Last summer, two US officials ventured into hostile territory for a high-stakes secret meeting with US adversaries.
The Syrian government officials they were to meet in Damascus seemed ready to discuss the fate of US hostages believed to be held in their country, including Austin Tice., a journalist who was arrested eight years earlier. The release of the Americans would be a boon to President Donald Trump months before the November election. A breakthrough seemed possible.
Still, the journey was ultimately fruitless, with the Syrians making a series of demands that would have fundamentally reformed Washington’s policies. towards Damascus, including the lifting of sanctions, the withdrawal of troops from the country and the restoration of normal diplomatic ties. Equally problematic for US negotiators: Syrian officials failed to provide meaningful information about the fate and whereabouts of Tice and others.
“Success would have brought the Americans home and we never got there,” said Kash Patel, who attended the meeting as a senior White House assistant, in his initial public comments on the effort.
The White House acknowledged the October meeting, but said little about it. New details have emerged in interviews The Associated Press has held in recent weeks with people familiar with the talks, some of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
The AP has also heard about US efforts to build goodwill with Syria well before the talks took place, with Patel describing how an unidentified US ally in the region helped treat cancer for President Bashar’s wife Assad.
The details shed light on the sensitive and often secretive attempts to free hostages from US opponents, a process that brought high-profile successes to Trump, but also dead ends. It is unclear how aggressively the new Biden administration will advance efforts to free Tice and other Americans detained around the world, especially when demands for a negotiating table clash with the broader White House foreign goals. policy.
The August meeting in Damascus represented the highest level talks for years between the US and the Assad government. It was extraordinary given the hostile relationship between the two countries and because the Syrian government has never acknowledged detaining Tice or knowing anything about his whereabouts.
Still, the moment held some promise. Trump had already shown a willingness to withdraw US troops from Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East. And he had made hostage recovery a top foreign policy priority, celebrating his release by inviting released prisoners to the White House.
Months after the talks in Damascus, when Tice’s name made the news again, Trump sent a note to Tice’s parents, who live in Houston, saying he would “never stop” working for their son’s release. his mother, Debra, told the AP. But Tice’s fate was unknown when Trump left office on January 20, and it remains to this day. The former Marine had reported for The Washington Post, McClatchy newspapers, CBS, and other outlets.
The Biden government has also pledged to make hostage recovery a priority. But it has also called on the Syrian government for human rights abuses and it seems unlikely that it will be more receptive to the circumstances created by Damascus last summer to even continue the dialogue.
Tice has held a prominent place in the public and political consciousness since disappearing at a checkpoint in a disputed area west of Damascus in August 2012. He had gone deep into the country at a time when other reporters had decided it was too dangerous, and disappeared shortly before he was due to leave.
A video released weeks later was shown blindfolded him and held by armed men, said, “Oh, Jesus.” Since then nothing has been heard from him. The US authorities assume that he is still alive. Syria has never admitted to detaining him.
Efforts to secure his release have been complicated by a lack of diplomatic relations and the conflict in Syria, where the US maintains about 900 troops in the eastern part of the country to prevent the resurgence of the Islamic State group.
“My assumption is that he is alive and waiting for me to come and get him,” said Roger Carstens, a former Army Special Forces officer who attended the meeting with Patel in his capacity as US special presidential envoy for hostage taking. under Trump. He was held in position by Biden.
At the time of the meeting, Patel was senior terrorism adviser at the White House after serving as an assistant to the House Intelligence Committee, where he gained some notoriety for ongoing Republican efforts to challenge the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 election. . He previously served as a prosecutor under President Barack Obama.
The meeting was more than a year in the making, Patel said, and he needed to seek help in Lebanon, which still has ties to Assad.
At one point, an American “ally in the region” also helped build goodwill with the Syrian government by providing assistance in cancer treatment for Assad’s wife, he said, declining to provide further details. The Syrian government announced a year before the meeting that it had recovered from breast cancer.
Arriving as part of a deliberately small delegation, the men drove through Damascus and saw no clear signs of the conflict that killed about half a million people and displaced half of Syria’s pre-war population of 23 million in 10 years.
In an office of Ali Mamlouk, the head of Syrian intelligence, they asked for information about Tice and about Majd Kamalmaz, a Virginia psychologist who disappeared in 2017, and several others.
Hostage talks are challenging by nature, confronting negotiators with demands that may seem unreasonable or run counter to US foreign policy, or that may fail even when satisfied.
In this case, the terms of the Syrians, described by several people, would have required the US to revise virtually all of its Syria policy.
The US closed its embassy in Damascus in 2012 and withdrew its ambassador as the civil war in Syria worsened. Although Trump announced the withdrawal of troops from Northern Syria in 2019, a military presence remains to help protect an opposition enclave in the Northeast, an area that includes oil and natural gas.
Because their demands were not met, the Syrians did not provide meaningful information about Tice, including proof of life, which could have generated significant momentum, Patel said. Although he said he was optimistic after a “legitimate diplomatic engagement,” he looks back with regret.
“I would say it is probably one of my biggest failures under the Trump administration, not getting Austin back,” said Patel.
The outcome of the diplomacy was empty for Tice’s parents, although they said involvement in Damascus was possible.
And it’s possible to have that dialogue without threatening the national security of the United States, without compromising our Middle East policy, without all the terrible things we’ve been told over the years being able to happen if the United States would really recognize that there was a government in Damascus, ”said Marc, Tice’s father, in an interview.
In a statement, the State Department said bringing hostages home is one of the Biden government’s top priorities and called on Syria to liberate them. But the outlook for talks is uncertain, especially without a more substantial commitment from Damascus. The government is unlikely to see the Syrians, who were summoned by the global chemical watchdog in December for failing to identify a chemical weapons facility, as credible negotiating partners.
Biden has said little about Syria, although he has counted it among the international problems that the UN Security Council should address. In February, he authorized air strikes against Iranian-backed militias in Syria. State Secretary Antony Blinken said the situation last week in Syria is as serious as ever.
Last November, after a reporter mistakenly tweeted that Tice had been released, his mother wrote a note to be delivered to Trump saying she hoped he could one day make that news a reality.
Trump responded by photocopying her note and adding his own message written by Sharpie. “Debra,” he wrote, she recalled. ‘I work so hard on this. Looking for the answer. We want Austin back. I will never stop. “
But she said the family doesn’t need letters from the president.
“What is desired here, what we are asking here, is to see Austin on the tarmac and let the President of the United States shake his hand,” she said.