In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [7]
As I passed through “Post One”—the embassy’s business gate—I was immediately filled with a sense of irony. Here I was, entering the US embassy in Syria—one of the original nations on the United States’s “State Sponsors of Terrorism” list. The list, created by Congress in 1979, “designated” countries that supported groups carrying out car bombings, hijackings, and other terrorist operations—an official mantra tattooed on the inside of my skull after writing it hundreds of times in news stories on Syria.
However, of the scores of US embassies that I have visited in the Arab world, this was the only one that didn’t resemble Fort Knox. The August 1998 bombings of the US embassies in Dar Es-Salam and Nairobi spurred the State Department to build a slew of new, more secure embassies in the Arab world. Each had thick concrete walls and crash barriers camouflaged as large concrete planters; some had watchtowers. The design—called “setback”—was based on the recommendations of a 1985 report into another tragic attack: the April 1983 bombing of the US embassy in Beirut (Lebanon was then partially occupied by Syrian forces). Seven months later, another truck bomb destroyed the US marine barracks at Beirut’s airport. The 241 marines who perished in the rubble marked the largest one-day death toll for the US Marine Corps since the battle of Iwo Jima.
To protect the American diplomats and staff from car bombs, the new embassy buildings were constructed several hundred feet inside the compound’s outer walls. The interior of the US embassy in Amman, Jordan, about three hours by car from Damascus, looked and felt like a futuristic high school somewhere in southern California. The embassy building—with tiled roofs and sidewalks—even featured its own restaurant. Security on the perimeter was as tight as a drum.
Stepping through the gate of the US embassy in Damascus, in contrast, was like traveling back in time—to a world before car bombs. For starters, the embassy building directly touched the embassy compound’s outer wall. The chancery—the part of the embassy that houses the US ambassador and staff—was a 1920s-era villa. An American flag foisted at the villa’s highest point, above the gate, was surrounded by a bird’s nest of barbed wire. The texture of the embassy’s stucco exterior was uneven, like a cheap New York apartment whose walls have been plastered over too many times. Two small windows served as the embassy’s only portholes to the outside world. Gigantic cypress trees ringed the inside of the compound’s outer wall, enclosing a small garden centered on a marble oriental fountain, whose basin held a pool of stagnant green water.
The embassy’s security procedures were remarkably relaxed. When I accidentally set off the gate’s metal detector—presumably with the cassette recorder in my briefcase—two Syrian guards just waved me through without searching the bag. The marine guardsman, finding my appointment in his logbook, smiled and traded me a clip-on ID for my passport. They all waved me through a heavy blast door into a waiting room, which appeared as though it had once served as the villa’s front porch.
I soon found myself staring at a row of old yellowed photographs on the waiting room wall. A 1947 photo, labeled “The American Legation in Damascus,” showed the villa at its prime, ringed on three sides with covered terraces resembling an old shopping arcade. The compound’s front gate led to the villa’s front porch, which, as far as I could tell, was exactly where the waiting room now stood. A number of massive 1940s-era cars were parked along the curb. The villa was virtually unchanged in another photo from 1982, apart from the natural growth of the garden’s trees and the comparatively streamlined 1970s American cars. Neither structure resembled the building I had just entered.
“Like another world,