by Jay Solomon
And Bashar wasted little time making news. I asked him if he was worried his government was susceptible to the same type of revolutions or political revolts consuming other Arab countries, because of his repressive policies and the religious imbalance in the country. (Bashar’s Alawite minority lorded over a country that was around 70 percent Sunni.) I mentioned that the country’s stagnating economy wasn’t providing enough jobs for Syria’s youthful population. But he rebuked me, saying he’d already started real reforms in his country by opening up the media, the banks, and the educational system. “If you want to go towards democracy, the first thing is to involve the people in decision making, not to make it,” he said. “It is not my democracy as a person; it is our democracy as a society. So how do you start? You start with creating dialogue.”
Assad then shot back that he would never be tested. He was the leader of the resistance to Israel, he proclaimed. His words made clear to me why his alliances with Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas made sense politically in the region. They, plus Syria, were united by their hatred of the Jewish state. Indeed, he described himself as a bulwark against Zionism and the West, even while he courted the United States. He opened up the potential for peace with the Jewish state, but also stressed that his support in the Arab world rested on his opposition to Zionism.
“Syria is stable. Why?” Assad asked in one of his more animated moments. “Because you have to be very closely linked to the beliefs of the people. This is the core issue. When there is divergence…you will have this vacuum that creates disturbances.”
Despite his fluency in English, the Syrian leader’s responses to questions about the Arab revolutions used odd phraseologies about how the region’s political systems had been infected by “microbes” and “stagnant waters.” “What you have been seeing in this region is a kind of disease,” he said. “That is how we see it.” His language seemed to be informed by his years of studying ophthalmology in London and Damascus. But it also suggested a tyrannical streak. He described his desire to “cut off” the malignancies that existed in Syrian society. He portrayed himself as the father to the Syrian people—and only he knew when the time was ripe for change.
True to form, he also offered up blatant lies about Syria’s roles in Iraq and Lebanon, claiming Damascus had no ability to stanch the flow of fighters crossing its borders and no involvement in fueling instability in Beirut. He also dismissed the UN’s investigation into the murder of Rafik al-Hariri and said the charges of Syrian involvement were baseless. “How can you accuse anyone without having any evidence that they are involved or complicit?” he asked us. “They said they suspect some people who were close to the region, some people who used the telephone, and things like this, i.e., theories. But we do not have any concrete evidence.”
Assad also said his government had never attempted to develop a nuclear program, despite the fact that UN inspectors reported finding vast amounts of uranium particles at the site in Syria’s Deir Ezzour province bombed by Israel in 2007. Why would he build such a facility, he asked, when it could fuel such criticism of Syria? The facility that was destroyed had been a “conventional” military site, he said, not one used for nuclear weapons, and he suggested that Israel was trying to frame Syria. “If they believed it was nuclear, they should have done that without the attacking,” Assad said of the Israelis. “If they want to create a problem for Syria, they could tell the IAEA, ‘Look, we have the satellite images, go to Syria and Syria will be cornered.’ ”
Assad, however, clearly wanted to send a message to Washington that he was a man who could be trusted and engaged. He told me that Damascus and Washington shared common strategic interests and that American economic sanctions on Syria were only preventing it from integrating more closely with the West. He said Iran and Syria were not natural allies, as his government was avowedly secular while Tehran’s was Islamist. And he stressed that peace between his government and Israel was still possible.
“We need to have normal relations. Peace for us is to have normal relations, like between Syria and any other country in the world,” Assad said, sitting slightly back on his couch. Bouthaina Shaaban, who had closely tracked his every word, interjected at one point with a clarification. She noted that Syria couldn’t have peace with Israel until all the Arab states did. She didn’t specifically mention it, but one of the reasons Egyptian president Anwar Sadat had been assassinated in 1981 was that he had signed a peace agreement with Israel without the support of the other Arab states. “So having a peace treaty only with Syria could be only one step, but cannot be peace,” Assad clarified. “That is why comprehensive peace [between Israel and the Arab states] is very important. This is the real solution.”
The interview with Assad lasted for nearly ninety minutes. But after a quick handshake, he vanished. One aide told me the president “liked you” and that other meetings could be set up if he approved of the article. He suggested I could become a regular guest of the president’s in the future. I frantically wrote the story over the course of an afternoon, worried about how it would be received. The spread of the Arab Spring and the protests that were gripping Tunisia and Egypt made Assad’s defiant, confident words incredibly newsworthy. I would have preferred to write the article after I left the country, given the erratic nature of the Syrian regime. But the Journal wanted the story that day, while I was still in Damascus.
The Assad interview was closely studied by Western intelligence services and Israel after its publication on January 31. Analysts seemed to draw conflicting conclusions. Some of President Obama’s Mideast advisors believed Syria’s leader was signaling he was willing to make peace with Israel and distance himself from Iran, if offered the right incentives. Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, however, drew the exact opposite lesson, according to his aides: Assad had said he was a leader of the Axis of Resistance, so therefore he could never end the war with Israel and abandon his allies in Hezbollah, Hamas, and Iran.
I felt I was being forced into the role of a diplomatic intermediary between Washington and Damascus—a position that most journalists probably coveted but also feared. A reporter’s role is to build understanding between opposing sides, I believe. But with Assad and his history of dissembling, I was concerned that I was being manipulated by the dictator. I didn’t want to filter his words. But I knew he had spoken untruths, and I needed to challenge them.
Just a month later, protests broke out against Assad’s rule. At first, many Syria analysts thought the uprising would prove short-lived and never reach Damascus. But the Syrian security forces’ heavy crackdown and the killing of teenagers fueled the much broader civil conflict that eventually fractured Syria and still threatens the future of Iran’s regional alliances. Bashar al-Assad’s vicious military offensive against his political opponents, using tanks, airpower, and chemical weapons, destroyed any last hopes in the West that he was a man willing to take risks for peace, either with Israel or with his own people. A colleague remarked that my meeting in Damascus was like interviewing Adolf Hitler in 1939 on the eve of World War II.
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THE MEETING WITH PRESIDENT ASSAD wasn’t the only time I was sought out to serve as an intermediary between the Axis of Resistance and the American public. Syria has also hosted the Palestinian militant group Hamas for much of the past two decades. The organization, like Hezbollah, closely tied its military operations to the Assad regime and Iran. But it’s also used the ballot to gain political control of the Gaza Strip in the Palestinian territories. The movement’s political chiefs, fearing assassination attempts, remained in Damascus and made many of Hamas’s decisions remotely from their Syrian safe haven. They regularly coordinated their activities inside Gaza with Hezbollah, the Syrian intelligence services, and visiting Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders.
But unlike Hezbollah, Hamas was a Sunni organization, essentially the Palestinian arm of the Egypt-based Muslim Brotherhood, the pan-Arab Islamist movement that was born out of the collapse of the Ottoma
n Empire in the 1920s and had political supporters and fundraising networks in most Middle East countries. U.S. officials believed that Iran’s sponsorship of Hamas showed Tehran’s willingness to reach across sectarian lines to challenge the United States and Israel. In their view, Iran’s relationship with Hamas, unlike Hezbollah, was purely strategic and political, more than religious. Hamas’s leadership would eventually leave Damascus after the onset of the civil war in 2011.
During one extended stay in Syria in 2009, I was granted a meeting with Hamas’s political chief, Khaled Meshaal. The Palestinian was born in Kuwait and had spent much of his political career based in Jordan. In 1996, Israel’s intelligence service, the Mossad, attempted to assassinate him in Amman by squirting a poisonous toxin into his ear. Meshaal survived only after Jordan’s late King Hussein intervened and forced Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu to ship over the antidote, threatening to terminate Jordan’s peace treaty with Israel if he didn’t. The Israeli leader quickly complied. King Hussein, though no fan of Hamas, worried that Meshaal’s death could spark a broad Palestinian uprising in his own kingdom.
Meshaal was charismatic and had increasingly challenged the Palestinians’ secular political party Fatah for political dominance in the occupied territories. Egypt, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia all worried Meshaal could stir up internal dissent in their own countries. Arab governments equated Hamas’s secrecy and cell-like structure to communist organizations during the Cold War. These governments were convinced Iran was backing Hamas to weaken them. Many European diplomats believed that as the Palestinians’ secular leaders in the Palestinian Liberation Organization aged, became corrupted or discredited, or fell into obscurity, Israel and the West ultimately would have no choice but to negotiate with Meshaal.
Meshaal forged a dashing, Che Guevara–type persona revered across the Arab and developing worlds and among the American left. He had steely blue eyes and a closely cropped, salt-and-pepper beard. His secluded life in Syria and covert travels across the Middle East and Central Asia added to his shroud of mystery and invincibility.
I took a taxicab with a colleague to a quiet backstreet in a central Damascus neighborhood for my meeting with Meshaal. The Syrian capital, despite hosting so many militant and terrorist groups, was remarkably peaceful before the civil war. There was little of the traffic and cacophony of noises that gripped most of the Middle East’s capitals. Vendors and street urchins were a rarity. Cool winds blew into the city on summer nights.
This calm, though, hid shadows from history. A number of Nazi officers had found shelter in the Mideast following the end of the Second World War. They provided counsel to the Egyptians and the Syrians for their wars against Israel. One of them, Alois Brunner, settled in Damascus in the late 1950s. He was a close associate of the SS commander Adolf Eichmann and had worked with him to exterminate Europe’s Jews through the Final Solution.
Brunner advised the Assad regime on the use of torture and interrogation techniques. He received round-the-clock protection from Syrian security forces, but still lost a finger and an eye after receiving a letter bomb from the Mossad. A German magazine once quoted him as saying his only real regret in life “was not killing more Jews.” His home was not far from where I was interviewing Meshaal; for all I knew, he was still living there.
My colleague and I walked into a nondescript bungalow. A bodyguard gave us a cursory frisk before sending us through a metal detector. Upon entering a second-floor room, I suddenly found myself confronting Hamas’s culture of martyrdom and resistance. Photos of assassinated Hamas politicians and military leaders lined the walls. In setting up the interview, I had wondered why Meshaal would meet with someone from The Wall Street Journal, and especially a journalist with the last name Solomon. Like the Assad regime, Hamas had intermediaries in Washington who engaged with American reporters, vetting them and providing a back channel. These included Arab diplomats, journalists, and academics at think tanks. Meshaal wanted to enhance his image in the United States, I was told. Like Ambassador Moustapha in Washington, Hamas officials stressed their movement wasn’t anti-Semitic and that they were merely fighting the “Zionists” who occupied Palestinian lands—and this was a point they wanted made to the Obama administration.
Meshaal arrived in the audience room seeming every bit the consummate politician. He vigorously shook my hand and led me to two chairs that were set against a faux backdrop of Jerusalem’s Old City. His underlings served Arabic tea. Meshaal understood enough English to engage in pleasantries. He wanted the interview to be conducted in Arabic, he told me. His translator, known as “Little Khalid,” had lived in Texas. He spoke American-accented English impeccably.
The point Meshaal clearly wanted to make was that Hamas, despite its alliances with Iran and Syria, was willing to enter into a prolonged hudna, or truce, with Israel that could last for decades. He stressed that Hamas supported the creation of a Palestinian state based on its 1967 borders with Israel, a view many Western diplomats believed equated to a de facto recognition of the Jewish state by Hamas. “We along with other Palestinian factions in consensus agreed upon accepting a Palestinian state along the 1967 lines,” Meshaal told me. “This is the national program. This is our program. This is the position we stand by and respect.” Israeli officials believed it was all a ruse.
Still, when pressed as to whether Hamas could ever truly recognize a Jewish state, Meshaal’s eyes flashed. He thundered through his translator: “I don’t care about Israel—it is our enemy and our occupier, and it commits crimes against our people,” he said. “Don’t ask me about Israel, Israel can talk for itself.”
The pace of the interview stalled as I struggled over where to lead the discussion next. The contradiction between his hopes for a hudna and his anger toward Israel seemed glaring. I tried to regain some momentum by turning toward Israel’s continued building of settlements in the West Bank and asking if the cessation of such construction would be received as a conciliatory step. He stressed it wouldn’t be enough. “If Israel doesn’t accept a halt to stop building settlements, what then?” Meshaal said. “The end of the settlements is a necessary step, but it’s not the solution itself.”
The interview concluded with Meshaal presenting me with a large box containing a vast array of baklava from Damascus’s most famous sweet shop. He also gave me a framed rendering of the Old City of Jerusalem like the one in his office. The Al-Aqsa Mosque, one of Islam’s holiest, and the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, where Jesus is entombed, were depicted against the backdrop of the city. Nothing in the image referenced Jerusalem’s centuries-old Jewish history.
I returned to the hotel where I was staying, Le Meridien, to write up my interview with Meshaal. When I turned on my computer it immediately crashed. I assumed that Syrian intelligence agents had hacked my hard drive while I was away, though apparently they didn’t mind letting visitors know they were being watched.
I hustled over to my colleague’s house down the block to make sure we could file the story by the deadline. I arrived back at the hotel around two in the morning, after the Meshaal story had hit the Web. I knew some of my friends in Washington’s pro-Israel community weren’t thrilled that I was giving voice to Hamas’s leader. While I believed I needed to get both sides of a hopelessly complex problem, they felt that I was publicizing the views of a terrorist and that I was being used. I braced for some blowback.
I turned on my cellphone to read the emails that were starting to stream in. There were some congratulatory notes about the interview. An Israeli television network wanted to interview me. One of my good friends in Washington, however, wasn’t amused: “You’re a tool,” he texted me. I knew he was only half joking.
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MY TRIPS TO DAMASCUS underscored for me just how tightly connected this Axis of Resistance really was and how rooted these relationships were in violence. The ability of the United States to woo these countries and groups into a partnership appeared to be a long shot. Iran and its par
tners were accused of assassinating a former head of state, collaborating with al Qaeda, and brutally repressing their own people. The risk, in my view, was that by engaging the Axis, Washington risked being complicit in its actions.
And as a journalist, I questioned my own role. The interviews with Assad and Meshaal captivated me and fed my knowledge and my reporting. I felt I knew much better the players about whom I was writing. But I was also spreading their messages and, in Assad’s case, his deceits. Did this make me complicit as well?
CHAPTER 5
The Physics Research Center
On August 14, 2002, an Iranian political activist named Alireza Jafarzadeh braved the ninety-degree heat in Washington, D.C., and shuffled across Fourteenth Street into a conference room in the city’s historic Willard Hotel, just blocks from the White House, to release some startling news. The journalists who greeted the bespectacled Persian in the Willard’s Taft Room were a smattering of newspaper and wire reporters and cameramen from cable television. In a summer dominated by the buildup to the Iraq War, many of Washington’s top-tier journalists were busy trying to confirm the latest date for the U.S. invasion, or details on Saddam’s alleged ties to the al Qaeda terrorist network. Most of the major networks, meanwhile, hadn’t even heard of Jafarzadeh or his organization.
Jafarzadeh appeared timid and unsure as he walked up to the lectern after being introduced by his colleague Hedayat Mostowfi. The spokesman wore owlish, professorial glasses and a pressed suit. The two men unfurled a map of Iran, with arrows pointing to two Iranian cities, Natanz and Arak, where they claimed the country was building covert nuclear facilities. They also produced a chart showing the sophisticated front companies that Iran was using to procure nuclear equipment. They described in technical terms Tehran’s efforts to develop a nuclear fuel cycle. But for many of the journalists in the crowd, the cities were unfamiliar and the companies’ names unpronounceable. The science of nuclear weapons wasn’t a specialty for most in the Washington press corps.
