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Did Jordan’s closest allies plot to
unseat its king
?
Alleged sedition and a royal family feud may have been driven by
a broader plan to reshape the Middle East
Martin Chulov in
Amman and Michael Safi
Wed 26 May 2021 12.45
BST
The phone call that shook the Jordanian government came in the second week
of March this year. On the line to the General Intelligence Directorate (GID)
in Amman was the US Embassy, seeking an urgent meeting about a matter of
national importance. The kingdom’s spies were startled. Danger was brewing on
the home front, they were told, and could soon pose a threat to the throne.
Within hours, the GID had turned its
full array of resources towards one of the country’s most senior royals, Prince
Hamzah bin Hussein, a former crown prince and half-brother of the king, whom
the Americans suspected was sowing dissent and had begun rallying supporters.
By early April, officials had placed Hamzah under house arrest and publicly
accused the former heir and two close aides of plotting to unseat King
Abdullah.
As two alleged plotters prepare to face
court in Amman, a fuller picture is emerging of the three weeks that rattled
the royal family. This week prosecutors in possession of phone taps,
intercepted messages and recorded conversations will outline evidence
supporting sedition charges against Bassem Awadallah, a former head of the
Royal Hashemite Court and businessman and cousin of the King, Sharif Hassan bin
Zaid.
However, away from the courthouse,
evidence that a family feud could have been driven by a broader conspiracy has
also been taking shape. The alleged deeds of Hamzah and his two accused
conspirators are increasingly being seen as the dying echoes of a larger plot,
fuelled by Jordan’s closest allies, that could have imperilled Abdullah’s grip
on the throne if Donald Trump had won a second stint as US president.
As the turmoil of Trump’s term recedes,
the implications of his attempts to redraw the map of Israel and Palestine via
his showpiece foreign policy play – the so-called deal of the century – are
crystallising. Officials in the Biden administration, which has restored a more
traditional approach to regional diplomacy fear that Jordan’s interests would
have been shredded in a second Trump government. And its leadership might well
have been a casualty.
Regional officials say there may be
links between Prince Hamzah’s alleged actions, which officials in Amman
describe as sedition but not a coup, and the approach to Middle East affairs
steered by Trump’s son-in-law and Middle East envoy, Jared Kushner, with the
backing of his friend and ally, Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin
Salman.
The charges against Hamzah accuse him
of rallying support using three key events: the deaths in March of seven people
in a hospital in the town of Salt during an oxygen outage blamed on negligence;
the commemoration of a 1968 battle between Israel and the Palestinians; and the
birth of a Jordanian youth movement nearly a decade earlier.
“Hamzah turned up to Salt, and we know
he was plotting with his aides to make a show of things,” a senior official
said. “It was then that this whole thing moved from abstraction to something
that was much more coherent and organised. There were trigger words and a
deployment of methods such as demoralisation agents and ways explored of
tapping into the hardships of the people.”
Phone intercepts from that time heard
by the Guardian portrayed Hamzah and Sharif Hassan in close coordination. The
pair often spoke in English and referred to each other as ‘bro’. For Awadallah,
they used the nickname ‘No Lube’.
From the early months of Trump’s
presidency, Kushner and Prince Mohammed rode large across the regional
landscape, drawn by each other’s nakedly transactional worldview and their
readiness to blend political power and business interests.
Both saw
themselves as change agents breaking barriers through coercion and intimidation
and were dismissive of allies who refused to do their bidding.
The normally
watertight relationship between Amman and Washington, built on 50 years of
security cooperation, reached breaking point in Trump’s first term, senior
Jordanian officials say, as the White House pursued its Middle East agenda
through a team of handpicked loyalists, eschewing both structures of state and
sidelining officials whom Jordan would normally have dealt with.
First among
the administration’s schemes was an attempt to forge peace between Israel and
the Palestinians that ripped up the rulebook governing decades of talks and
shattered understandings of what an eventual deal may look like. Despite being
directly affected, Jordan knew none of its elements until the grand
announcement in early 2019.
When the
plan was finally revealed, Jordanian leaders sensed mortal danger in its
implicit intention to share control of the Haram al-Sharif compound in
Jerusalem, over which the Hashemite dynasty of the King of Jordan has maintained
custodianship since 1924. Beyond that, the plan rejected many starting points
of earlier peace talks, annexing 30 per cent of the West Bank and the Jordan
Valley and rejecting the central Palestinian demand of a capital in East
Jerusalem. The offering was so untenable to Jordan that the prime minister at
the time, Omar Razzaz, warned that its peace treaty with Israel was at risk.
Guardianship
of Haram al-Sharif, the site of both of al-Aqsa mosque and the Dome of the
Rock, is a key source of legitimacy for the Hashemites, pre-dating the creation
of Jordan and Israel
“Sharing
[the Haram al-Sharif] with the Saudis and the Israelis was definitely something
they [the Trump administration] considered,” said one US official. “They were
desperate to get this done, and made no bones about blackmailing friend and
foe. For the Emiratis it was F-35s. For the Sudanese, it was getting them off
the terror blacklist. The prize (for both countries) was American patronage and
Israeli technical expertise.”
By mid-2020
King Abdullah was under increasing strain, buffeted by ill winds from
Washington and just as troubled by the chill from across the border with Saudi
Arabia. Jordan has depended heavily on both countries, the US primarily to fund
its security apparatus and Riyadh to help pay its public sector. Privately,
Riyadh had made its dissatisfaction felt with Jordan’s reluctance to follow
Trump’s Middle East policy, according to officials in both capitals. The
Kushner plan would cement Saudi Arabia as a central player in a reshaped region
and clear the way for a peace with Israel.
“The
rejection of the new Middle East on the other hand meant the entire plan would
fall over,” said a senior regional official who refused to be named. “Others,
however, were willing to go with such a formula.”
During the
dying months of the Trump White House, demands to get the deal done
intensified. Jordan’s defiance angered Kushner and Prince Mohammed, who had
also been displeased with a similarly reluctant Palestinian president, Mahmoud
Abbas.
“They were
thought of as like the Lebanese,” a Saudi businessman with ties to the Saudi
royal court said of the Jordanian leadership. “They take a lot and give nothing
back. The new regime (Prince Mohammed) wants a return on investment. He and
Kushner bonded over this way of thinking.”
As the
friendship between Kushner and Prince Mohammed blossomed – often during
all-night discussions in tents deep in the Saudi desert – ties between Bassem
Awadallah and Riyadh were also deepening. A former Jordanian finance minister,
Awadallah joined a panel at the Future Investment Initiative in Riyadh in 2019,
where local dignitaries knew him well from another previous role as Jordanian
envoy to Riyadh.
With Trump
gone, only one pillar of the flatlining Deal of the Century remained: Saudi
Arabia, where Prince Mohammed was yet to bring back Amman from the cold. After
Awadallah was arrested on 3 April, the Saudi foreign minister, Faisal bin
Farhan, flew to Amman to meet Jordanian officials. Hamzah was by then under
house arrest, where he remains today. The Guardian understands that Farhan
requested Awadallah’s release but was rebuffed by his hosts. Saudi Arabia has
said Farhan made no request of Jordan and had flown to Amman to express support
for King Abdullah.
By then, the
GID was wading through hundreds of hours of intercepts all recorded from 15
March. Officials say that not long before that, Sharif Hassan had made contact
with an embassy (the Guardian understands this to be the US embassy in Amman),
soliciting support for Hamzah. That approach led to the US warning and the
scramble to understand what had been happening.
“The upshot
is that Trump lost and it all fell over,” said a regional intelligence source.
“Had he been re-elected, this would be a very different region.”
Senior
officials in Amman would not be drawn on the likelihood of a foreign element to
the alleged plot, and nor would they confirm that their most trusted security
partner, the US, had alerted them to a potential threat. However, the officials
clearly took comfort from the fact that the new US administration has restored
a traditional security relationship, which had been traduced under Trump.
US officials
have confirmed to the Guardian that in the final months of 2020, officials
sought advice on which areas of funding to Jordan were outside congressional
approval and could therefore be cut without debate.
Amman was
ultimately spared a budget blow. As Joe Biden has settled in, its leaders have
collectively exhaled and prefer not to focus on how close, if at all, King
Abdullah came to being ousted by Jordan’s two closest friends.
Instead,
senior officials are busying themselves with local dimension to the alleged
plot. The March phone taps and listening devices appear to depict organisers
demanding that meetings of military officials be confined to a maximum of seven
people, while tribal meetings consisted of no more than 15. “In addition, they
were not just implementing a systematic approach that built consensus among
East Bankers, they were also appealing to the Palestinian part of the Jordanian
demography.”
While Jordanian officials refused to be to be drawn on whether Saudi Arabia played a role, it is understood that a bilateral arrangement broke down around the time the alleged plot was uncovered. Every autumn, locusts emerge from the Saudi deserts and fly north to Jordan, Syria and Lebanon. The plagues usually arrive in three waves, and early warning systems have been put in place to give Jordanian farmers time to safeguard crops. This year, there were no warnings.
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