My father’s generation was fixated on December 7, 1941, the “day of infamy” when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and triggered America’s entry into World War II. My day came on March 20, 2003, when the administration of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney responded to Osama bin Laden’s attack on New York and Washington of September 11, 2001, by bombing Baghdad, the capital of Iraq. The strange decision to respond to an Islamist terrorist attack on the United States by bombing the capital of a nation whose leader, Saddam Hussein, was known for his hostility to Islamist terrorism, was rarely remarked upon as the US went to war. America invaded Iraq along with many embedded journalists, who were individually handpicked by the military and allowed to ride along and report on American glory as US forces sped toward Baghdad from Kuwait, America’s fervent ally in the Persian Gulf. And so, on the night of June 18, with Saddam Hussein in hiding and the war in what was thought of as a mop-up phase, there was an American special forces shoot-up on the Syrian side of the Iraqi border. As many as eighty Syrians involved in smuggling gasoline—not covert arms or nuclear bombs—were slain. The Syrian government chose to make no complaint about the incident, which had been covered up when I chanced on the story in Washington while working for the New Yorker. I had been told earlier by persons in the US intelligence community that Syria, then led by Bashar Assad—the son of Hafez Assad, who had collaborated with Henry Kissinger during the Nixon administration—had become one of America’s best intelligence sources in the fight against Al Qaeda. Ironically, Syria had been on the State Department terrorism list since 1979 and was considered by the Bush administration to be a sponsor of state terrorism. At one point, the nation was publicly named by the White House to be a junior member of its infamous “Axis of Evil” while it was providing much valued intelligence to the CIA. So I had to get there. I had a contact in Beirut who initially arranged a meeting with me with Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of Hezbollah, who was assassinated by Israel in his Beirut hideaway on September 27. From Nasrallah’s offices it was a short car ride across the Syrian border to Damascus. Nasrallah told me then—we were speaking on the record—that although he hated Israel for its treatment of the Arab community in Israel and elsewhere, he would support any peace agreement that was agreed to by the Arab world. Damascus, considered to be the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, is steeped in charm, beauty, and history. One could not imagine what was to come. An interview was arranged for me with Assad. But on the day before that meeting, I was invited to meet with Khaled Mashal, the head of Hamas’s office in Damascus. Hamas had just been kicked out of Jordan, and Assad had given it a temporary home. I knew little about Hamas, but learned a great deal over a long morning and lunch with Mashal, who told me he had been a high school physics teacher in Kuwait before being fired for his radical political activities, such as advocating the violent end of Israel. The last I heard of him came this past summer when he was named the de facto head of what is left of Hamas—Israeli assassinations had thinned the Hamas leadership—and he was no longer in Doha. He did not tell me then in Damascus that he had survived a botched Israeli attempt to assassinate him with opiates in 1997 in Amman. The assassination was authorized by then first-term Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was forced to apologize publicly to the incensed Jordanian government and agree to a prisoner release in amends. And so I met with Assad, in his unpretentious office in downtown Damascus. I was full of CIA leaks about the reliable information Assad had provided the agency, including hundreds of files on the membership and operations of Al Qaeda. It was invaluable information. I also knew the Syrian intelligence service had hundreds of files on the men who participated in the 9/11 attacks and, so I had been told in Washington, many files on those who wanted to participate. Assad’s intelligence service also had tipped off the US to an impending Al Qaeda bombing attack on the headquarters of the US Navy’s Fifth Fleet, headquartered in Bahrain. Assad did not want to talk about that because, so I thought, it was newly acquired intelligence. It was hard not to be impressed, especially when I was told that Assad, under pressure from the CIA, had given the US the name of his government’s most vital agent inside Al Qaeda. There was a condition that came with the name—that the CIA would make no direct approach to recruit the agent. Of course, the agency did, presumably with wads of cash. The Syrian source rebuffed the US recruiting attempt and angrily broke off contact with the Syrian intelligence services. Net gain: minus one fantastic source. The Syrian president insisted that I not publish a word of this—about his and America’s, indiscretions—and I did not. But I was surprised by his willingness to help America beat Al Qaeda. I would learn that Israel, once informed of the information provided by Assad, remained skeptical. If Assad knew as much as he claimed about Al Qaeda, a senior Israeli diplomat told me, he surely had to know in advance of the 9/11 attacks and gave no warning. The diplomat was deadly serious. I have another stunning memory of one of my post-9/11 visits to Damascus. I had published a book on Henry Kissinger’s diplomacy in 1983 and became, as did Kissinger, fascinated with the brilliance of one of the revered Syrian military generals of the time. He was retired and living modestly with his wife when I called on him and got myself invited for dinner. I went happily and noticed two new Mercedes sedans in his driveway. Dinner was off the record. He was fluent in English, as I had been told, and afterwards, with his wife off to bed and the house quiet, the general—we had had a few drinks of arak by then—told me he had something special he wanted to show me. Down to his basement we went, and I was greeted by dozens of photographs, many of them pornographic, of one of Europe’s most famous and most beautiful movie stars. There was even a naked statue of her. This was the general’s prize possession: not the medals and pendants hanging on a wall upstairs. It was a hell of a revelation for a kid from Chicago who covered the police there in the early 1960s and thought he had seen it all. I had a few more meetings with Assad as the Iraq War wore down and America was consumed with the hunt for weapons of mass destruction that some in Washington were convinced that Saddam Hussein had hidden somewhere in Iraq. The meetings came because I had continued to visit with Nasrallah in Beirut and invitations from Damascus were extended. I learned then of the intense hatred and contempt held by many Syrians for Assad. My concerns were always about international events, not domestic conditions, though I was aware of rural hardships outside Damascus. I had been invited to a concert by an international string quartet that was being held in the courtyard of an elegant home in the historic old quarter of Damascus. There were a hundred or so chairs set in the yard with two empty seats in the front row for the president and his wife. When they arrived at the last moment, a groan of disappointment and disapproval rolled through the crowd. It was hard to ignore. I asked a friend who had invited me what was up. He told me of the enormous contempt for the president for his unwillingness to stop the rampant corruption of his family and the jailing and brutal mistreatment of dissidents. I had asked the president many times about his family’s corruption, and he complained, again and again, that he was unable to stop his uncles and cousins in their insatiable need for money. As for the jailing of dissidents, he explained that he was constantly intervening with the internal security authorities to minimize the length of sentences and mistreatment in prisons. I made a point in my articles for the New Yorker to quote the various human rights organizations that were increasingly critical of Assad. But it would become clear in the next few years that it was not enough. At the time, I was dealing with many outside complaints about Syria, such as Israel’s still unproven claims that Assad was involved in a secret project to build a nuclear bomb and was enriching uranium in an above-ground reactor a few hundred miles northeast of Damascus, along the Euphrates River. In 2007 the Israeli air force had destroyed the building in a widely reported bombing raid. I reported that the facility was not a reactor but had been involved in upgrading the Syrian missile arsenal. There are many who insist otherwise, but in the seventeen years since there has been exhaustive and accurate reporting on the Syrian chemical and biological arsenal that was destroyed under United Nations watch, but nary a word about a Syrian nuclear weapons program. Many still believe that the facility was enriching uranium with the help of workers from North Korea. It was impossible to imagine what was to come: a civil war beginning in 2012, which Assad survived only because of the intervention of Russia and its air force in 2015. Six million Syrians have fled the country, creating a refugee crisis across much of Europe, while strengthening the role of the Alawites, the religious minority to which Assad belongs. There were more prisons and more torture of the growing political opposition. I was invited to meet with Assad on my last visit to Damascus in late 2011, when there were strong rumors of a possible settlement with Israel, orchestrated by Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey. In the end, Russian President Vladimir Putin, who has another war on his hands, allowed Assad to send his wife and children to Moscow in late November. The humbled and despised Syrian President followed them ten days later, just as ancient Damascus, disfigured by years of civil war, fell quietly to an uncertain future. |