Black Flags (6 page)

But now the young commander sat in the dining room of the Hummar Palace, overwhelmed. With a single sentence, his father had upended his world and the stable, if privileged, life he had built for himself, his wife, and their two children.

The king also had acknowledged something he had never said aloud: the fact of his impending death.

“
A cold sensation crept into my stomach,” Abdullah would recall. “I think that was the first instant I felt truly alone.”

He left the palace and returned home to find his wife, Rania, sitting on the floor of their living room with family photos spread out around her. Her eyes filled when he shared the news, as the magnitude of the changes awaiting both of them began to sink in.

“
We would soon be thrust into the spotlight in a way that neither of us could have imagined,” he later wrote in his memoir. “And there were a lot of wolves out there, waiting for us to stumble.”

Those worries were soon shoved aside by more immediate crises. King Hussein had decided to try one more round of cancer treatment, which meant leaving Jordan for another bone-marrow transplant in the United States. Abdullah would effectively serve as regent during his absence, a role that would force him to plunge headlong into a sea of political and foreign-policy challenges, despite his limited experience. Though he did not yet know it, the list of urgent tasks would soon include preparations for a state funeral and his formal coronation as king.

On January 29, Abdullah drove his father to the airport to begin his journey to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. The king sat in the front passenger seat, looking quietly out the window as the car wound through Amman’s affluent western district, with its high-rise hotels and office towers, and then onto the airport highway. They passed poorer suburbs and villages with their outdoor markets and small, neon-lit mosques. Then they were speeding through open country, past craggy hills and rock-strewn fields where sheep and Bedouin tents compete for space with satellite dishes and Toyota
pickup trucks. Abdullah reached over to rest a hand on top of one of his father’s, then kept it there as they rode in silence.

The farewells were going fine until they reached the airplane, when Abdullah, convinced he was seeing his father for the last time, briefly lost the steely composure he had vowed to maintain. Choking back tears, he helped his father onto the plane and then stood with him for a moment in the aisle to say goodbye. The king looked at his son directly but was clearly struggling with his emotions as well, Abdullah later recalled. Instead of a hug or parting instruction, he simply nodded, then turned to walk down the aisle alone.

Minutes later, the crown prince was on his way back to Amman and the duties awaiting him at the palace. He would never again see his father conscious. The king returned to the country he had ruled for nearly half a century, but this time there were no cameras on hand as the dying man was wheeled from the plane to a waiting ambulance and onward to Amman’s King Hussein Medical Center, where thousands of ordinary Jordanians stood vigil in a cold rain, refusing to leave until the moment, shortly before noon on February 7, 1999, when television stations throughout the country abruptly went dark.

Abdullah sat by the hospital bed during the final hours, feeling even more alone for his inability to comfort his father, or to ask for a single word of advice on governing a country that seemed perpetually in crisis, beset by enemies within and without.

—

Not since the founding of the country had Jordanians seen an event as grand as the funeral of King Hussein bin Talal. Never had there been such crowds, as ordinary Jordanians—an estimated eight hundred thousand of them, or nearly a quarter of the country’s population—clogged the sidewalks and spilled out of windows and rooftops along the route through which the flag-draped coffin would pass.
They stood for hours, bundled up against a damp chill, to honor the only ruler most had ever known: the smiling monarch with the common touch who had led the country through wars and civil strife and then, in his later years, on a historic path to peace. Men and women openly wept, and some wailed and slapped themselves in a traditional
Arabic show of mourning. Others ran alongside the funeral cortege and even lunged into its path in a frenzy of grief.

Nearly as impressive was the gathering of foreign dignitaries at Amman’s Raghadan Palace. Less than twenty-four hours after the king’s death, premiers and potentates from seventy-five countries had passed through the palace’s arched limestone entrance to attend what commentators were already calling “the funeral of the twentieth century.” Four U.S. presidents were among the visitors, including the White House’s current occupant, Bill Clinton, who paused before boarding Air Force One to praise Hussein as a “magnificent man” whose nobility came “not from his title, but from his character.” Britain’s Prince Charles and prime minister Tony Blair rushed to Amman to attend, as did UN secretary-general Kofi Annan and the heads of state of Japan, France, Germany, and the other major European powers. Russian president Boris Yeltsin, looking pale and disoriented, arrived with a phalanx of security guards but left minutes later, complaining of illness.

The Middle Eastern guests invited the most stares. The contingent included a surprise visitor, Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, for years a bitter foe of Hussein, having fought his neighbor across their common border and tried repeatedly to undermine his government. Now the aging autocrat mingled with other emirs and strongmen who at various times had battled the Jordanians, or the Syrians, or each other. Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, wearing a traditional Hebrew prayer cap over his graying locks, occupied a corner of the domed reception hall with an entourage that included generals, bodyguards, and a bearded rabbi. The Palestine Liberation Organization’s Yasser Arafat, his five-foot-two frame dwarfed by an oversized military coat, made small talk with Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak. Perhaps the most anxious man in the room was Khaled Mashal, the leader of the militant Palestinian faction Hamas and a repeated target of Israeli assassination attempts. Two years earlier, agents from Israel’s Mossad spy service had jabbed Mashal with a poison needle on an Amman street a few miles from where he now stood. He survived only after a furious King Hussein prevailed on the Israelis to provide his doctors with an antidote.

Greeting them all, looking slightly uncomfortable in his black
suit and red-checkered keffiyeh, was the man whom visitors now addressed as King Abdullah II. The new monarch stood near the coffin in a royal receiving line of siblings and uncles, shaking hands with presidents and ministers who were mostly strangers to him. He was not yet officially king—the formal swearing in would take place before Parliament later in the day—but he had gone on Jordanian television moments after Hussein’s death to signal the change to the nation. When he appeared on camera, reading from a paper script with his father beaming from a portrait over his shoulder, it was the first time most Jordanians had heard his voice.

“This was God’s judgment and God’s will,” he had said.

Now he was taking his place at the head of the line of mourners, walking behind his father’s coffin to the royal burial plot, flanked by his uncles and brothers and trailed by the late king’s favorite white stallion, Amr, bearing an empty saddle. At the graveside, next to markers for the first two kings of Jordan, Hussein’s body was removed from the casket and lowered into the ground, covered only by a simple white shroud.

Then all that remained was the formality of the swearing-in ceremony before the combined houses of Parliament. After administering the constitutional oath, the Senate president introduced the country’s new sovereign.

“May God protect His Majesty King Abdullah and give him success,” he said.

It was official, and yet not quite real. As the new king was leaving the ceremony, he was caught off guard when an aide called out, “Your Majesty, this way.”

“
Out of habit, I looked around for my father,” he recalled later.

But the title now was his, and so was the country. Abdullah now owned the sagging economy, the fractious politics, the sectarian tensions, the regional disputes.

At one stroke, he had also inherited legions of enemies. Some were close to home, and covetous of his job. Others were foreign powers who saw an independent Jordan as an obstacle to their own designs for the region. Still others were religious extremists opposed to the very idea of a secular, pro-Western state called Jordan. In the early months of 1999, as the newest heir to the Hashemite throne settled
tentatively into his perch, all were watching closely to see if he would fall.

—

To serve as ruler of a Middle Eastern country is to give up any expectation of dying of old age. It’s especially true in Jordan, where the extraordinary perils of the job seem to generate a kingly appetite for dangerous hobbies.

Hussein survived at least eighteen assassination attempts in his lifetime. He was just fifteen on the summer day in 1951 when his grandfather—Jordan’s first king, Abdullah I—was shot to death by a Palestinian gunman as the two royals were visiting Jerusalem’s al-Aqsa Mosque. The young prince gave chase, narrowly escaping death himself when the assassin turned and fired a bullet that deflected off a medal on his uniform, according to the palace’s version of events. Later, his enemies would try ambushes, plane crashes, and even poisoned nasal drops, which Hussein discovered when he accidentally spilled the dispenser and watched in horror as the frothing liquid cut through the chrome on his bathroom fixtures. The king dodged death so many times that he took on an aura of invincibility. Jordanians would often say that Hussein possessed
baraka
—Allah’s favor. The prospect that one of his sons could be equally blessed seemed unlikely.

Hussein refused to be deterred by the attacks. If anything, they increased his appetite for risky pastimes: racing cars and flying helicopters and fighter jets. Once, famously, while entertaining Henry Kissinger, he had taken the former U.S. secretary of state and his wife on a gut-churning chopper tour of the country, zipping across Jordan’s rolling terrain as the helicopter’s skids shaved the tops off palm trees. Kissinger would later recall that his wife tried politely to ask the king to climb to a safer altitude.

“
I didn’t know helicopters could fly so low,” she said.

“Oh! They can fly lower!” the king replied. Then he dropped below treetop level and skimmed along the ground. “That really aged me rapidly,” Kissinger said.

In choosing Abdullah as his successor, Hussein picked a leader who resembled him at least in that respect. In contrast to the cerebral
and cautious Prince Hassan, the king’s brother, Abdullah shared his father’s informal bearing and devotion to high-testosterone pursuits. As a young boy, Abdullah would squeal with delight whenever his father put him in his lap and took off for a spin through the desert in his roadster, the dust billowing behind them as the car blew down empty highways to strains of the cartoon theme song “Popeye the Sailor Man.” His adrenaline addiction spurred a lifelong interest in motorcycles, race cars, airplanes, and free-fall skydiving.

Abdullah excelled at wrestling, track, and schoolboy pranks at his American prep school, and as a military cadet at Britain’s prestigious Sandhurst academy, he turned down an infantry officer’s commission for the speed and firepower of battle tanks. He liked driving the Fox, a nimble, tanklike armored vehicle with a thirty-millimeter cannon, and wheels instead of tracks. Once, he led a column of Foxes on an expedition along the M4 motorway west of London, squeezing every ounce of horsepower from the boxy vehicles until they were flying past the civilian traffic. After a few minutes at full throttle, he peered out of the turret to see a police cruiser racing alongside of him, lights flashing. The officer motioned the column to stop and then approached Abdullah in the lead vehicle, shaking his head.

“
I have no idea how I’m going to write this up,” the officer said. The cadets were eventually released with a warning.

The prince’s reputation for daredevilry nearly scuttled his courtship with his future queen, Rania al-Yassin, even before it officially started. The stylishly beautiful Rania was a twenty-two-year-old marketing employee for Apple Inc. when the two met at a dinner party. Abdullah was instantly smitten, but Rania shunned his advances. Abdullah was then a thirty-year-old armored-battalion commander with perpetually sunburned skin and a bad-boy reputation, and Rania, the daughter of middle-class Palestinian parents, had no interest in being his latest conquest, Abdullah would acknowledge in his memoir years later.

“I’ve heard things about you,” Rania had said.

“
I’m no angel,” Abdullah admitted. “But at least half the things you hear are just idle gossip.”

The two finally agreed to date. Six months later, having mustered the courage to pop the question, he drove Rania to one of his favorite
spots in Jordan: the summit of a small mountain that had been the setting for daring hill-climb car races for both Abdullah and his father. “I had hoped for a more romantic proposal,” he acknowledged afterward. But this time, Rania did not push him away. They were married on June 10, 1993, just ten months after they were introduced.

Yet, in the weeks after he became King Abdullah II, all traces of the brash battalion commander and adrenaline junkie faded from view. The man who had plunged from airplanes hundreds of times moved quickly to eliminate risks, at least those that threatened his survival as monarch. He set out to repair his tattered relations with members of the royal family, offering the position of crown prince to his younger brother Hashem, son of Hussein’s popular fourth wife, the American-born Queen Noor. But he fired or demoted top officials of the security services whom he suspected of having close ties to his uncle, his stepmother, or other royals. He then decreed that his own, decidedly nonroyal wife would become queen. After that, Queen Noor left Jordan for good.

Other risks beckoned from beyond the border, so the new king launched a diplomatic offensive aimed at mitigating the biggest ones. He traveled to Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf emirates to patch a nearly decade-old rift over Jordan’s policy of neutrality during the first Iraq war. He invited Israel’s prime minister, the notoriously pugnacious Netanyahu, to Amman for a get-acquainted luncheon. He even tried to improve ties with Syria, reaching out first to President Hafez al-Assad and then, after the autocrat’s death, befriending his son, Bashar al-Assad, another Western-educated thirty-something who had been a surprise choice to succeed his father.