Part 3 (2/2)

After we returned from America, Rania and I were looking for a house to buy together when my father said he would give us a place on the outskirts of Amman that he had bought previously and intended to renovate. The renovations were fairly extensive and took us about a year. In the meantime, we lived in a small guesthouse, part of my father's house that he would use to accommodate visitors. Living next door to my father meant that we saw him a lot, and allowed Rania and him to get to know one another better. We would often sit together for breakfast, or watch television together in the evenings. This time also served as Rania's introduction to the other side of royalty. Such proximity to the king caused some people to become envious, and she had to be extremely diplomatic. I commuted from Amman to the Special Forces headquarters in Zarqa, about an hour away. For the first time in many years I was not living on an army base. Our home was far from a palace-just a living room, dining room, and two bedrooms-but we were very, very happy. Our happiness was made even greater by the constant presence of my father in our lives. In later years we would look back and realize just how precious that time was.

Rania had left her job at Apple. Initially we had thought that she would get our household set up and spend some time getting accustomed to being a member of the royal family. But she was a career woman and had far too much energy to sit around at home all day. Being a housewife was not the future that she had envisioned for herself. Our relations.h.i.+p had always been an equal partners.h.i.+p. I could tell that she wanted to return to work, but as part of the royal family, it would not have been appropriate for her to go back to her old job at Apple, or to work for another commercial enterprise. We decided together that the ideal way for her to use her vision, talent, and intelligence would be within the public sector. I went to my father and asked him if he could suggest a suitable role for Rania. Knowing of her background in the commercial sector, he suggested that she work at the Jordan Export Development and Commercial Centers Corporation, helping to promote Jordanian companies in foreign markets.

Although he could be conservative about some things, my father believed women should play a public role, which was unusual for a man of his generation in the region. In the 1970s, at a time when the wives of many Arab leaders were rarely seen in public, my father insisted that his wife, Queen Alia, accompany him to public functions and meetings with heads of state, both in the region and overseas. He was also very supportive of my sister Aisha's desire to go into the military.

Always a bit of a tomboy, Aisha was very tough, as we found out when we were children. If Feisal or I ever tried to tease her, she would give as good as she got. Aisha left for the United States at the age of eight, where she attended school in Was.h.i.+ngton before moving to Dana Hall High School in Wellesley, Ma.s.sachusetts. One summer, when she was back in Amman on holiday, she asked me if I would take her parachute jumping. I said I would, but we would have to keep it secret from my father, who was not very keen on the idea. She was not yet sixteen and so light that we had to put weights and rocks in her webbing. I landed first, and because of her weight, she drifted away from the landing zone and ended up in a nearby field. I sprinted across the rocky ground, and as I drew near I found her lying on the ground, not moving. Alarmed, I ran up alongside her. Flat on her back, she was singing with happiness! That summer I took her up several more times, and she became the first woman in Jordan to complete five parachute jumps and receive her wings.

At this point, we decided we would have to let my father know. He was traveling, so I called him up and said, ”By the way, Father, I have Aisha next to me, and I wanted to say congratulations. Your daughter has earned her jump wings.” There was a moment of stunned silence on the other end, and then my father proceeded to ask me exactly what I thought I was doing. He pretended to be angry, but we all knew that once he had recovered from the shock he would be tremendously proud. Coming from a military family herself, my mother was also extremely supportive of Aisha's interest in the armed forces. Their pride grew even greater when in 1987 Aisha became the first woman from the Middle East to graduate from Sandhurst. She is currently a brigadier general and is serving as a military attache to the Jordanian emba.s.sy in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., the first female officer ever to hold such a post. She believes that women should play a greater role in the armed forces and is a powerful advocate on the subject.

It is women like Aisha, with her active role in the armed forces, and Rania, with her leaders.h.i.+p positions in philanthropic and charitable organizations, who are showing that the potential for women in our country is unlimited.

In the summer of 2009, I was on holiday in Arizona with my son Hussein and Aisha's son, Aoun, when we went to a flight school and the boys asked if they could go parachute jumping. ”Please don't let my mother know,” Aoun said to me. ”She'd kill you!” Knowing my sister, this was no idle threat. After the boys jumped, I called Aisha and said, ”I have your son standing next to me, and I just wanted to say congratulations, he's done his first parachute jump.”

I have always loved parachuting, and when Rania and I were newly married I would get up before dawn two or three times a week to go and jump. The thrill of jumping from a plane thousands of feet in the air, feeling the wind rus.h.i.+ng past my face, and seeing the ground below rus.h.i.+ng up would keep me on a high for days afterward. For Rania, who had very little previous interaction with the military, this took a bit of getting used to. She would insist that each time I jumped, somebody phone to tell her I had landed safely. No matter how early I left, she would stay awake by the phone until she had received that call. As I progressed through the army, my other responsibilities began to increase and I had fewer and fewer opportunities to go parachuting. My father began to ask me to travel more, representing Jordan internationally, conducting informal diplomacy, and a.s.sessing foreign military equipment. I accepted gladly, as I wanted our Special Forces to have the best, most advanced equipment and training available anywhere. And at times he would ask me to go to some very out-of-the way places.

Chapter 10.

Lessons in Diplomacy In late 1993 my father was scheduled to travel to Asia for a visit to Singapore, j.a.pan, China, and North Korea. At that time, the United States was engaged in a political confrontation with North Korea, which had recently successfully tested a Nodong-1 ballistic missile in the Sea of j.a.pan and had threatened to pull out of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT). My father felt that a formal visit to North Korea from a head of state might be perceived by the United States as undermining its efforts at tough diplomacy, so he canceled his trip and asked me to go in his place. He asked me to apologize to President Kim Il-sung, whom Koreans called ”the Great Leader,” that he could not come in person.

At the end of November I set out for Singapore, where I met with senior leaders and bought some light weapons. I continued on to j.a.pan, where we discussed a.s.sistance to the Jordanian police, as the j.a.panese were then helping us with training in bomb disposal. After Tokyo I went to China, where I met with senior members of the People's Liberation Army in China. The meetings went well, and my delegation and I prepared to travel on to Pyongyang. But getting there would prove to be an adventure in itself.

One of the world's least modern airlines, Air Koryo, the North Korean state airline, is currently banned from operating in the European Union due to its poor safety record. The plane looked like a Russian copy of a Boeing 727, and inside the ”first cla.s.s” section, rather than rows of seats we found a couple of couches. To reach the bathroom you would have to make your way past boxes and crates stuffed into the back of the plane. We landed at Sunan International Airport late in the evening and taxied along the runway in the dark for what felt like half an hour. The airport was blacked out, perhaps because the North Korean authorities feared an escalation in the standoff with the United States.

Finally the plane came to a stop and my delegation and I headed down the steps and onto the tarmac. We were met by a group of soldiers, one of whom said something in Korean, which I believe meant ”Welcome.” We were escorted to the side of the tarmac and lined up against a wall when suddenly a bright spotlight came on. While blinking in the sudden glare, I thought, ”Oh no, we're going to be shot!”

As it turned out, our hosts were filming our arrival. They showed us to an official guesthouse and led us into a large dining room with 1970s decor where some twenty generals, marshals, and a.s.sorted army officers were waiting. The dinner was very stiff and formal, and near the end of the meal one of the officers leaned over to me and asked, ”What gifts are you going to give the Great Leader?”

I said, ”I have brought a clock, a traditional Jordanian dagger, and a gift box from my wedding.” The general nodded his approval. We finished the meal and then headed to our guesthouse.

Not long after midnight, as I was about to fall asleep, there was a knock on my door. I got up from bed and found my protocol officer, Faisal Fayez, at the door. Faisal said the generals were outside and they wanted an explanation of the significance of my gifts. I headed back to the dining room and found the twenty officers waiting for me, all in full uniform, holding notepads. The lead general asked me what the meaning of my gifts was, and I replied that they were gifts of friends.h.i.+p. He was not satisfied and pressed for more detail on each specific present.

”What is the meaning of the clock?” the general continued. I was stumped. But as it was nearly one in the morning and I was keen to get to bed, I remembered one of the basic rules of international diplomacy and started making stuff up.

”The clock,” I said, ”signifies the precious time my father and the Great Leader spent together at t.i.to's funeral, and the time that has pa.s.sed since then.” The generals nodded in unison and began scribbling furiously in their notebooks. Getting into the spirit, I continued, ”The dagger is a gift from one warrior to another.”

The general asked, ”And the wedding box?” I said, ”I look on the Great Leader as a father, and so this is a gift from my recent wedding, from a grateful son.” The generals nodded and continued writing. After they had finished, Faisal and I retired, eager to get some rest.

The next day we were taken to see the village where the North Korean president had lived as a young man, then on to lunch with the Great Leader himself. Kim Il-sung was dressed in a two-piece safari outfit and greeted us warmly. He was in good spirits, and his view on the mounting crisis between North Korea and the United States was that it was not too serious. In common with isolated dictators across the world, Kim Il-sung had an unrealistic belief in the strength of his own military and a lack of understanding of the power and technological prowess of Western forces. ”I've beaten the Americans once and I can do it again!” he said in an apparent reference to the Korean War, when he was prime minister. His rhetoric reminded me of the language used by Saddam's sons, Uday and Qusay, before the Gulf War in 1991.

After lunch he took us to a side room where our gifts and his were laid out on a table. Then one of the generals from the previous night appeared, holding his notepad, and said, ”Please explain to the Great Leader the significance of your gifts.” I began to sweat, struggling to remember what I had said the night before.

Thankfully, I remembered the gist of it, and Kim Il-sung seemed satisfied by my explanation. He pointed to a silver soup pot and said, ”I hope you get the chance to try this traditional dish before you leave.” I thanked the Great Leader for his hospitality and went to visit a North Korean Special Forces base, where I was treated to one of the most impressive demonstrations I have ever seen. They performed a live-fire exercise in which soldiers would run, jump into the air, somersault, and while in midair fire and knock down the targets. We discussed Kim Il-sung's offer to send North Korean Special Forces to Jordan to build a new military base and train our soldiers, and then we said good-bye. In the car heading back to the guesthouse, one of the generals leaned over to me and said, ”What did you think of our Great Leader?”

”He is a very charismatic man,” I replied. The general whipped out his notepad and, pencil at the ready, asked, ”What do you mean by 'charismatic'?”

I leaned over to my protocol officer, Faisal, and quietly said, ”See if you can get us on an earlier flight.”

Faisal had us on a flight leaving early the next morning, and after writing a formal letter of thanks to the Great Leader for his hospitality, I headed to bed. At about 4:30 a.m. there was another knock at my door and Faisal appeared with a look of astonishment on his face, saying, ”You're not going to believe this . . .”

Waiting for me in the guest room were the same twenty generals, accompanied by a steaming pot of traditional sweet-and-sour North Korean soup. Apparently they were serious about having me try it before I left. I took a sip and said, ”It's very good.” One of the generals looked at me and said, ”What do you mean by 'very good'?” as the rest of the group raised their notepads.

We made it onto our flight that morning without any further delays and headed to Russia for the final leg of our trip. We flew on a Russian-made airplane that was similar to a TriStar, and a couple of hours into the flight I happened to look up at the c.o.c.kpit. The crew were sitting on the floor playing cards and the copilot was asleep with his feet up on the dashboard. They carried on like this for most of the fourteen-hour flight. After experiencing the best of Pyongyang's hospitality, Moscow felt almost like home, and I was happy to meet friends from the Russian army who were at the airport to receive me.

In June 1994, shortly after Rania and I moved into our new house, our first child, a boy, was born. We named him Hussein, in honor of my father. In Arab culture, when a man has a son, close friends and relatives often stop calling him by his own name and refer to him as the father of his son. So many people began to refer to me as ”Abu Hussein,” which means ”Father of Hussein.” It is hard to express how proud I was-and still am-to hear that phrase.

Not long after that, Rania left the Jordan Export Development and Commercial Centers Corporation (now Jordan Enterprise Development Corporation), where she had worked since 1993, to set up the Jordan River Foundation, a nonprofit organization devoted to tackling tough social issues. She decided to focus on speaking out against child abuse, which is a taboo subject in much of the Arab world, and on empowering Jordanian women by encouraging entrepreneurs.h.i.+p. Some of the foundation's first projects sponsored training, offered funding for craftmaking programs, and helped teach women how to set up new businesses. Once a woman starts to bring in money, she is empowered in the household, because she is also a breadwinner. If her husband wants to try to keep her down, she can demand respect by pointing out that she is contributing to the family finances. So opportunities for women to work or become entrepreneurs can have a sizable social impact.

My father was very supportive of Rania's work. He had encouraged Jordanian women to enter professions typically regarded as male bastions, and had even sponsored women's motor-racing teams. On his recommendation, Royal Jordanian was the first airline in the Middle East to have female pilots.

A few months before Rania began setting up her foundation, I became commander of Special Forces. I had been promoted to colonel in late January 1993 and had finally managed to persuade the army's senior bra.s.s that I was there to stay. We trained hard, aware of the many enemies threatening Jordan, including terrorist fighters returning from the wars in Afghanistan, Bosnia, and Chechnya; smugglers; and spies. This was my chance to put into practice some of the lessons I had learned at Sandhurst and serving in the British army. The first thing I did was to insist that all of our officers lead from the front.

One morning I was at an airbase watching the men prepare for a parachute jump. Airborne operations are a crucial part of Special Forces tactics, as they allow troops to penetrate far into enemy territory. The air was thick with the smell of aviation fuel and the noise of C-130 transport plane engines. Smiling at the chance to get a parachute jump, which were rare by that time, I began to suit up. One of the young captains came up to me, grinning, and said, ”This is the first time we've ever seen an officer above the rank of major jump with us.”

I realized then that a lot of officers were wearing jump wings on their uniforms but not necessarily carrying out the regular jumps needed to keep their parachute qualification current. I decided that in order to shape this unit into what I wanted it to become, I would need to ensure that the senior officers shared the same dangers and hards.h.i.+ps as their men. That evening in the officers' mess I rose to make an announcement. ”From now on, anybody who wants to wear the jump wings of Special Forces has to regularly do parachute jumps,” I said. For the rest of the meeting, some of my officers were very quiet. I went on to train as a jumpmaster, somebody who supervises the paratroopers jumping out of the airplanes, and ran regular jumps for my men.

Parachute jumps were not just useful in training for war, but also turned out to have a valuable role to play in international diplomacy. During World War II, C Company of 156th Para, a parachute regiment of the British army, was stationed in what at the time was Transjordan. They arranged an exercise to demonstrate their capabilities to the ruler of Transjordan, my great-grandfather Abdullah. The British troops parachuted into an empty fort at Shouneh, a mile east of the River Jordan, and took it from its imaginary defenders, capturing the flag in the process. My great-grandfather was so impressed with their maneuvers that he let them keep the flag to fly in place of their regimental standard. C Company subsequently fought their way across North Africa and Europe and suffered heavy losses at the battle of Arnhem in the Netherlands in 1944, when the British paratroopers attempted to capture a bridge over the Rhine. C Company carried the Transjordan flag into battle, but was overwhelmed by the German forces. The company adjutant stashed the flag under his clothing, kept it hidden through several years in a German prisoner-of-war camp, and brought it back safely to Britain after the war ended. I was extremely touched when I watched a dramatization of that battle in the movie A Bridge Too Far A Bridge Too Far, as I remembered the story of how C Company raised the flag over the divisional headquarters at the town of Oosterbeek to denote its position.

Five decades later, to mark the historical connection between Jordan and the British parachute regiment, I jumped out of a Douglas Dakota aircraft in the Netherlands as part of the proceedings commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Arnhem. I landed and presented a new Jordanian flag to Prince Charles, who in turn gave it to the successor of that regiment, C Company of 1 Para. We had been celebrating the end of a historical war. But it wasn't long before we would have the chance to celebrate a new peace.

On July 25, 1994, on a sunny morning in Was.h.i.+ngton, D.C., some six hundred journalists, foreign dignitaries, and U.S. government officials waited patiently in front of a raised dais on the South Lawn of the White House. Behind the stage were the flags of Jordan, Israel, and the United States. The guests clapped as my father and Rabin stepped onto the dais, accompanied by President Bill Clinton. This was the first time the two men had met publicly, although they had done so privately many times. They had both come to the White House to end the state of belligerency that had existed between Israel and Jordan for forty-six years, since 1948.

The signing of the Oslo Accords had allowed Jordan to focus on its own peace negotiations with Israel. My father was now determined to secure the peace he had long sought. On many occasions, when we spoke of his negotiations with the Israelis, he would point out how difficult they were. But he believed a breakthrough was possible.

Although initially wary of each other, over time my father and Rabin had become close. They were both military men and heavy smokers. Once my father found out that Rabin smoked almost as much as he did, they were always pa.s.sing cigarettes back and forth. They met many times in secret, in both Jordan and Israel. Once they had bonded, they sat around the table as two friends, trying to see things from each other's perspective and to work out a common ground for peace. My father did not need to see a doc.u.ment signed. He felt that as long as Rabin said it was going to happen, it was going to happen.

Before signing the doc.u.ment, known as the Was.h.i.+ngton Declaration, which formally terminated the state of belligerency between their two states and recognized Jordan's special role in protecting the Muslim holy shrines in Jerusalem, my father said, ”For many, many years, and with every prayer, I have asked G.o.d, the Almighty, to help me be a part of forging peace between the children of Abraham. . . . Out of all the days of my life, I do not believe there is one such as this.” He continued, ”This is a dream that those before me had-my dead grandfather, and now I. . . . This is a day of commitment, and this day is a day of hope and vision.”

Rabin also addressed the gathering. ”It is dusk at our homes in the Middle East,” he said. ”Soon darkness will prevail. But the citizens of Israel and Jordan will see a great light.”

After the ceremony, my father and Rabin were Clinton's guests at a White House dinner, and the next day they addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress. My father told Congress that ”the state of war between Israel and Jordan is over.”

Three months later, on October 26, 1994, my father and Rabin met again, accompanied by President Clinton, at the border crossing at Wadi Araba in southern Jordan for the signing ceremony of the formal peace treaty between Jordan and Israel. It was a historic moment. Jordan became only the second Arab country, after Egypt fifteen years earlier, to make peace with Israel. Two years after signing the treaty in 1979, Egyptian president Anwar Sadat was a.s.sa.s.sinated by an Egyptian radical. We all anxiously hoped my father would not pay the same price for peace.

Initially, Jordanians and Israelis had high hopes for the fruits of peace. Jordan had regained all of the territory in the East Bank that had been occupied by Israel and its fair share of water rights. The urgent need to end the occupation of the West Bank, including East Jerusalem and Gaza, was being addressed in direct negotiations between the Israelis and Palestinians. Thanks to its peace treaty with Israel, Jordan would now be able to help advance these negotiations.

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