Amman, Jordan – Shocked into action by violence on their own soil, Jordan officials months ago began an intensive campaign of spying on insurgents in neighboring Iraq, a gambit that ultimately helped lead to the death of militant leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, Jordan’s top spies said Monday.
Maj. Gen. Muhammed Dahabi, director of Jordan’s General Intelligence Department, and Col. Ali Burjaq, his chief of counterterrorism, said in a rare interview Monday that a videotape al-Zarqawi released earlier this spring helped Jordanian intelligence pinpoint his approximate location at the time, a key lead that ultimately led to al-Zarqawi’s death in a U.S. airstrike last week.
Al-Zarqawi’s need to micromanage all aspects of his al-Qaeda in Iraq organization, from finances to operations, also made him vulnerable to discovery, the two officials said.
“We knew him personally,” Burjaq said of the Jordanian- born militant, who spent part of the 1990s in Jordanian prisons on terrorism charges.
“We knew how he behaves,” he continued, speaking at the Jordanian intelligence agency’s mountaintop complex in Amman. “He was vicious, mean – a dictator in his decisions. He didn’t allow anyone else to question his decisions.”
Until November 2005, when al-Zarqawi operatives allegedly blew up three hotels in Amman, killing more than 60 people, Jordan had barely operated in Iraq.
After the hotel bombings, Iraq became and remains Amman’s primary security worry, although Jordan also abuts the simmering troubles in neighboring Israel and the Palestinian territories.
The bombings, the two intelligence officials said, served as a wake-up call for Jordanians, forcing them to seek a more active role in combating Iraq’s troubles.
The hotel bombings also showed a skeptical Iraqi government – suspicious of its neighbors’ security forces – that al-Zarqawi was training Iraqis for cross-border operations in Jordan, a source close to Jordanian intelligence officials said.
With the permission of Iraq’s fledgling government, Jordanian operatives flooded the war- torn country, cultivating informants and working the periphery of al-Zarqawi’s network to find ways into the organization.
