Jordnians say Zarqawi's control freak habits helped in the hunt

LA Times:

Shocked into action by violence on their own soil, Jordanian 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 Zarqawi, Jordan's top spies said Monday. Maj. Gen. Mohammed Dahabi, director of Jordan's General Intelligence Department, and Col. Ali Burjaq, his counterterrorism chief, said in a rare interview that a splashy videotape Zarqawi released this spring helped Jordanian officials determine his approximate location at the time, a key lead that ultimately resulted in Zarqawi's slaying last week in a U.S. aerial bombing.

Zarqawi's need to micromanage all aspects of his group, Al Qaeda in Iraq, including finances and 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 prisons in Jordan after officials there found bombs and firearms at his home.

'We knew how he behaves,' Burjaq said, speaking at the 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 Zarqawi operatives crossed the border into Jordan and bombed three hotels in Amman, killing 60 people, Jordan's intelligence service had barely operated in Iraq.

After the bombings, Iraq became, and remains, Amman's primary security worry, even though Jordan also abuts the simmering tensions in Israel and the Palestinian territories.

The hotel bombings alarmed the Jordanians, forcing them to seek a more active role in combating Iraq's troubles, the two intelligence officials said. The attack also showed a skeptical Iraqi government, suspicious of its neighbors' security forces, that 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 the Zarqawi network to find ways into the organization, a Jordanian official and intelligence experts said. Jordan's GID set up spy bureaus in Iraq and began working with the Dulaimis, a large, mostly Sunni Arab tribe, some of whose members are closely tied to the insurgency, to gather information about anyone associating with Zarqawi or others in militant groups.

It marked a watershed for the Jordanians. 'We always pursued a defensive policy' against terrorism, said Dahabi, who has headed the agency since December. 'But ever since I became chief, we started to think of external operations. We wanted to do more daring operations and do external operations.' U.S. military officials have said they managed to track Zarqawi's spiritual advisor, Sheik Abdel Rashid Rahman, to the village of Hibhib, west of the provincial capital of Baqubah, where U.S. jets dropped two 500-pound bombs.

But Jordan also played a key role in ferreting out the militant, U.S. and Jordanian officials have said, providing crucial intelligence that apparently corroborated information the Americans were getting from within the insurgency.

Jordanian security and intelligence authorities were involved in the hunt from the start, helping trace locations at which Zarqawi and his group frequently stayed, Jordanian government spokesman Nasser Joudeh said.

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There is much more on how Jordan helped in the hunt.