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Popular policy accounts of Jordan's General Intelligence Directorate (GID) commonly detach it from the country's history, society, and political economy. By isolating and focusing on the GID's role as protector of the monarchy, one loses sight of other important effects of its historical evolution. This article explores the GID's origins in the late 1960s and 1970s and how it has evolved. It positions Jordan's security services as institutional and political-economic actors contributing to the decline of the Jordanian public sector and the emergence of a fiscal crisis.
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In the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan today, there is no political actor more powerful than the regime's intelligence arm and secret police, the General Intelligence Directorate (Da'irat al-Mukhabarat al-'Amma, hereafter the GID). The monarchy it is tasked to protect has arguably been one of Washington's most critical assets in the Arab world since the 1970s. Consequently, many in the American foreign policy community view the GID, along with the Jordanian Armed Forces (JAF), as one of the United States' most important partners in implementing US regional policies, particularly the so-called War on Terror. Observers commonly couple these accolades with the trope - apparently perennial - that the Jordanian monarchy is "on the brink" of disaster or "weathering the storm" to survive. Much of what has been written about Jordan's secret police is colored by these assumptions and commitments.1
One of the most successful authors writing in this genre is Joby Warrick, a Washington Post correspondent who won a Pulitzer Prize for his 2015 book, Black Flags.2 Warrick's books and similar academic accounts narrate the rise of violent substate actors in Iraq and Syria primarily through the lives and ideologies of infamous individuals, many linked to Jordan.3 From this vantage Jordan's security officials valiantly thwart plot after plot, protecting not just the Hashemite monarchy but the US's interests as well. In such narratives the GID rivals Israel's Mossad as "the best intelligence service in the Middle East" thanks to Jordanians' native cunning.4 As Warrick put it in Black Flags, "The skills essential for solving such a case were the ones that the Jordanians already possessed, in abundance. In the gritty art of human intelligence gathering, they were wired in a way that...