The Jordanian intelligence service
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The Jordanian intelligence service occupies a particular place in John Kiriakou's ranking of foreign services: one of the best in the world, very sophisticated, and, he adds without hedging, very good friends and great partners to the United States.

Why it is good

His explanation is demographic and existential. Fully half of Jordan's population is Palestinian, refugees and the descendants of refugees, distinguishable, he says, by passport colour: green for Jordanians, black for Palestinians. In 1968, by his dating, the Palestinian group Black September set out to overthrow the monarchy and make Jordan the new Palestine, and fought literally on the steps of the palace before being beaten back. The Jordanians, wanting no more trouble, had to develop arguably the best or second-best intelligence service in the Middle East simply to protect themselves. They are trained, he says, by the Americans, by Mossad and by the Saudis.

The service's strength, in his assessment, is operational rather than analytic. Jordan hosts the Palestinian Authority, Hamas, Islamic Jihad, the Quds Force and every other faction with representatives; the government must allow the resentment of Israel to simmer without letting it boil into a threat to its own stability. The only way to manage that balancing act, Kiriakou says, is to have infiltrated every one of those groups, and then to keep the economy good enough that hungry people do not get angry.

The demonstration

Kiriakou's stock illustration of Jordanian competence is the Brüno shoot. Advising Sacha Baron Cohen on filming in Amman, he warned that the Jordanians would be "on you like white on rice" and that the production would have to be brought in on the joke; Baron Cohen refused. The comedian and his cameraman landed a day ahead of Kiriakou, walked out of the airport and found a driver holding a sign with Sacha Baron Cohen's name on it. The limousine drove them through the gates of the royal palace, where the king was waiting with the director of the Jordanian intelligence service, told Baron Cohen he was his biggest fan, and said that anything he needed in Jordan should be taken up with the man standing next to him. Kiriakou's verdict: "You hadn't even landed in the country and they knew that you were doing this. That's how good they are."

He credits the same service with a disruption that touched him personally: a hotel he had stayed in around a New Year celebration in Jordan was, he later learned, on an al-Qaeda list of a dozen hotels to be bombed simultaneously, and the plot was broken up by Jordanian intelligence.

What he will not say

Asked directly whether the CIA conducts joint operations with the Jordanians, Kiriakou refuses: "that's a question that I'm not permitted to answer." What he will say is that he was once at a facility with Jordanian officers in a very rural part of the United States, a story he tells for its comedy rather than its content, since a Jordanian captain, seeing a deer walk past, asked whether it was a gazelle.

See also

- The Brüno shoot in Jordan
- MOSSAD
- John Kiriakou
