Lion of Jordan

by Avi Shlaim

  The main items on the agenda of the Cairo summit were to settle the differences between the three countries, to coordinate their military–political strategy and to re-establish diplomatic relations. Hussein conceded that if Israel refused to withdraw from the occupied territories, the Arabs would only be left with the option of liberating them by military means. But he stressed that war required careful preparation and the support of the oil-producing states. Sadat’s comment was that the confrontation states alone had the responsibility for liberating their own territories. He then dropped the subject of war and raised the subject of the PLO, hinting that Jordan would have to take back the Palestinian guerrillas as the price for restoring diplomatic relations. Hussein refused point blank and threatened to leave Cairo. Sadat backed down and agreed to re-establish diplomatic relations with Jordan immediately; Asad pretended he needed to consult his colleagues and a few days later Syria announced the re-establishment of formal relations with Jordan. The summit thus looked like a triumph for the king: ‘War was discussed as a possible option but only after proper preparation. For the time being Jordan would be expected to play a purely defensive role and deter an Israeli attack on the rear of Syrian forces through Jordan. Relations were re-established with Jordan and the king did not give in to Sadat’s conditions.’7

  What Hussein did not know at the time was that during his stay in Cairo, Sadat and Asad held a secret meeting to put the final touches on a joint war plan. What Asad did not know was that Sadat had his own separate war plan. After the war, Asad told Zaid Rifa’i that Sadat had double-crossed him. The two leaders agreed to wage war to liberate their occupied territories, but Sadat planned only a limited war to reactivate the political process. In accordance with the joint plan, the Syrian Army would go into battle to liberate the whole of the Golan Heights. Sadat’s war aim, however, was much more limited. Instead of keeping up his attack against the Israeli Army in Sinai and advancing to the Giddi and Mitla Passes, he crossed the canal and stopped. This, Asad complained, enabled Israel to concentrate all its might against Syria.8 What is reasonably clear about this generally murky summit is that Sadat and Asad did not divulge to Hussein their war plan. Support for Hussein’s assertion that he was not told at the summit of the plan to go to war comes from an unexpected source: Abu Iyad (Salah Khalaf), the PLO leader. Abu Iyad wrote in his memoirs that he, Yasser Arafat and Faruk Qaddumi heard from Sadat about the imminent war on 9 September, whereas Hussein, who arrived in Cairo the following day, was told nothing: Sadat informed the PLO leaders that he had no intention of breathing a word to Hussein. The main purpose of the summit, said Sadat, was to restore normal relations with Jordan in order to create suitable conditions on the ‘Eastern Front’ during the coming hostilities.9

  Hussein’s next secret meeting was with Meir in Tel Aviv on 25 September 1973. Less than two weeks later, on 6 October, Egypt and Syria launched their carefully coordinated attack against the Israeli Army in Sinai and in the Golan Heights. In Israel this war became known as the Yom Kippur War because it started on the Day of Atonement, the holiest day in the Jewish calendar; in the Arab world it is usually referred to as Operation Bader or the Ramadan War; and the most commonly used name is the October War. The proximity between the three dates gave rise to suspicions in Arab quarters that Hussein went to meet with the Israeli leader to give her advance warning of the imminent Egyptian–Syrian attack. These allegations make the meeting of 25 September more controversial than any of Hussein’s numerous other meetings with Israeli leaders. Hussein routinely denied the rumours about these meetings, but, if pressed, he could have argued that direct contact was necessary for the defence of his country and that he never conceded a single inch of Arab territory to Israel. On the other hand, if Hussein disclosed to the Israelis secret Arab war plans, he would have been a traitor to the Arab cause. Hence Hussein’s anger at the tendentious Israeli leaks from this particular meeting and the lengths to which he went to rebut the specific Arab allegations of duplicity and betrayal.10 Special care is therefore called for in analysing the meeting that preceded the October War.

  The meeting was arranged at short notice in response to a request made by the king on 23 September. The principal participants were Hussein, Zaid Rifa’i, who had become prime minister in May 1973, General Fathi Abu Taleb, the director of military intelligence, and, for the Israelis, Meir and Mordechai Gazit, the director-general of the prime minister’s office. Hussein flew his helicopter from his house in Shuneh and landed on the Israeli side of the Dead Sea near the Caves of Komran.11 An IAF helicopter then flew the Jordanians to the outskirts of Tel Aviv, and the rest of the journey was completed in cars provided by the General Security Service (Shabak). The meeting took place in the Midrasha, the Mossad headquarters in Herzelia, just north of Tel Aviv, and lasted about three hours, from nine in the evening until close to midnight. The meeting of Hussein, Rifa’i, Meir and Gazit was secretly filmed and transmitted by CCTV to another room in the building where Meir’s military secretary and three senior intelligence officers were sitting. At the same time, General Fathi Abu Taleb met in another room with Colonel Aharon Lavran from Israeli military intelligence and with Zvi Zamir, the director of the Mossad.12

  Hussein opened the meeting with a description of the Cairo summit of 10–12 September. He commented favourably on Sadat’s courtesy and kindness but was much more reserved about Asad. He stressed that neither Sadat nor Asad was prepared to tolerate a continuing state of neither peace nor war; he added that he too shared their view but hoped that before Arab patience was exhausted something would happen to prevent war from breaking out. In this connection he reported that the two other leaders sounded him out for his opinion about the renewal of the eastern front and that his reply was: ‘Leave me alone.’ Meir questioned Hussein about his intentions to allow the fedayeen to return to his kingdom. He replied that he intended to allow the PLO and other fedayeen organizations to open offices in Jordan but that he would prevent them from undertaking any military or terrorist operations from his territory. After reassuring Meir on this score, the two leaders moved on to discuss the Soviet arms that had started flowing to Egypt and Syria.13 At this point Hussein became more specific and said the following:

  HUSSEIN: From a very, very sensitive source in Syria, [from whom] we have had information in the past and passed it on, [we have learned that] all the units that were meant to be in training and were prepared to take part in this Syrian action are now, as of the last two days or so, in position of pre-attack. That were meant to be part of the plan, except for one minor modification – the Third Division is meant also to cater for any possible Israeli movement through Jordan on their flank. That includes their aircraft, their missiles and everything else that is out on the front at this stage. Now this has all come under the guise of training but in accordance with the information we had previously, these are the pre-jump positions and all the units are now in these positions. Whether it means anything or not, nobody knows. But I have my doubts. However, one cannot be sure. One must take those as facts.

  MEIR: Is it conceivable that the Syrians would start something without full cooperation with the Egyptians?

  HUSSEIN: I don’t think so. I think they would cooperate.14

  Whether this passage amounted to a warning of war is a subject of some contention in Israel. Hussein did not speak of an Arab war plan but about the situation on the Syrian front, referring to Egypt only in response to a question. He did not say that Syria was planning to attack but that it was ready to attack without further preparations. Meir’s critics claimed that she should have questioned him much more closely and probed for further information but the king was not a prisoner of war under interrogation, he was a friendly head of state who had come on his own initiative because he was worried and wanted to share his concern with one of the parties involved. Alerting Israel to the danger of war was, perhaps, a service to the enemy but it was also an attempt to protect the security of his own country. The charge that M
eir did not heed her visitor’s warning is baseless. As soon as the meeting ended, close to midnight, she called Dayan at his home and repeated to him what she had just heard. Dayan convened two meetings the following day to evaluate the conversation as well as all the other data at their disposal. The consensus among the Israeli experts, with one or two exceptions, was that there was nothing new in what the king had to say: his information about Syrian military deployments simply confirmed what the IDF already knew. This was also the opinion of Zvi Zamir, the director of the Mossad. Zamir noted that throughout the meeting the king argued that the status quo would lead to military confrontation but he gave no date and did not speak of cooperation between the Syrians and the Egyptians.15 Furthermore, Zamir was distressed by the publicity given to the meeting and took a dim view of those Israelis who created the impression that Hussein was an agent of the Mossad.16

  The present author interviewed three of the participants at that meeting: Hussein, Rifa’i and Gazit. All denied that specific Arab war plans were revealed or discussed at the meeting. Hussein replied as follows:

  I can only say that, as far as I was concerned, I was caught completely off guard. I was riding a motorbike with my late wife [Alia] behind me in the suburbs of Amman when a security car behind started flashing us to stop and then I was told that a war had started. I had no idea that anything of that nature would happen and certainly not at that time. I had met with Anwar Sadat and Hafiz al-Asad in Cairo shortly before the outbreak of war. We didn’t have relations with either of them at the time. Egypt restored relations and Asad didn’t until the day before the war, if I am not mistaken. Sadat wanted the fedayeen to be permitted back into Jordan and I refused that. At the same time we were told that they were afraid of an Israeli attack through Jordan and I said that if that ever happened, we will fight it. We were not going to leave our territory open for anyone. So they seemed satisfied with that and I returned to Jordan and a few days later we had the October War. We were totally excluded from any knowledge of what the plan was.

  After this emphatic denial, Hussein was asked for his reaction to Ezer Weizmann’s assessment that he made two big mistakes in his relations with Israel: one in joining in the June War and the other in not joining in the October War. After reviewing at length the road to war in 1967, Hussein continued: ‘In 1973 I wasn’t a part of it and, in any event, I had embarked on a course of trying to achieve peace and I could not be double-faced about it even if they [Sadat and Asad] had told me about the plan to go to war. Thank God I wasn’t told anyway.’17

  Zaid Rifa’i insisted that Hussein could not have given advance warning of the October War for at least three reasons. First, he would never have betrayed the Arab cause for the sake of the Israelis or anyone else. Second, Hussein was invited to the Cairo summit to restore diplomatic relations, not to participate in planning a war. Third, Rifa’i dismissed the notion that Jordan could have information that no other intelligence service had. How could anyone in their right mind, he asked, think that Jordanian military intelligence was more capable than the Mossad, the CIA, MI6 or the KGB? And even if Jordan had information that no one else did, was it conceivable that it would share it only with Israel? Hussein did not prepare for a war, Rifa’i concluded, because he did not know there was going to be one.18

  The background to Mordechai Gazit’s testimony is the claim by Major-General Eli Zeira that at the meeting of 25 September Hussein passed on to Meir a warning about the approaching war and that she failed to appreciate the significance of what he said or to act on his warning.19 Zeira was the director of military intelligence in 1973. The Agranat Commission of Inquiry held him and Chief of Staff David Elazar responsible for the intelligence failure that preceded the October War, and both were forced to resign. Meir and Dayan, who were responsible for the policy failure that made the war inevitable, were allowed to stay in their posts. Zeira, not unreasonably, felt that it was unfair to blame only the military echelon and to exonerate their political counterparts. But his account of Hussein’s visit is coloured by the desire to shift responsibility for the intelligence failure from himself to the prime minister. Writing and talking to the press about this meeting was in itself an indiscreet act that damaged both Zeira’s credibility and, more importantly, Israel’s relations with a friendly Arab king. Mordechai Gazit is an honest civil servant with no axe to grind. He regards the allegations made by Zeira as groundless.

  According to Gazit, Hussein did not come to warn Meir of an impending war but to review the situation and to underline the dangers of the continuing stalemate. Gazit also had the impression that Hussein wanted to share with Meir his thoughts following the Cairo summit. Sadat had become president in 1970 and this was Hussein’s first meeting with him. What Sadat told him had implications for Israel as well as for Jordan. Gazit did detect a note of urgency in what the king had to say. Hussein’s message was that the Arabs could not go on waiting for ever; that the situation of no war and no peace was inherently unstable; and that the danger of war was increasing all the time. In this connection Hussein also pointed out that the Syrian Army was fully mobilized on the border and that it was ready for war. When Meir asked him whether Syria would dare attack Israel without Egypt, he replied that this was unlikely. Hussein did not come to talk about something that was about to happen immediately but to warn that the situation was intolerable and that it could not go on like that indefinitely. Switching suddenly from Hebrew to English, Gazit exclaimed, ‘This is the whole story. You have to believe me. I was there!’20

  The attack on 6 October 1973 caught the Israelis by surprise, and this helped the Arabs to score impressive military victories in the first few days of the fighting. The Egyptian Army crossed the Suez Canal in force, captured the Bar-Lev line of strongholds along the canal, advanced twenty kilometres into Sinai, and inflicted heavy losses on Israel in troops, tanks and aircraft. The Syrian Army launched a highly effective armoured thrust on the Golan Heights, and for a short period it seemed unstoppable. Hussein’s main preoccupation following the outbreak of war was the protection of his country. But the poor state of IDF preparedness, with only seventy tanks deployed along the entire eastern front, constituted a temptation to engage in the battle. The king’s advisers were divided. Rifa’i was opposed to Jordanian involvement, as was Amer Khammash, the former chief of staff. Mreiwad Tall, the king’s private secretary, and a number of army commanders, on the other hand, believed that Jordan should fight. Some members of the cabinet also thought that the regime could not sit out a war in which its fellow Arab states were fighting with the avowed aim of liberating the occupied territories.21 Arab leaders with whom Hussein was in almost daily contact were also giving him conflicting advice. Sadat encouraged Hussein to maintain his defensive posture because a third front could get in the way of his strictly limited political ends. Asad, on the other hand, kept urging Hussein to open a third front and to commit his 70,000-strong army to the battle for the liberation of the West Bank and Jerusalem. Hussein was always a good listener, and during the war he listened to a wide range of opinions, but the Hussein of 1973 was very different to the one who jumped on Nasser’s bandwagon in 1967. Then Hussein had been impatient, impulsive and imprudent. He paid the price and learned his lesson. Now he was much more calm, cautious and calculating. At the outset he settled on a defensive strategy and adhered to it, despite all the conflicting pressures and the vicissitudes of war. He found a formula that enabled him to participate in the war while avoiding a military confrontation along the Jordanian–Israeli front.

  While walking a tightrope between Israel and the Arabs, Hussein also had to deal with the rival superpowers. The Soviet Union was encouraging other Arab states, particularly Algeria and Jordan, to enter the fray. On 9 October the Soviet chargé in Amman told Hussein that the Soviet Union fully supported the Arabs in the conflict with Israel and thought that all the Arab states should enter the battle. Sadat also reversed his position and started putting pressure on Hussein to join the ba
ttle. Hussein had the idea of sending an armoured brigade to Syria in order to avoid the more dangerous course of opening a third front by attacking Israel along the Jordan River. Henry Kissinger appealed to Hussein to delay any decision for at least forty-eight hours. Kissinger said that he was making a major effort through diplomatic channels to end the fighting and that he needed Hussein’s help. ‘Hussein did not reply, which was prudent, but he accepted the recommendation, which was statesmanlike.’22 On the same day Hussein received a stern message from Israel warning him of the consequences of opening a front along the Jordan River. The warning was required because of the enormous risk that the IDF took in moving its only strategic reserve division from the central front to the northern front. Some Israeli generals wanted to move this division to the southern front. One of the arguments for moving it north was that dealing a serious blow to Syria might deter Hussein from entering the war.23

  Popular support was building up in the Arab world for participation in what was being described as a battle of destiny. King Faisal appealed to Hussein to allow a Saudi brigade stationed in Jordan to move to Syria. At first Hussein refused to give permission but later relented. The Saudi brigade lost its way in Jordan, and Hussein had to send a desert patrol to find it and to lead it to Syria. The PLO did not wish to be left out and started to put pressure on Hussein to allow a thousand fedayeen to cross from Jordan into southern Israel to carry out sabotage operations. Hussein refused permission because this would have amounted to the opening of a third front against Israel from his territory. Abu Iyad, Yasser Arafat’s deputy, called Sadat and asked him to intercede on the PLO’s behalf. Sadat doubted that there was much he could do. He suspected that Hussein would enter the battle only after the Israelis had been so severely weakened that they were in no position to give him much trouble. But Sadat passed on the PLO request anyway. Hussein sent Amer Khammash to Cairo to tell Sadat that he was against opening up a Jordanian front because his country lacked air defences and that he preferred to send units of his army to give support on the Syrian front.24