By: Nick Santangelo

Being a spy always seems so exciting in the movies. The star trots around the globe, uncovers some nefarious plot and stops the "bad guys," usually in a death-defying action sequence. So why not start with a movie?

That's exactly what Case Western University Professor Pete Moore did in telling the tale of the U.S. government and CIA working with Jordan's General Intelligence Directorate (GID) to prop up that nation's monarchy. Visiting the College of Liberal Arts on an invitation from Political Science Associate Professor Sean Yom, Dr. Moore opened his Anderson Hall presentation last Thursday with a clip of 2008's Body of Lies.

"It's not the best film," he admitted, "but I think this scene really encapsulates this sort of cottage industry I'm talking about."

The cottage industry he was talking about is sensationalizing spy agency exploits through media. In that regard, Dr. Moore said he was at Temple University "to do a little myth-busting." In his research on Jordan and the GID, the professor had reviewed declassified CIA archives going back to the 1950s, spoken with high-ranking U.S. Army officers and retired Pentagon and U.S. State Department personnel. Despite all this, he admitted "there's a lot we don't know." What is known is that the Jordanian monarchy and its protective intelligence agency have engaged in questionable activities for decades, all of which was and continues to be made possible by massive funding from the United States.

Dr. Moore explained that in 2017 alone our government gave $632 million in aid to Jordan, which is small and asset-light but strategically important. Jordan's borders touch Iraq, Syria, Israel and Saudi Arabia, making it a key location when various conflicts broke out in its neighboring countries over the last five decades.

The country is in the top five that the United States gives security and military aid to. When President Donald Trump scaled back foreign aid to many countries, Jordan didn't lose a cent. Dr. Yom has argued that the Jordanian state would be "functionally insolvent" without American aid. Dr. Moore agrees.

"So here's this small country that most Americans don't know about beyond films but that's incredibly important in Washington," he said.

How and why are things this way? That's where the spies come in. the GID was formally created in 1962, but years earlier the CIA had placed a Jordanian at the head of its more loosely formed predecessor. He would go on to lead the GID as well, and the agency would really come into its own from 1970 to 1971 during Jordan's civil war. The monarchy eventually prevailed in that war, but the army, which had done the bulk of the fighting, wasn't adept at hunting down and eradicating the remaining rebel elements that scared the king. Enter the GID.

"The GID is going to take on the role after the Jordanian civil war to purge Jordanian elements that were sympathetic to the rebels," explained Dr. Moore.

Embedding themselves in the country's education, medical and other public sectors, GID agents hunted down tens of thousands of rebel sympathizers and arrested, tortured and/or executed many of them. The GID was growing in power, and the CIA was taking notice. Dr. Moore explained that its functions became very alike what's seen in other authoritarian regimes, with the agency becoming "a coercive force that keeps [the monarch] in power." Syria and Iraq have had similar agencies in place to varying degrees for decades.

"You create a secret police as your personal guard dog to watch the [armed forces] like the army," continued Dr. Moore. "You want to have your own praetorian guard that you can trust to take care of the bad guys who might be coming out of your military."

But Jordan was heading toward a crisis in the late '70s, with an astronomical 25 percent of its national budget going to the military and huge amounts of debt being taken on to pay for it all. Then Iraq invaded Iran in 1980, and Iraq began funneling all of its trade networks through Jordan's ports. Over the next eight years, somewhere between two and 10 billion dollars flowed into the country. New homes, hospitals, banks and more sprung up all over Jordan.

Iraq's invasion of Iran ultimately failed, but it later tried another invasion, this time in Kuwait in 1990. That invasion was also a failure and resulted in Iraq being sanctioned, so the GID took its illicit trade operations underground but became a trans-national actor "with access to some serious economic assets," explained Dr. Moore.

The GID then ended up with so much control in the '90s that college students couldn't even get poems published before first having them approved by a GID agent. Dr. Moore referred to this as "horizontal oppression," noting that open rebellion against or even verbal discontent with the agency or the monarchy it protects became virtually impossible. If citizens want to be employable, if they want their children to be able to attend a university, they have little choice but to keep quiet. For this reason, Jordan wasn't in the news much during 2010's Arab Spring.

By the 2000s, evidence of GID corruption was plain to see, according to Dr. Moore, but few Jordanians have dared to talk about it. The government also holds what the professor referred to as "sham trials," putting a few GID officials on house arrest in nice areas of the country to create a thin veneer of justice without actually doing anything to end the corruption.

How bad is the corruption? Dr. Moore referenced the CIA's memorial wall of KIA agents containing 10 stars of those killed by a Jordanian suicide bomber who was mistaken for an al-Qaeda informant. (It's another movie reference—the events were part of 2012's Zero Dark Thirty.) It was the single largest loss of CIA lives since the 1983 terrorist bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut, Lebanon. Still, the United States continues aiding Jordan. Dr. Moore said this is because Washington, D.C. believes the GID is necessary to keep the Jordanian monarchy protected and stable. The professor disagrees.

"In Washington, the belief is the GID inoculates against the threats to the monarchy," he said. "That's confusing cause and effect. They're creating the very effects that they're built to thwart."

The picture Dr. Moore paints doesn't make it look like change will come any time soon. Despite a lack of oil, the resource that has filled the coffers of so many of its surrounding countries, Jordan is able to secure favorable loans thanks to the massive aid the U.S. sends it. The GID has used that money to build such deep levels of control that Jordanians would imperil their ability even to get medical care were they to speak out or rise up. By destroying Jordanian society in this manner, the agency has made itself, in Dr. Moore's view, the world's most effective "coercive force" protecting an authoritative regime.

"Unchecked power and institutional predation in Jordan has led to corruption and state weakness," said Dr. Moore. "It's not corruption that weakens states. It's weak states that make room for the corruption."