Chapter 10
In late 1993 my father was scheduled to travel to Asia for a visit to Singapore, Japan, China, and North Korea. At that time, the United States was engaged in a political confrontation with North Korea, which had recently successfully tested a Nodong-1 ballistic missile in the Sea of Japan and had threatened to pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). My father felt that a formal visit to North Korea from a head of state might be perceived by the United States as undermining its efforts at tough diplomacy, so he canceled his trip and asked me to go in his place. He asked me to apologize to President Kim Il-sung, whom Koreans called “the Great Leader,” that he could not come in person.
At the end of November I set out for Singapore, where I met with senior leaders and bought some light weapons. I continued on to Japan, where we discussed assistance to the Jordanian police, as the Japanese were then helping us with training in bomb disposal. After Tokyo I went to China, where I met with senior members of the People’s Liberation Army in China. The meetings went well, and my delegation and I prepared to travel on to Pyongyang. But getting there would prove to be an adventure in itself.
One of the world’s least modern airlines, Air Koryo, the North Korean state airline, is currently banned from operating in the European Union due to its poor safety record. The plane looked like a Russian copy of a Boeing 727, and inside the “first class” section, rather than rows of seats we found a couple of couches. To reach the bathroom you would have to make your way past boxes and crates stuffed into the back of the plane. We landed at Sunan International Airport late in the evening and taxied along the runway in the dark for what felt like half an hour. The airport was blacked out, perhaps because the North Korean authorities feared an escalation in the standoff with the United States.
Finally the plane came to a stop and my delegation and I headed down the steps and onto the tarmac. We were met by a group of soldiers, one of whom said something in Korean, which I believe meant “Welcome.” We were escorted to the side of the tarmac and lined up against a wall when suddenly a bright spotlight came on. While blinking in the sudden glare, I thought, “Oh no, we’re going to be shot!”
As it turned out, our hosts were filming our arrival. They showed us to an official guesthouse and led us into a large dining room with 1970s décor where some twenty generals, marshals, and assorted army officers were waiting. The dinner was very stiff and formal, and near the end of the meal one of the officers leaned over to me and asked, “What gifts are you going to give the Great Leader?”
I said, “I have brought a clock, a traditional Jordanian dagger, and a gift box from my wedding.” The general nodded his approval. We finished the meal and then headed to our guesthouse.
Not long after midnight, as I was about to fall asleep, there was a knock on my door. I got up from bed and found my protocol officer, Faisal Fayez, at the door. Faisal said the generals were outside and they wanted an explanation of the significance of my gifts. I headed back to the dining room and found the twenty officers waiting for me, all in full uniform, holding notepads. The lead general asked me what the meaning of my gifts was, and I replied that they were gifts of friendship. He was not satisfied and pressed for more detail on each specific present.
“What is the meaning of the clock?” the general continued. I was stumped. But as it was nearly one in the morning and I was keen to get to bed, I remembered one of the basic rules of international diplomacy and started making stuff up.
“The clock,” I said, “signifies the precious time my father and the Great Leader spent together at Tito’s funeral, and the time that has passed since then.” The generals nodded in unison and began scribbling furiously in their notebooks. Getting into the spirit, I continued, “The dagger is a gift from one warrior to another.”
The general asked, “And the wedding box?” I said, “I look on the Great Leader as a father, and so this is a gift from my recent wedding, from a grateful son.” The generals nodded and continued writing. After they had finished, Faisal and I retired, eager to get some rest.
The next day we were taken to see the village where the North Korean president had lived as a young man, then on to lunch with the Great Leader himself. Kim Il-sung was dressed in a two-piece safari outfit and greeted us warmly. He was in good spirits, and his view on the mounting crisis between North Korea and the United States was that it was not too serious. In common with isolated dictators across the world, Kim Il-sung had an unrealistic belief in the strength of his own military and a lack of understanding of the power and technological prowess of Western forces. “I’ve beaten the Americans once and I can do it again!” he said in an apparent reference to the Korean War, when he was prime minister. His rhetoric reminded me of the language used by Saddam’s sons, Uday and Qusay, before the Gulf War in 1991.
After lunch he took us to a side room where our gifts and his were laid out on a table. Then one of the generals from the previous night appeared, holding his notepad, and said, “Please explain to the Great Leader the significance of your gifts.” I began to sweat, struggling to remember what I had said the night before.
Thankfully, I remembered the gist of it, and Kim Il-sung seemed satisfied by my explanation. He pointed to a silver soup pot and said, “I hope you get the chance to try this traditional dish before you leave.” I thanked the Great Leader for his hospitality and went to visit a North Korean Special Forces base, where I was treated to one of the most impressive demonstrations I have ever seen. They performed a live-fire exercise in which soldiers would run, jump into the air, somersault, and while in midair fire and knock down the targets. We discussed Kim Il-sung’s offer to send North Korean Special Forces to Jordan to build a new military base and train our soldiers, and then we said good-bye. In the car heading back to the guesthouse, one of the generals leaned over to me and said, “What did you think of our Great Leader?”
“He is a very charismatic man,” I replied. The general whipped out his notepad and, pencil at the ready, asked, “What do you mean by ‘charismatic’?”
I leaned over to my protocol officer, Faisal, and quietly said, “See if you can get us on an earlier flight.”
Faisal had us on a flight leaving early the next morning, and after writing a formal letter of thanks to the Great Leader for his hospitality, I headed to bed. At about 4:30 a.m. there was another knock at my door and Faisal appeared with a look of astonishment on his face, saying, “You’re not going to believe this . . .”
Waiting for me in the guest room were the same twenty generals, accompanied by a steaming pot of traditional sweet-and-sour North Korean soup. Apparently they were serious about having me try it before I left. I took a sip and said, “It’s very good.” One of the generals looked at me and said, “What do you mean by ‘very good’?” as the rest of the group raised their notepads.
We made it onto our flight that morning without any further delays and headed to Russia for the final leg of our trip. We flew on a Russian-made airplane that was similar to a TriStar, and a couple of hours into the flight I happened to look up at the cockpit. The crew were sitting on the floor playing cards and the copilot was asleep with his feet up on the dashboard. They carried on like this for most of the fourteen-hour flight. After experiencing the best of Pyongyang’s hospitality, Moscow felt almost like home, and I was happy to meet friends from the Russian army who were at the airport to receive me.
In June 1994, shortly after Rania and I moved into our new house, our first child, a boy, was born. We named him Hussein, in honor of my father. In Arab culture, when a man has a son, close friends and relatives often stop calling him by his own name and refer to him as the father of his son. So many people began to refer to me as “Abu Hussein,” which means “Father of Hussein.” It is hard to express how proud I was—and still am—to hear that phrase.
Not long after that, Rania left the Jordan Export Development and Commercial Centers Corporation (now Jordan Enterprise Development Corporation), where she had worked since 1993, to set up the Jordan River Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to tackling tough social issues. She decided to focus on speaking out against child abuse, which is a taboo subject in much of the Arab world, and on empowering Jordanian women by encouraging entrepreneurship. Some of the foundation’s first projects sponsored training, offered funding for craftmaking programs, and helped teach women how to set up new businesses. Once a woman starts to bring in money, she is empowered in the household, because she is also a breadwinner. If her husband wants to try to keep her down, she can demand respect by pointing out that she is contributing to the family finances. So opportunities for women to work or become entrepreneurs can have a sizable social impact.
My father was very supportive of Rania’s work. He had encouraged Jordanian women to enter professions typically regarded as male bastions, and had even sponsored women’s motor-racing teams. On his recommendation, Royal Jordanian was the first airline in the Middle East to have female pilots.
A few months before Rania began setting up her foundation, I became commander of Special Forces. I had been promoted to colonel in late January 1993 and had finally managed to persuade the army’s senior brass that I was there to stay. We trained hard, aware of the many enemies threatening Jordan, including terrorist fighters returning from the wars in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya; smugglers; and spies. This was my chance to put into practice some of the lessons I had learned at Sandhurst and serving in the British army. The first thing I did was to insist that all of our officers lead from the front.
One morning I was at an airbase watching the men prepare for a parachute jump. Airborne operations are a crucial part of Special Forces tactics, as they allow troops to penetrate far into enemy territory. The air was thick with the smell of aviation fuel and the noise of C-130 transport plane engines. Smiling at the chance to get a parachute jump, which were rare by that time, I began to suit up. One of the young captains came up to me, grinning, and said, “This is the first time we’ve ever seen an officer above the rank of major jump with us.”
I realized then that a lot of officers were wearing jump wings on their uniforms but not necessarily carrying out the regular jumps needed to keep their parachute qualification current. I decided that in order to shape this unit into what I wanted it to become, I would need to ensure that the senior officers shared the same dangers and hardships as their men. That evening in the officers’ mess I rose to make an announcement. “From now on, anybody who wants to wear the jump wings of Special Forces has to regularly do parachute jumps,” I said. For the rest of the meeting, some of my officers were very quiet. I went on to train as a jumpmaster, somebody who supervises the paratroopers jumping out of the airplanes, and ran regular jumps for my men.
Parachute jumps were not just useful in training for war, but also turned out to have a valuable role to play in international diplomacy. During World War II, C Company of 156th Para, a parachute regiment of the British army, was stationed in what at the time was Transjordan. They arranged an exercise to demonstrate their capabilities to the ruler of Transjordan, my great-grandfather Abdullah. The British troops parachuted into an empty fort at Shouneh, a mile east of the River Jordan, and took it from its imaginary defenders, capturing the flag in the process. My great-grandfather was so impressed with their maneuvers that he let them keep the flag to fly in place of their regimental standard. C Company subsequently fought their way across North Africa and Europe and suffered heavy losses at the battle of Arnhem in the Netherlands in 1944, when the British paratroopers attempted to capture a bridge over the Rhine. C Company carried the Transjordan flag into battle, but was overwhelmed by the German forces. The company adjutant stashed the flag under his clothing, kept it hidden through several years in a German prisoner-of-war camp, and brought it back safely to Britain after the war ended. I was extremely touched when I watched a dramatization of that battle in the movie A Bridge Too Far, as I remembered the story of how C Company raised the flag over the divisional headquarters at the town of Oosterbeek to denote its position.
Five decades later, to mark the historical connection between Jordan and the British parachute regiment, I jumped out of a Douglas Dakota aircraft in the Netherlands as part of the proceedings commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Arnhem. I landed and presented a new Jordanian flag to Prince Charles, who in turn gave it to the successor of that regiment, C Company of 1 Para. We had been celebrating the end of a historical war. But it wasn’t long before we would have the chance to celebrate a new peace.
On July 25, 1994, on a sunny morning in Washington, D.C., some six hundred journalists, foreign dignitaries, and U.S. government officials waited patiently in front of a raised dais on the South Lawn of the White House. Behind the stage were the flags of Jordan, Israel, and the United States. The guests clapped as my father and Rabin stepped onto the dais, accompanied by President Bill Clinton. This was the first time the two men had met publicly, although they had done so privately many times. They had both come to the White House to end the state of belligerency that had existed between Israel and Jordan for forty-six years, since 1948.
The signing of the Oslo Accords had allowed Jordan to focus on its own peace negotiations with Israel. My father was now determined to secure the peace he had long sought. On many occasions, when we spoke of his negotiations with the Israelis, he would point out how difficult they were. But he believed a breakthrough was possible.
Although initially wary of each other, over time my father and Rabin had become close. They were both military men and heavy smokers. Once my father found out that Rabin smoked almost as much as he did, they were always passing cigarettes back and forth. They met many times in secret, in both Jordan and Israel. Once they had bonded, they sat around the table as two friends, trying to see things from each other’s perspective and to work out a common ground for peace. My father did not need to see a document signed. He felt that as long as Rabin said it was going to happen, it was going to happen.
Before signing the document, known as the Washington Declaration, which formally terminated the state of belligerency between their two states and recognized Jordan’s special role in protecting the Muslim holy shrines in Jerusalem, my father said, “For many, many years, and with every prayer, I have asked God, the Almighty, to help me be a part of forging peace between the children of Abraham. . . . Out of all the days of my life, I do not believe there is one such as this.” He continued, “This is a dream that those before me had—my dead grandfather, and now I. . . . This is a day of commitment, and this day is a day of hope and vision.”
Rabin also addressed the gathering. “It is dusk at our homes in the Middle East,” he said. “Soon darkness will prevail. But the citizens of Israel and Jordan will see a great light.”
After the ceremony, my father and Rabin were Clinton’s guests at a White House dinner, and the next day they addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress. My father told Congress that “the state of war between Israel and Jordan is over.”
Three months later, on October 26, 1994, my father and Rabin met again, accompanied by President Clinton, at the border crossing at Wadi Araba in southern Jordan for the signing ceremony of the formal peace treaty between Jordan and Israel. It was a historic moment. Jordan became only the second Arab country, after Egypt fifteen years earlier, to make peace with Israel. Two years after signing the treaty in 1979, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was assassinated by an Egyptian radical. We all anxiously hoped my father would not pay the same price for peace.
Initially, Jordanians and Israelis had high hopes for the fruits of peace. Jordan had regained all of the territory in the East Bank that had been occupied by Israel and its fair share of water rights. The urgent need to end the occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza, was being addressed in direct negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians. Thanks to its peace treaty with Israel, Jordan would now be able to help advance these negotiations.
For the first time, Jordanian planes were allowed to fly over Israel and the occupied Palestinian territories, and flights from Amman to Europe would thus go over Jerusalem. Although I had visited Jerusalem as a young child, I have not been back since it was occupied by the Israelis in 1967. But on a clear day, sitting on the left side of a passenger plane, I could now look down and see the sun glinting off the golden Dome of the Rock. One of the three holiest sites in Islam, the ancient shrine of Al Aqsa is also the site from where the Prophet Mohammad first ascended to heaven—in the miracle of Isra and Miraj—when the angel Gabriel took him from Mecca to Jerusalem.
Jordan’s treaty with Israel opened the way to increased political and economic cooperation, and a wave of Israeli tourists washed into Jordan, visiting Aqaba and historic sights like Petra and Wadi Rum. An equally curious group of Jordanians began making their way to Israel, many visiting for the first time this neighbor who had played such a large role in our history.
But, like many things in the region, this initial optimism would soon be marred by tragedy.
On November 4, 1995, Israeli prime minister Rabin was assassinated by a Jewish extremist at a peace rally in Tel Aviv. The murderer was opposed to the 1993 Oslo Accords and their follow-up, Oslo II, signed at the White House in September 1995, which gave the Palestinians partial control of over 40 percent of the West Bank. Like many from Israel’s extreme right, he opposed the withdrawal from the West Bank on religious grounds and decided to take matters into his own hands.
My father would devote the rest of his life to working for a peaceful settlement of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the only time after 1967 that he visited Jerusalem was for Rabin’s funeral. The ruthless warrior of the 1967 war had in later decades been transformed into a soldier for peace. My father believed that had Rabin lived longer, they would have made even greater strides together in bringing about a comprehensive Arab-Israeli settlement.
At Rabin’s funeral, he spoke to honor his friend and former foe, saying:
Never in all my thoughts would it have occurred to me that my first visit to Jerusalem and response to your invitation, the invitation of the Speaker of the Knesset, the invitation of the President of Israel, would be on such an occasion. . . . We are not ashamed, nor are we afraid, nor are we anything but determined to fulfill the legacy for which my friend fell, as did my grandfather in this very city when I was with him and but a young boy.
Rabin’s tragic death meant that we lost a true partner for peace. And in the years after his death, no Israeli leader would follow his example and succeed in the hardest challenge of all, that of achieving a lasting peace between Israel and the Palestinians.
That year, much of our attention was focused on Israel, our neighbor to the west, but we could never forget about our neighbor to the east. In August 1995, Hussein Kamel, one of the most powerful men in the Iraqi government, defected to Jordan following a clash with Uday. His wife, Saddam Hussein’s daughter Raghad, came with him, along with her sister Rana and Rana’s husband, Saddam Kamel, a senior officer in the Republican Guard and Hussein Kamel’s brother. The two families drove five hundred miles from Baghdad to Amman, ostensibly to catch a flight to Sofia for an official visit to Bulgaria. Iraq was then under United Nations sanctions, so there were no international flights out of Baghdad. Once in Amman, they met with my father, who granted them asylum.
Hussein Kamel was responsible for overseeing Iraq’s chemical and biological weapons program—and its nuclear program. He was the most senior member of Saddam’s regime to defect. My father arranged for him to be debriefed by the United Nations weapons inspectors, and he decided to house the Kamel brothers and their families in the Hashemiyah Palace, a modern palace frequently used to host visiting heads of state and other dignitaries.
The night they arrived, my father called me and said, “Could you please go over and say hello to them and tell them that their safety is guaranteed? Just make them feel at home.” So I went and greeted the Kamels. I introduced myself, saying that I was the Special Forces commander and that one of my units was protecting them. They were our guests. But from what I had seen on my visits to Baghdad I knew what type of people these men were, and I kept my distance. Although we were neighbors—at the time Rania and I were living nearby in our new house—I probably saw Hussein Kamel and Saddam’s two daughters only three times while they were living in Amman. I believe Hussein Kamel thought he would be embraced by the West, and that the United States would use its power to install him as the leader of Iraq. Clearly he was delusional.
Six months later, in February 1996, Saddam sent a message to Hussein Kamel and his brother that if they returned to Iraq all would be forgiven. Tired of their relative lack of status in Jordan, and proving conclusively that their judgment was fatally flawed, they decided to believe their father-in-law and return, along with their families. My father gave orders that they were to be escorted to the Iraqi border. A Jordanian military convoy drove them east through the desert, while one of my sniper teams watched the handover from afar, in case of trouble.
When the Kamels arrived at the border, Qusay and Uday were at the other side, waiting to meet them. The sniper team reported that Uday shook hands with both of the brothers, and then Iraqi soldiers grabbed them. As the soldiers hustled the Kamels into a waiting car, Uday and Qusay turned and knelt on the ground in prayer. When I heard this, I called my father and said, “The Kamels are as good as dead.” Three days later Hussein and Saddam Kamel were killed by Saddam’s men. Both his daughters, Raghad and Rana, lost their husbands, and his grandchildren their fathers.
The disregard for rules I had witnessed in Uday and Qusay on our fishing expedition in the 1980s had by then begun to mutate into something much darker. The wife of a friend, an Iraqi woman who grew up in Baghdad, told Rania and me that when she was at university, Uday would burst into class, surrounded by armed guards, scan the female students, and when he found one to his liking, he would arrange for his men to take her back to his palace. I heard that he kept lions and cheetahs in the basement of his palace, and had garages filled with luxury cars, including a pink Rolls-Royce. The luxurious lifestyles of Saddam’s family were in shocking contrast to the misery suffered by ordinary Iraqis as sanctions imposed by the West in the wake of the 1991 Gulf War took their toll.
We had our own problems with Uday. He was in charge of the Iraqi national football (soccer) team, and at times Jordan would play Iraq. If we defeated the Iraqi team, Uday would arrange to have the Iraqi players beaten on return. Although his brother, Qusay, was quieter and less flamboyant, he was the smarter and, I suspected, more dangerous of the two.
After the U.S. invasion of Iraq, Saddam’s daughters asked if they could come and live in Jordan, to escape the chaos and danger of Baghdad. We agreed, and they came to live, for the second time, in Amman. One subsequently left Jordan and went to live in Qatar.
Over time, as some senior officers began to retire, I found the army brass becoming more supportive of my drive to modernize, and I decided that I would make my life in the army. After almost a year as deputy commander of Special Forces, I was promoted to commander and immediately pushed the idea of restructuring our Special Forces along the lines of other leading nations. In November 1996 I created Special Operations Command (SOCOM), based on the model adopted by the French and the Americans. Reporting directly to the chief of staff of the armed forces, Field Marshal Abdul Hafez Kaabneh, SOCOM brought together under one roof Special Forces and a number of elite specialist brigades from throughout the army. We had a unit similar to the British Special Air Service (SAS) or the U.S. Delta Force, a dedicated counterterrorist unit, and two airborne battalions similar to the British paratroopers.
That year we put our parachuting skills in the service of international diplomacy. I had been approached by a group of international Special Forces veterans who wanted to carry out a parachute jump in Jordan. There is an everlasting brotherhood among Special Forces soldiers, and I readily agreed. So in mid-June 1996, a C-130J transport aircraft took off from Zarqa filled with veterans of every war imaginable, including two German soldiers in their eighties who had parachuted into Crete during World War II. I acted as the jumpmaster. The men were lined up in rows of eight, and as they reached the rear door, I slapped each man on the back, sending him out of the plane.
Colonel Shaul Dori, a retired Israeli Special Forces officer, stepped forward. “Go!” I shouted over the roar of the engines, and slapped him on the back. Smiling, he jumped out of the plane, and became the first Israeli soldier to jump with the Jordanian army.
“If someone had told me back in 1973, while I was fighting along the Suez Canal, that one day Israeli paratroopers would be jumping with the Jordanians,” said another of the Israeli veterans who jumped with us that day, “I’d have told him to get his head examined.” The jump was a great success and reminded all the men, fierce fighters and veterans of countless wars, how much they shared in common. Although today the relationship between Jordan and Israel is strained, at that time there was a sense of a new beginning. We hoped that the peace treaty between the two countries would lead to a comprehensive regional peace and that we were entering a new phase in Middle Eastern politics. There was so much optimism that I can’t help but look back on those years with great fondness, as well as with some bitterness at the opportunities that have been squandered.
I asked the French Special Forces and the British Parachute Regiment to come out and train my men. We made quite a few changes. One was to introduce live-fire exercises and to ban the use of blanks. I remembered from Sandhurst how using real bullets increases one’s concentration. We have been fortunate that only one soldier has been wounded in the years since we started live-ammunition exercises.
We had a chance to demonstrate our capabilities to our neighbor in 1997, when the Israeli defense minister, Yitzhak Mordechai, visited Jordan. My father asked me to put on a demonstration exercise in Zarqa, and we happily obliged. We began with basic trench work, in which you assault a fortified position. The soldiers ran toward the trenches, firing as they went, using live ammunition. Then they threw grenades and blasted their way across the barriers. The second exercise involved fighting in built-up areas. My troops assaulted a series of buildings using flamethrowers and Bangalore torpedoes, long tubes with explosives inside that cut through barbed wire. The men cleared a path up to the buildings, tossed grenades through the windows, and then stormed inside.
When they had finished, Mordechai turned to me and said, “I’m very glad your father decided to make peace with us!”
Live-fire exercises were nothing compared to actual missions. Due to the nature of Special Operations, many of our activities remain confidential. One particular mission, however, stands out in my mind.