Israel Matzav: Assad's password

Sunday, February 12, 2012

Assad's password

I just told Mrs. Carl that the hacker group Anonymous had hacked Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's computer. I asked what she thought the password might be and she guessed "I hate Israel." Well, that would have been a more secure password than the real one. When I told Mrs. Carl that the password was "12345" she burst out laughing.

But that might be the least interesting tidbit from the emails of 78 members of Syria's Ministry of Presidential Affairs. The most interesting ones come from the computer of Bouthaina Shaaban, the 58-year old gatekeeper of access to the Syrian dictator (Hat Tip: Memeorandum).

Shaaban’s email cache shows her fine-tuned sense of status. When she’s invited to speak at a panel in Ankara, her assistant requests two seats for her since the flight offers neither first-class nor business. When she finds out she’s not scheduled to deliver the keynote address, she directs her assistant to cancel her appearance. Former CBS anchor Dan Rather requests an interview with Assad in October 2010 for his new HDNet show, but Shaaban tells the Syrian ambassador to the United States Imad Moustapha to decline. “You mentioned in your letter that the HDNet station has a limited number of audience and therefore we kindly ask you to apologize.”

Those journalists to whom Shaaban granted access were best friends forever. One exchange features Shaaban and Alix Van Buren—who conducted an interview with Assad for La Repubblica—blowing cyber kisses to each other across the Mediterranean. Who knows what journalistic ethics are like in Rome, but Van Buren’s editors may be surprised to find that Van Buren considers the interview a joint effort to get the Syrian president’s message out to the masses. “Did you notice that Charlie Rose practically copied our interview from top to bottom,” Van Buren writes in an ingratiating email from May 2010. She thanks Shaaban (“you and I, what a team!”) for the lovely presents—Valentino perfume, a jewelry box—and spares nothing in the way of flattery. And yet eventually Van Buren pushes her luck a little too far. She writes Shaaban to request privileged access for a colleague, Gad Lerner, who is planning a trip to Damascus. Lerner, as it turns out, is Jewish. Van Buren furiously pleads his case—he is “independent (i.e., doesn’t belong to any lobby),” he has signed petitions against Netanyahu, and Shabaan should ignore the fact his signature is next to that of Bernard-Henri Lévy—but the Syrian apparatchik has to reject her dear friend’s request. “Many of those signatories,” Shaaban writes, “have indeed a history of strong support for Israel, and their long term aim is to serve the true interests of Israel.”

American journalists flattered the regime as well, but with less luck. In November 2011, more than half a year into the uprising, Brian Williams’s producer at NBC wrote to request an interview, as did Scott Pelley’s producer at CBS’s Evening News a few weeks later. With deaths mounting by the hour, it was quite a feeding frenzy last fall. Bob Simon’s producer at 60 Minutes sought an advantage. He reminded his Syrian correspondent that “60 Minutes interviewed President Hafez al-Assad back in the 1970s.” After a few paragraphs of boilerplate PR for his show (“For the last 43 years, it has featured stories on the most important newsmakers of our time . . . ”), the producer signs off, “We would be most honored to have President al Assad on our program.” God only knows what Barbara Walters’s staff wrote to actually get her prized interview with Assad in December—those missives weren’t leaked.

...

[Martin] Indyk’s efforts to get President Clinton to visit Damascus in November 2009 came up empty. He wrote Shaaban about a delegation of U.S. officials that he was taking to Jerusalem for the annual Saban Forum of the Brookings Institution, where Indyk is the director of the foreign policy program, and he proposed a stop in Damascus along the way: “I’m sure you will agree that first hand exposure to the views of President Assad—especially before they hear the views of the Israeli leadership—would do much to enhance their understanding of Syria’s approach to strategic issues in the region at a critical moment.”

Not surprisingly, Shaaban was receptive, as was her boss. “I am glad to let you know that President Assad also welcomed the idea of receving [sic] President William Clinton and the accompanying delegation.”

A month later, Indyk explains to Shaaban that Clinton has decided not to go to Damascus. Shaaban then takes her revenge. She writes that Indyk’s delegation will not meet with Assad; nor will they even enjoy the privilege of meeting with Shaaban or Foreign Minister Walid Mouallem. It’s not clear if Clinton backed out—perhaps sensing that a meeting with Assad, after he’d already met with North Korea’s Kim Jong Il, was a fasttrack to Jimmy Carterdom—or if Indyk had invoked the possibility of the former president’s participation to get access for the rest of the group.

Read the whole thing.

If you were hoping for more details on the infamous Vogue cover story, Lee Smith didn't include them.

Labels: Bashar al-Assad, Syrian uprising