The British prime minister was a large man, whose face and figure had been ravaged over the years by the finest wines of Burgundy and Bordeaux. When it came time for him to speak, he made a brief address about the specialness of the special relationship, in which he managed to quote Winston Churchill three times in less than five minutes.
To the Director’s considerable surprise, the British official then launched into a discussion of the crisis that was looming in Jordan-the otherwise obscure Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan-where the friendly, pro-Western monarchy was threatened by Palestinian guerrillas.
“We feel that a most delicate situation has arisen in Jordan,” said the prime minister.
Americans around the room looked quizzically at each other.
“The King of Jordan has asked our advice, in the most urgent terms. And we are quite frankly at a loss what to tell him.”
The president nodded toward the Director at that point, as if to say: Will you please explain what in the hell this is all about?
The Director spoke up.
“The King is a worrier,” he said. “I have been holding his hand for the better part of a decade, and I don’t mind telling you that he is a worrier.”
“A what?” said the president, who had been distracted by an aide whispering something in his ear.
“A worrier, and I will give you an example to prove it,” said the Director. He loved telling secrets to those who were authorized to hear them.
“We have been working for two years to get the King together with the Israelis. Back and forth, yes and no. You can imagine. We finally succeeded in arranging a meeting aboard a speedboat in the Gulf of Aqaba between the King and the Israeli prime minister. Just the two of them. We provided the boat and, needless to say, we wired it for sound. Do you know what the King talked about most of the time? About how the other Arabs would try to kill him if he ever made a peace agreement. The man, as I say, is a worrier.”
The president cleared his throat. It was a signal that he was impatient.
“Excuse me,” said the president. “But the question is: Does the King have anything to worry about from the Palestinians?”
“Our judgment, at this point, is that he does not,” answered the Director. He summarized in a few sentences the most recent intelligence estimate of the situation in Jordan. The gist was that the Palestinian guerrillas were a rag-tag, irregular group and would be trounced by the Jordanian Army if it ever came to civil war.
The British prime minister broke in again.
“We shared that opinion, until recently, when we obtained a most interesting set of documents.”
The prime minister handed a copy to the president. An aide simultaneously handed a copy to the Director. It was a collection of several internal Fatah documents, translated from Arabic into English, outlining plans for a new government in Jordan. One of them was a handwritten note from the Old Man to a prominent Jordanian politician, offering him, in oblique terms, the post of prime minister in the new regime.
“What about all this?” asked the president, turning to the Director with a reproachful look.
“Our reporting is not dissimilar,” said the Director, stalling for time. “I’m reluctant to go into the details of what we have, for obvious reasons, but I don’t disagree with our British friends that the Palestinians are intent on overthrowing the King of Jordan. That information, if you will forgive me, is hardly a secret. To confirm it, all you need to do is listen to the radio. They proclaim it every day.
“The issue is what we should do about all this.” The Director emphasized the word “ do ” to make clear that this was an area in which the British contribution was likely to be modest.
“Precisely,” said the British prime minister. “Or to be more exact, what you should do, since we are in the process of withdrawing our forces east of Suez.”
The president looked to an aide, looked at his watch, and cleared his throat.
“Stenographer,” whispered the aide. A Navy enlisted man in a corner of the room took out his pad and pencil.
“The King of Jordan is a friend of the United States, and we intend to stand by our friends,” said the president. He nodded his head abruptly, as if that settled the issue once and for all.
The meeting turned to a discussion of NATO strategy in Central Europe that left everyone bored and confused, even the attentive aides sitting along the wall of the Situation Room.
The Director walked out of the White House that day still steaming about the British sneak attack. Obviously the Brits had promised the King of Jordan that they would plead his case. Outrageous. The Director made a mental note to make life unpleasant for the MI6 man in Washington. And he began composing in his mind the tart memo he would send to the Deputy Director for Plans telling him that he had dropped the ball on Jordan.
When he returned to his seventh-floor office at CIA headquarters, the Director called for Edward Stone, the chief of the Near East Division of the clandestine service. He did so partly to snub Stone’s boss, the DDP, and partly because he had grown over the years to trust Stone’s judgment.
Stone was a tough old soldier, a warrior-intellectual in the George Marshall tradition, who had made his name in the 1940s as an intelligence officer in London, working with the British to unravel enemy intelligence networks. So many years of living in London had given Stone a British look: he had a ruddy face and silver-gray hair that was always combed in place; he dressed in heavy wool suits with cuffed trousers; he wore sturdy, well-shined Oxfords that he purchased every few years from a shoemaker on Jermyn Street in London; he carried an umbrella even when it wasn’t raining. In his office, Stone had on the wall a paraphrased quotation from Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil, mounted in a simple wooden frame. It read: “Gaze not too long into the abyss, lest the abyss gaze back at you.”
Stone arrived promptly at the Director’s office and stood stiffly in front of his desk.
“I’ve just come from the White House,” said the Director in a weary, pained tone of voice.
“I had to pretend to the president that I know what’s going on inside the PLO, when in fact I don’t know what’s going on inside the PLO. I can assure you, I don’t like being in that position.”
Stone looked distressed.
“Do we have any penetrations of these guerrilla groups?” asked the Director.
“Nothing very useful,” said Stone. “We bought a handful of Palestinians in Beirut and Amman years ago, but they don’t provide us with much.”
The Director was frowning and drumming his pen against the desk top.
“We have a promising operation starting up in Beirut,” ventured Stone. “One of our best young officers out there is trying to recruit a senior man in Fatah. It could be a real catch, but it’s the sort of thing that will take time to ripen.”
“We don’t have time,” said the Director, raising his voice slightly.
“We must recruit one of these fellows,” he said, talking as if he was describing a rival tennis team, “as soon as possible! I don’t care what it takes, what it costs, or who gets mad about it!”
The division chief nodded his head.
“There is a slight problem that I must bring to your attention,” said Stone.
“And what is that?”
“Our relationship with the Fatah official is currently structured as ‘liaison.’ ”