Last summer, two U.S. officials stormed the enemy territory for a secret meeting with U.S. opponents.
The Syrian government officials who were to meet them in Damascus were ready to discuss the plight of American hostages held in their country, including Austin Tice, a journalist who had been caught eight years earlier. The release of the Americans will be a blessing to President Donald Trump ahead of the November election. It looks like a breakthrough is possible.
Yet the journey was ultimately fruitless, with the Syrians making a series of demands that would fundamentally reform Washington’s policies. in the direction of Damascus, including the lifting of sanctions, the withdrawal of troops from the country and the restoration of normal diplomatic ties. Equally problematic for U.S. negotiators: Syrian officials have not provided any meaningful information about the fate and location of Tice and others.
“Success would have brought the Americans home and we never got there,” Kash Patel, who attended the meeting as a senior assistant in the White House, said in his first public comment on the effort.
The White House acknowledged the meeting in October, but little said about it. New details have emerged in interviews The Associated Press has conducted in recent weeks with people familiar with the conversations, some of whom spoke on condition of anonymity due to the sensitivity of the matter.
The AP also learned well about US efforts to reach goodwill with Syria before the talks took place, and Patel described how an unidentified US ally in the region assisted in treating cancer for the president’s wife Bashar Assad.
The details shed light on the sensitive and often mysterious attempts to free hostages held by US opponents, a process that has yielded striking successes for Trump, but also dead ends. It’s unclear how aggressively the new Biden administration will advance efforts to free Tice and other Americans around the world, especially when demands at a negotiating table conflict with the White House’s broader goals.
The August meeting in Damascus represented the highest level in years between the US and the Assad government. This was extraordinary in light of the controversial relationship between the two countries, and because the Syrian government has never admitted to detaining Tice or knowing anything about his whereabouts.
The moment offers a promise after all. Trump has already shown willingness to withdraw US troops from Syria and elsewhere in the Middle East. And he made the recovery of hostages a top priority for foreign policy and celebrated release by inviting released detainees to the White House.
While Tice’s name reappeared in the news, Months after the Damascus conversation sent a letter to Tice’s parents, who live in Houston, saying he would “never stop” working for their son’s release, his mother, Debra, told AP. 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 newspapers, CBS and other stores.
The Biden government has also promised to make hostage recovery a priority. But it has also called on the Syrian government to violate human rights and it seems unlikely it will be more receptive to the conditions that Damascus raised last summer to even continue the dialogue.
Tice has taken a prominent place in public and political consciousness since disappearing in August 2012 at a checkpoint in a disputed area west of Damascus. He ventured deep into the country at a time when other reporters decided it was too dangerous, and disappeared shortly before leaving.
A video released weeks later showed blindfolded him and held by armed men, saying, “Oh, Jesus.” He has not been heard from since. U.S. authorities operate under the assumption that he is alive. Syria has never admitted to detaining him.
Attempts to secure his release have been hampered by a lack of diplomatic relations and the conflict in Syria, where the US maintains some 900 troops in the eastern part of the country in an effort to revive the Islamic State group. to prevent.
“I assume he’s alive and waiting for me to pick him up,” said Roger Carstens, a former Special Forces officer who attended the meeting with Patel in his capacity as U.S. special presidential delegate for hostage cases under Trump. He was held in position by Biden.
At the time of the meeting, Patel was a senior terrorism adviser at the White House after serving as an assistant to the House Intelligence Committee, where he gained some notoriety for promoting Republican efforts to investigate Russian interference in the 2016 election. to challenge. He was previously a prosecutor under President Barack Obama.
The meeting has been going on for more than a year, Patel said, demanding that he seek help in Lebanon, which still has ties to Assad.
At one point, a U.S. “ally in the region” also helped build goodwill with the Syrian government by helping Assad’s wife treat cancer, he declined to give more details. The Syrian government announced a year before the meeting that it had recovered from breast cancer.
The men arrived as part of a deliberate small delegation, which drove through Damascus and saw no clear signs of the conflict that had killed about half a million people and half of Syria’s population of 23 million before the war over ten years.
Inside an office of Ali Mamlouk, the head of the Syrian intelligence agency, they asked for information about Tice as well as Majd Kamalmaz., a Virginia psychologist who disappeared in 2017, and several others.
Hostage talks are inherently challenging, with negotiators facing demands that may seem unreasonable or in conflict with U.S. foreign policy or that, even if satisfied, can yield nothing.
In this case, the conditions driven by the Aramaeans, described by several people, would have required 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 escalated. Although Trump announced the withdrawal of troops from northern Syria in 2019, there remains a military presence to protect an opposition enclave in the northeast, an area that includes oil and natural gas.
With their demands not met, the Syrians offered no meaningful information about Tice, including a proof of life, which could have caused considerable momentum, Patel said. Although he said he was optimistic about a ‘legal diplomatic involvement’, he regretted it.
“I would say this is probably one of my biggest failures under the Trump administration, because I’m not getting Austin back,” Patel said.
The outcome of the diplomacy was deflating to Tice’s parents, although they said it appeared involvement in Damascus was possible.
“And it’s possible to have a dialogue without threatening the United States’ national security, without affecting our policies in the Middle East, without all the terrible things we have been told over the years happening. if the United States really recognizes that there is a government in Damascus, ”Tice’s father, Marc, said in an interview.
In a statement, the Foreign Ministry said hostages were one of the top priorities of the Biden government and called on Syria to liberate them. But the prospects for talks are uncertain, especially without a more substantial commitment from Damascus. It is unlikely that the government will regard the Syrians, who were called by the global chemical watchdog in December for failing to declare a chemical weapons facility, as credible negotiating partners.
Biden has said little about Syria, although he does include it among international issues that the UN Security Council needs to address. In February, he allowed airstrikes on Iran-backed militias in Syria. Foreign Minister Antony Blinken said last week in Syria is as grave as ever.
Last November, after a journalist wrongly tweeted that Tice had been released, his mother wrote a note to be delivered to Trump, saying she hoped he could one day realize the news.
Trump responds, copying her letter and adding his own Sharpie-written message. “Debra,” he wrote, she remembered. “I work so hard on this. 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 that is being sought here, that is 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.