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We headed over to the office of Sami Moubayed, a Damascus-based historian educated at the American University in Beirut. While Sami had published a number of books in English on Syrian history, he had also become an analyst on Syrian and regional politics.

When Katherine told him that word out of New York was that the report would finger high-level members of the Syrian regime, Sami looked down and sighed. “This contradicts everything we have been hearing over the past few days…. What we’ve been hearing from sources close to the government is basically that the regime is innocent, but that it will be incriminated nonetheless. Naming the regime as a whole is still much less embarrassing than saying that a particular person is responsible. This changes everything,” Sami said. “The regime’s best-case scenario was going to be that the regime as a whole would be held responsible. Now they are going to be told to hand over Assef Shawkat, and I don’t know if they can actually do that. Assef Shawkat is a very strong man, and it’s not just about the love story between him and Bushra al-Assad [Bashar’s sister]. Shawkat was hated by Hafez and hated by Basel [Bashar’s brother, who died in 1994], and he’s overcome that. He’s very, very strong. No one ever sees Assef Shawkat. He’s my neighbor, and I’ve only seen him once in my entire life.”

Katherine and I just looked at each other. It was very rare that Syrians, especially analysts, spoke so openly about members of the regime. However, there were plenty of signs of trouble in the Assad family. In the days leading up to the investigation announcement, former Syrian intelligence chief in Lebanon Ghazi Kanaan and the current interior minister had committed “suicide” in his office. As the de facto viceroy of Lebanon for years, many suspected his involvement in Hariri’s murder, and most I met doubted that he had committed suicide.

“With Ghazi Kanaan and Assef Shawkwat gone, this completely breaks the power of the Alawi community in Syria,” Sami continued. “They will never arrest Assef. Syria will have to simply say that this report is political and that we are innocent. This is going to be really terrible. If Syria does not respond, there could be more sanctions. There’s no telling what might happen. When you’ve got someone like Assef Shawkat who is so powerful in his own right, you can’t arrest him.”14

As Katherine filed her quotes to New York, I jumped on the Internet to see if a soft copy of the report was available. After two hours of searching, I gave up looking and helped Katherine prepare dinner for a party we were hosting that evening for Hugh and Joshua Landis, an American professor from Oklahoma University on a Fulbright in Syria to turn his dissertation into a book. Joshua was particularly attuned to the thinking of the Alawite sect via his marriage to the daughter of an Alawite admiral in the Syrian Navy. Joshua spent most of his time working on his blog, Syria Comment. Several times a week, he would blog on things he was hearing around Damascus—everything from the Hariri investigation to reform.

Over several glasses of Lebanese wine and oriental salads, all of us speculated about what would happen and what the final text of the report might say. In an interview the previous week, Joshua had expressed what we were all thinking. “Obviously, this is going to lead to the Syrian government,” he told the Council on Foreign Relations. “How far up the line is [the investigation] going to go? … Will Mehlis implicate someone in the president’s family[?] … If it was somebody in the immediate family, it would be a real crisis.”15

As soon as I awoke the next morning, I ran to my computer to see if the report’s text was available. A colleague in Beirut, The Times’ correspondent Nicholas Blanford, had sent me the report electronically. As soon as I opened it, Hugh called.

“Did you see it? Did you see it?” he yelled into the phone. When I asked him what he was talking about, he said, “The report. Hit ‘View