WASHINGTON — The suicide bombers who struck three Western hotels in Amman, Jordan, this week also were targeting the increasingly important U.S. partnership with that country.
Jordan's General Intelligence Directorate, or GID, has surpassed Israel's Mossad as America's most effective allied counter-terrorism agency in the Middle East. Since the Sept. 11 attacks, its cooperation with the CIA has grown even closer.
The GID has aggressively hunted Abu Musab Zarqawi, the Jordanian-born head of the extremist group Al Qaeda in Iraq and suspected planner of Wednesday's bombings. Last year, Jordanian agents arrested several Zarqawi associates, reportedly foiling truck bomb attacks on the U.S. Embassy and government targets in Amman, the capital.
Former CIA Director R. James Woolsey called Jordan "a natural target for Al Qaeda" and Iraqi insurgents. "It's a little surprising there haven't been more attacks" against Jordan, he said.
The U.S. provides secret financial assistance to subsidize the GID's budget, former senior U.S. intelligence officials said, adding that the two intelligence agencies conduct sophisticated joint operations and routinely share information.
Jordan's intelligence partnership with the U.S. is so close, in fact, that the CIA has had technical personnel "virtually embedded" at GID headquarters, said a former CIA official in the Middle East. One former CIA official said he was allowed to roam the halls of the GID unescorted.
Most recently, Jordan has emerged as a hub for "extraordinary renditions," the controversial, covert transfer of suspected extremists from U.S. custody to foreign intelligence agencies.
GID personnel are characterized as highly capable interrogators by Frank Anderson, a former CIA Middle East division chief. "They're going to get more information [from a terrorism suspect] because they're going to know his language, his culture, his associates -- and more about the network he belongs to," he said.
But in two previously undisclosed cases, citizens of Yemen say they were detained in Pakistan and Afghanistan, then transported to Jordan and held by the GID, their lawyers said. One of the detainees said he was tortured by the Jordanian service and then handed back to American authorities.
The State Department praised Jordan for combating terrorism in one report this year and accused it of human rights abuses in another.
