In the Lion's Den Page 4

  I then asked myself the question, Why am I living here? Egyptians always told me they differentiated between their opposition to the American government and the American people themselves. But their reactions indicated otherwise. I knew that the United States supported Israel and that its sponsorship of the peace process had yet to solve the problem. But did anything justify ploughing jets full of innocent passengers into skyscrapers? No, I thought. Standing on my terrace, overlooking the office buildings and slums that make up the Cairo skyline, I suddenly realized that I couldn’t stand living there anymore. I called my travel agent and asked her to get me on the next flight to Damascus.

  Stepping off the bus ferrying passengers from the Cairo International Airport terminal to the Syrian Arab Airlines jet the following afternoon, I immediately sensed that this was going to be a strange ride. Instead of participating in the normal mad dash for the stairway leading up to the aircraft’s door, we stopped as an airline employee screamed at us to wait. Before us, all the passenger luggage sat in a long row on the tarmac beside the plane. One by one, we had to identify our bags and confirm the luggage tags against our boarding passes and passports before getting on the plane.

  The dirty Boeing 727 looked like something out of an early 1970s airport-disaster film—it provided a window into the era before US sanctions restricted sales of American aircraft to Syria. The décor inside the plane was timeworn, and the stuffing in the seat cushions was so compacted in the center that it felt like sitting on a toilet seat. As the plane took off and the weight of my body was thrust backwards, the back of my seat gave way and slammed into the knees of the passenger behind me. All over the plane it was the same story: the seats’ decades-old gearing was stripped bare from overuse.

  Ideas started to race through my head. If the suspected attackers were part of a Sunni radical group led by a Saudi, and if they had links to similar terrorist groups who had been attacking Western tourists in Egypt, I began to wonder if the United States was betting on the wrong people in the Arab world. After all, didn’t the Syrian regime battle with the same groups in the 1980s?

  Upon arrival in Damascus, almost everyone I spoke with asked me about my family. The driver from the airport asked about my “loved ones.” Checking in at the Cham Palace Hotel, a five-star hotel in Syria where I had basically lived for five months, the receptionist said she hoped “everyone was fine” as she handed me back my passport. When I called Leila, she invited me to come over to her apartment and have dinner with her parents. They were worried: Leila’s brother, Tarek, had just graduated from Tufts dental school and was now practicing in Boston. While they knew by now that he was safe, they didn’t know how it would affect the status of his green card in the United States. “Do you think they will kick him out?” Leila’s mom asked me. I didn’t know what to say.

  The following morning, I met up with a few OBG analysts already in the country carrying out research. I told them about the response of Egyptians to the attacks and how much more sympathetic Syrians had seemed. Most agreed with me. The only sympathy for the attackers they had heard had been the previous morning in the SEBC’s kitchen. As the Syrian staff ate a midmorning breakfast and discussed the attacks, one OBG analyst said that he had heard an SEBC employee—who was rumored to be the former girlfriend of Bashar al-Assad before he married his wife, Asma—say the attacks “made her proud to be an Arab.” According to the analyst, the other SEBC employees hurriedly averted their eyes before changing the subject.

  Of everyone I met, Rola seemed the most sympathetic. She sat me down in her office and asked me if my family and friends were safe.

  “It’s just unbelievable,” she said, and she launched into a diatribe against “Sunni fundamentalists” and in favor of “our war” against the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1980s. “We have a common cause now,” she said. “Maybe we always did, but some other factors got in the way.”

  This message was almost exactly the one that the Syrian government gave to Washington. The Syrian ambassador to the United States, Imad Moustapha, contacted US security agencies immediately and offered Syria’s help, saying, “We have been fighting against al-Qaeda and other extremist fundamentalist groups for the past thirty years, and we have a wealth of information.”10 Washington accepted the offer. In the year following the September 11 attacks, Damascus provided to American security forces information on Mohammed Haydar Zammar, later identified as a planner in the September 11 attacks, who had been taken into Syrian custody after he was extradited from Morocco. Damascus also gave information to US authorities on a planned al-Qaeda attack on a US Navy unit in Bahrain that was so useful that a senior administration official told a congressional panel that “the cooperation the Syrians provided in their own interest saved American lives.”11 What Washington gave Damascus in return was not clear, but when Syria was nominated the following month for a rotating seat on the UN Security Council, the Bush administration said nothing.12

  I do not know whether it was Syria’s new-found cooperation with Washington or my growing appreciation for Damascus’s secular lifestyle, but my research on Syria progressed extremely well from then onward. The Ministry of Information told me that the only “red lines”—issues that we were not allowed to write about, or we risked being banned from the country—in my coverage concerned the president and his family and the pipeline from Iraq to Syria, which the Syrian government insisted it was only “testing.”

  Rola made arrangements with “new guard” reformers loyal to the president to write a number of opinion pieces for the report. These reformers included Ayman Abdel Nour, an Assyrian Christian engineer who served as an adviser to the president on finance, and Samir Seifan, a Christian economist trained in East Germany, who served as the Damascene representative of the oil company Petrofac. Both produced well-argued pieces on time.

  By rubbing shoulders, I was able to attract some really talented people to the project. Abdul Kader I. Husrieh, a lawyer with the Arthur Andersen accounting office in Damascus, wrote the entire legal and accounting sections of the report himself. Husrieh loved Syria, but he also loved the power of the American education he had received at the American University in Beirut. Of all the Syrians writing for OBG’s first Syrian report, it was Husrieh who believed that only legal and tax reforms would eventually change the way the Assad regime ruled, essentially taming it by necessity.

  When it came to finding a politics writer, I asked Ammar Abdulhamid, an SEBC translator and compiler of the organization’s newsletter, to participate. I first met Ammar when he served as my interpreter for an interview with his mother, the renowned Syrian actress Muna Wassef. Sporting a long blond bushy ponytail and baggy clothes, Ammar did not conform to the SEBC’s fashion code. In this instance, however, Ammar failed to write the section and instead subcontracted a friend to do it.

  In the month before we went to press, I circulated drafts of each section to various local economists and diplomats as part of the fact-checking process. Daniel Rubinstein at the US embassy liked the draft and appreciated that we were critical of the country while outlining its strengths. He reminded me that Syria’s $534 million debt to the United States should be added into our section on Syria’s external accounts.

  When the report was finally launched in February 2002, the Ministry of Information was pleased and passed the report through the country’s strict censorship bureau in one day. This was surprising, given that the report basically told the international community that while good things were going on in Syria, it was hardly a place to invest until much deeper reforms had taken root. Syrian TV covered the book’s launch at the Meridien Hotel as if it were the Academy Awards.

  Sitting in the hotel bar with OBG senior staff after the launch, I realized that I had reached a tipping point. At first I thought it was just my desire for the Levant’s more secular lifestyle. But it was more than that. I had stumbled into what seemed to be a great story—the transformation of a brutal dictatorship into a developing country with grea
t potential. I knew I already had access to Syria, but I couldn’t live there due to the country’s visa restrictions for foreign journalists. So I flew to Cairo the next day, said good-bye to my friends, and closed my apartment.13 I moved everything I owned to Syrian-controlled Beirut, where the liberal Western lifestyle was a welcome relief after seven years in an increasingly conservative and radicalized Arab regime. In Lebanon there were beautiful mountains, forests, wine châteaus, Roman ruins, and rain—the first I had seen in years. And while it wasn’t Pennsylvania, it felt like home.

  2

  THE GREAT UNRAVELING

  Almost a year to the day after the launch of OBG’s Syria report, I was back in Damascus working on another one. As I entered my rented apartment in East Mezze, a few blocks from the SEBC, the air was so cold that I could see my breath. I threw the switch to the apartment’s boiler, which let out a roar as it ignited ten seconds later. The apartment filled with the smell of diesel—the cheap subsidized fuel Syrians use for everything, from heating their homes to keeping irrigation pumps running.

  I turned on the television and cranked the volume up to drown out the boiler’s drone. Secretary of state Colin Powell was beginning a presentation to the UN Security Council concerning allegations that Iraq was attempting to conceal its weapons of mass destruction (WMD) program from UN inspectors. His slide presentation, entitled “Failure to Disarm,” was peppered with English translations of Iraqi radio transmissions that helped make Washington’s case. In one transcript, an Iraqi officer said, “Nerve agents. Stop talking about it. They are listening to us. Don’t give any evidence that we have these horrible agents.” Another showed computer animations of “mobile labs”—rail-car and truck-sized trailer facilities that US intelligence claimed could produce as much biological agent in one month as the whole of Iraq had produced in “all the years prior to the Gulf War.” I knew that Iraq had no missiles or planes that could deliver such agents to Europe or the United States. But they could make their way into the hands of terrorist groups set on America’s destruction. For the first time in my life, I thought about the possibility of an anthrax attack on my hometown near Pittsburgh.

  While Powell didn’t prove any of his claims, he did demonstrate that Iraq was attempting to conceal something regarding a biological, chemical, or nuclear weapons program.1 This was in violation of Security Council Resolution 1441, a measure passed the previous November that declared Baghdad in “material breach” of its disarmament obligations following the 1990–1991 Gulf War and gave Baghdad “a final opportunity to comply with its disarmament obligations.”2 Powell’s presentation was the Bush administration’s opening diplomatic salvo to try to pass another UN resolution giving international legal justification for the use of military force against Saddam Hussein’s regime.

  From afar, Damascus’s reactions to Washington’s plans might have seemed mixed. Syria voted in favor of 1441, allowing the resolution to be adopted unanimously and giving it a wider range of support than had been achieved leading up to the US-led liberation of Kuwait in the 1990–1991 Gulf War.3 Powell’s presentation seemed to change Syria’s tune, however. In prepared remarks, Syria’s representative to the UN, Mikhail Wehbe, read a statement by the Syrian foreign minister, Farouk al-Shara, implying a new resolution was not needed.4

  In the weeks that followed, there were signs that perhaps Washington and Damascus were still working together behind the scenes. Syria ordered the withdrawal of around four thousand troops from Lebanon. Damascus threw all its troop- and tank-transport trucks onto the Damascus-Beirut highway at the same time, jamming the road and raising the redeployment’s profile.

  From my office in Damascus, however, it was clear that relations between Syria and the West were worsening. The euphoria surrounding Assad’s promised reforms had vanished, as scores of new legislative initiatives remained unimplemented. Many held Syria’s “new guard” reformers responsible, as well as the EU and UN projects designed to assist them. The pressure was so strong on many reformers that they wouldn’t even meet with me.

  The Ministry of Information was less friendly as well. It limited the duration of my visa from six months to three, giving the government the option of not renewing it, in case OBG operations got out of line. We were told that, shortly following the release of OBG’s first report, a local economic research firm published a report that severely criticized our work, as well as the Ministry of Information for allowing it. While the matter seemed to have been resolved by the time that I first arrived in Damascus in the autumn of 2002, my first meeting with the director of the ministry’s public relations office, Mounir Ali, told me exactly what worried the government most. “I don’t want to read anything about the pipeline from Iraq,” he said.

  Reports continued to make it into the Western press that Syria received up to two hundred thousand barrels per day of Iraqi crude at discounted prices. For proof, most diplomats pointed to figures showing Syrian oil exports rising—quite an anomaly for a country whose oil fields were well known to be in slow decline. The extra top-up from Iraq helped the regime not only to export more crude but to continue subsidizing diesel, food stuffs, and other basic goods far below market prices. Businessmen close to the regime, whose factories produced poor-quality goods, were rumored to have dealings with Iraq as well.

  Suddenly, anything to do with Iraq became a red line. On December 23—while most Westerners in Syria were home spending the holidays with their families—security forces arrested Ibrahim Hamidi, Damascus bureau chief of Al Hayat and author of the main political commentary in our OBG report the previous year. No one knew where he was for about a week—Syria’s emergency law allowed the state to detain any Syrian citizen indefinitely without charge. A few days before his arrest, Ibrahim had written a story about Syria’s preparations to receive up to one million Iraqi refugees should American forces invade Iraq and oust Saddam Hussein. His arrest was finally confirmed by the official Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA), which stated that he was being held on charges of “publishing false news,” a crime that carried a possible term of three years in prison and a fine of one million Syrian pounds (twenty thousand US dollars).5

  I knew Ibrahim well, and his arrest upset me greatly. When I returned to my desk at the SEBC in January, I reread Ibrahim’s article, “Modernizing Syria’s Image,” in OBG’s last report. The article was one of the most concise summaries of the clampdown on the “Damascus Spring” during Bashar’s first two years in power. He concluded the article with a certain degree of optimism about the release of political prisoners and the closing of Syria’s most notorious gulags. I hated to think of the one in which he now found himself.

  With reforms frozen, people avoiding my phone calls, and the story of Syria’s opening up to the outside world fading, I could see from my edition-planning sheet that this year’s report would be remarkably thin. So I called a meeting with Rola to ask for her advice on what to do. She agreed with me that there had been setbacks in Syrian reform, due largely to the “regional situation.” However, unlike most Syrians and foreigners involved in reform that year, Rola was optimistic that reform would continue. She said a number of new NGOs under the patronage of the president’s wife, Asma al-Assad, showed the president’s dedication to reform. “Would you like to see their operations in action?” she asked.

  Two days later, I found myself sitting in the backseat of a black SUV speeding down a windy dirt road that cut through the lush green countryside outside Aleppo. I was there to tour the development projects of the Fund for Integrated Rural Development of Syria (FIRDOS), an NGO dedicated to tackling rural poverty that was supported by Mrs. Assad. As I read through the NGO’s introductory pamphlet, I remembered that “firdos” was Arabic for “paradise.”

  The SUV slowed down as we entered a village southwest of Aleppo. Before the driver could put it into park, villagers gathered around the car to greet us. I stepped down from the car, and my polished shoes immediately sloshed into four inches of deep red mud tha
t carpeted the village’s town square. A village representative from FIRDOS greeted me with a handshake and a smile and asked me to follow him to the village’s project site.

  They called it a dental clinic, but it looked more like the window-less concrete shell of a would-be gas station that you might find in the mountains of Pennsylvania. The representative described the building as a former “municipal complex.” He said that FIRDOS had provided enough funds to cover the current renovations and the purchase of state-of-the-art dental equipment. Syria’s Ministry of Health would be responsible for providing the dentists.

  In the next village, it was a different version of the same story. FIRDOS had purchased scores of computers and created a computer lab in a village municipal building. The eyes of smiling students sitting at every computer terminal greeted me as I entered the room. When I tried to make small talk and ask them what they were working on, I noticed that most had Microsoft Word documents open on-screen and were practicing their typing; a few were playing with blank Excel spreadsheets. The representative told me the center was one of twelve FIRDOS-sponsored labs throughout the country. The organization had a “mobile information center” (MIC)—a bus that had been turned into a sort of mobile computer lab.

  In the next village, I interviewed a recipient of a FIRDOS scholarship, a bright girl named Amira who had scored particularly well on her high school exams. “I could never go to college without FIRDOS,” she told me nervously. “I want to study English literature and return to my village and teach.”

  Late in the afternoon, while taking lunch with FIRDOS representatives, I started to have mixed feeling about what I had seen that day. On the one hand, I strongly identified with the stories of the Syrians we had visited. I grew up in rural western Pennsylvania, where my mother and father had bettered themselves through a combination of hard work and higher education. They often told me about the “chances” they had been given with the help of scholarships or benefactors. I had received similar help as well: more than one scholarship fund in my hometown had helped me pay college tuition, and a number of foundations had paid my way through MA study at the American University in Cairo, launching me on a career in journalism in the Middle East.