In the Lion's Den Read online

  For most of the summer, tensions seemed to ease between Washington and Damascus. On May 3, Powell made his third and arguably most high-profile visit to Damascus. During the discussions, Powell addressed the issues of (1) Iraqi border security; (2) Damascus’s harboring of high level Baathists from Saddam Hussein’s regime; (3) Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and other Palestinian militant group offices in Damascus; and (4) Syria’s WMD program. A number of Bush administration officials, led by undersecretary of state for arms control John Bolton, expressed concern about Syria’s stockpiles of chemical weapons, most notably sarin nerve gas, which could be loaded onto Syria’s large stockpile of Scud missiles. Bolton also expressed concern about Syria’s development of biological weapons as well as its pursuit of nuclear cooperation with Russia, which “provides opportunities for Syria to expand its indigenous capabilities, should it decide to pursue nuclear weapons.” In an interview on April 15, Bolton said, “I’m not saying they’re doing anything specific…. I’m just saying it’s a worrisome pattern that we’ve seen.”19

  Powell’s visit had mixed results. Powell cited “some closures” of the offices of Islamic Jihad, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine–General Command (PFLP-GC), and Hamas following his visit, but calls to these facilities indicated they were still open.20 The number of foreign fighters continued to be lower than during the first weeks of the war, but the issue of Iraqi Baathists fleeing to Syria remained a sore point. On June 18, US forces in “hot pursuit” of a convoy of SUVs suspected of carrying Iraqi officials penetrated some twenty-five miles into Syrian territory. Iraqi officials were not found in the convoy.

  Nevertheless, with increased reports of foreign fighters crossing the Syrian frontier into Iraq as well as accusations that Syria was harboring remnants of Saddam Hussein’s regime and arsenal, those voices within the administration advocating a hard line with Damascus won out. In September, the Bush administration allowed Bolton to testify before a congressional subcommittee hearing on Syria’s efforts to develop weapons of mass destruction (having prevented him doing so two months earlier). While much of the information was not new, the hearing marked the first time that the Bush administration, in the words of the New York Times, “presented a detailed, public assessment of such activities.” Bolton said that Syria had developed “a stockpile of the nerve agent sarin that can be delivered by aircraft or ballistic missiles, and has engaged in the research and development of more toxic and persistent nerve agents such as VX” and “is continuing to develop an offensive biological weapons capability.” Bolton also reported on Syrian efforts to acquire nuclear technology, adding that Russia and Syria “have approved a draft program on cooperation on civil nuclear power”—all expertise that could be applied to a nuclear weapons program.21

  As OBG expanded into more countries, the pace of expansion was getting to be too much for me. Traveling every week to a new country might sound glamorous, but it takes its toll. I spent most of my time at OBG’s production facility in Istanbul, Turkey, far away from the Arab world that I had come to the region to learn about. Around the time that Powell visited Damascus, I knew that I was ready to leave OBG.

  Looking for a way out, I took a week’s vacation in July and traveled from Amman, Jordan, to Damascus to talk with Rola. Sitting in her office at the SEBC, I explained my novel idea for improving Syria’s image: create an English-language, privately owned magazine and give its writers freedom to write critically on issues in Syria. Much of OBG’s success in the Arab world was simply based on the fact that well-edited English-language articles, based on in-country research, were virtually nonexistent. Creating high-quality articles wasn’t simply a matter of editing, however. The uncertain red lines governing media in Syria would have to be thrown out of the window as well. The only restriction that we would observe would be avoiding harsh criticism of the president and his wife.

  When I finished my presentation, Rola looked into my eyes, took a deep breath, and exhaled. “Interesting,” she said. “Can you draw up plans to create such a magazine?”

  As I worked on the plans at a friend’s house in Damascus, I watched the news carefully to see which way the wind was blowing between Washington and Damascus. Everything seemed quiet, and there was no news of any fallout from Bolton’s WMD testimony. It seemed that Powell’s more stern diplomatic approach with Syria had worked and that Washington’s interests in preserving intelligence cooperation in the war on terror trumped other issues.

  A week later, I handed Rola a business plan to create Syria Today—a quarterly magazine on Syrian affairs—before returning to my work with OBG in Jordan. Soon after I arrived at my hotel in Amman, Rola called me from Damascus. “The first lady loved your proposal,” she said. “Can you make it here next week to go over the details with her?”

  As soon as Rola and I walked through her office door, I sensed something was different about Asma al-Assad. She seemed tired and preoccupied. The first characteristic I could chalk up to the fact that she was pregnant; the second I couldn’t tell, but I guessed it was a result of the political situation.

  After a bit of casual chat, she got right down to business. She told me she had read the business plan and liked the idea. During the week that I was in Amman, Asma and Rola had agreed that Syria Today would be set up as a start-up company in the business incubator of a new NGO being established under Asma’s patronage: Modernizing and Activating Women’s Role in Economic Development (MAWRED). Leila, with whom I had developed the business plan, would be the lead entrepreneur, legally hosted in the incubator.

  I would be hired as the media adviser for FIRDOS, the NGO I had written about six months before. While I would have duties editing materials for FIRDOS, I would be seconded to MAWRED to advise Leila on founding Syria Today. After reading through the business plan together, she only had one question: “Are you sure you will have enough time to advise FIRDOS and work on Syria Today at the same time?” I assured her that I would.

  After a half an hour of discussing the details, Rola and I said good-bye to the first lady and piled into the palace car for the ride back down the hill. As we rolled out of the front gate, I turned to Rola and blurted out, “Strange, she didn’t talk about the costs I outlined. I was going to say something, but I was afraid to ask.” Rola suddenly looked serious and shushed me by putting a finger to her lips, then pointed to the palace drivers in the front seat.

  After a few seconds, her smile returned. “She likes you,” she said. “You are going to do well here.”

  3

  PARADISE LOST

  It was October 5, 2003—two weeks to the day after I began work at FIRDOS. I sat in the NGO’s kitchen reading the Syrian broadsheets on my morning coffee break. On most days, I was able to read the main pages of Syria’s state-owned broadsheets in a mere fifteen minutes. This wasn’t because my Arabic was that good or that the articles were that well written—it was that all Syrian newspapers ran the same stories, word for word, that SANA, the state’s official mouthpiece, produced.

  Looking up from a story on a council of ministers meeting, I saw Nouar al-Shara—daughter of foreign minister Farouk al-Shara and the NGO’s external relations coordinator—staring at me while nibbling on a carrot. Of all my colleagues at FIRDOS, Nouar was always the most polite, so I greeted her with a smile and asked her how she had spent her evening the day before.

  “Didn’t you hear? They bombed us last night,” she said in between bites. Then she raised her eyebrows, grabbed her coffee mug, and walked out of the kitchen.

  As the first lady’s premier NGO, FIRDOS’s office had one of Syria’s fastest Internet connections, so I jumped online and checked the English-language media. After a bit of frantic searching, I finally found the story on the English-language site of the Israeli paper Haaretz. Israeli planes had bombed a Palestinian camp at Ain Saheb, fifteen miles outside Damascus. The raid was in response to a suicide bombing in a Haifa restaurant that had killed nineteen people two days before; responsibility
for the bombing had been claimed by the Palestinian terrorist group Islamic Jihad. Israel held Syria responsible for the attack because Islamic Jihad’s offices in Damascus remained open, despite Assad’s pledge to Powell a few months earlier. Syria claimed that it had in fact closed the offices but that only “media representatives” remained in each office’s information bureaus.

  My heart started to race. The last time Israel had bombed Syria was during the October 1973 War, which happened to have begun nearly the same day thirty years before. The surprise attack by Syria and Egypt against Israel had been thwarted a few days later by a massive Israeli counterattack. After countless rounds of “shuttle diplomacy” by Kissinger, both sides had signed a disengagement agreement in May 1974, and since then, Syria’s border with Israel was the country’s quietest one.

  I ran a few hundred yards down the street to the SEBC offices to see Rola. Through her open office door, I could see her frantically wading through the stacks of papers on her desk. Without looking up from her desk, she simply said, “I heard,” and motioned for me to sit down. For the next ten minutes, she said nothing; instead she nervously searched through the drawers of her desk, then slammed them shut. She then wheeled her desk chair over to me, looked me in the eyes, and said, “We might need to go to Jordan to support the president and the first lady from there.”

  I swallowed hard and thought, Jordan? Why would that be necessary? Is the regime about to fall?

  “I know it’s hard to understand,” Rola said. “But everyone knows that the Assad regime is based on a sort of understanding between Israel and the Assad family. That understanding was broken last night.”

  Panic filled my head. My Syrian friends had told me countless times about the “rules of the game” between Israel and Syria: the Assad family rules Syria, it doesn’t directly attack Israel, and it keeps Syria stable and the Muslim Brotherhood in check. In return, Israel agrees not to attack Syrian soil. Up until this point, however, I had just chalked this up to the conspiratorial nature of politics in the Levant, which often attributed events to the playing out of a sinister plot. Throughout Bashar’s early years in power, there were constant rumors of conflict between the president and the “old guard”—political and security officials appointed by Bashar’s father who continued to serve the new president. While no one was able to specifically name members of this “old guard,” most believed that the group was headed by the Syrian vice president, Abdel Halim Khaddam, the man many held as responsible for the crackdown that ended the Damascus Spring shortly after Bashar came to power. Driving the panic home, Rola said, “I’m going to pay you before the Syrian pound crashes.”

  I bid Rola good-bye and ran downstairs, one floor below, to the offices of MAWRED, which the SEBC officially “hosted.” Inside a small room in the MAWRED business incubator, Leila sat at her desk, working on Syria’s Today’s marketing strategy. I told her in a hushed voice what Rola had just told me. She wrinkled her eyebrows, looked at me, and yelled, “What!” Then she became uncharacteristically quiet and just stared out of the window for a few minutes. Without saying a word, she then packed her bag and headed home.

  Syria is seven hours ahead of Washington, so when I arrived home I switched on the TV expecting to hear Washington’s response—none was forthcoming. Before heading to bed, I listened to the BBC World Service’s Newshour on my short-wave radio. The program’s host interviewed Tom Lantos, then chairman of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs and a Holocaust survivor who had helped draft the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act of 2003 (SAA)—a bill designed to tighten trade sanctions on Syria because of its support for terrorism, foreign fighters entering Iraq, and its WMD program.

  Because of Syria’s intelligence sharing after the attacks of September 11, the Bush administration opposed the SAA on the grounds that it tied the president’s hands in waging the war on terror. As Lantos ranted against the Syrian regime and its sponsorship of terrorism, the announcer reminded Lantos that Bush opposed the SAA and had asked the committee to block its passage. “Oh no they don’t,” Lantos retorted. “I just got off the phone with the national security adviser. They are going ahead with it.” The radio suddenly fell silent, and I drifted off into sleep.

  I had a dream. I was running through the streets of Koreitem, the Beirut neighborhood that was home to the Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri. Bombs were falling from the sky around us as we ran by a nearby lighthouse. Scores of Lebanese around me were ducking for cover. As I approached the Hariri compound’s rear entrance, I stopped and looked up at the sky to see who was bombing us. It was an American plane. Somewhere deep down, I realized that I now worked in the newest member of the “axis of evil.” I also understood that the battle between the United States and Syria would take place in Lebanon.

  The following morning it was official: President Bush described the Israeli attack as “justified” and announced that he was lifting his administration’s opposition to the SAA. News coverage speculated that the new sanctions would have little impact, given Syria’s small trade volume with the United States. Politically, however, the sanctions were billed as a turning point in US-Syrian relations. When I visited a contact at the US embassy that morning for background information on the new sanctions regime, he concluded our conversation by saying, “We need to talk about whether your work helps or hurts the new situation.” As I exited the embassy and walked across Rouda Square, I contemplated ways that I might leave the country.

  I had never realized my work in Syria was so precarious. It wasn’t just that I was an American working with the leader of a regime whose fortunes were fading with Washington. It was also that the NGOs that I worked for had no clear legal foundation. When Syria passed its associations law in the late 1950s during its political union with Egypt, economic assistance to developing countries like Syria was through bilateral aid agreements—that is, transfers from states to states. Beginning in the 1980s, most Western countries began funding NGO programs in developing countries instead of the states themselves because their programs were not meeting their goals. There were also concerns of corruption surrounding bilateral programs as well as manipulation of development statistics. For example, a developing country’s literacy rate might appear high on paper, but a visit to the country in question—especially to rural areas—made it apparent that many, if not most, people could not even read a newspaper.1

  Syria and other authoritarian Arab countries such as Egypt took issue with development assistance falling outside state control. In the 1990s, the Egyptian state shut down many Western-funded NGOs in Egypt, which were dedicated to promoting rule of law or democracy, for “improper registration.” In reality, however, the Egyptian state saw these organizations as Trojan horses for inducing regime change. Foreign funding of NGO operations became particularly sensitive. To deal with the problem, the Egyptian state passed a new associations law that required foreign NGOs to gain government permission for all foreign-funded activities.

  After Bashar al-Assad came to power in 2000, and the state openly recognized its development problems (which it hadn’t under Hafez al-Assad), NGOs remained politically sensitive. During the Damascus Spring, a number of “discussion forums” tried to register under the associations law as “advocacy NGOs” and were rejected. Operational NGOs, which are associations dedicated to addressing societal problems, were kept in limbo by the state’s unwillingness to reform the associations law—modern NGOs simply didn’t exist when the law was passed in the 1950s, so their applications could not even be accepted. Some operated illegally but were tolerated by the government because they were run by known regime figures.

  It was in this legal limbo that Asma al-Assad began building a network of NGOs under official patronage. Because they were under regime control, they were permitted to register as charities under the associations law, even though their activities transcended the boundaries of what traditional charities do. Perhaps the best example was FIRDOS’s rural micr
ofinance project. In villages in which FIRDOS operated, Syrians applied for loans to buy anything to start a business. Some bought cows to produce milk and cheese; others bought computers to open Internet cafés. However, there was a catch: because establishing a microbusiness is risky, and many are therefore bound to fail, microfinance institutions in other countries were forced to charge a small rate of interest to ensure their program’s sustainability. Since FIRDOS was registered as a charity, however, it could not charge interest on the loans.

  When I inquired about this to the FIRDOS administration, I was told that it wasn’t an issue, because not a single Syrian borrower had defaulted on a loan. In times of crisis—if the cow died or a power surge knocked out a computer—other program beneficiaries would take up a collection to repay the loan. The FIRDOS administrators chalked this up to the integrity of rural Syrians. Others said that 100-percent repayment rates were only ever seen in the realm of loan-sharking.

  After returning to Damascus, I edited FIRDOS’s quarterly newsletter. The first to work on the newsletter was Ammar Abdulhamid—the same writer I had contracted to write the politics section of OBG’s Syria reports. With his wife, Ammar also set up another business, Dar Emar, in the MAWRED incubator. To meet the incubator’s requirements, Dar Emar was established in his wife’s name. Ammar’s project—Tharwa, the Arabic word for “wealth”—sought to talk about diversity in the Arab world. After a bit of editing, I sent the final version of the newsletter, using the FIRDOS mailbag, to the palace for final approval, along with a letter outlining my work and a few ideas I had about how to improve the way FIRDOS communicated with the outside world.

  With things moving ahead at FIRDOS, the Israeli strike and looming US sanctions were increasingly an afterthought. The first lady seemed committed to reform in Syria, and her NGOs, which were just getting off the ground, were everything the West wanted to see in Syria. Nevertheless, a lingering sense of stasis, which I couldn’t explain, permeated FIRDOS’s operations. Everyone seemed to be waiting on approval from the palace for whatever project they were working on—but the word was not coming. So, as things slowed down, I turned my attention to Syria Today.