 Abu Nuwar sought to allay Hussein's concerns and told him it was a routine exercise executed numerous times in the preceding years to monitor the traffic into and out of the city, while Rashid later claimed it was part of a broader contingency plan to move troops to the West Bank in the event of an Israeli invasion.According to Pearson, Rashid's maneuver was meant to intimidate Hussein, while historian Betty Anderson has speculated that the "officers could have been testing the waters to see what they could achieve militarily".Whatever the actual reason for the maneuver, it heightened Hussein's suspicions of a coup by Abu Nuwar and the Arab nationalists, and it prompted warnings from veteran royalist officials, namely Bahjat al-Talhouni and Sharif Naser, that such a coup was impending.