A letter sent by King Abdullah to influential General Intelligence Directorate (GID) head Gen. Ahmad Husni on Feb. 17 is keeping the kingdom's political class guessing over what the king really wants. In the lengthy letter, the king praised the GID’s role over the past years but called on Husni to continue the process of renewal, modernization and development of the department. 

The king said that as the kingdom marks its second centennial, the time has come for the department “to allow the country’s institutions to immediately step up to their constitutional and legal responsibilities in order to release the GID from the great burden it had to carry over the years.”

The king said the GID “must remain a model of efficient intelligence in countering terrorism and security threats to our nation” so that “it may develop its tools and methods to provide the best modern intelligence assessments to decision-makers in the political, economic and security-related fields, away from the regulatory and oversight roles that the circumstances had at times imposed on the department in areas that lie within the specialty of others that had not possessed the tools to practice them properly, but now do and must, therefore, undertake these roles in full, without delay.”

Analysts here took this to mean ending the GID’s “oversight” over the domestic political, legislative and economic affairs, which had increased in the past two decades. This comes after the king said in an interview last month that the time has come to review laws regulating the political process such as elections and political parties.  It also comes a few days after the Economic Intelligence Unit's Democracy Index labeled Jordan an authoritarian country, retreating by four steps from its 2020 ranking.