From Jailer to Jailed by Bernard B. Kerik

Author:Bernard B. Kerik
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Threshold Editions

13

In Jordan

“Prince Ali is on the phone,” Hala said, waking me from a deep sleep.

“What? What time is it?”

I was in a daze as she handed me the phone. I looked at the clock next to the bed. Six-thirty in the morning. I had just arrived home from Amman, Jordan, thirteen hours earlier.

During the media frenzy surrounding my failed nomination, I had resigned from the security consulting company that I partnered with Rudy Giuliani and had created my own firm, The Kerik Group. For the past eight months I had had a team of about eight people conducting an operational, threat, and vulnerability assessment of Jordan’s national security for His Majesty King Abdullah II. So the first thought I had about this call was that one of the men or women who worked for me in Jordan had possibly gotten hurt or was in some kind of trouble.

“Hello, who is this?” I asked.

“Bernie, it’s Ali. I’m with His Majesty. Did you hear about the bombings?”

At that point I sat straight up in bed. Prince Ali and His Majesty had been in Kazakhstan on a state visit, he informed me, when suicide bombers attacked three hotels back home in Amman—the Days Inn, the Grand Hyatt, and the Radisson SAS.

Ali said that he was calling on behalf of His Majesty. They wanted me to come to Amman to assist in any way I could, primarily to act as a surrogate spokesman for the Jordanians, because the international press was already questioning Jordan’s security and stability. I told him that I’d just gotten in the night before but could return that evening.

Then I remembered there was no direct flight from New York to Amman that evening. I would have to fly to Chicago to get the Royal Jordanian flight to Amman. Prince Ali said he would work on the tickets and he and His Majesty would see me there.

I hung up the phone and Hala looked at me.

“Do you have to do this? You just got home, and they’ve already blown up the hotels.”

“I’ll be fine,” I said. “I can’t say no to the king. They haven’t hit the Four Seasons, so I’m in good shape.” The little sarcasm at the end didn’t help.

“Yeah, like when you couldn’t say no to the president. You see what that got us, right?”

At that point I realized I wasn’t going to win the argument, so I didn’t say a word. I got up, called Kim Petersen, a former U.S. Army Special Forces officer and head of the Diplomatic Protective Security Service for the State Department, and Debbie Kurtz, who had worked with me as a deputy commissioner in the NYC DOC, and told them that I’d been summoned back to Jordan because of the bombings. I needed their help.

Kim said he would start preparing an intelligence package and email it to me before my flight.

I arrived in Amman just shy of forty-eight hours after the bombings. I dropped my things at the Four Seasons and headed

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.