NCS’s Clarissa Ward confronts the man who held Austin Tice captive. Subscribe to watch the full exclusive report.
“The Americans drove through here,” the Syrian military guard stated, pointing to a steep highway behind him. “I don’t know where they headed, I’m not allowed up there.”
The barricaded highway results in a labyrinth of army amenities wedged into the rocky slopes of Mount Qasioun on the outskirts of the Syrian capital Damascus. It was as shut as NCS might get to the areas searched by an FBI-led staff that got here right here in September wanting for traces of American journalist Austin Tice — greater than a decade after he disappeared.
The American staff was arduous to overlook, arriving in a convoy of armored automobiles. Their goal was two-fold: to go looking for the place the place Tice was final believed to have been held and, if attainable, to search out his stays.
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watch the full unique report.” class=”image__dam-img image__dam-img–loading” onload=’this.classList.remove(‘image__dam-img–loading’)’ onerror=”imageLoadError(this)” height=”1080″ width=”1920″ loading=’lazy’/>The US search targeted on a facility known as the Syrian Scientific Studies and Research Center. It lasted lower than three days. On September 9, Israel launched its explosive assault on Qatar and the delegation abruptly left.
The tip that led to the US search got here from a number of witnesses, together with Bassam Al-Hassan, a strong adviser to former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad and the man who held Tice after his seize in mid-August 2012.
For 13 years, the thriller of what occurred to Austin Tice has plagued a number of US administrations. Then, after the fall of the Assad regime in December 2024, witnesses started to emerge. After fleeing to Iran, Al-Hassan made his strategy to Beirut, Lebanon in April, the place he was interrogated by FBI investigators, together with a number of associates, about Tice’s seize.
In September, NCS managed to trace the residence the place Al-Hassan was dwelling in Beirut. After knocking on his door, the staff launched themselves as NCS journalists. During a 20-minute dialog, the first time he’s been confronted by a journalist, Al-Hassan advised NCS that Assad ordered the execution of Tice.
“Of course, Austin is dead. Austin is dead,” he stated, his feedback captured on video by hidden cameras worn by the staff. He nodded sure when requested if Tice was killed in 2013, saying that he had handed the execution order all the way down to a subordinate.
“I don’t want to protect Bashar al-Assad because he abandoned and left us,” Al-Hassan added. “I don’t want to protect Russia or Iran, because the US thinks Russia and Iran have something to do with the case. And I can assure you that this is not the case. This relates to President Bashar only,” he stated.
Assad fled to Russia after the collapse of his regime and makes an attempt by NCS to succeed in him had been unsuccessful.
Al-Hassan claims he handed the execution order onto a subordinate in the infamous Iran-backed, pro-government militia the National Defense Forces (NDF). NCS has discovered the man in query is now in Russia. Through an middleman, he refused to answer NCS’s questions.
Several sources that NCS spoke to claimed that there are holes in Al-Hassan’s story. NCS has confirmed that he failed a polygraph take a look at given to him by the FBI.
The fact is tangled in an internet of lies that stay the enduring legacy of a regime that killed and disappeared tons of of 1000’s of its personal folks. In order to piece collectively what occurred to Tice, NCS spoke to dozens of former and present officers, investigators and eyewitnesses in seven totally different international locations. Many solely spoke on situation of anonymity to debate delicate issues or shield their precarious standing in the international locations they fled to.
While NCS can’t verify that Tice is useless, for the first time we’re listening to from folks with direct information of his seize, captivity and tried escape. The accounts they supply strongly recommend that Tice was killed greater than a decade in the past, however there isn’t a arduous proof. Since the Assad regime fell final 12 months, the new Syrian authorities has been eager to ascertain good relations with the US and has been working carefully with American officers to assist clear up the Tice case. The FBI has ramped up its personal investigation, gathering proof on the floor.
“As well as a recovery operation this is also an active federal investigation and there is always the goal of trying to bring some justice to this situation,” stated an individual aware of the FBI investigation.
Since Tice disappeared in 2012, his household has not wavered from the perception that he’s nonetheless alive. His mom, Debra Tice, has waged a tireless public marketing campaign on behalf of her son, lobbying the US authorities throughout a number of administrations to do no matter it might to return him alive. Earlier this 12 months, not lengthy after the Assad regime fell, Debra travelled to Damascus to look for him and sat down with Syria’s new President Ahmed Al-Sharaa. She has beforehand dismissed Al-Hassan as a “pathological liar.”
“Austin Tice is alive. We look forward to seeing him walk free,” the Tice household advised NCS in an announcement.
Tice, an ex-US Marine Corps officer, reported from Syria throughout the summer time of 2012, when protests towards Assad had become an armed battle. He embedded with rebels on the frontlines and documented the regime’s brutal crackdowns on peaceable protests. His daring method bought him bylines in prime US shops together with the Washington Post and McClatchy.
He filed his final report from Darayya, a Damascus suburb that also bears the marks of years of preventing and bombardment. His household and editors stated they misplaced contact with him in mid-August when he was speculated to journey to Lebanon for a break.
For 13 years, the Syrian authorities constantly denied holding Tice or having any information of his whereabouts, regardless of strain from the American authorities and his household. Weeks after Assad fled Syria to Russia, cracks began to emerge in that story. Early this 12 months, a former officer with Syria’s exterior intelligence department, General Safwan Bahloul, gave testimony to Al Jazeera, saying that he’d interrogated Tice in 2012 at the behest of Al-Hassan.
Bahloul agreed to speak to NCS solely after securing permission from the new authorities in Damascus. A safety official led the strategy to his home up a leafy hill in Latakia, the coastal province in Syria identified for its loyalty to the Assads. Unlike different former officers who fled Syria, Bahloul took a settlement provided by the new authorities that primarily provides him amnesty.
During a wide-ranging interview final month, Bahloul mentioned how he first grew to become conscious of Tice.
“I went to [Al-Hassan’s] office and he told me, ‘We have caught an American journalist. We want you to interrogate and see the possibility if he’s not a mere journalist or if he’s a spy,’” Bahloul stated.
Bahloul, who has frolicked in the US and the UK and speaks English fluently, advised NCS he interrogated Tice 3 times. “I just went through the names and the contacts on his phone, asking him about each name,” Bahloul stated. “He was cooperative about it. He told me that he’s an ex-Marine officer. He wasn’t shaky. He was brave enough to face his custody. Sometimes even we talked about music.”
Tice was held in a Republican Guard compound sometimes called Tahoune, below the command of Ghassan Nassour, a senior officer who reported to Al-Hassan. The line between the Republican Guard and the NDF was usually blurred with officers serving in each, together with Nassour.
NCS managed to succeed in Nassour on the cellphone in his new house in the UAE.
“This was not a formal prison, but a brief detention facility for offending soldiers,” he stated.
When NCS visited the compound in September, it was principally refurbished and utilized by troopers of the new authorities. Faded Assad murals, discarded ammunition and bars on the home windows of some rooms had been the solely traces left of the outdated guard.
According to Nassour, the soldier who was assigned to deliver meals to Tice was instructed to not communicate to him. Tice’s nationality and identification, Nassour claims, had been identified solely to a handful of individuals near Al-Hassan, whose workplace was throughout the highway from Tahoune.
“Ask any soldier in Tahoune and he would tell you they knew we had an important [prisoner], but no one knew who he was,” a low-ranking soldier who labored in Al-Hassan’s workplace at the time, advised NCS over the cellphone from his village in Latakia. He stated he solely discovered it was Tice when particulars of his captivity had been reported in 2025. Before that, he didn’t dare ask.
Nassour recalled the day they took Tice to Rakhla, a mountainous space close to the Lebanese border, to movie a video that was launched in September 2012.
Under the course of Al-Hassan, regime troopers dressed up as jihadists and led a blindfolded Tice up a hill whereas chanting “God is Great,” Nassour stated. The level, he added, was to present the impression that Tice was held by extremists and never the Assad regime.
“The video was posted online the next day, and it was as if Tice was held by Taliban in Afghanistan and he never entered Syria,” Nassour stated. Tice was seen in the 46-second video reciting the Muslim proclamation of religion and pleading, “Oh, Jesus.”
US officers and impartial analysts shortly decided the video was a ruse. US investigators adopted the digital breadcrumbs to the Syrian regime. It was taken as proof that Tice was in authorities arms and the first and solely proof of life.
Back in Tahoune, someday in late October, Tice requested Bahloul for cleaning soap and a towel, which Bahloul stated Tice used to flee. Syrian investigators at the time, Bahloul defined, decided that Tice used the cleaning soap to slide by means of the excessive window and the towel to leap over the shattered glass cemented at the prime of the compound’s exterior wall.
The low-ranking soldier in Al-Hassan’s staff described the ensuing havoc. “We were on a state of alert. There was chaos because someone had escaped prison,” the soldier advised NCS. “They distributed his picture to the checkpoints close to the compound.”
Tice made it to the upscale Mazzeh neighborhood, a couple of mile from Tahoune. For greater than 24 hours he was on the run in an space dotted with embassies and the properties of a few of the regime’s prime generals.
“Every security apparatus in Damascus, thousands of operatives, they started the search, and he was caught by one of them, and he was redelivered to the National Defense Forces militia, which was headed at that time by Bassam Al-Hassan,” Bahloul stated.
Once Tice was recaptured, Bahloul was introduced in another time to see him.
“I felt the connection between me and him was just lost. I was talking to him and he was not responding. He was, in a way we could say, depressed,” Bahloul recalled. “I never saw the guy again.”
This time, Tice was taken to Al-Hassan’s workplace throughout the highway from Tahoune. From there, the path went silent, in keeping with a number of Syrian intelligence and NDF commanders.
“I stopped asking about the issue,” Nassour stated. “In Syria if anyone hears that you’ve asked about what doesn’t concern you, you will be in trouble. I never asked again until the fall of the regime.”
Bahloul advised NCS of Tice, “It’s one of the most mysterious cases I have ever experienced.”
The one who is aware of the key to the thriller is Al-Hassan.
Al-Hassan served as Assad’s adviser and created the infamous NDF militia, implicated in a few of the worst crimes throughout Syria’s civil battle. He was sanctioned by the UK and the EU in 2011 and by the US in 2014. The US sanctions word his a number of roles in the regime together with “acting as the Syrian presidential representative to Syria’s Scientific Studies and Research Center (SSRC), which is the government agency responsible for developing and producing non-conventional weapons and missiles.”
In 2023, French prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for Al-Hassan, Assad and others for complicity in battle crimes over the use of chemical weapons towards civilians in August 2013. The two assaults referenced in the case killed greater than 1,000 folks in the Damascus suburbs of Douma and Eastern Ghouta.
“He was sort of like a right-hand man to Bashar al-Assad, someone Bashar could absolutely trust, someone who Bashar could farm out his dirtiest jobs, his most unpleasant of tasks to,” stated Economist journalist Gareth Browne who has coated Al-Hassan extensively since the fall of the regime.
Al-Hassan has refused to speak to journalists and the solely images of him on-line had been incorrect or very outdated. In September, NCS obtained a latest picture of him, and a tip about the place he was hiding out — an upscale residence complicated in a suburb of Beirut.
A staff from NCS spent a night observing the buildings. One balcony and one man in explicit appeared to match the picture. The subsequent morning, NCS knocked on his door and requested him about Tice. He invited them in as quickly as he heard Tice’s title.
During the dialog, Al-Hassan appeared rattled that NCS had discovered him and repeatedly requested who advised the place he lived. He defined to NCS that he had not too long ago advised a staff from the FBI that he had been holding Tice when Al-Assad gave him the order to execute him. According to a number of sources with information of the interrogation, Al-Hassan additionally claimed that he tried to push again on Assad’s order however that the then-president was adamant.
Multiple Syrians who know Al-Hassan disputed the chance of him difficult Assad.
“You could say whatever you like about Bassam, but he is not the courageous guy… I couldn’t imagine him giving such, you know, ‘Sir, we shouldn’t.’ No, he doesn’t give such advice,” Bahloul stated.
Other sources advised NCS that they query his motives for speaking to the FBI. After the regime fell, the US authorities provided a reward of $10 million for data on Tice. Al-Hassan advised NCS that he was not searching for a financial award for coming ahead.
Sources additionally described Al-Hassan as crafty, Machiavellian, and never somebody to be trusted. In some ways, Al-Hassan embodied the tradition of the Assad period.
“You have to look at the nature of this regime. You know, these people are competing with each other. It’s riddled with rivalries. There are people lying and deceiving each other, even though they’re nominally on the same side,” stated Browne, the Economist reporter.
Both Nassour and Bahloul advised NCS that when Tice was first captured Assad was happy and noticed him as a helpful card for use in later negotiations with the US.
“Assad knew about Tice and knew he could use him in negotiations. It would be extremely stupid to kill him… to let go of a winning card in your hand,” Nassour stated.
Others NCS spoke to believed it was believable that Assad would order Tice’s execution, significantly after his escape.
Over the previous 13 years, a number of US administrations made a number of presents to the Assad authorities in trade for Tice’s launch. Syrian negotiators had been steadfast in their denial, even when US officers merely requested for a proof of life.
“It wasn’t logical for me. But I started to feel that there is something wrong happening around the case or around Austin,” General Abbas Ibrahim, Lebanon’s former spy chief, stated of the failed negotiations throughout President Donald Trump’s first time period.
A mediator who has negotiated the launch of quite a few Western hostages throughout the area, Ibrahim labored on Tice’s case by means of all US administrations beginning with President Barack Obama’s till his retirement in 2023.
“The Americans were very interested in this case, and they were ready to pay any price to get [Tice] back,” Ibrahim stated. “The regime in Syria had a big opportunity to save themselves [with] Austin, but they didn’t play this card because maybe they don’t have this card anymore,” he stated.
During NCS’s go to to Tahoune and Bassam Al-Hassan’s workplace throughout the highway, it was clear that traces of what occurred there 13 years in the past had been gone — not simply misplaced in the looting and vandalism by crowds retaliating towards years of oppression in December, however painted over by the horrors these compounds witnessed over the years.
In the months after the Assad dungeons had been flung open final 12 months, the hope to search out Tice and tens of 1000’s of lacking Syrians started fading. Those who hadn’t emerged had been presumed useless. Many of their households refuse to formally settle for this till the stays are discovered. They nonetheless hope that the fact, buried in secret graves and hidden in tens of millions of outdated authorities paperwork, might present closure sooner or later.
For the Tice household, the search for Austin goes on.
It was solely at the door on our approach out that Al-Hassan’s voice cracked, saying he owed Tice’s mom an apology.
“Truly, it upsets me to remember it. I wish what happened hadn’t happened,” Al-Hassan stated. He eliminated his glasses revealing blood-shot eyes. “It was a predicament that I was burdened with.”
Tice might merely be remembered as one more sufferer of the countless lies and mindless cruelty of a ruthless regime.
-Additional reporting by journalist Zaher Jaber in Syria