It is also likely to make the Hashemite kingdom's General Intelligence Directorate more of a target for al-Qaida, along with other Arab spy agencies that have provided invaluable help to the United States since Sept. 11, 2001.

Indeed, these days it almost seems like al-Qaida has declared open season on the intelligence services that are pursuing them, suggesting that the jihadists are being hurt by the allies' clandestine operations.

Jordan's GID is one of the best Arab intelligence services, with close links to Britain's Secret Intelligence Service, better known as MI6, and the CIA, which since Sept. 11 has become the Jordanian agency's main benefactor.

One of the most effective GID chiefs was Gen. Saad Kheir, who headed the GID from 2000 to 2005. He excelled in penetrating extremist Palestinian groups, such as the Abu Nidal Organization, one of the deadliest in the 1970s and 80s, and later al-Qaida.

Considered a brilliant spymaster by those who knew him, Kheir thwarted a series of jihadist plots against the United States and Jordan.

These included a jihadist operation in April 2004 to attack the GID's Amman headquarters with a huge, truck-mounted chemical bomb that authorities said would have killed upward of 20,000 people had it detonated.

Kheir joined the GID as a rookie in the 1960s and became its director on Nov. 9, 2000. He was sacked on May 5, 2005, by King Abdullah II, who believed he was interfering in politics.

Kheir never got over that. He became a hard-drinking playboy. He was found dead of a heart attack in his suite at a luxury hotel in Vienna, Austria, on Dec. 9. His death was attributed to a heart attack. He was 56.

Other security chiefs have met more violent ends at the hands of their jihadist foes.

One was the deputy chief of Afghanistan's National Directorate of Security, Abdullah Laghmani. He perished on Sept. 2, along with 20 other people, in a suicide bombing outside a mosque near Kabul.

Laghmani, like Kheir, was considered a gifted intelligence operative. He began his career in Afghanistan's dreaded secret police of the former Soviet-backed regime. Then he changed sides to fight alongside the mujahedin Islamic warriors against the Red Army during the 1979-89 Afghan war.

When the Soviets retreated, he joined the new rulers in Kabul. He fought against the Taliban when U.S. Special Forces moved against the fundamentalists weeks after Sept. 11.

His encyclopedic knowledge of the Pashtun tribes and the inner workings of the Taliban and their sometime paymaster, Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence Directorate, made him the CIA's top Afghan expert on al-Qaida.

His assassination was a major blow to the CIA in Afghanistan, as was the suicide bombing that killed the CIA operatives at Forward Operating Base Chapman last week.

Chapman is a key CIA facility in the region that provides intelligence on Taliban leaders to be targeted -- and often assassinated -- by the agency's missile-firing Predator drone aircraft.

The attack was widely seen as Taliban retaliation for the drone attacks that over the last 19 months have eliminated a score of their top chiefs.

Like the slaying of Laghmani, it demonstrated that the unruly Taliban is capable of precise and meticulously planned operations against key intelligence personnel.

Al-Qaida meantime has been busily assassinating intelligence officers in several countries, including Yemen, Somalia and Mali.

On Dec. 4 jihadists killed Lt. Col. Ahmed Subhi al-Fahal, one of Iraq's top counter-terrorism officials, in a suicide bombing in Tikrit, north of Baghdad.

A week later another senior security man, Col. Saad al-Shimari, narrowly escaped death in a car bomb ambush in Fallujah, west of Baghdad.

On Aug. 27 a leading al-Qaida operative tried to kill Prince Mohammed bin Nayef, Saudi Arabia's deputy interior minister and commander of counter-terrorism forces who crushed al-Qaida in the kingdom in 2007.

It was the first direct attack on a member of the Saudi royal family by al-Qaida. The jihadist blew himself up with explosives sewn into his underwear (exactly like the would-be suicide bomber of a Northwest Airlines flight over Detroit on Christmas Day) as he approached the prince, who escaped with minor injuries.

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