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EARLY INDNIDNICIADNIDNICVDNIDNIUS Your browser does not support the element. 2019 a Lebanese-American businessman tried to bring a stunning piece of information to the attention of , then a 37-year-old Democratic congresswoman from Hawaii. The man told her that two years earlier, while they were visiting together, he had met Austin Tice, a freelance American journalist abducted in 2012 while working outside Damascus.The man who delivered the news was Elias Khawam, who had contacts in the regime of and had helped arrange Ms Gabbard’s four-day visit to Syria in January 2017. According to sources familiar with the details, reported for the first time here by , Mr Khawam said that he saw Mr Tice in the flesh—which would make him the last known person to do so. (A thus-far fruitless hunt for Mr Tice has been ongoing since the fall of Mr Assad in December 2024.)The contents of the conversation between Mr Khawam and Ms Gabbard, who is now Donald Trump’s nominee for director of national intelligence (), are contested. She denies that she learned of Mr Khawam’s reported meeting with Mr Tice. “She didn’t get that information,” said Alexa Henning, a spokeswoman for Mr Trump’s transition team, responding to questions for Ms Gabbard. “She got no actionable information about Mr Tice. Otherwise, she would have acted on it.”According to interviews with participants and others familiar with the episode, the Tice case gives a glimpse of the labyrinthine twists of the intelligence world that Ms Gabbard will enter if confirmed as . The role involves assessing intelligence reports for the president and making recommendations about the multi-billion-dollar budgets of 18 different agencies. The ideal person for the job would be a savvy operator with institutional experience, who has a vision of how to adapt to the age of artificial intelligence. Ms Gabbard is not that.Back then, Ms Gabbard was a lonely voice of understanding for Mr Assad, despite his record of brutality against his own people, which included the use of chemical weapons. On her trip in 2017 she became the first sitting member of Congress to meet Mr Assad since the Arab Spring. She did not inform her party’s leaders in advance, citing security concerns. Nor did she co-ordinate her travel with the State Department. Adam Kinzinger, then a Republican congressman, called Ms Gabbard’s visit to Syria “a shame and a disgrace”. Her critics still see the visit as evidence of her poor judgment and a reason for the Senate to deny her nomination.Yet there was more to Ms Gabbard’s visit than has been previously reported. She was serving as a conduit between Mr Trump and Mr Assad, according to two people familiar with her trip. In mid-November 2016, after Mr Trump’s defeat of Hillary Clinton, Ms Gabbard met the president-elect. They discussed Syria, Ms Gabbard said afterwards. On January 16th, four days before Mr Trump’s inauguration, Ms Gabbard met Mr Assad and asked if he would speak directly to Mr Trump after the latter became president, according to one of the people familiar with her visit. (According to the second person, Ms Gabbard delivered a letter from Mr Trump.) Mr Assad said he would be willing to speak to the president-elect and provided Ms Gabbard with a phone number. (A version of this exchange was reported by a Lebanese newspaper in April 2017.)Ms Gabbard denies that any of this took place, Ms Henning said. She reiterated a statement Ms Gabbard made about the Lebanese newspaper account soon after it was published: “The Trump Administration was not aware or involved in her trip in any way, and she did not relay any communications from the Trump administration.” Ms Henning added that there was “bad intelligence” being circulated in Washington about Ms Gabbard from unknown sources.Mr Khawam’s reported encounter with Mr Tice occurred later in the same trip, while Ms Gabbard was meeting captured Islamist fighters who had come from abroad to join the rebellion against the Assad regime. At a facility in Damascus, Mr Khawam was reportedly taken to another room, where he was introduced to an American prisoner. The man did not identify himself. He appeared frail and unkempt. He quickly shouted at Mr Khawam to leave him, ending the exchange. The prisoner may have believed that Mr Khawam was another interrogator. Afterwards, Mr Khawam searched online for images of Mr Tice and recognised him as the prisoner, according to information Mr Khawam later gave officials in the Trump administration who were working on the case.The encounter with Mr Tice was arranged by aides to Mr Assad. The regime’s apparent motive was to show Mr Khawam, a trusted American interlocutor, that Mr Tice was alive and in Syrian custody at a time when Mr Assad hoped to negotiate humanitarian aid or sanctions relief with the incoming Trump administration, using the imprisoned journalist as a bargaining chip. (The Assad government continually denied that it held Mr Tice.)The Trump administration wanted Mr Tice back. Mike Pompeo, the new director, called a Syrian counterpart to ask about the journalist on January 23rd, three days after Mr Trump’s inauguration. Mr Khawam later told associates that he felt apprehensive about being drawn into the matter. After more than a year had passed, contacts in Mr Assad’s regime urged Mr Khawam to tell Ms Gabbard that he had met Mr Tice, in the apparent hope that the information would kickstart negotiations.Early in January 2019 Mr Khawam met Ms Gabbard at a charity fundraiser at the Wiltern Hotel in Los Angeles organised by Sean Penn, an actor. (Mr Khawam had worked with Mr Penn on a film project in Syria.) Mr Khawam pulled the congresswoman aside and told her for the first time about his encounter with the American prisoner he believed to be Mr Tice, according to people familiar with the episode. Ms Gabbard denies this happened.Robert O’Brien, then the Trump administration’s lead hostage negotiator, did not learn about Mr Khawam’s report through Ms Gabbard. The information came through Mr Penn, who told him that Mr Khawam might be able to help with the Tice case. American officials assessed Mr Khawam’s information to be credible, if uncertain. Mr Penn, Mr O’Brien and Mr Khawam met in late January and again the next month to explore whether Mr Khawam’s contacts in Syria could create a channel through which to negotiate for Mr Tice’s freedom. However, the effort foundered by the end of 2019.Mr O’Brien declined to discuss specific sources of information he received about Mr Tice’s case, but said: “My policy was to talk to everybody” who might have a lead. “We tried to exhaust every effort.”Mr Khawam’s report did not provide definitive “proof of life”; he had not obtained a time-stamped photo or video of the prisoner. But it became a new thread of intelligence about Mr Tice’s whereabouts and condition. Mr O’Brien, who became Mr Trump’s national security adviser later in 2019, pursued a multi-track effort until the end of 2020, but was unsuccessful.Debra Tice, the journalist’s mother, said she has recently come to believe that, across three administrations, the American government sat on key leads and failed to push Assad’s regime hard enough. “Now what I’m hearing is that the entire time they knew exactly where Austin was, who was taking care of him—everything,” she said. “I just see what a huge failure our government deliberately has been for Austin.”The new details about Ms Gabbard’s journey to Damascus show that she handled her diplomatic task professionally, a useful quality in a prospective spy chief. Yet other concerns cloud her suitability to become . Three principal issues have been raised: her lack of relevant experience, her views about America’s adversaries and her ability and willingness to analyse complex situations impartially, which is arguably the ’s most important task.Consider first her . Ms Gabbard has an admirable record of military service. She enlisted in the Hawaiian National Guard before she earned a college degree, deployed to Iraq, gained admission to an officer candidate school, and is today a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserve. In Congress, she served on the House Foreign Affairs Committee and the House Armed Services Committee. Even so, Ms Gabbard has never helped run a large organisation or worked in intelligence. Still, other members of Congress have done the job before. If Ms Gabbard’s inexperience were the only worry, she would be all but certain to be confirmed.More troubling is Ms Gabbard’s “sympathy for dictators like Vladimir Putin and Assad”, according to a letter signed by dozens of former national-security officials. This is a touch hyperbolic. Ms Gabbard, who was disillusioned by America’s wars in the Middle East, does not evince “sympathy” for tyrants, but her ideology and policy views are certainly aligned at times with their interests.Ms Gabbard has been a fan of Edward Snowden’s whistleblowing and a sceptic of intrusive snooping by America’s counter-terrorism and counter-intelligence officials. In 2019 she called Hillary Clinton, once her party’s standard-bearer, “queen of warmongers”. By backing anti-Assad rebels, Ms Gabbard argued, America had embarked on another “counter-productive regime-change war” in Syria that could empower Islamic State and al-Qaeda, and even lead to a nuclear war with Russia.Ms Gabbard was hardly alone in these concerns, but her silence about Mr Assad’s brutality gradually isolated her within the Democratic Party. She began to look sympathetically on Mr Trump’s non-interventionism. She became an independent after a failed run in 2020 for the Democrat presidential nomination. In 2024 she endorsed Mr Trump for re-election.Yet a with unconventional foreign-policy views could be an asset. The most glaring problem with Ms Gabbard’s nomination is that she cherry-picks information or rehashes undocumented propaganda to advance her views. The ’s most important job is to provide the president and cabinet with vetted and impartial intelligence, including in the top-secret president’s daily brief.Like many others, Ms Gabbard has criticised the American intelligence system for publishing inaccurate intelligence about Saddam Hussein’s arsenal. Yet Ms Gabbard makes similar errors when citing evidence to back up her provocative opinions. In 2019 she published a sceptical report about two chemical-weapons attacks in Syria attributed to Mr Assad’s regime. After auditing the report, Eliot Higgins, the founder of Bellingcat, an open-source-investigations group, described it as Ms Gabbard’s own collection of “fake intelligence, dodgy dossiers and lies”. In 2022 she released a video suggesting that labs in Ukraine funded by America were developing dangerous germs, a spurious line of propaganda used by Russia to try to justify its unprovoked invasion.The Senate’s Republican majority, under pressure from Mr Trump, may well confirm Ms Gabbard. ’s reporting showed that her trip to Syria in 2017 required her to navigate a poorly mapped landscape. But the possibility that she will distort sensitive intelligence to advance her views, or withhold information that undermines her opinions, would make her appointment a serious risk. Mr Trump is already not particularly well-informed. She would make him less so.
