Last summer, two U.S. officials ventured into hostile territory for a secret meeting with U.S. adversaries.
Syrian government officials who had planned to meet in Damascus seemed willing to discuss the fate of U.S. hostages believed to be detained in their country, including Austin Tice., a journalist captured eight years earlier. The release of the Americans would be a blessing for President Donald Trump months before the November election. A breakthrough seemed possible.
Still, the trip was ultimately unsuccessful, with Syrians making a series of demands that would have fundamentally reformed Washington’s policy. to Damascus, including the removal of sanctions, the withdrawal of troops from the country and the restoration of normal diplomatic ties. Equally problematic for U.S. negotiators: Syrian officials did not provide meaningful information about the fate and whereabouts of Tice and others.
“The success would have been to bring 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 on the effort.
The White House recognized the meeting in October, but said little. New details have emerged in The Associated Press interviews 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 has also heard of U.S. attempts to build goodwill with Syria long before talks took place, and Patel described how an unidentified U.S. ally in the region offered help with cancer treatment in the US. wife of President Bashar Assad.
The details shed light on sensitive and often secret efforts to release hostages detained by American opponents, a process that produced high-profile successes for Trump, but also a dead end. It is unclear how aggressively the new Biden administration will advance efforts to free Tice and other celebrated Americans around the world, especially when demands at a negotiating table clash with the broader foreign policy goals of Biden. the White House.
The August meeting in Damascus represented the highest-level talks in years between the United States and the Assad government. It was extraordinary given the contradictory relationship between the two countries and why the Syrian government has never acknowledged the celebration of Tice or the fact of knowing anything about his whereabouts.
Still, the moment offered some promise. Trump had already shown his willingness to withdraw U.S. troops from Syria and other places in the Middle East. And he had made the recovery of hostages one of the top priorities of foreign policy, celebrating the release by inviting released detainees to the White House.
Months after the Damascus talks, when Tice’s name resurfaced in the news, Trump sent a note to Tice’s parents, who live in Houston, saying he would “never stop” working for his son’s release. , his mother, Debra, told the AP. But Tice’s fate was unknown when Trump left office on Jan. 20 and remains so to this day. The former Marine had reported for the Washington Post, McClatchy newspapers, CBS and other outlets.
The Biden administration has also pledged to make hostage recovery a priority. But he has also called on the Syrian government for human rights abuses and seems unlikely to be more receptive to the conditions Damascus raised last summer even to continue the dialogue.
Tice has held a prominent place in public and political consciousness since he disappeared 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 journalists had decided it was too dangerous, disappearing shortly before he left.
A video posted weeks later was shown he blindfolded and held by armed men and saying, “Oh, Jesus.” Nothing has been known since then. U.S. authorities operate on the assumption that he is 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 U.S. maintains about 900 troops in the eastern part of the country in an effort to prevent the resurgence of the Islamic State group.
“I have an assumption that he is alive and waiting for you to come and get him,” said Roger Carstens, a former Army Special Forces officer who attended the meeting with Patel as a special U.S. presidential envoy. for hostage affairs under Trump. He was held in position by Biden.
At the time of the meeting, Patel was a senior counterterrorism adviser in the White House after serving as an aide to the House Intelligence Committee, where he gained some notoriety for advancing Republican efforts to challenge the investigation of Russian interference in the 2016 elections. He was previously a prosecutor in President Barack Obama’s Justice Department.
The meeting lasted more than a year, said Patel, who demanded that he seek help from 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 for cancer treatment to Assad’s wife, he said, and declined 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 an intentionally small delegation, which was driving through Damascus and saw no clear signs of the conflict that has killed about half a million people and displaced half the population of 23 million people. the war in Syria for ten 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 several others.
Negotiations over hostages are challenging in themselves, with negotiators facing demands that may seem unreasonable or confronted with U.S. foreign policy or that may 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 all of its Syrian policy.
The United States closed its embassy in Damascus in 2012 and withdrew its ambassador as the Syrian civil war worsened. Although Trump in 2019 announced the withdrawal of troops from northern Syria, there is still a military presence to help protect an opposition enclave in the northeast, an area that includes oil and natural gas.
With their demands unsatisfied, the Syrians offered no meaningful information about Tice, including a life test, that could have generated a significant boost, Patel said. Although he said he was optimistic after a “legitimate diplomatic compromise,” he looks back with regret.
“I would say it’s probably one of my big failures under the Trump administration, not getting Austin back,” Patel said.
The result of diplomacy was deflated for Tice’s parents, although they said it proved that compromise with Damascus was possible.
“And it is possible to maintain this dialogue without the national security of the United States being threatened, without our Middle East policy being affected, without all the horrible things that have been said to us over the years being able to happen. if the United States really recognized that there was a government in Damascus, “Tice’s father, Marc, said in an interview.
In a statement, the State Department said taking 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 important commitment from Damascus. The administration is unlikely to see the Syrians, summoned in December by the global chemical watchdog for failing to declare a chemical weapons facility, as credible negotiating partners.
Biden has said little about Syria, though he has included it among the international issues the UN Security Council should address. In February, he authorized airstrikes against Iran-backed militias in Syria. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said the situation last week in Syria it is as serious as ever.
Last November, after a reporter mistakenly tweeted that Tice had been released, his mother wrote a note that he would hand over to Trump saying he hoped that one day this news could come true.
Trump responded, photocopying his note and adding his own message written by Sharpie. “Debra,” he wrote, he recalled. “Working hard on this. Looking for the answer. We want Austin back. I will never stop. “
But he said the family does not need letters from the president.
“What we want here, what we’re asking for here, is to see Austin on the tarmac and have the president of the United States shake his hand,” he said.