In the early days of the Trump administration, the CIA set up a backchannel to secure the release of Austin Tice, an American journalist and former Marine believed to be held hostage by the Syrian government.
According to a report Friday by The New York Times, the operation to save Tice, which has been unsuccessful to date, was set back after the Syrian government’s nerve gas attack on civilians in April that led President Trump to approve missile strikes against a Syrian air base.
The talks elevated to the highest levels of the CIA when the agency’s director, Mike Pompeo, spoke on the phone in February with Ali Mamlouk, the head of Syria’s National Security Bureau intelligence service.
The call was the highest-level contact between the two governments in years, the Times reports. Syria has been engulfed in civil war over the last six years, and many have blamed the brutal tactics of Syrian President Bashar Assad for inflaming the rise of Islamic State in the region.
Tice disappeared while doing freelance journalism in the country nearly five years ago. The U.S. believes the Syrian government is keeping him hostage. But Syria says it does not know what happened to Tice.
The Times report says that the Syrian government and American officials had begun moving toward communicating about Tice before Trump took office. It said that shortly after the election, U.S. officials briefed Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner and Stephen Bannon, the president’s chief strategist, about the plans to free Rice.
Bannon, the Times says, was resistant to the effort, questioning why Tice would travel to Syria.
Still, the efforts moved forward, and Trump administration officials even began thinking about how Syria would explain Tice’s disappearance once the U.S. freed him. But the momentum to free Tice stalled after the April gas attack. The relationship between the two countries has since worsened, and on Sunday the U.S. shot down a Syrian warplane, the first time an American warplane has downed a manned aircraft since 1999.
