Josh uncovers a world of secret negotiations and backchannels. : Embedded : NPR

Transcript

JOSH BAKER, HOST:

Hello. I just want to make you aware that this episode contains some strong language.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #1: It’s been three months now since an American freelance journalist went missing in Syria. His name is Austin Tice. He’s 31 years old. Tonight, Austin’s parents are in Lebanon, hoping to learn more about what happened to their son.

BAKER: By November 2012, it’s been two months since anyone has seen Austin publicly. The last sighting was in a staged abduction video that appeared on YouTube. So his parents, Debra and Marc, travel to Beirut. They know Austin is somewhere across the border in Syria, but this is as close as they can get to him.

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MARC TICE: We’re here to appeal for help from people in the region and especially to whomever is holding our son, Austin, that they treat him well, keep him safe, let us contact him and, most of all, return him to us as soon as possible.

BAKER: On a small stage, they peer through a sea of microphones placed there by the press. This is the beginning of a media campaign to bring global attention to Austin’s case.

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DEBRA TICE: Our main purpose is to try to make contact with our son and to bring him safely home.

BAKER: There’s an exhaustion in their faces that comes from being parents who can’t reach a missing son, and that’s a feeling shared by many families. Throughout the civil war, Syrians are disappearing in huge numbers, and Austin isn’t the only American.

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #2: At least 11 American citizens have been jailed, tortured or killed.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #3: James Foley was working for a French news outlet.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #4: Female American hostage.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #5: Another U.S. reporter, Steven Sotloff.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #6: Syrian American aid worker Layla Shweikani.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #7: Majd Kamalmaz, a 61-year-old American psychotherapist who disappeared.

BAKER: I’ve had friends and colleagues go missing in Syria. And when you spend time around hostage cases, one criticism comes up again and again. America has a hostage problem, not because it lacks power. It has highly effective intelligence agencies, diplomats, law enforcement and a military that can seemingly go anywhere. But each part of that system has its own priorities, so they don’t always work as one or share information effectively. So opportunities to help people can get lost inside that system. And this is what Debra Tice has told me she feels happened to Austin’s case for the first 18 months of his abduction.

D TICE: OK. I bought a really nice Earl Grey.

BAKER: I love Earl Grey.

In her daughter’s kitchen, over many cups of Earl Grey, I asked Debra about February of 2014 when she decided to go to Syria to look for her son alone.

How did you arrange to go to Damascus? Did you just get on a plane or what did you do?

D TICE: I made sure that nobody knew what I was doing, and I flew to Beirut, got in a cab and went to Damascus.

BAKER: You got in a cab and drove all the way to Damascus?

D TICE: Yep.

BAKER: Weren’t you scared?

D TICE: No. No. The only thing I was scared of was that my government would find out and prevent me from going. That was the only thing I was afraid of.

BAKER: How long did you plan to be there?

D TICE: I didn’t have a plan. I ended up being there 3 1/2 months.

BAKER: And what were you hoping to achieve?

D TICE: I had no idea, but at least I would be there. I had pictures of him that I gave out – flyers. I met with quite a few people in the Syrian government.

BAKER: Debra, who has never been to the region before and doesn’t speak Arabic, is now inside the Syrian regime’s surveillance state.

D TICE: This guy told me that he had Austin, and he wanted, like, $150,000.

BAKER: For Austin.

D TICE: And then he showed me a picture that I had.

BAKER: He showed you a picture of Austin?

D TICE: Yeah. But it was the one that McClatchy had printed.

BAKER: Oh, so he’d taken it off the internet?

D TICE: Yeah. And then when he showed me the picture and I got really angry, he said, OK, $20,000. And he’s menacing me on my chair.

BAKER: He’s trying to intimidate you.

D TICE: He had his guy come in, and his guy had on an AK and a knife and a pistol. I’m praying like crazy like, what do I say to this person? And then I ended up saying things that I would not think God would tell me to say. But I have my mother pointer finger right on his nose, and I’m just threatening him. Finally, the foreign minister invited me to meet him. But while I was walking there, I got a call from Marc that said, have you heard that the United States has closed its embassies in Washington, D.C.? We’d already closed them.

BAKER: Oh, they’ve closed the Syrian embassy?

D TICE: Yes, and the two consulates.

BAKER: To try to stop the Assad regime committing more atrocities against civilians, America has sanctioned the regime and limits official communication with the Syrian government. For Debra, this timing is terrible. It traps Austin’s case in a diplomatic standoff.

D TICE: And so moments before my meeting, the meeting was, of course, canceled. I never had a chance to get it again. I did all I could in Syria. I did everything I could think of.

BAKER: Was it difficult to leave Syria?

D TICE: Yes. It felt like abandonment. It felt like I was failing and abandoning my son. That’s how it felt.

BAKER: A few months after Debra’s visit to Damascus, the stark reality of the Syrian hostage crisis is laid bare.

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #8: U.S. officials are trying to verify the authenticity of a video that purportedly shows the violent killing of an American journalist.

UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #9: It shows a man in an orange jumpsuit kneeling in a desert area, and then he is executed by a man in black who is standing next to him and the man in black…

BAKER: James Foley, an American journalist who once tried to help find Austin, is executed by ISIS on camera. The video is addressed to President Obama. ISIS say his death is a warning about America’s intervention in the region. It’s a moment of horror felt globally.

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BARACK OBAMA: Families of hostages have told us, and they’ve told me directly about their frequent frustrations in dealing with their own government. It is true that there have been times where our government, regardless of good intentions, has let them down.

BAKER: In June 2015, almost three years after Austin’s disappearance, President Obama overhauls the American hostage recovery system. Pressure has been building from the family members of hostages like Debra Tice and Diane Foley, James’s mother.

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OBAMA: As a government, we should always do everything in our power to bring these Americans home safe and to support their families.

BAKER: Despite the changes, Austin still hasn’t been brought home, and Debra has consistently told me that she feels let down. So what has the American government been doing to find Austin Tice?

I’m Josh Baker, and from BBC Radio 4 and NPR’s EMBEDDED, this is Where Is Austin Tice? Series 3 of “I’m Not A Monster Presents…” Episode 6 – A Meeting in Muscat.

There are typically three ways a government can get someone like Austin home. The first is money. Some governments pay. The United States doesn’t. The second is the military option, special forces going in to rescue him. But that’s the Hollywood answer. In reality, it’s incredibly dangerous, and it would only work if they know exactly where Austin is, and the United States doesn’t. The third option is to talk to the captors. But the Syrian regime won’t admit they have Austin, and the Americans won’t officially talk to them.

I recognize that…

ROGER CARSTENS: Hey, there he is.

BAKER: …Deep voice walking towards me.

CARSTENS: Good to see you, man.

BAKER: How are you?

CARSTENS: I’m doing all right. Doing all right.

BAKER: This is Roger Carstens, a former Special Forces soldier turned America’s special presidential envoy for hostage affairs. I first interviewed him at the Four Seasons Hotel in Damascus, just after the regime fell. He was there with the U.S. delegation searching for Austin.

Roger, would you just give me some levels?

CARSTENS: Sure. One, two, three, four, five.

BAKER: I’ve come to see him in Washington, D.C., because back in 2020, Roger managed to begin secret conversations with the Syrians about Austin.

How do you begin to set up a back channel with the Syrian regime?

CARSTENS: The American government had not really engaged with the Syrian government diplomatically in eight years. It’s challenging to restart something because if you go into a meeting at the White House or the State Department and say, hey, I’d like to go talk to the Syrians about Austin Tice, the knee-jerk is to say no. We’ve stopped talking to the Syrians. And in a way, what I tried to do is get permission to start reaching out to intermediaries, and I started talking to the head of Lebanese intelligence. Shot them a note on WhatsApp and said, hey, I’d like to introduce myself, maybe have a broader conversation. I said, my goal, however, is to eventually meet the Syrians on the topic of Austin Tice and other Americans that have gone missing in Syria.

BAKER: How did he receive that?

CARSTENS: Very warmly.

BAKER: So this huge geopolitical global issue is essentially being orchestrated over WhatsApp?

CARSTENS: Yeah. I find like diplomacy – if you can remember what it was like to be 5 years old on a playground, all diplomacy is is that, except you wear suits and ties and everyone’s gone to Harvard. It’s the same stuff, you know, in terms of communicating, I think.

BAKER: So you get this text. What happens then?

CARSTENS: The head of Lebanese intelligence came back and said, look, they’re willing to do this. But if you do this, you cannot bring up Austin Tice.

BAKER: So they said they’ll meet you, but you’re not allowed to talk about Austin?

CARSTENS: Correct. And I thought, well, that’s really a strange request, since I’ve made it clear that’s why I want to go. But I said, sounds good. I hear what you’re saying. If you would, please pursue with the Syrians an opportunity to meet with them.

BAKER: Why do you think they were trying to shut that down so much?

CARSTENS: Our general thought is they wanted a chance to tell us what they wanted before we went in and started demanding information on what we wanted. So we finally get an invitation to go to Damascus. My counterpart at that time at the White House was Kash Patel.

BAKER: Who’s now head of the FBI.

CARSTENS: Who’s now head of the FBI. And so, you know, essentially, I’m like, let’s go together. And he said, yeah, let’s do it. So I land and we drove off to Damascus from Beirut. Went straight to the intelligence quarters there. So we were sitting there with the person who was, at that time, we would have said is the No. 2 or 3 in terms of power within the country. And we…

BAKER: Was that Ali Mamlouk?

CARSTENS: Indeed, Ali Mamlouk.

BAKER: Who was, like, the head of all in intelligence?

CARSTENS: Correct. He’s smart, he’s diligent, well dressed, super articulate, commands a room. But I have to think that he’s probably the one that gave a lot of the orders that resulted in the deaths of well over a hundred thousand Syrians. And so I was sitting across from a person who, you know, was probably not the nicest guy.

BAKER: Ali Mamlouk is one of President Assad’s most trusted men, deep inside his inner circle and central to Syria’s intelligence state. So a conversation with him is, by extension, a conversation with the president.

CARSTENS: First off, they wanted the United States to pull entirely out of Syria. So we want every U.S. soldier and all U.S. equipment out of Syria. No. 1. No. 2, we want to reestablish diplomatic relations, but as a start, we’d like you to open up your embassy in Damascus. And No. 3, remove all sanctions. And if you do all that and when you’ve done all that, then we might be willing to talk to you about your concerns.

BAKER: I.e., Austin Tice.

CARSTENS: And they did not say Austin Tice. They said about your concerns.

BAKER: What goes through your mind when they say that? ‘Cause those aren’t small requests, right? Those are, you know, geopolitically shifting requests.

CARSTENS: Yeah.

BAKER: They’re huge.

CARSTENS: Yeah. I mean, I think I probably didn’t want to judge too much in my mind what was in the art of the possible at that time.

BAKER: Really, you weren’t in your head going like, well, that’s never going to happen?

CARSTENS: Well, you know, ’cause I always wondered, like, what could we get away with? Why don’t we cooperate on counterterrorism? So maybe the idea that we have to remove every soldier out that could be transitioned into something else. In terms of sanctions, maybe I could talk him down a little bit on that. And on the embassy, maybe what I could offer there is to say to them, well, why don’t we get a team out there and we’ll take a look at it? So instead of just saying, no, no, no, impossible. Ain’t going to happen. I’m thinking to myself, I wonder what I could get away with that might result in me getting some information on Austin Tice.

BAKER: So Roger is considering whether the U.S. government could make concessions to the Syrian regime. In effect, they’re beginning to negotiate.

You have obviously been told not to bring up Austin Tice.

CARSTENS: I brought it up. The one thing that could speed up this timeline is if we could get some information on Austin Tice. I threw that out there, and to their credit, he actually leaned back in his chair and he responded. We spent, you know, about 15 minutes or so talking about…

BAKER: What did he say?

CARSTENS: No one would ever really bring up Austin’s name, but who are these people that you’re talking about? Because we – there are other Americans too that had gone missing, and I was able to actually slide a list over to them. And they were, you know, in a way, playing a game of we don’t know about these people. So tell us more. And what I tried to do is not to be too accusatory at that point. We’d like your help in determining what happened and, if possible, finding him and them.

BAKER: So in a way, you’re kind of leaving the door open for, like, if they want to miraculously invent, we found this person. We found Austin…

CARSTENS: A hundred percent.

BAKER: …In a barn somewhere.

CARSTENS: A hundred percent. That was absolutely conscious. And say that if we could, we would like to work together, and maybe you could help us in locating Austin Tice and these other Americans.

BAKER: Roger returns to America and debriefs with intelligence agencies, politicians and diplomats. He gives them every bit of information he can – what was said, who was there. He even draws a diagram of the room. As they start to consider what their next move might be, President Trump goes on Fox News, and he’s asked about President Assad.

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #10: And is it true that after Assad gassed children for the second time, that it was you that wanted to take out Assad, that you had a good sight on him, and it was General Mattis who talked you out of it? And if it is true, do you regret not taking him out?

PRESIDENT DONALD TRUMP: I would have rather taken him out. I had it all set. Mattis didn’t want to do it. Mattis was a highly overrated general, and I let him go. He worked for Obama.

BAKER: He says he wanted to kill Assad. His statement goes viral. The Syrians go quiet. And 2 1/2 years go by before the Americans can get back in a room with them to discuss Austin Tice. This time, Roger sends his deputy, and President Assad appoints a new envoy.

There we go.

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BAKER: How are you?

IMAD MOUSTAPHA: I was stuck in the traffic now. The number of cars in Damascus maybe tripled since the fall of the regime.

SARA OBEIDAT, HOST:

Yeah.

BAKER: This is Imad Moustapha. He led the Syrian delegation. He’s thin with a shaven head, smartly dressed as you’d expect from a diplomat. I’ve been told he’s shrewd, even a brilliant negotiator.

Would it be possible to put a microphone on you?

In downtown Damascus, my colleague Sara and I are shown into his living room. Syrian art adorns the walls, alongside ornate furniture from China, his last diplomatic posting. We sit and begin to discuss the secret talks that this time took place on neutral territory in Muscat, Oman.

MOUSTAPHA: We arrived to the guest house, and then the American delegation came, exuberant, happy, started shaking hands with everyone, the Syrian delegation, and asking me about if I slept well and in which hotel I was staying (laughter). I am sure they already knew in which hotel I was staying. How was my trip? Was it comfortable? You know, the American style. So the ice melted immediately and we engaged in a very, very long discussion that lasted five hours, 20 minutes. So we discussed almost everything – the Syrian crisis, Israel, Palestine, Lebanon, everything.

BAKER: What sort of things were they saying to you about Austin?

MOUSTAPHA: They would say and repeat time and again nonstop. If you engage with us, trying to find where is Austin Tice, we promise you it will be a game changer, and things will change between us and you. They are willing to withdraw from the oil fields and gas fields that they are occupying in northeast Syria.

BAKER: So they were willing to physically move their troops in Syria. Did it surprise you that they were willing to offer something that big?

MOUSTAPHA: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

BAKER: So Imad says the Americans came to the table with a big offer. If this is true, it’s hard to overstate its significance.

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #11: Today, the White House announced the first deployment of U.S. forces to Syria. Dozens of special operations troops will be sent…

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #12: American boots will now be on the ground in Syria. The plan is…

BAKER: In 2015, American troops officially enter Syria to fight the militant group ISIS. Over the next few years, the group is crushed into an insurgency, but the Americans don’t leave. Around 2,000 troops remain in Syria, many in strategic areas.

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UNIDENTIFIED REPORTER #13: A U.S. military convoy is helping secure oil fields, not only from ISIS, but from Syria and Russia, as well.

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TRUMP: We’re keeping the oil. We have the oil. The oil is secure. We left troops behind only for the oil.

BAKER: The troops give the American government influence over vast oil reserves. Potentially worth tens of billions of dollars, reserves President Assad wants. And Imad Moustapha says he’s being told that they might give that up for Austin Tice. This could reshape alliances on the ground and redraw the map of who controls what in Syria, all for one man. Let me pause my conversation with Imad for a moment. I need to take you back to Roger in Washington, D.C., because when you hear Roger and Imad side by side, the truth of what happened in these talks becomes much clearer.

Imad has said to me that it was put on the table that America would withdraw its troops from Syrian oil and gas fields for the return of Austin Tice.

CARSTENS: I’ve always wanted to say this, and I don’t think I’ve ever said it in seven years of doing this work. And that is, I can neither confirm nor deny that.

BAKER: But you’re not denying that.

CARSTENS: (Laughter) I just – I couldn’t talk about it even if I wanted to.

BAKER: I’m aware there’s a limitation on how specific you can be.

CARSTENS: Yeah.

BAKER: But theoretically, that would be a huge offer for Austin.

CARSTENS: Yeah, it would be. It would be huge vis-a-vis ISIS, the Kurds, the Turks, the Syrians, oil fields. I mean, it would have been huge.

BAKER: Some people will look at that as you are willing to essentially potentially make a concession for one American citizen that would, in some ways, prop up Assad, if that was to go through. And this is a mass murderer. Are you conscious of that disparity between, you know, the value of one American life and a concession that might be given that could influence the lives of countless Syrians?

CARSTENS: Yeah. I mean, obviously. I mean, we really are. And…

BAKER: How do you weigh that?

CARSTENS: Yeah, gosh, so many ways I could answer that. And by the way, there might be ways that I would feel about it personally, but whether I felt that one objective was better than the other, my job at a certain point was to lay out all the objectives and represent Debra Tice’s views as well, to lay everything out there so that the national security adviser and the president could render the best decision that they wanted, and then my job’s to execute.

BAKER: I understand Debra Tice. I’ve spent a lot of time with her. But there are also, you know, countless Syrian mothers. You’re talking about more than a hundred thousand Syrians disappeared in that same situation. And I can’t help but feel, at some point, there is a greater prioritization of American life going on over Syrian life here. And that may be because that’s the job or what have you.

CARSTENS: Yeah. I mean, I guess, a few things. No. 1, that is the job. You know, you’re there specifically to get Austin Tice out. I had a chance to participate in the return of 65 Americans while I had this job for five years. And every night after we get a return, you know, you go and you look at yourself in the mirror, and you should be elated because you got that American back. But usually, in a way, you’re elated, but you’re also sick to your stomach because you know to get that American back, you had to give something, you had to do something and make some sort of accommodation with a cruel regime.

BAKER: Nothing’s for free.

CARSTENS: Nothing’s for free.

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BAKER: The Americans offer, you say, this huge geopolitical gift to Syria – we’ll give you back the oil and gas fields. We’ll move our troops. How did President Assad receive that information?

MOUSTAPHA: Please, you have to remember we never trusted the Americans on any promise or plan. From the Syrian perspective, all promises from the Americans are hollow promises that they will never honor or keep. President Assad had a very bitter experience with the Americans. They disappointed him many times on Iraq, and his father was disappointed also by them many times. It’s amazing how interested the U.S. was in the fate of Austin. But it also confirmed what everybody in Syria thought – that Austin Tice was not just an ordinary journalist who came and disappeared in Syria.

BAKER: What do you mean by that?

MOUSTAPHA: With all this interest in Austin Tice, incredible interest, he must be a very important CIA operative.

OBEIDAT: There were other Americans who were being held in Syria and who were missing, like Majd Kamalmaz or Layla Shweikani. Did any of these names come up in the negotiations?

MOUSTAPHA: En passant. Like, if they have talked about Austin Tice for 300 minutes, they mentioned these names once in half a minute and that’s it. For years, the only reason they were contacting us was Austin Tice. Tens and tens of different people from Lebanon, from Jordan, from Oman, from the United Arab Emirates were contacting the Syrian government and trying to find out anything about Austin Tice. He became the idee fixe, the only subject that the Americans were interested. It was such an open book.

CARSTENS: I could literally probably write 30 pages on how many times I heard that from all the countries – he must have been a spy.

BAKER: I think the Syrians are surprised by the scale to which the focus was on Austin Tice.

CARSTENS: Yeah.

BAKER: And they became convinced, partly because of the scale of the U.S. effort on Austin and other reasons, that he was a member of the CIA.

CARSTENS: I think it would also make it hard for the Syrians to, like, wrestle with this. He’s a former U.S. Marine. The guy who was good-looking, in shape. If you wanted to look like what a CIA officer might look like, I mean, that’s Austin Tice. Good-looking, well-built, tough, smart, combat vet, officer. And yet he wasn’t – he was a journalist out there doing his job.

BAKER: Austin wasn’t CIA?

CARSTENS: No. No, he was not.

BAKER: Unequivocally.

CARSTENS: Unequivocally. He was not a – he was a journalist.

BAKER: There was another thing that Imad has said to me. Imad’s read was that he felt there was a disparity between the focus on Austin compared to other U.S. hostages. Do you think that’s fair?

CARSTENS: I would say that Austin might have received the preponderance of diplomatic time. Well, for the main reason that if you can get a breakthrough on Austin, then you’ve opened up the door. You put your foot in the door and can start perhaps making more progress on the others. And we lacked strong information on all those cases.

BAKER: ‘Cause I think there will be some people rightly or wrongly who feel that the – you know, Austin, as the sort of white American poster boy to some degree, was prioritized over, say, like, American hostages, like Majd Kamalmaz, the psychotherapist or Layla Shweikani, the human rights activist. You know, people with a sort of more Arab heritage and things like that. Do you think that’s fair?

CARSTENS: I can see that perspective. But I would probably destroy your interview if I told you all the time and effort that we put into trying to get Majd Kamalmaz back. And again, Austin was kind of like the breaching tool that got us into the meeting, and we’d spend time talking about, to the extent that we were allowed to by the Syrians.

BAKER: Roger comes from the school of thought that says you do whatever you can to bring Austin and other American hostages home. But Washington doesn’t think with one mind. Some people look at Syria through a very different lens.

Hello.

JAMES JEFFREY: Hello. How are you doing?

BAKER: It’s so lovely to meet you.

JEFFREY: OK.

BAKER: How are you?

JEFFREY: So, Josh, right?

BAKER: Yeah. I am.

This is James Jeffrey. He was the special representative for Syrian engagement, the closest thing America had to an ambassador. Before becoming a diplomat, he spent a lot of his life around war – Vietnam, Iraq and later as an adviser to the director of the CIA.

JEFFREY: So, therefore, I’ll sit here, if I may, because it’s most comfortable for me.

BAKER: He tells me that part of his job on Syria was to destabilize, or, as he put it, f*** Assad. He was coming at Syria from a very different viewpoint to Roger. And over the years, he’d become aware of some of the attempts to get Austin home.

JEFFREY: The hostage negotiator for the Department of State came into my office and said he wanted to talk about the important issue of Austin Tice. It’s your job to make sure his particular I won’t say hobby horse on something as important as Austin Tice, but his particular issue does not come to be the defining issue of a much broader geostrategic issue.

BAKER: Are you saying sort of Austin is one issue in a sea of issues? Or…

JEFFREY: Right. Exactly.

BAKER: And you don’t want Austin’s case to become disproportionate to a wider vision? Or…

JEFFREY: I don’t want our Syria policy to be taken hostage by people who think that the only issue with Syria of importance, or by far the top priority, is getting Austin Tice back. I won’t go into whether they should or shouldn’t. I would want somebody to try to get me back.

BAKER: I guess it’s interesting, isn’t it? Because in that scenario, what you’re doing is you are – you’re getting a human being home, yes. You’re also getting a big political and public win, but you’re trading potential stability or policy that can affect the lives of millions.

JEFFREY: You’re doing that. You’re also opening the door to a repeat.

BAKER: ‘Cause you’re signaling to the Syrian regime or other regimes, hey, we will pay. We will change policy.

JEFFREY: Right. We will modify our geostrategic goals in the region to your advantage and to our disadvantage to get Americans back, including the next American who gets grabbed. I met, I think, twice with the mother and father. It was very difficult. You could understand – as a father, I could understand their pain, and I could understand their desire that we, the U.S. government, do anything at any cost to get their son back. I would have had exactly the same approach.

BAKER: So the American government’s position is not clear. But despite this, a few months later, they returned for a second round of talks in Muscat with Imad.

MOUSTAPHA: But this time, it was a different meeting. They were not as warm and friendly as in the first time, and the meeting was short. It lasted one hour 10 minutes. They were curt and they were very clear – are you going to engage with us or not? I really, really wanted that this could have happened, really, genuinely. I want a little bit to alleviate the suffering, the daily suffering of the people. Getting back some oil and some gas will help generating more electricity, having some income. The people were really suffering. What they were looking for is for us to come and tell them, OK, guys, we are willing to engage with you on looking for Austin Tice. But I could not discuss Austin Tice because those were my instructions. So the meeting ended quickly. I wasn’t able to say anything.

BAKER: What Imad is telling me changes the way I understand the Syrian position. He tells me that before he ever entered the room with the Americans, Assad had given him strict boundaries.

MOUSTAPHA: I met with President Assad one day before our departure. I asked him an innocent question – what about if they insist on knowing the fate of Austin Tice? He said, we don’t know anything about it. What if they insist that we cooperate with them on looking for Austin Tice? He said, we don’t have him. I told him, Mr. President, since we don’t have him, then this is a very good diplomatic overture. We will prove to them that we are very positive and constructive and let us together work on trying to sort out the fate of Austin.

He said, no, you are not allowed to discuss Austin Tice at all. The Americans are occupying our oil fields and gas fields. They are bombarding us from time to time. They are the cause of the deaths of tens of thousands of Syrians, and they have imposed sanctions on the Syrian people. They are suffering because of those sanctions, and they are only worried about Austin Tice.

BAKER: How did you feel when he said that?

MOUSTAPHA: I felt that the whole trip to Muscat would be an exercise in futility.

BAKER: But just to confirm, sorry, there was never a conversation had about what Syria might want, theoretically, to just engage a little bit with the Americans or give a proof of life or, OK, we will think about working with you to find Austin if you do X. Discussions internally never got that far?

MOUSTAPHA: This is a puzzle to me. I find it very mysterious. Very mysterious story. I don’t know why Assad refused totally to engage on – with the Americans on Austin Tice. I don’t understand why he wouldn’t tell them he is dead. I don’t understand why, if he were not dead at the time, he did not want to use him as an exchange bargain with them on something or another. Too many things that I fail to understand. I myself – I’m still in search for a meaning to this story. I don’t understand it.

BAKER: Is there anything you would like his family to understand?

MOUSTAPHA: I can understand their sorrow and their pain. After all, this is their son, their family member. They need to understand that almost every family in Syria has the same amount of pain and suffering. It’s universal here in Syria. It has been very, very tough 15 years for us. It continues to be in many aspects.

BAKER: So from the beginning, Imad says he isn’t really there to negotiate. He has no power to make a deal, no information to share, no mandate to discuss Austin. No matter how much he wants to trade Austin to try to help his country, the president won’t let him. Assad’s only goal seems to be to keep Austin’s detention secret, no matter what is offered.

CARSTENS: The question that we would always ask in our meetings was, if Austin is still alive and Assad has him or knows what happened to him, why on earth is he taking this long? Surely, there’s something he wants from us, absent these three huge things that are almost impossible. But I think either he killed him, and Assad did not want that hung over him, or he was playing a very long diplomatic game in which he might have Austin or have information about Austin but was going to wait to the right – for the right time to use that as leverage to get something that he wanted out of the United States government.

BAKER: In the weeks before the fall of the regime, there was the potential for another round of talks, and this time the Syrians were seemingly going to send some more senior people. Did you take that as an indicator that Austin might be alive, the fact that they were still willing to talk at that stage?

CARSTENS: I think my belief that Austin was alive was based on, I would say, evidence that I’d seen that people did walk out of those jails that had not been heard of in, you know, 10 or 20 years, based on the – what scant trail of evidence we had. I chose to be in the group of people who looked at everything, and the conclusion was that Austin is alive and he is waiting for me to somehow find a way to get him out.

BAKER: So Roger hoped that the next round of talks might actually bring Austin home. But before he could find out if that was going to happen, the regime collapsed, and President Assad fled to Russia. After years of talks with the Syrians that never proved Austin was alive, and with Austin still missing, one key question comes into my mind – when was the last time that anyone saw Austin alive? And I think I know who can answer that.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

BAKER: You’ve been listening to Where Is Austin Tice? Series 3 of “I’m Not A Monster Presents…” Please share, rate and review the show. It really does help. If you have any information on Austin Tice, you can email me directly on josh@bbc.co.uk, or message me on social media – @joshbakerstory.

The series is written and showrun by me, Josh Baker. The investigative producer is Sara Obeidat. The series producer is Simon Maybin. At NPR, our producer is Monika Evstatieva. Editors are Robert Little and Katie Simon. Field producing by Ouday Al Hussein. Additional producing by Lucy Burns. Open-source intelligence by Thomas Bordeaux and Gabor Friesen. Our production coordinator is Gemma Ashman. The series editor is Clare Fordham. The head of BBC News Long Form Audio is Emma Rippon, and at BBC Radio 4 the commissioning editor is Dan Clarke.

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