreement in writing. Hussein’s achievement consisted of getting an Israeli agreement in principle to an international conference and thus meeting the basic Arab condition, laid down at the Fez summit of 1982, for negotiations with Israel.

  Unsigned but with the date and venue at the bottom, the London Agreement was typed in English on a single sheet of paper. It was divided into three parts. The first proposed that the UN secretary-general should invite the five permanent members of the Security Council and the parties to the Arab–Israeli conflict to negotiate a peaceful settlement based on resolutions 242 and 338 ‘with the object of bringing a comprehensive peace to the area, security to its states, and to respond to the legitimate rights of the Palestinian people’. The second proposed that the conference should invite the parties to form bilateral committees to negotiate on issues of mutual interest. It was the third, however, that was the key, for it summarized all the points on which Jordan and Israel had agreed:

  1. The international conference will not impose any solution or veto any agreement arrived at between the parties. 2. The negotiations will be conducted in bilateral committees directly. 3. The Palestinian issue will be dealt with in the committee of the Jordanian–Palestinian and Israeli delegations. 4. The Palestinians’ representatives will be included in the Jordanian–Palestinian delegation. 5. Participation in the conference will be based on the parties’ acceptance of resolutions 242 and 338 and the renunciation of violence and terrorism. 6. Each committee will negotiate independently. 7. Other issues will be decided by mutual agreement between Jordan and Israel.

  Finally, it was stated that the document was subject to approval by the respective governments of Jordan and Israel and that it would be shown and recommended to the USA.4

  The PLO was not mentioned anywhere, and this was bound to upset its supporters. On the other hand, an international conference, however impotent, was bound to upset right-wing Israelis. Both Hussein and Peres needed US help in order to overcome opposition to their agreement from within their own camps. Not long after his return home, Hussein contacted George Shultz and explained what had been agreed, urging the secretary of state to give his blessing. Peres acted with greater dispatch by sending Yossi Beilin to Helsinki to intercept Shultz, who was on his way to Moscow to arrange a summit meeting between Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the new president of the Soviet Union.

  Peres himself called on Shamir as soon as he got home, early on Sunday morning. They arranged to meet alone, after the weekly cabinet session. Peres gave Shamir a full account of his talks with Hussein and read to him the text of the document. Shamir asked Peres to read it again, and he did so. But when Shamir asked for a copy of the document, Peres refused. He told Shamir frankly that he was afraid of leaks not by the prime minister but by his staff. Peres added, a bit disingenuously, that as the arrangement was for the Americans to put forward the plan as their idea, it would be better if Shamir received it directly from them. Shamir said nothing.5 Shamir and his colleagues did not trust Peres, and, although the London Agreement dealt only with procedures, they suspected that Peres had made secret concessions on substance. The fact that Hussein, who in the past had always insisted on knowing the outcome before official negotiations could start, now agreed to negotiations without any preconditions seemed to them to support these suspicions. Besides, even though the London Agreement did not formally commit Israel to anything of subst
ance in advance, Shamir feared that it might open the door to the territorial compromise favoured by the Labour Party.

  In Helsinki, Beilin gave Shultz a full account of the London meeting, describing it as an historic breakthrough, and urging him to adopt it as an American plan. ‘Don’t let it evaporate,’ Beilin said. ‘It’s in your hands now.’ Shultz had no difficulty with the idea of a carefully controlled international conference that would meet to propel the parties into direct, bilateral negotiations. Yet he thought it was extraordinary for the foreign minister of Israel’s government of national unity to ask him to sell to Israel’s prime minister, the head of a rival party, an agreement made with a foreign head of state. The problem was compounded by the fact that Shamir, in his Passover message to Reagan on 1 April, had stated that it was ‘inconceivable that there may be in the US support of the idea of an international conference, which will inevitably reintroduce the Soviets into our region in a major role’.6

  On 22 April, Shultz telephoned Shamir to tell him that he had been informed of the London Agreement by his foreign minister and by the king of Jordan, and to say that he was ready to go to the Middle East to move forward with him in the peace process. Shamir replied that he wanted to think the idea over for a day or two, but Shultz could sense that he was dead against it. Two hours later Elyakim Rubinstein, Shamir’s aide, called from Jerusalem to give Shamir’s answer. Shamir did not want to say this directly, but the London document had no appeal for him and he would not welcome a visit by the American secretary of state. An international conference would amass pressure on behalf of the Arabs on Israel. If the United Nations was involved, it was inevitable that the PLO would be as well. The next day, 23 April, word came from Peres: he was pleased with the way Shultz had handled the issue with Shamir; he recognized that he would have to risk breaking the government over this; but he would not be party to Israel missing this opportunity. ‘In London, Israel and Jordan had been in direct negotiations and had achieved agreement. Would the Israeli prime minister now turn away from this opportunity?’ Peres asked.