JORDAN: Brave Young King

As a boy of 15, he had seen assassins shoot down his grandfather, King Abdullah, before Jerusalem’s Mosque of the Rock; legend has it that the boy stood erect and defiant as the King’s bodyguard fell to the ground in fright. As a lad of 16, he had seen his mad father, Crown Prince Talal, removed from the throne. At 18, slight, down-mustached Hussein became King of the impoverished desert kingdom of Jordan. Most of his country’s people—the 900,000 Palestinians incorporated into his kingdom after Israel became a nation—plainly felt no loyalty to King or kingdom. His most trusted army officers had proved to be traitors.

Now his cousin King Feisal had been killed, his country’s union with Iraq shattered by the Baghdad revolt. His own throne was in jeopardy, his own life in danger. At a critical moment when he still had no pledge of outside help and no firm assurance that his own troops would remain loyal, King Hussein I, a 22-year-old boy turned man, chose to hang on and to fight back. For sheer pluck and determination, no man in the Middle East surpassed him last week.

The No. 2 King. Under the Arab Union’s constitution, Hussein, the “No. 2 King” in the federation of Iraq and Jordan, automatically became ruler of both Jordan and Iraq when Feisal was assassinated. He appealed to loyal Iraqis to fight under his banner alongside his own British-trained Arab Legion, once the best Arab fighting force in the Middle East. When it became apparent that there were no loyal forces left in Iraq, Hussein told his people in a broadcast, “The ambitions of international Communism have reached our country through certain Arab leaders who gave themselves to the devil.”

Hussein, who in 1956 had unceremoniously booted out the Arab Legion’s famed English commander, Lieut. General Glubb Pasha, and ended the British $25 million-a-year subsidy to Jordan in an unsuccessful attempt to compromise with Nasser, turned now to Britain for help. Two days after the U.S. Marine landings in Lebanon, Prime Minister Harold Macmillan told the House of Commons of Hussein’s urgent message: “Jordan is faced with an imminent attempt by the United Arab Republic to create internal disorder and to overthrow the present regime.” According to British intelligence, said Macmillan, Hussein was to have been assassinated that very afternoon.

Airlift to Amman. From nearby Cyprus, British transport planes airlifted 2,000 red-bereted troops of Britain’s 16th parachute brigade, the “Red Devils,” with 50 jets from the U.S. Sixth Fleet flying cover. Both Hussein and his people, who are as Arab as Nasser, appeared embarrassed to have the British “colonials” back: the Red Devils were confined behind barbed wire at the Amman airport. But not only was Hussein’s throne shaking; the economy of Jordan was near collapse. Jordan’s oil supplies were snapped off when the rebels seized Iraq, and queues lined Amman’s streets to buy gas at exorbitant prices. To alleviate the fuel shortage, the U.S. agreed to fly in 1,000 tons daily from Bahrein in the Persian Gulf, and to help out the economy gave Hussein $12.5 million. Symptomatic of current Arab fears of antagonizing Nasser, Saudi Arabia forbade the U.S. oil transports to fly over it.

At week’s end Hussein announced that he had appealed to the U.S. to send troops to help him in a battle of survival against Syria and Egypt and “agents of international Communism,” and talked of marching northward into Iraq to reverse the revolution. But Prime Minister Macmillan had made it clear that the British had sent the Red Devils to protect Hussein, King of Jordan, not Hussein, the head of the now-dissolved Arab Union with Iraq.