Wife of the devil: secrets of a first lady

Syrian First Lady Asma al-Assad. Picture: Miguel Medina Source: AFP

LATE in the afternoon of December 1, 2010, I took a call from a features editor at American Vogue.

 She asked if I wanted to go to Syria to interview the first lady, Asma al-Assad.

"Absolutely not," I said. "I don't want to meet the Assads, and they don't want to meet a Jew." The editor explained that the first lady was young, good-looking, and had never given an interview.

Vogue had been trying to get to her for two years.

"Send a political journalist," I said.

"We don't want any politics, none at all," said the editor, "and she only wants to talk about culture, antiquities and museums. You like museums. You like culture. She wants to talk to you. You'd leave in a week."

"Let me think about it," I said. I had written four cover stories that year, three about young actresses and one about a supermodel who had just become a mother. This assignment was more exciting, and when else would I get to see the ruins of Palmyra?

I looked up Asma al-Assad.

 Born Asma Akhras in London in 1975 to a Syrian cardiologist, Fawaz Akhras, and his diplomat wife, Sahar Otri.

School: Queen's College. University: King's College. Husband: President of Syria.

My notions about the country were formed by the British Museum. This was where civilisation was born 6000 years ago.

I knew the country's more recent past was grim, violent and secretive. The dictator Hafez al-Assad took power in 1970 and, until his death in 2000, ran the country as cruelly and ruthlessly as his idol, Stalin. He dealt with a Sunni Muslim Brotherhood uprising in Hama in 1982 by killing 20,000 of its men, women, and children.

His son Bashar al-Assad looked meek.

He'd been studying ophthalmology in London in 1994 when his older brother, the heir to the presidency, died in a car accident. Bashar was brought home, put into a series of military uniforms and groomed for power.

At Hafez's death, a referendum asked whether the 34-year-old Bashar should become president. He "won".

Under Bashar al-Assad, Syria was still oppressed, but the silence and fear were such that little of the oppression showed, apart from vast numbers of secret police, called Mukhabarat.

In 2010 Syria's status oscillated between untrustworthy rogue state and new cool place. 

It was the Soviet Union with hummus and water pipes. In the world view of fashion magazines, Syria was a forbidden kingdom full of silks, essences, palaces, and ruins, run by a modern president and an attractive, young first lady.

 Sting, Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt, Francis Coppola had visited.
 

It was also a Pandora's box.
 

Syria was a dictatorship. I called Barbet Schroeder, who'd made the ultimate documentary about a dictator,  Idi Amin. "Hafez al-Assad was the worst evil genius in the world, but I think his son is trying to be a reformer," Schroeder said.

Someone who went to Syria for its ruins raved about Damascus, mentioned in passing some men seen hanged outside the Four Seasons Hotel, and then raved about Palmyra.

I should have said no right then. I said yes.

I was curious. That's why I'd become a writer.

 Vogue wanted a description of the good-looking first lady of a questionable country; I wanted to see the cradle of civilisation.

Syria gave off a toxic aura. But what was the worst that could happen? I would write a piece forVogue that missed the deeper truth about its subject? I had learned long ago that the only person I could ever be truthful about was myself.

I didn't know I was going to meet a man who is an alleged murderer.

There was no way of knowing that Assad, the meek ophthalmologist and computer-loving nerd, would kill more of his own people than his father and torture tens of thousands more, many of them children.
 

In December 2010, there was no way of knowing that the Arab Spring was about to begin, and that it would take down the dictators of Tunisia, Libya, and Egypt.

There was no way of knowing, as I cheered the events in Tahrir Square in Cairo, that I would be contaminated because I had written about the Assads.

There was no way of knowing that this piece would cost me my livelihood and end the association I'd had with Vogue since I was 23.

I met the devil and his wife, with full fashion magazine access to their improbable fishbowl apartment where they lived out their daily lives on display to the eyes of thousands, like a Middle Eastern version of The Truman Show. They showed off their fantasy lives for me.

The Assads' PR firm, Brown Lloyd James, took care of my visa. I landed in Damascus in the snow at night on December 12, 2010. A PR rep named Sheherazade Ja'afari, 22, was waiting on the runway in a government car, incongruously with a bouquet of flowers. She handed me a Syrian cell phone. "Your American one won't work here," she said.

The next day Sheherazade took me through Damascus: in the dark, early-evening streets, I felt uneasy. Moustached men stood in our path, wearing shoes from the 1980s and curiously ill-fitting leather jackets over thick sweaters.
On December 14, I left my laptop on the desk. A government car conveyed us to the first lady's office, a fairly anonymous little white building in a residential neighbourhood.

Asma al-Assad was informal and cheery. An attractive woman of 35, she wore a pale blue jacket and dark trousers. Her curly chin-length hair was sprayed into place, her eyebrows delineated in the Syrian manner. She was as brisk as a prefect, as on-message as a banker, as friendly as a new acquaintance at a friend's cocktail party. She was on show and delivered a well-rounded and glossy presentation of a cosy, modern, relaxed version of herself, her family, and her country -- with a London accent.

Her parents came from Homs. She'd grown up with two younger brothers in London: she rode horses; her school friends called her Emma; she cut class to hang out on Oxford Street and got her degree in computer science at King's College.
 

She briefly worked at Deutsche Bank in New York, and was back in London at Morgan Stanley, about to take up an MBA at Harvard when, on holidays at her aunt's in Damascus in 2000, she again met Bashar al-Assad, a family friend. She was 25, he was 35. She began to go to Damascus on weekends to see the president's son. The word "president" rang as glamorous in her mouth as "movie star".

The word "dictator" never got in.

"You don't plan to do this," she said.
 

After Hafez al-Assad died and Bashar became president, she quit her Morgan Stanley job and moved to Damascus.  They married, and had three children: Hafez, 9, Zein, 7, and Karim, 6.

She liked secrets. Their wedding, she said in a conspiratorial tone, was held in secret, its exact date still private.

She spent her first three months as Mrs Assad travelling through Syria with people who, to her delight, did not know who she was. She was not wearing a wedding ring. Her husband did not either. "When you meet him, you'll understand why," she said.

She wanted to tell me about Massar, the series of youth "discovery centres" she was setting up. The first Massar was in the port city of Latakia, where the Assad family came from. "Massar in Arabic means "path, destiny", and destiny is created by the choices you make. Our project is about empowering this generation of young people to become active citizens, able to be part of the change the country's going through."

I asked if we could see the ancient city of Palmyra or, if not, a museum. "That's what we're doing right now!" she said, and drove us to a museum for a meeting with a group of Italian archaeologists and the Italian ambassador. There was nothing to see there but offices.
 

On Wednesday I sat, unfed, with PR firm Brown's associate Mike Holtzman through long meetings about fund-raising for the Syria Trust. "Doesn't she stop for lunch?" I asked one of her aides. "Never," the aide said proudly. Before the next meeting sandwiches were served. I avoided the lettuce; Holtzman did not.

Asma unwittingly gave me a glimpse into the Assad way of thinking: "I told my kids yesterday there's a journalist going to be writing about me," she said. "My eldest, Hafez, asked: What's she going to say? I said I didn't know. He asked: How can you get her to write about you if you don't know what she's going to say?"

That night, Sheherazade was going out to dinner and Holtzman was in bed with food poisoning. One night I ate a bowl of stew in my hotel room and uploaded photos and reference videos to an American website. I used the ethernet cord from the bureau drawer.

The next day Sheherazade called, sounding like a very old man with a sore throat. "I ate salad last night," she said, "and I had the driver take me straight to the hospital. They pumped my stomach. It hurt my throat."

The first lady was making lunch at the presidential residence. It would be fondue, the family's favourite.
 We set off for the old apartment of Hafez al-Assad, which they had redone over five years, into three floors of modern, child-friendly open space.
 

Both Assads were in jeans and sweaters. Bashar turned out to have a neck so long that he looked like something you might glimpse breaking the water in a Scottish loch. He spoke with a slight lisp. He showed me his cameras, described the wide variety of lenses now available and showed me framed photos he'd taken on family holidays in Qatar. He didn't strike me as much of a monster.
 

And he wanted to talk. I thrust the recorder at him and asked the most innocuous question I could think of.
Why had he wanted to become an eye doctor? "Because it's never an emergency," he said. "It's very precise, and there is very little blood."

The entire back half of the apartment was glass, rising from the lower level through the main reception floor above. Other residential buildings with hundreds of windows had an unobstructed view of the Assads' doings.

Nosy neighbours, Asma said, had commented on their orange seating area. "This curiosity is good," said the president. "Even if you want to be secure, you have to choose between being secure and being ... psychotic."

Asma pulled open three boxes of fondue mix. The base of the saucepan she used was bright and brand new. The president attempted to ignite a little can of fuel gel with a match. "I've never tried it, this is the first time," he said. If this was a set, the props were well chosen: rubber boots piled by the lower-level door, a collection of completed Lego projects _ trucks, buildings, a shark, all perfect _ lining the edge of the plate-glass walls, a decorated Christmas tree.

There were no staff to be seen, no nannies, maids or cooks.

We all clustered around the table in the kitchen and dipped squares of bread into the fondue.  Assad told jokes; they weren't funny. Everyone laughed. After lunch, Asma announced we were going to Massar in Latakia.

It was December 17, 2010. In Tunisia that day, the Arab Spring began when Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old street fruit vendor, set himself on fire.
 

Asma drove us to Massar; it was sleek, well designed and looked expensive. It was also noisy and crawling with kids.  I was told they were learning "action and process" _ they had rid the city of Latakia of plastic bags and run marathons to fund a dialysis machine for the hospital.  The teenage boys had wide, unformed faces, bad haircuts, breaking voices, and used their arms to create their own territory. The girls had sloping shoulders and tapered limbs.

They all stood up when Asma came in, and then cleared their throats and pulled at their sweaters and debated and argued and proudly showed off for their first lady.
 

Massar was her gift.
 

She listened to a long debate then she rose and made an announcement.

"There isn't enough money for Massar, and this centre has to close down so that we can open another further up the coast."
 

Some kids' mouths fell open. Shoulders rose. Heads went down. Boys and girls went silent. Some cried.
 

A boy stood up.
 

The translator whispered: "He says: I understand why this should happen, but it's not fair."
 

Asma al-Assad said: "What about we fire the person who gave me this bad idea to close this centre?"
 

She spoke again, this time with a big smile. The translator relayed: "Now she's saying that this centre isn't really closing. It was just a test to see how much they cared."

It took a moment before the kids showed any joy or any relief. The little ride they'd just been on was no fun.

Back in my hotel room, I found the ethernet cable had been ripped out of my laptop so violently, the plastic tab on the end had broken off.
 

I never made it to Palmyra.
 

I attended a concert. Two hundred children sang carols, Broadway hits and Arabic rap. The president shook a little bell to Jingle Bell Rock.

I found myself in the opera house foyer with the Assads. "Do you understand now?" Asma asked, looking at her ring finger and then at her husband. "Yes," I said.

I understood nothing. That was our parting.
 

Later, I sat in the hotel bar with the French ambassador and asked what was really going on in Syria.
 

He removed the battery from my Syrian cell phone and then did the same with his. This must have set off an alert, because suddenly Sheherazade materialised in front of us.
 

"What are you doing?" she asked. "Aren't you sick?" I asked. "Go back to bed."
 

The ambassador drew maps of Syria's shifting boundaries, with dates.
 

The next day Sheherazade told me: "We don't want you to talk to the French ambassador". "You can't talk to me that way," I said. 
When I opened my laptop at the Vienna airport on the way back to  New York, an icon on the screen announced itself as the server for someone named Ali.

I arrived in New York on December 21, 2010, and quarantined the compromised laptop.
 

I watched Al Jazeera on my other computer as I transcribed. A small uprising in Algeria at the end of December was quickly quashed. In Tunisia on January 4, 2011, Mohamed Bouazizi died of his burns, and the country erupted.  I watched the protests in Lebanon, Jordan, Oman, and Saudi Arabia.

In my earpiece as I transcribed, I heard the voice of Asma al-Assad talking, on and on, about empowering children to build a civil society. I didn't want to write this piece. But I always finished what I started.

I handed in the piece on January 14, the day President Ben Ali fled Tunisia. "The Arab Spring is spreading," I told Vogue on January 21. "You might want to hold the piece."

They didn't think the Arab Spring was going anywhere, and the piece was needed for the March "Power Issue".

I got an expert to clean Ali out of the laptop. "They weren't very skilled, but they were thorough," he said.

On January 25, protesters massed in Tahrir Square. Sunni Muslims in Lebanon staged a "day of rage" against Hezbollah.

 I asked Vogue's managing editor in early February if we could meet to discuss how to handle the Assad piece. A meeting was held, without me. I was asked not to speak to the press.

On February 25, as Libyan protesters demanded an end to Gaddafi, my piece on Asma al-Assad went online at Vogue.com. They had excruciatingly headlined it A Rose In The Desert.

I was attacked as soon as it went up. How dare I write about Asma al-Assad? By describing Syria's first lady in Vogue, I had anointed her.

Syria stayed quiet until the middle of March, when a small incident set off the horrifying massacres that have now gone on for 17 months.

In a town called Daraa at the end of February, 15 children broke the country's silence. The boys, aged nine to 15, wrote "The people want to topple the regime" on the walls of their school. The police arrested them. When they had not been released after two weeks, their families staged a protest on March 15.

At a second protest, on March 18, Syrian forces fired on the crowd and killed four people.
 

The boys were released from prison. Their families saw that they had been tortured and took to the streets.
 

On March 23, a grenade was hurled into a crowd of protesters in the Daraa mosque. President Assad's forces began to kill Syrians every day.

They fired on mourners at funerals, men gathered in mosques, women and children in the street. On April 29, a chubby 13-year-old boy named Hamza Ali al-Khateeb was arrested during a protest in Saida, near Daraa. 
On May 24, Hamza's mutilated body was returned to his parents.
 

The report by Al Jazeera said: "The child had spent nearly a month in the custody of Syrian security, and when they finally returned the corpse it bore the scars of brutal torture: lacerations, bruises and burns to his feet, elbows, face, and knees. Hamza's eyes were swollen and black and there were identical bullet wounds where he had apparently been shot through both arms, the bullets tearing a hole in his sides and lodging in his belly. On Hamza's chest was a deep, dark burn mark. His neck was broken and his penis cut off."
 

Asma al-Assad had said that "Massar" meant destiny.
 

Throughout 2011 I wondered about Asma al-Assad, the woman who cared so much about the youth of Syria. How could she stand by and do nothing while the Syrian regime ate its young?
 

In May  2011, Vogue took the piece off its website. I kept my word and did not speak to the press. At the end of the year my contract was not renewed.

Last December, Bashar al-Assad told Barbara Walters the truth on ABC: "No government kills its people, unless it's run by a crazy person." 
 

I wondered what their massive apartment windows looked like now -- and whether they still lived on show to the gaze of thousands.

Was Asma locked up, or back home in London? 
 

When pictures of her appeared making charity packages with her husband or voting in a referendum, I wondered if she was drugged, compliant, indifferent, complicit.
 

Most of all, I wondered about Massar and Asma al-Assad's project to empower 6 million young Syrians to become "active citizens".
 

"Part of the change," she had said.
 

Was Asma al-Assad conscious that by empowering the children of Syria  to take charge of their destinies,  she was feeding them to her  husband's torturers?
 

What is consciousness when you are first lady of hell?
 

I will never know.