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.
Chapter 11
Very Special Operations
I
n 1997, Special Operations Command (SOCOM) was deployed to eastern Jordan to help the police combat drug smugglers on the Iraqi border. The smugglers were looking to transit Jordan to access lucrative markets in Saudi Arabia and Egypt. One of Saddam’s sons, Qusay, ran a drug-smuggling operation from Baghdad, but the problem was not all foreign—people on the Jordanian side were also known to be involved.
The last Jordanian town before the Iraqi border, Rweished, was a small town with little industry. Most people made their money from trade across the border, both legal and illegal. From there to the Iraqi border was fifty miles of completely flat ground. The smugglers had souped-up General Motors trucks, with the exhausts pointed down so that they would kick up a dust cloud as they drove to prevent identification. They had secure communications, night-vision capabilities, and heavy machine guns mounted on the back of their trucks.
The desert police patrolled at night in old jeeps and didn’t have anything like night-vision equipment. The smugglers would roar past at full speed and disappear into a network of tents and buildings on the outskirts of town. It was a bit like facing a wellequipped foreign army, and the police were outgunned. When a policeman was killed while trying to tackle the smugglers, my father asked army headquarters to send me in. Although they were directed from Qusay’s headquarters in Baghdad, the smugglers had a long reach. Just how long, I had discovered to my discomfort a few weeks earlier.
Rania and I were living in the Hashemiyah district of Amman, and I would leave for work early in the morning. One day I noticed a pickup truck parked by the side of the road, with a man sitting in it. When I returned from work that evening, he was still there. I noticed him the next day, still sitting there, watching. Worried that he was carrying out surveillance for a terrorist attack, I alerted my guards. The next morning, as I pulled out of the driveway, the watcher gunned his engine and the truck screamed toward me. Thinking it was an ambush, we drew our guns and rushed out of the car, preparing to shoot.
The man jumped out of his truck shouting, “No, no, no!” and brandishing a briefcase. When he reached me, he said, “I know you’re going to get the order to go out to the border. Here’s one hundred thousand dollars to look the other way.” My heart was pounding. I asked the fellow if he knew who he was talking to, and he replied that I was the commander of Special Operations.
“But do you know I’m the son of the king?”
The man, a Jordanian, said, “Yeah, here’s one hundred thousand dollars.”
I was shocked by his audacity. My father was renowned for his transparency and open governance, and here was this fellow thinking he could just bribe the king’s son and have me look the other way. I had him arrested on the spot. The army can be a little isolated from wider society, and this was my first introduction to the scope of narcoterrorism and the corrupting influence of large sums of money. It is straightforward to guard the border and defend Jordan from our enemies, but this was a much more complex situation. This border operation had suddenly become personal.
We had been there a year before with our regular equipment—pistols, rifles, and machine guns—and could do very little. I went back to my father and said, “Please untie my hands.” I asked him for permission to deploy heavier weapons from the Special Operations arsenal. He agreed, and now we were returning with the firepower we needed to tackle the smugglers head-on. I deployed my troops three days earlier than planned, because I was worried that the smugglers would find out the timing of our operation. The troops were armed with artillery and some anti-aircraft weapons.
That evening, my soldiers took up positions in trenches near the border and waited. It was quiet until about eleven at night, when they saw an Iraqi car at the border, flashing its headlights. About two miles away, inside Jordan, several cars flashed their lights back. The smugglers were using their headlights to communicate. Soldiers heard the roar of a truck engine and saw a convoy heading across the border. They opened fire. Then all hell broke loose. The smugglers began shooting back, using automatic weapons, and there were firefights up and down the border. The first few nights my battalion must have fired ten thousand rounds of amunition. The smugglers did not want to leave men or machinery behind for us to capture, so when we knocked out one of their trucks, others came with grappling hooks to drag the burning wreck across the Iraqi border.
A few days later, the smugglers stopped trying to sneak goods past us and focused on killing my soldiers. Although they were unsuccessful, at that point I lost patience. I joined the troops and decided to deploy the heavy guns. I brought out the M61 Vulcan 20mm cannon, which is capable of firing six thousand rounds per minute. A company closer to the border was engaged in heavy fire with the smugglers. My brother Feisal, who at the time was in the air force, commanded a squadron of fighters in support of our operation. As F-5 fighters flew past dropping flares, I gave the order to fire. My men opened up with artillery and our Vulcan anti-aircraft guns. Originally designed for use against Soviet jets, these were also pretty devastating on the ground. You could hear a “brrrrrrrrrrrp, brrrrrrrrrrp” as a wall of bullets descended, and see the explosions up and down the border.