Lion of Jordan (27 page)

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.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.'
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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.

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.'
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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.
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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.'
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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.
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