Fri, 17 Oct 1997:

"Over many years, it has been an open secret in the Middle East that Israel and Jordan have quietly cooperated on a host of covert projects..."

"The head of Israel's Mossad intelligence agency, was a frequent, if unheralded, visitor to Amman..."
 
"(Jordan's) intelligence service had worked closely and secretly with Israel and the West, sometimes at considerable risk. The lines of communication to Mossad had been kept open through many turbulent
years..."
 
"...The (Mossad) agents were on permanent station here, though their presence was never publicly acknowledged."
 
"...Hamas officials here operate under tight control by Jordan's pervasive intelligence service."

MER - Washington - 17 October 1997:

In all likelihood, King Hussein was so outraged by the Mossad assassination attempt in Amman precisely because he knew that after such decades of close connections to both the CIA and the Mossad many would conclude he must be somehow involved, whether or not it was true.
 
With Parliamentary "elections" next month, and with the main opposition already boycotting Hussein's monarchistic "democracy", Hussein obviously felt he was seriously endangered.  Jordan is "stable", but it is a fragile stability and one based on considerable repression and police-state tactics.
 
Furthermore, Israel's ruling Likud Party has a long ideological history -- going back to Jabotinsky and Revisionist Zionism -- of insisting that "Jordan is Palestine".  And this remains a formula for active or tacit acceptance of the overthrow of the Hashemite Dynasty in order to further consolidate the Zionist hold on everything West of the Jordan River.
 
The Hashemite alliance with the Israelis has always been through the Labor Party, rather than the Likud.  No matter how many visits Likud officials have been making, overtly and covertly, to Jordan of late, very serious suspicion still lingers.