Last summer, two American officials ventured into hostile territory for a secret meeting with high stakes with American opponents.
The Syrian government officials they were to meet in Damascus seemed ready to discuss the fate of American hostages believed to be in their country, including Austin Tice., a journalist captured eight years earlier. The release of the Americans would be an advantage for President Donald Trump months before the November elections. A discovery seemed possible.
However, the trip was ultimately unsuccessful, with Syrians raising a number of demands that would have fundamentally reshaped Washington’s policy. to Damascus, including the lifting of sanctions, the withdrawal of troops from the country and the restoration of normal diplomatic ties. Equally problematic for American negotiators: Syrian officials did not provide significant information about the fate and whereabouts of Tice and others.
“It would have been a success to bring the Americans home, and we never got there,” said Kash Patel, who attended the meeting as a senior White House aide in his first public comments about the effort.
The White House acknowledged the October meeting, but he said little about it. New details emerged in The Associated Press interviews conducted in recent weeks with people familiar with the talks, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the issue.
The PA also learned of US attempts to build goodwill with Syria long before talks took place, with Patel describing how an unidentified ally in the region assisted President Bashar Assad’s wife in treating cancer.
The details shed light on sensitive and often secret efforts to free hostages held by US opponents, a process that has been of great success to Trump, but also to the dead end. It is unclear how aggressively the new Biden administration will advance efforts to free Tice and other Americans around the world, especially when demands for a negotiating table clash with broader White House foreign policy goals.
The August meeting in Damascus was the highest-level talks in recent years between the United States and the Assad government. It was extraordinary, given the contradictory relationship between the two countries and because the Syrian government has never acknowledged that it owns Tice or knows anything about its place.
However, the moment offered a promise. Trump has already expressed a desire to withdraw American troops from Syria and other parts of the Middle East. And he made the recovery of the hostages a top priority in foreign policy, celebrating the releases by inviting the released detainees to the White House.
A few months after talks in Damascus, as Tice’s name reappeared in the news, Trump sent a note to Tice’s parents, who live in Houston, saying he would “never stop” working to free their son. stated for AP his mother, Debra. But Tice’s fate was unknown when Trump left office on January 20 and remains so to this day. The former Marine reported for The Washington Post, McClatchy, CBS and other outlets.
The Biden administration has also pledged to make the recovery of hostages a priority. But he also called on the Syrian government for human rights abuses, and seems unlikely to be more receptive to the conditions Damascus raised last summer to continue the dialogue.
Tice has held an important place in the public and political consciousness since his disappearance in August 2012 at a checkpoint in a disputed area west of Damascus. He had ventured deep into the country at a time when other reporters decided it was too dangerous, disappearing shortly before leaving.
A video released weeks later showed He blindfolded him and was held by armed men and said, “Oh, Jesus.” He hasn’t been heard from since. The US authorities operate on the assumption that he is alive. Syria has never admitted to owning it.
Efforts to secure his release have been complicated by a lack of diplomatic relations and the conflict in Syria, where the US is keeping about 900 troops in the eastern part of the country in an effort to prevent the rebirth of the Islamic State group.
“My guess is he’s alive and he’s waiting for me to pick him up,” said Roger Carstens, a former Army Special Forces officer who attended the meeting with Patel as the US presidential special envoy for hostage affairs. under Trump. He was held by Biden.
At the time of the meeting, Patel was a senior White House counterterrorism adviser after serving as an adviser to the House Intelligence Committee, where he gained some notoriety for advancing Republican efforts to challenge the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. He was previously a Justice Department prosecutor under President Barack Obama.
The meeting took place more than a year ago, Patel said, asking him to seek help in Lebanon, which still has ties to Assad.
At one point, a “US ally in the region” also helped build goodwill with the Syrian government by providing cancer treatment assistance to Assad’s wife, he said, refusing to provide further details. The Syrian government announced a year before the meeting that it had recovered from breast cancer.
The men arrived as part of a deliberately small delegation that drove through Damascus and saw no obvious signs of the conflict that killed about half a million people and displaced half of Syria’s pre-war population of 23 million. within 10 years.
Inside an office of Ali Mamlouk, the head of the Syrian intelligence agency, they asked for information about Tice and Majd Kamalmaz, a Virginia psychologist who disappeared in 2017 and a few others.
Discussions with the hostages are provocative on the inside, negotiators facing requirements that may seem unreasonable or contradictory to US foreign policy or that can produce nothing, even if they are satisfied.
In this case, the conditions floated by the Syrians, described by several people, would have forced the US to revise virtually its entire Syrian policy.
The US closed its embassy in Damascus in 2012 and withdrew its ambassador as Syria’s civil war worsened. Although Trump announced the withdrawal of troops from northern Syria in 2019, he remains a military presence to help protect an opposition enclave in the northeast, an area that includes oil and natural gas.
With their requirements unsatisfied, the Syrians did not provide significant information about Tice, including evidence of life, which could have generated a significant boost, Patel said. Although he said he was optimistic about a “legitimate diplomatic commitment”, he looked back with regret.
“I would say it’s probably one of my biggest failures under the Trump administration, not being back on Austin,” Patel said.
The result of the diplomacy was deflated for Tice’s parents, although they said it showed that it was possible to engage with Damascus.
“And it is possible to have this dialogue without the national security of the United States being threatened, without our Middle East policy being affected, without all the horrible things we have been told over the years happening if The United States would actually recognize that there is a government in Damascus, “Tice’s father, Marc, said in an interview.
In a statement, the State Department said bringing the hostages home is one of the Biden administration’s top priorities and called on Syria to release them. But the prospects for talks are uncertain, especially without a more substantial commitment from Damascus. The administration is unlikely to see the Syrians, called in December by the global chemical surveillance body, for failing to declare a chemical weapons facility as credible negotiating partners.
Biden said little about Syria, although he included it among the international issues that the UN Security Council should address. In February, he authorized airstrikes against Iranian-backed militias in Syria. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said last week in Syria it is as serious as ever.
In November last year, after a journalist erroneously wrote that Tice had been released, his mother wrote a note that would have been sent to Trump saying that he hoped that one day he would be able to turn that news into reality.
Trump responded, photocopying his note and adding his own message written by Sharpie. “Debra,” he wrote, she remembered. “It simply came to our notice then. Looking for the answer. We want Austin back. I will never stop. ”
But she said the family did not need letters from the president.
“The thing we want here, the one we’re asking for here, is to see Austin on the tarmac and get the president of the United States to shake his hand,” she said.