Details of the crisis emerged in the cable traffic from the CIA station in Amman. On February 9, the king had issued a decree banning the Palestinian commandos from carrying weapons in public in Amman. The decree also required the commandos to carry identity cards and put license plates on their cars. The king’s demands sounded modest enough. But in the supercharged atmosphere of Jordan, where the PLO commandos had become a virtual state-within-a-state, they amounted to a declaration of war.
It’s a bluff, thought Rogers as he read the cables. It has to be a bluff. The king doesn’t want a showdown yet.
The Fatah leadership seemed eager enough for a confrontation. The Foreign Broadcast Information Service, the CIA’s radio-monitoring unit, picked up a communique the night of February 9 from Fatah Radio in Cairo. In the tormented syntax of the Revolution, it declared: “The time has come for the masses to act and act quickly, not only to stop the new conspiracy, but to inflict final defeat on the conspirators.”
That meant that if the king wanted war, he would have war.
When Rogers put the pieces together in his mind, he saw that the crisis in Jordan might provide a useful opportunity. It represented movement, and movement of almost any kind was beneficial. Movement altered the field of play and created space in which to operate. A political crisis of this sort was better still, since it provided openings that, in normal times, wouldn’t exist.
The trick was to contrive the right moment, Rogers told himself. The moment when your target had no choice but to walk through the door you were opening for him.
Rogers decided to follow Jamal to Amman. He sent Fuad separately by car and booked an MEA flight for himself in the name of Edwin Roberts. The same name was on the Canadian passport that Rogers carried in his briefcase.
In a saner world, the MEA flight from Beirut to Amman would take about thirty minutes. The plane would fly due south from Beirut, enter Israeli airspace over the northern Galilee, pass over the biblical towns of Nazareth and Tiberias, then glide across the Jordan River near the town of Ajlun and land in Amman. But in the actual world of the Middle East in 1970, Arab maps didn’t even identify Israel by name, let alone overfly its airspace. The maps called it “Occupied Palestine” and the Beirut-Amman flight made a long detour through Syria.
Rogers scanned the bleak Jordanian landscape through the window as the plane approached Amman. Jordan was a dry, dusty country at the best of times, with rocky hills and arid plateaus alternating with sandy deserts. It was worse in the winter, when dust storms blew across the unprotected countryside and biting winds swept the hilltops. Amman was bitterly cold that day, and the air was so full of dust that it began to make a little sandpile in the bottom of Rogers’s throat soon after he stepped off the airplane.
As Rogers rode into Amman by taxi the afternoon of February II, he found the city in an uproar. The commandos were openly defying the king’s ban on carrying weapons and had set up roadblocks at the entrances to the Palestinian camps that ringed the city. The Jordanian Army, for its part, had established checkpoints on the four major roads leading into the city. They were stopping Palestinian commandos and refusing to let them pass unless they turned over their guns. Rogers waited more than an hour in a long line of traffic at one checkpoint on the airport road.
Amman is a city built on seven hills. The souks and mosques of the old Arab quarter lay in a valley at the center of town. The residents of the city, many of them Palestinians, lived on the surrounding hills, in houses of white stone that seemed to have been carved like steps out of the rocky hillsides. The international quarter, which housed the fancy hotels and shops and the American Embassy, was on a hill known as Jebel Amman. The Palestinian headquarters stood atop the next hill, called Jebel Hussein. It adjoined the sprawling Al-Hussein refugee camp.
Rogers headed for the safehouse in Jebel Hussein that night. He got past the Palestinian checkpoint at the entrance to the fedayeen quarter by showing his Canadian passport and a business card that said he was a construction contractor. He gave the address of a small engineering concern in the neighborhood, where he said he had an appointment.
The safehouse was a small, white stone villa on a road that skirted the hillside of Jebel Hussein. The road was called Jaffa Street, after the coastal city in old Palestine, and it was several blocks from the Fatah military headquarters.
Fuad was already there when Rogers arrived. He had his sunglasses off and he was sitting on the stone floor of the nearly-empty house, relaxing. He had a serene look, like someone who has finally begun a task he has anticipated and dreaded for a long time.
This is Fuad’s graduation day, thought Rogers. He is in a dangerous place, helping his case officer run an operation. He has made the team.
“What’s for dinner?” asked Rogers.
“Tuna fish and crackers,” said Fuad, who had already examined the meager provisions in the house.
“I’d like tuna fish and crackers please,” said Rogers. He scouted around the pantry and found a few cans of Foster’s Australian lager. Drinking the beer, he wondered who the previous users of the hideaway had been, and why on earth they had left behind cans of beer from the other side of the world.
There was a radio in the house. Rogers tuned in the BBC World Service.
The Old Man was visiting Moscow to discuss joint Soviet-Palestinian action in the Middle East, the radio said. Fuad muttered something derogatory about the Palestinian leader in Arabic.
That’s bad news for the king, thought Rogers. The Old Man has upped the ante by going to see his patrons in Moscow.
“And in Munich today,” continued the broadcaster, “a taste of Palestinian terror as three PLO commandos tossed hand grenades at a group of passengers awaiting a Lufthansa flight, killing one person and injuring twelve.”
Rogers turned up the radio. Things are getting out of control, he thought to himself.
“The Munich police captured an unusual message written by the leader of the group, which he planned to read to the passengers of the Israeli jet.
“According to police sources in Munich, the message read: ‘Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. This is the deputy commander of the 112th unit of the Martyr Omar Sastadi Division of the Action Group for the Liberation of Palestine. In the name of the Palestinian Revolution, we are taking command of this aircraft and renaming it Palestine II.’ According to German police, little is known about the Sastadi group.”
“Bullshit,” said Rogers over the sound of the radio. “Nothing is known about the group because there is no such group.”
“My dear Mr. Reilly, you do not understand the Arab mind,” said Fuad. “We think that if we announce that there has been an operation by the 112th unit of an organization that no one has ever heard of, then people will assume that this organization must have at least III other units. No Arab would believe it, of course. No Arab believes anything that anyone tells him. But we think the rest of the world is stupid.”
“And now for the soccer results,” said the radio newscaster. “In the fourth division, Hartlepool nil, Wigan nil. Doncaster two, Cardiff, one.”
“Turn it off,” said Rogers.
“And in the Scottish League, Partick Thistle nil, Queen of the South, one. Aberdeen two, Celtic two. Hibernians nil…”
“Turn it off,” said Rogers again. The radio went silent.
At 8:00 P.M. that night, they heard the sound of gunfire coming from the eastern part of the city, near Jebel al-Taj. It seemed to be a clash between the Jordanian Army and the commandos.
An hour later, the neighborhood of Jebel Hussein shook with the sound of heavy-caliber machine-gun fire. Rogers could see from the window a volley of tracer bullets coming from the rooftop of the headquarters of the Jordanian Ministry of Interior. It was answered by a rattling barrage from two machine guns positioned within Jebel Hussein.