King's Counsel: Two Perspectives.

• Author: DeAtkine, Norvell B.
• Position: 'King's Counsel: A Memoir of War, Espionage, and Diplomacy in the Middle East' - Book review

Editor's note: In a new approach to this section, we are using two reviews of a single book to provide different, sometimes similar but also conflicting, perspectives of a fascinating memoire.

King's Counsel: Two Perspectives

Jack O'Connell with Vernon Loeb, King's Counsel: A Memoir of War, Espionage, and Diplomacy in the Middle East, W.W.Norton and Company, New York, New York, 2011. ISBN 978-0-393-06334-9. 752 pp. $35.00 (hardcover.)

Probably no other work of recent vintage has been so revealing of the intricacies and imponderables of the byzantine world of Middle Eastern politics as this book. In a book written by an ex-CIA "spy" (as the author refers to himself), it is never quite clear what has been left out as a result of the CIA rules, but plenty in this book remains to provoke heated discussion. That it has not yet done so puzzles the reviewer. After all, to claim, as the author does, that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger actively encouraged the Egyptians to launch the 1973 war on the Israelis or to admit that the author provided King Hussein with U.S. intelligence that the Israelis were about to attack Egypt in 1967 -- information the King relayed to Nasser who apparently disregarded it--seems rather startling. Perhaps the Middle East, with all the recent unhappy U.S. involvement there, has simply outworn public interest.

The author is a throwback to the type of personality who transferred from the OSS to the CIA following World War II. Athletic, scholarly with a law degree from Notre Dame and with good connections in the Washington area, he typifies a generational type much less found today -- someone who ditches an assured career path for an often dangerous and a much less remunerative one. This reviewer overlapped with O'Connell's tenure at the Amman Embassy and while I seldom saw or had dealings with him, his reputation was that of the consummate professional. He was always unflappable, self-effacing and never put himself in the spotlight. Within the embassy it was assumed, with good reason, that King Hussein kept O'Connell in the decision-making process.

When this reviewer arrived in Jordan in the summer of 1970, Mr. O'Connell constituted the leadership of the embassy. The King had declared the previous ambassador as persona non grata and turmoil characterized the leadership inside the embassy and political situation outside. Palestinian gunmen controlled most of Amman, making life for U.S. embassy personnel hazardous, culminating in the murder, in front of his family, of the assistant Army Attache. The author's depiction of those days is accurate and immensely readable.

O'Connell first became acquainted with the King in 1958 when the Agency sent him to help the King ferret out the anti-regime plotters. Made up mostly of army officers, many from prominent families, they were to carry out an Egyptian-inspired anti-regime coup and put Jordan firmly into the pan-Arabist Abdul Nasser coalition. The King was having a difficult time providing the proof necessary to convince the people that it was indeed a plot and not just a ploy to get rid of potential political opposition. After some period of time spent fruitlessly trying to elicit confessions, the Agency sent an expert interrogator, an ex-Polish nobleman who came into the CIA during WWII, known only as "Peter." By use of a skillfully concocted story, the interrogator broke one plotter and the whole web unraveled.

For several years after that, O'Connell was assigned to Beirut and there relates many anecdotes about the spy world at that time, with all the notable personalities -- Kim Philby, Miles Copeland, Kermit Roosevelt, and Bill Eveland, a previous station chief who was said to have run Lebanon out of the Lebanese President's office. O'Connell ruminates about the various CIA engineered coups of that era, mostly unsuccessful and concludes, "covert wars are a contradiction in terms." The meat of this section of the book, however, is O'Connell's philosophy on recruiting local agents, including the importance of finding a principal agent "who knows everyone in town" and the use of the polygraph to establish his reliability. It is less cloak and dagger than just common sense, human understanding, and a bit of intuition.

The main part of the book begins in 1963 when O'Connell overcame initial objections by the U.S. Ambassador to his being assigned as station chief in Amman, which begins the author's long association with Jordan and particularly King...