Chapter 7
I was relaxing at my army base in Qatraneh one evening when the phone rang. My father asked me to come to Amman to see him immediately. I drove to meet him, wondering why he had to see me so late at night, and arrived around ten o’clock.
Pulling me to one side, my father told me he intended to go to Aqaba tomorrow night. From there, he would take a boat to meet with the Israelis to press them to agree to a solution that would end their occupation of the land they had seized in 1967 and bring peace to the region. “I want you to be my driver and bodyguard,” he told me. Although Jordan shared a lengthy border with Israel, it was very foreign territory for us. To enter Israel would be like a West Berliner sneaking over the wall for a visit to East Berlin during the height of the cold war. I said it would be an honor to be at his side. He told me to meet him at the airport the next morning. Heading home, I felt excited, but also nervous. I was a captain in the army, and escorting my father on a secret mission into enemy territory was a weighty assignment. For the first time I would not just be an observer of Arab-Israeli history—I would play a small part in it myself.
I have decided to tell this personal story because it offers a glimpse of the huge risks my father would take for peace. With his passing, I feel it is important to describe how dedicated he was to bringing about a regional peace that would ensure an Israeli withdrawal from all occupied Arab territories, especially Jerusalem, which had a special place in his heart. He believed that peace was a right for all peoples of the region, Arabs and Israelis. You make peace with your enemies, not your friends, he would say. Nothing good would come of refusing to engage them. My father met many times with Israelis to discuss proposals, but he always held to the idea of full Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank, including East Jerusalem, as the basis of a solution. Jordan shared a 375-mile border with Israel and he felt discussions were needed to prevent war. We had already experienced one disaster in 1967 and needed to avoid another. One of my father’s greatest virtues was that he was trusted and admired by everyone, even by those who disagreed with him. He was far too well-mannered to point out that many of the Arab leaders who criticized him publicly for engaging Israel were asking him in private to intercede on their behalf.
My father and I flew from Amman south to Aqaba, accompanied by the prime minister, Zaid Rifai, and by Sharif (later Prince) Zeid bin Shaker, the chief of the Royal Court. The plan was to take a clandestine nighttime trip in a small fishing boat across the Gulf of Aqaba into Israel. When we reached Aqaba we found our boat and waited for nightfall. Around 9 p.m. the four of us boarded the thirty-three-foot fishing boat and sailed out of the harbor. We headed for the border, then crossed into Israeli waters. Proceeding cautiously, we flashed a light from the bow of the boat and saw a light flash back. Out of the darkness came a small dinghy with Efraim Halevy, a member of the Mossad, the Israeli foreign intelligence service, onboard. Halevy, a British-born lawyer who would go on to head the Mossad, was not much for conversation that night, and beckoned for us to follow him. We began to pull in closer to Israel. A location for the meeting had been agreed, but the dinghy changed course. Sharif Zeid was very concerned. “This is not what we agreed on,” he said. My father motioned for me to come with him to the top of the boat. When we were out of hearing, he said, “Well, what do you think?”
As a young man on his first secret mission, I urged my father to go ahead. He looked at me and smiled. We went back to the others and my father told Sharif Zeid, “It’s okay, we’re going to do this.”
We went all the way to the Israeli city of Eilat, a short distance from Aqaba, and anchored in front of a naval hangar, some 325 yards from shore. My father, Zaid Rifai, and Sharif Zeid boarded the Israeli dinghy and went ashore, and I was left alone to guard the boat.
I turned off all the lights and scanned the beach with my binoculars, looking for Israeli soldiers. Everything seemed quiet. I saw a campfire and a couple of hippies sitting next to it, playing the guitar. I caught a glimpse of a glowing cigarette butt next to the hangar and focused on it with the binoculars. It was an Israeli sniper, watching me. I had no means of communicating with my father and realized how isolated I was, sitting alone on a fishing boat outside an Israeli port. So I took my hand grenades and rigged them up along the side of the boat with a pulley system. One pull of the string would set the whole lot off.
It must have been ten o’clock at night when we arrived, and hours went by while I waited for my father and the others to return. At one point I thought, “In about five hours, the sun will come up. I’m all alone on a boat in an Israeli harbor, loaded to the gills with guns and grenades, and nobody knows I’m here. If my father doesn’t come back, what will I do?” Fortunately, I did not have to storm the beaches single-handedly or return to Jordan and explain how I had managed to misplace the king. Shortly before sunrise my father came back via that same small dinghy, and we all sailed back to Aqaba. Although my father never spoke of what had taken place that night, meetings such as this one laid the groundwork for the peace treaty that would eventually be signed between Jordan and Israel.
Over the years I progressed through the ranks, occasionally leaving Jordan for brief periods of training, then returning to the army. One memorable trip was a six-month company commander training course at Fort Knox, Kentucky, in the United States in 1985 to study armor strategy and tactics. Although we were closing the gap with the NATO armies, we still had a ways to go, particularly in obtaining the most advanced military equipment. One afternoon I was pulling on my kit when a colonel in the Israeli army who was attending the same course walked up next to me. Seeing the patch on my shoulder, he said, “40th Armoured Brigade, eh? You Jordanians are tough.” He was obviously referring to the strong fight the brigade had put up against the Israeli army in the 1967 war.
When I returned to Jordan I was made a company commander in the 91st Armoured Brigade, which was based in Zarqa, to the northeast of Amman. The second largest city in Jordan, Zarqa was known for its military garrison, as well as for some heavy industry. Unlike towns with large military bases in England, such as Aldershot, where there could sometimes be tensions between the soldiers and the locals, in Zarqa the soldiers felt very much part of the community. People from all over Jordan serving in the army had moved there along with their families, so the inhabitants were diverse, with strong links to the military.
On the base, officers and soldiers would eat in separate mess halls, but once off base these distinctions disappeared. At that time there were very few restaurants in Zarqa, so my friends and colleagues would invite people to their houses to eat traditional Jordanian food. A particular delight was mansaf, boiled lamb served on a bed of rice, with a yogurt sauce garnished with roasted pine nuts. We would eat in the traditional way, using our hands.
One of the less pleasant aspects of life in Zarqa was the industrial pollution. There was an oil refinery to the north of town and a tannery to the south, neither of which was kept to modern environmental standards. When the wind blew in a certain direction, the fumes from the two factories mixed together, creating an unpleasant sulfuric smell. For a change of scene, we would sometimes head to the nearby town of Ruseifa, known for its gardens and citrus trees, to sit and eat in a restaurant, watching the world go by.
Although personally I was having a very good time, professionally it was tough. I still had not resolved my differences with some of the senior army officers who were determined to derail my career. Word had come down from the top brass to make life difficult for me, and during the year or so that I was in Zarqa my company was always getting extra duties and surprise inspections. I was friends with a group of other company commanders, with whom I would hang out to pass the time. I had a more formal relationship with another company commander, who was from a bedouin background and always respectful, but kept his distance.
Every year there was a general inspection, which required a lot of hard work and preparation. You had to lay out all your equipment, and the inspectors would go through the books to see if anything was missing. If you had lost even a spanner there would be big trouble, so all the companies would exchange notes and swap equipment before the big event. Normally the annual inspection was for the entire brigade, but one night the bedouin company commander came up to me and said, “They’re going to have a surprise inspection tomorrow, just for your company. They want to catch you out, so they can send a bad report up to headquarters.” This was unprecedented.
The other company commanders, whom I had thought were my friends, abandoned me and left me to my own devices, but the commander who had kept his distance said, “I’ll give you anything you need.” We worked together all night to make sure my company would be ready in the morning. I apologized to my soldiers, telling them that the extra scrutiny was imposed because of who I was, but that unfortunately we had no choice but to put up with it.
The battalion commander came in with his team the next morning and carried out the surprise inspection. We passed. But then an incident occurred the likes of which I have never seen before or since. The battalion commander walked up to my senior NCOs, who were standing in a line, and said, “Your boots are not good enough.” My men had been up all night, and their boots were gleaming. While looking him straight in the eye, the battalion commander ground his boot into the sergeant major’s. Another senior NCO did not answer a question fast enough, and the battalion commander, breaking all the rules, slapped him across the face, which in my culture is incredibly insulting.
At that point, I snapped. I followed the battalion commander back to his office and said, “If you ever touch another one of my soldiers again, I swear to God I’ll shoot you.” I think that got his attention. I am not someone who easily loses his temper, but his behavior toward my soldiers made me so angry. And although my outburst protected my company, that was not one of my proudest moments.
For the rest of my time in that company, which was around six months, I stayed in my room in the evenings. I never went back into the officers’ mess. My fellow company commanders had let me down, and I elected to distance myself from them. This was the lowest point in my army career, and I gave serious thought to quitting. I badly wanted to talk about my problems with my father, but I didn’t want to get special treatment. So I turned instead for advice to my uncle, Prince Hassan. After we discussed the difficulties I was facing, he suggested that I should wait out the end of my tour and see how I felt.
In 1987, I took a break from my military career and spent a year at Georgetown University in Washington as a mid-career fellow in the Master of Science in Foreign Service program. I studied international relations and got to know the U.S. capital well. When I got back from Georgetown, I again discussed my army career with my uncle, and said I was thinking about choosing a different career. Prince Hassan said, “Why give the bastards the satisfaction?” Although we did not always see eye to eye in later years, my uncle was a source of support and wise advice then, especially over problems that I felt I could not speak to my father about.
After leaving Zarqa, I continued in the armored corps and learned to fly attack helicopters.
In the late 1980s I was invited by General Norman Schwarzkopf, who had recently taken over as commander in chief of U.S. Central Command, to spend a week on a training mission with the U.S. military in the Arabian Gulf. The Iran-Iraq war was drawing to a close, but oil tankers passing through the strategically important Strait of Hormuz would occasionally be attacked, so the U.S. Navy had extended its protection to all neutral ships. Special Forces troops, based on a floating barge in the Gulf, provided extra support, searching for hostile ships.
At that time, the Gulf was a very dangerous place to be. In May 1987 a friendly Iraqi F-1 jet fired two Exocet missiles at the U.S. frigate USS Stark, killing thirty-seven sailors and nearly sinking the ship. The Iraqis said that the attack was an accident. In April 1988 the frigate USS Samuel B. Roberts was badly damaged when it hit an Iranian mine; one American helicopter was lost in the U.S. response, and both of its crew members were killed. Then, on July 3, 1988, the American cruiser USS Vincennes mistook an Iranian civilian airliner as an attacking military aircraft. Tragically, the Iranian Airbus was shot down and all 290 civilians onboard died.
When I arrived in the Gulf, things were very tense, and the narrow waterways were crowded with American, Iranian, Iraqi, NATO, and even Soviet ships. Over the previous several decades control of the Gulf had been one of the major strategic issues in the Middle East. At Georgetown I had discussed such topics in abstract terms, analyzing the politics of the Middle East like a giant chessboard. But here the chess pieces had surface-to-air missiles and could fire back. I was seeing the larger political issues playing themselves out in real time and understanding both what it meant in practical terms to prevent the Iranians from blocking the Gulf and how small incidents had the potential to escalate quickly.
Although a civilian career has many strengths, some things you get only through serving in the military. If I had been a lawyer in Amman, I would have had a very different perspective of the conflict. But here I was, an army officer observing helicopter missions protecting neutral shipping. It gave me an up close and personal understanding of regional power struggles that would prove to be increasingly useful in the years to come.
I spent three days on the frigate USS Elrod. Although I was well looked after, bunking in the captain’s quarters, it did not make me want to join the navy. After three days, I transferred to a large barge called the Hercules, which was bustling with action. It was interesting to see so many different branches of the military—U.S. Delta Force teams, Navy SEALs (Sea, Air, and Land teams), and regular soldiers, sailors, and airmen—all working seamlessly together. The experience helped shape my enthusiasm later for creating our own Special Operations Command in Jordan.
Not long after that, in January 1990 and almost a year after I was promoted to the rank of major in February 1989, I returned to England for further military training. I spent nearly a year attending Staff College. It was next to Sandhurst, and as I drove through the ornate gates I remembered my time as a cadet, and my old color sergeant predicting that none of us would ever see the inside of the place. His taunt had worked.
As part of our introduction to international politics, we were scheduled to go on a trip to East Berlin, which was canceled at the last minute because of the dramatic changes then taking place. The previous November my fellow students and I had watched in amazement as the Berlin Wall fell and the old world order we had known was swept away. The confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union had divided the globe into two competing blocs. Old certainties would all too soon be replaced with new, shifting alliances.
In the Middle East, countries that had long looked to the Soviet Union as a patron were slow to adjust to a changed world, one in which there was now only one superpower. Opportunists and predators began to make different calculations about war and peace than when the region was divided into Soviet and Western spheres, and a small flashpoint could trigger a global conflict. What none of us at Staff College knew was how soon we would have to confront the new dangers of a changed world.