by Jay Solomon
The breakdown of cooperation in 2005 and Hariri’s assassination fueled an increasingly hard-line stance toward Damascus in the White House. Elliott Abrams, one of President Bush’s closest Middle East advisors on the National Security Council, privately pressed the president to order the bombing of Damascus International Airport as a means to cut off the flow of foreign fighters into Iraq, according to former U.S. officials. The U.S. Treasury also began imposing increasingly draconian financial sanctions on the Assad regime, including cutting off the country’s largest financial institution, the Commercial Bank of Syria, from dealings with Western banks.
The Pentagon, meanwhile, began plotting aggressive incursions into Syria to target al Qaeda commanders and Baathist supporters of the insurgency. General Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal, head of the Pentagon’s Special Operations Command, left open the possibility of direct talks with the Syrians about joint security operations, but President Bush and the White House increasingly cooled on the idea of another outreach to Damascus.
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THE UNITED STATES TRIED again to woo President Assad after the election of Barack Obama in 2009. Obama campaigned on a platform of holding direct talks with many of the world’s worst despots, including Iranian president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chávez, and members of the Burmese military junta. This approach was intended as a direct rebuke of the Bush administration’s diplomatic tactics, which Obama considered too rigid and shaped by a black-and-white view of the world. The new president sincerely believed his outreach could significantly cool tensions in the Middle East and Asia and help end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
President Assad emerged as a central target of Obama’s new diplomacy, the idea being that the Syrian leader could be wooed away from his military alliance with Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas. As Obama’s election appeared more and more certain as the summer of 2008 progressed, the candidate’s Mideast advisors, including Princeton professor Daniel Kurtzer and former State Department negotiator Dennis Ross, held secret meetings with Syrian officials, including foreign minister Walid al-Moallem and Bouthaina Shaaban, one of Assad’s political advisors, to set the table for an improved relationship. Ambassador Imad Moustapha, meanwhile, sensing an end to Syria’s diplomatic isolation, appeared at diplomatic functions in Washington’s upscale Kalorama district and began attending local think tank events focused on Obama’s new Mideast policy and Syria’s potential role in it. In his meetings with journalists and academics, Moustapha appeared triumphant, recounting Assad’s successful eight years of weathering the Bush administration’s financial, diplomatic, and intelligence war on Damascus. Syria’s waiting game, he said, appeared to be working. And American officials were now knocking on his door.
Within weeks of taking office, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton sent her first diplomatic mission to Syria. According to her State Department aides, she was skeptical about the United States’ ability to improve relations with Assad. Her husband had spent two years trying to broker a peace agreement between Israel and Hafez al-Assad’s government during his presidency, only to see the diplomacy break down in his final weeks in office. Bill Clinton blamed his advisors, Israel, and Syria for the failure, and the experience soured both Clintons on the true intentions of the Assad family.
“Be careful when you’re there,” Hillary Clinton told the State Department’s top Mideast official, Assistant Secretary of State Jeff Feltman, shortly before sending him to Syria in March 2009. “The Syrians are notoriously compulsive liars!”
In the ensuing months, Obama emissaries, including former senator George Mitchell, the White House’s special Mideast envoy, held a series of audiences with President Assad in Damascus. Their talks had a familiar focus: getting the Syrian government to seal its border with Iraq and bolster stability in Lebanon and the Palestinian territories. But the United States was now offering carrots. In a late July trip, Mitchell said the United States would ease certain sanctions on Syria, specifically the purchases of computer software and airplane parts, to promote better ties. Assad and his advisors regularly downplayed the impact of the American sanctions, but senior Syrian officials were ebullient.
“Now we can begin to pursue new projects and improve our commercial ties to the U.S.,” Syria’s central bank governor, Adib Mayaleh, excitedly told me during an interview in his central Damascus office the week of Mitchell’s 2009 visit. Mayaleh cited his desperate need to purchase aircraft parts for Syria’s crippled fleet of Boeing jets: sixteen of Syria Air’s planes had been grounded or barred from traveling to Europe due to safety concerns.
Amid this bonhomie, Senator John Kerry, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, quietly took the lead in pressing the Obama administration’s efforts to win over Assad. The future secretary of state had a long history of traveling to Middle East hotspots and developing personal friendships with such regional leaders as Jordan’s King Abdullah II, Israeli president Shimon Peres, and Egypt’s former dictator Hosni Mubarak. Obama had turned to the Massachusetts lawmaker shortly after taking office to carry messages to a number of important yet troublesome American allies in the Islamic world, such as Afghanistan’s leader, Hamid Karzai, and Pakistani president Azif Ali Zardari. Now it was time to see if Kerry could deliver a bigger diplomatic prize.
Kerry’s entrée to Assad was Ambassador Moustapha, who had already met with the senator during the starker diplomatic days of the Bush presidency to press Syria’s case for engagement. Kerry strongly backed the sentiment of many Mideast experts and independent panels such as the Iraq Study Group, which concluded that the U.S. mission in Iraq could be saved only through cooperative relationships with Iran and Syria. Moustapha had also told Kerry that Assad was prepared to resume direct peace negotiations with Israel.
Back in 2006 Kerry had defied the Bush White House and traveled to Damascus for a meeting with the Syrian leader, heading a delegation that included Democratic senators Chris Dodd and Bill Nelson. The young Assad expounded on his desire for peace with Israel and rapprochement with Washington, as he had with many Western audiences. Now, four years later, Kerry was eager to build on that encounter and his relations with Moustapha, and he soon initiated an extensive dialogue with Assad that would last for two years. A March 2009 dinner in Damascus at the five-star Naranj restaurant cemented a strong working relationship and friendship between the two men, according to Syrian officials and Kerry’s aides. They dined for nearly four hours just down the street from the Umayyad Mosque, along with Kerry’s wife, Teresa Heinz Kerry, and Asma al-Assad. The Assads downplayed Syria’s alliance with Iran as an “unnatural alliance.” The two men discussed the future of Mideast peace and building stronger U.S.-Syrian relations, according to their aides. And they pledged to continue consultations as the Obama administration’s foreign policy gained traction.
Kerry was emerging as the Syrian dictator’s man in Washington. Although Assad was, like his father, one of the world’s most repressive leaders, Kerry stressed in his meetings with U.S. lawmakers and administration officials that the Syrian leader was strictly secular and recognized the threat posed by radical Islamists such as al Qaeda to the stability of the Middle East. “He doesn’t want to lead a religious-based country,” Kerry told a dinner for Arab Americans in late 2009. Kerry also portrayed Assad as a progressive Arab who understood his young population’s desire for jobs and access to the Internet, desires that could be satisfied only by a real rapprochement with the United States.
Kerry’s description of Assad surprised a number of Lebanese Americans, who were convinced that the Syrian leader’s family was behind the killing of anti-Syrian activists in Beirut. “Kerry’s characterization of Assad seemed grossly exaggerated,” said one attendee at the dinner. “But the senator promoted it unchecked.”
By the second half of 2010, Kerry was shuttling between the Syrians and the Israelis in a push to resume direct peace talks over the status of the Golan Heights. The senator believed the talks were progres
sing so well that by fall he and Assad’s aides had secretly drafted terms they hoped would allow for the resumption of the peace track. In particular, the plan called for Israel to agree to resume negotiations and commit to returning all Syrian lands seized during the 1967 Six-Day War. For his part, Assad would pledge to distance himself from Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, and the Axis of Resistance. “I thought what I brought back in writing was sufficiently powerful and real that it merited any administration to follow up on it,” Kerry told me.
Still, just weeks later, in early 2011, the U.S. diplomatic pursuit proved unsustainable. American officials and French president Nicolas Sarkozy had pressed Assad to use his influence with Hezbollah to end the political turmoil that had engulfed Beirut that year and raised fears of a return to civil war. They also wanted Syria to cooperate with the UN investigation into the murder of Rafik al-Hariri, even though early reports directly implicated members of Assad’s family. Instead, Syria’s Lebanese allies overthrew Prime Minister Saad al-Hariri, Rafik’s son, in early 2011, installing a civilian government that took a pro-Damascus line. This led the White House to call off Kerry’s planned 2011 trip to Damascus.
In March of that year, Syria’s leader cracked down on political opponents in one of the modern Middle East’s bloodiest encounters, which is still ongoing. In five years, nearly five hundred thousand Syrians would be killed. But Kerry and the Obama administration were slow to recognize what was happening in Syria. Addressing Washington’s Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in March 2011, weeks after the Assad crackdown started, the senator stunned the audience by personally recognizing the presence of Ambassador Moustapha, noting the ambassador’s efforts to promote U.S.-Syrian relations, and again stating his belief that Assad would emerge as a political reformer. “My judgment is that Syria will move; Syria will change, as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West and the economic opportunity that comes with it,” Kerry said.
Only later, as the violence surged, did Kerry and the Obama administration distance themselves from Assad. By August of that year, the White House had called on the Syrian leader to step down. They began placing travel bans and financial sanctions on many of the diplomats in Damascus the United States had once used as a channel to Assad, including Moallem and Shaaban. Ambassador Moustapha, meanwhile, became the focus of an FBI investigation looking into allegations that he and his staff threatened the families of Syrian American dissidents who were agitating against Assad.
Kerry, however, never gave up his belief that there was a moment when Assad could have been turned from his alliance with Iran and the Axis of Resistance. “I never argued Assad was a reformer so far as the internal political affairs of Syria,” the former senator told me. “But there was an opportunity staring us in the face on foreign affairs.”
Kerry’s enthrallment with Assad, even as Syria devolved into war, showed a troubling lack of judgment and raised questions about his ability to read the intentions of world leaders. Kerry didn’t appear capable of distinguishing between Assad’s welcoming demeanor and the police state run by him and his family.
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IN JANUARY 2011, WHEN KERRY and the White House were still seeking a rapprochement with Syria, I was invited on short notice by the Syrian government to interview President Assad in Damascus. Interviews with President Assad were tightly controlled by Ambassador Moustapha. The diplomat was an anomaly in Washington’s post-9/11 world: although U.S. government officials had come to view him as a pariah, Moustapha was still a star on the diplomatic circuit and among the American press. He was the only foreign official in George W. Bush’s Washington who could speak to what members of the Axis of Resistance thought about the war on terror, and he was sharply critical of the White House.
Moustapha engaged in a crafty diplomatic dance with Israel’s supporters in Washington and with American Jews in general. He was quick to lambaste Israeli policies, claiming they were at the heart of virtually every problem in the Middle East. And he publicly espoused a belief that the “Israel lobby” and “neoconservatives” controlled everything that happened in Washington, and in the United States in general; he regularly appeared on CNN and described allegations of Syrian malfeasance—such as its alleged nuclear weapons program—as “lies” concocted by Syria’s enemies and the Israel lobby. But he’d regularly meet with Jewish academics, diplomats, and journalists at the Syrian embassy in Washington, stressing that Damascus was anti-Israel, not anti-Semitic. He embodied the Assad regime’s double-dealing from his mansion in the Kalorama district. On a table in his meeting room there he kept a cookbook that detailed the Syrian city of Aleppo’s history of great Jewish cuisine and which, apparently, demonstrated his own admiration for the Jewish people. He also kept a blog on which he mixed his interest in Arabic poetry and Syrian art with political observations from his active Washington social life. Moustapha’s diplomatic efforts were both entertaining and disturbing. On one hand, he was charming and always open for a lunch or a phone conversation. But he was such a tried-and-true regime loyalist that virtually anything he said needed to be discounted or scrutinized.
But Moustapha, who had both family and business ties to Assad, served as a conduit to the Syrian leader. And Moustapha seemed to have concluded that if Assad wanted to communicate to Washington’s leaders, he might as well talk to me—a Jewish reporter from The Wall Street Journal, the newspaper seen as most closely aligned with American conservatives and hawkish pro-Israel interests.
I had put in for an interview with President Assad in early 2010 and had more or less forgotten about it, assuming it would never happen. So I was surprised when Moustapha called me into his Washington office on a Tuesday morning and said with a smile, “You have to be there in forty-eight hours.” The interview was on.
I was picked up at Damascus International Airport by the president’s handlers and dropped off at the city’s premier hotel, the Four Seasons, exhausted. The hotel resembled a giant tomb near the heart of the capital’s old city, with only a few guests: mostly turbaned Arab traders, European business contractors, and Indian IT specialists. U.S. senator John Kerry would have arrived at the hotel that same evening had the White House not canceled his trip.
A pre-interview was scheduled for my first morning in Damascus—January 29—with the president’s chief media and foreign affairs advisor, Bouthaina Shaaban. Shaaban was from the Assad family’s Alawite sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, and had earned a Ph.D. in English literature from a London university. She later served as a translator for President Hafez al-Assad and, under Bashar, as minister for expatriate affairs. She was a true regime insider, but with a font of Western contacts. The Assads regularly sent her to meet the foreign media.
I had heard stories of journalists who had traveled all the way to Damascus for interviews with President Assad, only to be sent back following a bad initial encounter with Shaaban. I decided I’d narrowly focus my meeting with her on the prospects for better relations between the United States and Syria, knowing this was one of Assad’s main objectives in courting the Western press. We also discussed the collapse of the government in Beirut just days earlier, which had been warmly received in Syria, and the troubles facing Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, Damascus’s arch-nemesis. She seemed to like this line of questioning, chuckling during our tea about the fall of the Hariri regime and the fact that the French, Americans, and Saudis were relying on Damascus to help stabilize Lebanon. She mentioned how Syria had previously been blamed for all the chaos there. “And now they’re turning to us for the solution,” she said with a big smile. The pre-interview went well.
The following morning I was driven to one of the president’s working offices, located in the foothills of Damascus’s Qassioun Mountain. Security at the site was surprisingly minimal. There was a gate when we entered what felt like a forest reserve, and a few guards were stationed along the road to the palace. I had expected an armed fort, but in all likelihood I had been monitor
ed around the clock since my arrival in Damascus two days earlier. Assad’s intelligence service, the Mukhabarat, knew they had little to fear.
The rail-thin Syrian leader surprised my colleague Bill Spindle, the Middle East bureau chief, and me by greeting us at the door of our car upon our arrival. I had expected a long line of handlers to shuttle us through a maze of offices and security checks before seeing Bashar. His father was famous for keeping foreign ministers waiting for hours before an audience, just to establish a sense of his authority. But Bashar took us straight into his compound.
The president and Shaaban gave us a tour of his offices and their expansive view of Damascus. The meeting room was surprisingly Spartan, featuring a brown marble floor and a few modern Syrian paintings and sculptures. Bashar spoke fluent English, but with a subtle lisp that made him seem shy, if not lacking in confidence. Despite his family’s reputation for brutality, his soft voice put me at ease. I sensed I could establish a rapport with this dictator. He walked with his wiry, six-foot-two frame slightly hunched. I worried, though, that it was all a ploy to lower my defenses.
Colleagues and diplomats back in Washington had warned me not to go light on Assad and stressed he was a habitual liar. The president’s enemies in Washington, particularly among the Lebanese Americans, wanted me to begin the session with an abrupt question about why he had ordered Hezbollah to murder Rafik al-Hariri. They advised that I should hit him early with evidence of his government’s abysmal human rights record. But I figured such an approach might force the president to go tight-lipped or to shut down the interview entirely. It was smarter, I figured, to start with general questions about the political turbulence in the Middle East and the prospects for peace between Syria and Israel. I’d often found that politicians like Assad could hang themselves answering even benign questions, if you gave them enough rope.
