Lion of Jordan (19 page)

Personal relations between Hussein and Glubb had never been close or cordial. The gap in age between them was one problem. To the 21-year-old king, the Englishman, who was now only a month off sixty, smacked too much of the Victorian era. There were other issues too. In the words of one British observer,

Hussein remained open to suggestions from the modernists and the reformers: and in particular he was sensitive, as a young king of pride and lofty breeding, to the insinuation that he was no more than a British toy, dancing to the batons of Glubb Pasha and the Foreign Office. It was obvious that Glubb was not the political master of Jordan, and had no pretensions to Kirkbride's role of grey eminence. His profession was soldiering, his responsibility was security, and on political matters he was not even consulted, let alone obeyed. Hussein had a skulking suspicion, though, that some other canards about Glubb were true: that
he had in fact so hampered the Legion in Palestine that the war was lost; that he was outdated or defeatist in his thinking… Hussein was understandably overawed by Glubb, a soldier of long experience from his grandfather's generation, from whom he was separated by a great gulf of age and ingrained respect. As a young man of dashing tastes, he no doubt thought Glubb an old fuddy-duddy slow-coach, better at defence than offence. He was also often in the company of young, ambitious and politically conscious… Jordanian officers, jealous of British control of their Army, and covetous of senior commands; and he began to see that while in Jordanian eyes the Legion was an instrument of war against Israel, to the British War Office it was part of the West's defences against Russia. By 1955 Hussein had fostered a profound resentment of Glubb's dominating position, both commander and creator of the modern Arab Legion. His throne depended upon the surety of the Army, and it was galling to be dependent upon the skills of an elderly foreigner.
¹

The British failed to see any of this. During a visit to London in October 1955 Hussein tried to alert Foreign Office officials to the need to make changes in the command of the Arab Legion, but they did not take him seriously. Had they done so, they might have avoided the explosion that took place four months later.
²
Hussein's broad political reason for dismissing Glubb stemmed from his fear that if he did not place himself at the head of the nationalist movement, he would be overwhelmed by it.
³
But Hussein and Glubb also disagreed on two fundamental issues: the role of Arab officers in the Arab Legion and defence strategy. The Arab Legion was the single strongest national institution in Jordan, yet it was led by senior officers who could not ignore their loyalty to Britain. Hussein wanted to see a more rapid transfer of command and responsibility in the legion from British to Arab officers. Glubb dragged his feet. After months of patient negotiations, the British authorities finally agreed to submit a plan of Arabization that ‘in due course' would give more opportunities to Jordanian officers. Excitement at this minor victory turned into exasperation, however, when Hussein was informed that this meant that the Royal Engineers of the Arab Legion would have an Arab commander in 1985. This answer rankled with Hussein, especially as the question of when an Arab might command the armed forces of Jordan was not even mentioned.

The second issue on which the two men disagreed concerned the defence of the West Bank in the event of a war with Israel. Glubb
proposed a conservative and cautious strategy of concentrating Jordan's slim forces on the defence of strategic high points and pulling them back at the outset of an attack from the West Bank to the East Bank. Hussein rejected this plan in favour of a more forward strategy. He argued that they should start their defence right on the 400-mile frontier and accept death with honour if they could not hold it. To his way of thinking, a purely defensive strategy could not possibly deter an enemy attack, though an offensive strategy might.

Behind these specific disagreements, wrote Hussein, lay the ghost of his grandfather. From his grandfather he had learned that all Arab peoples must be masters of their own affairs.
⁴
Here, however, the grandfather received more credit than he deserved. Although Abdullah was a proponent of Arab independence in theory, he was a client of Britain in practice. Whereas the idea of sacking Glubb would have been unthinkable to him, Hussein not only conceived it but carried it out. On the other hand, Hussein hardly mentioned the encouragement and support that he received from the Jordanian Free Officers to embark on this audacious undertaking. After all, his agenda was their agenda: to Arabize the Arab Legion. His early contacts with them went back to his days as a cadet at Sandhurst. One of their members, Ali Abu Nuwar, was constantly at the king's side following his appointment as ADC in November 1955, arguing for the removal of Glubb and a break with Britain. James Morris has painted a vivid portrait of the king and his ADC:

Hussein was not a very brilliant young man. Sometimes, when he appeared during these anxious months, his face looked old and creased, his eyes were tired, his body was tense and thin, and he seemed the very embodiment of a struggling conscience, of a man trying hard to do his best. Ali Abu Nuwar, on the other hand, was almost a parody of the evil counsellor: a saturnine, beak-nosed Iago, his eyebrows bushy, his moustache sneaky, his grin gleaming but forced, the sort of face you sometimes see, peering through silken draperies, in the shaded backgrounds of Japanese prints. This unsavoury partnership presently sparked an explosion.
⁵

While Abu Nuwar was influential, a more important link between Hussein and the Free Officers was his cousin and childhood friend Zaid bin Shaker. During this period, Shaker was Hussein's closest confidant. This intimate relationship provoked jealousy on the part of Queen Zain
and her brother Sharif Nasser. They tried to discredit Zaid by suggesting that he was a Ba'thist and by questioning his loyalty to the monarchy. But Zaid was completely devoted to the king and shared his aspirations for the country and for the Arab Legion.
⁶
The decision to dismiss Glubb belonged to the king alone, but it was made against a background of rising tension between the British commander-in-chief and the young nationalist officers. Things came to a head on 28 February 1956 when Hussein was presented by the prime minister with papers containing the names of those officers whom Glubb wanted dismissed from the army. Hussein was shocked: he knew and respected some of the officers on the list. The only fault of these men, as far as he could see, was that they were nationalistic and ambitious. Hussein threw the papers on the table. ‘Tell Glubb Pasha I refuse to sign them,' he said angrily.
⁷

In the evening of that day, a crucial meeting took place in Shaker's house; present were the king and five of the Free Officers, led by Maher Abu Shahut and Mahmud Ma'ayta. There the king disclosed for the first time his plan to get rid of Glubb. Hussein asked the officers whether they were ready to move, and they replied without any hesitation that they were. Hussein then asked them whether they were sure they could pull it off, and again they replied positively, encouraging him to proceed.
⁸
At the end of the meeting Hussein gave the order to execute ‘Operation Dunlop'. Speed and secrecy were of the essence. Three people in particular, Hussein instructed Shaker, had to be kept in ignorance. One was Bahjat Talhouni, the chief of the royal court, who, despite his poor English, was a client of the British and therefore likely to tip them off. Another was Queen Zain, who was expected to interfere with the plan because she saw Glubb and the British as the guarantors of the Hashemite throne. The third was Sharif Nasser, who was certain to tell the British and to try to foil the plot.
⁹

Hussein also felt that Operation Dunlop had to be executed swiftly and decisively, so as to deny Glubb's allies the chance to rally to his support. The Arab Legion was divided into Bedouin regiments, recruited from the rural areas, and the Haderi regiments, recruited mostly from the urban areas. Glubb favoured the Bedouins because he thought they made better soldiers and were less interested in politics. He did a great deal to educate and train these Bedouin recruits and to help their families, and his bodyguard consisted of Bedouins from the areas bordering on Iraq and Saudi Arabia. They were fiercely loyal to him personally, and
there was a real risk that they might try to stage a counter-coup to restore him. Various precautions were taken to ensure that this did not happen. Glubb's house was surrounded with armoured cars, his telephone lines were cut, and loyal troops were stationed on the way to the airport. The British officers were confined to their quarters, and their telephone lines were also severed.

The next morning, 1 March 1956, the king put on his uniform and drove to the office of the prime minister, followed by Land Rovers containing his escort of armed soldiers. Hussein slapped a handwritten piece of paper on the prime minister's desk, ordering the dismissal of Glubb and the relieving of several other senior British officers of their command. ‘These are my wishes,' he said, ‘and I want them executed at once.' Samir Rifa'i was stunned, but he realized that things had moved so far that the king could not back down.
¹⁰
Rifa'i summoned the cabinet at once and informed them of the royal edict. The ministers were equally stunned, but after some discussion they decided to carry out the king's orders. Falah Madadhah, the minister of the interior, was instrumental in bringing his colleagues to the point of decision. He pointed out to them that the soldiers they saw outside had been sent by the king to ensure that they exiled Glubb. Rifa'i then summoned the British ambassador, Charles Duke, to break the news to him. Rifa'i apologetically explained to the ambassador that the cabinet had not been consulted and that the royal order was an ultimatum. Although Rifa'i obeyed, he distanced himself and the cabinet from the affair by telling the ambassador that the king seemed to be going mad.
¹¹

At two o'clock Rifa'i summoned Glubb himself and, somewhat apologetically, gave him his marching orders. Glubb did not question the legality of the royal order, only the undignified haste with which it was being carried out. Rifa'i asked Glubb to leave the country by four. Glubb replied, ‘No, sir, I have lived here for twenty-six years and I cannot leave at two hours' notice.' They compromised on seven o'clock the next morning. At the appointed hour Glubb was driven to the airport with full honours in the royal car but also under heavy armed guard. At the airport there was one of those curious scenes that abound in Britain's imperial history. The lord chamberlain handed Glubb a small gift from the king: a photograph of Hussein with the hand-written dedication ‘With our acknowledgements of the good services and untiring exertion, and with our best wishes for His Excellency Glubb Pasha'. It was an old
Harrow school custom to give farewell photographs to your parting friends, and Hussein's good public-school manners had not deserted him in the crisis. At a deeper level, however, the deed was ‘a clang in the dirge for a dying empire.'
¹²

Despite the early warnings, Glubb's dismissal caught the British by surprise, and they moved very swiftly to try to reverse it. Anthony Eden was in a state of shock at the news and his reaction was almost hysterical. In the late afternoon of 1 March, at Eden's instruction, Duke went to see the king to demand an explanation. The king began by telling the ambassador that his action did not affect Jordan's long-standing friendship with Britain. Duke interjected that, on the contrary, it was a sharp blow to this friendship. The king replied that it would not prove so in the long run. He went on to complain about inadequate ammunition stocks, deficiencies in the assignment of officers in the legion and Glubb's failure to help him fight the Egyptian propaganda attacks. He concluded by saying that he felt bound to do what he considered essential to preserve the honour of his kingdom.
¹³

Eden was not satisfied with these explanations. They were no excuse, he thought, for suddenly dismissing Glubb like a pilfering servant. He therefore instructed Duke to see the king again as soon as possible in order to deliver a message: that his action was inexplicable to the British ministers, who had met that morning to discuss the events in Jordan, and a severe blow to the confidence on which the good relations between their countries had been based. The king was urged to take immediate action to remedy the situation.
¹⁴
To Hussein the message sounded like a threat. At one o'clock in the morning Duke called the royal court and insisted on seeing the king, who had already gone to bed. The meeting took place in the small study of the Basman Palace. The atmosphere was demonstrably tense. Duke had in his hand a message from London. ‘I must advise you, sir,' he said, ‘that Her Majesty's Government feels that, unless you change your decision immediately on this matter, unless Glubb Pasha is permitted to continue his work here and we are given a chance to clear this whole matter up, the consequences could be very serious as far as you yourself, the monarchy' – he hesitated – ‘and the whole future of Jordan is concerned.'

The message from Eden angered Hussein because Glubb had been an employee of the Jordanian government, not of the British government, and in dismissing him he had merely exercised his constitutional prerogative,
as Glubb himself was the first to acknowledge. Hussein therefore rejected Duke's threat robustly and vehemently. In his memoirs he recorded his reaction: ‘I know my country, and I know my responsibilities. I am going to carry out what I believe to be right in the best way I can.' Duke did not respond, so Hussein added, ‘I believe, Mr Duke, that what I have done is for the good of my country and I am not going to alter my decision, regardless of any consequences. I would rather lose my life than change my mind. The monarchy belongs to the people, I belong to this country, and I know that I am doing this for the best, come what may.'
¹⁵