U.S. Secretary of State Rex Tillerson is meeting with his Russian counterpart Sergey V. Lavro on Wednesday in Moscow. Relations between the two countries are tense, especially after the White House accused the Kremlin of trying to cover for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's role in the deadly chemical weapons attack on civilians. The Trump administration says there's "no question" that a future Syria will have a leader other than Assad running the government, but exactly how that transition will occur remains to be seen.
In fact, as Syrian Independence Day approaches on April 17, it's worth recalling the time that the CIA secretly provided moral support to Syrian Army Chief of Staff Col. Husni Zaim, who pulled off a coup d'état on March 30, 1949, overthrowing Shukri al-Quwatli—the country's first elected president who led the drive for Syrian independence—and establishing a military dictatorship.
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The agency had only been created in 1947, so "it was one of the first covert actions that the CIA pulled off," according to Douglas Little, professor of history at Clark University.
Elected in 1943, Quwatli had come from an elite family that owned land in Damscus and traded with Saudi Arabia.
Quwatli had changed the constitution to allow himself a second term, so already Syria was moving towards dictatorship, and on top of that, his agenda was at odds with that of President Harry S. Truman's administration. Quwatli was blocking a big American oil project—the route through Syria required for the Trans-Arabian Pipe Line (TAPLINE) from Saudi Arabia to the Mediterranean—because of the Arab-Israeli conflict happening at the time, argues Joshua Landis, Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. In the immediate aftermath of the The Arab-Israeli War of 1948, the U.S. wanted to broker a truce between the Arabs and new Israeli government. Syria was one of the governments most resistant to a truce, as Quwatli was anti-Israel, and it had gone to war in order to keep Palestine. But it lost. Syria was "furious" that America voted for the U.N. resolution calling for Palestine to be partitioned by between Arabs and Jews on November 29, 1947.
Quwatli "wouldn’t have blocked the pipeline for any other reason because they wanted the money," argues Landis, "but Syria was furious that America was helping the Jews expel two-thirds of Palestinians and turn them into refugees that were coming to Syria [in addition to Israel's border countries Jordan and Lebanon]." The influx of Palestinian refugees caused overcrowding to the point where schools in Damascus couldn’t start in the fall because they were filled with too many Palestinian refugees, according to Landis.
America was in the process of setting up a training mission to reshape the Syrian army and provide it with arms. " Quwatli thought the training mission would be the perfect pretext for firing officers he (believed were plotting to overthrow him) and to purge the military of many of the officers recruited from the 'minority communities' by the French, officers, whose loyalty he distrusted," says Landis. "He hoped to use the American training mission as cover for this purge and to build up the moral and loyalty of the officer corps more generally."
America dropped all this help to Syria, placed an arms embargo, and made sure European nations wouldn’t give the country any arms either. "The diaries of Adil Arslan , the guy who wanted to be minister of defense, say that the moment they got this letter saying Americans wouldn’t help them with their military mission, he proposed to Quwatli that they go to the Soviet Union to get arms, which was the beginning of Syria's relationship with Russia," says Landis.
"Syria got off on the wrong track with America because it had invaded Palestine," argues Joshua Landis, Director of the Center for Middle East Studies at the University of Oklahoma. "Everyone blamed Quwatli for this lost war in Palestine. This led to chaos in the streets and wide spread public anger and demonstrations by the many emerging political parties in Syria. Quwatli declared emergency law, put the army on the streets to beat up the demonstrators and make them shut up. But then he tried to dismiss Zaim, the head of the army, accusing him of corruption and the loss of Palestine—at which point, the army, feeling like it was unfairly treated and being used as a scapegoat."
The tension between Quwatli and the Syrian army has to do with the internal politics that existed when the France left in 1946. He was one of the so-called wealthy, land-owning merchant class of Sunni urban notables who dominated politics. By contrast, "The French built the army with what Quwatli perceived as disloyal Syrians because the French had to put down a nationalist uprising in Syria, and the people who volunteered to fight in the army didn’t mind shooting at wealthy nationalists in the cities," says Landis. "The army provided an avenue for the underprivileged to get three square meals a day, carry a gun, be a somebody, and Alawites stormed into the army in big numbers because they were the poorest of the poor in the country." Thus, the coup was partly the army's way of showing it could fend for itself and didn't have to listen to the wealthy, land-owning elites.
Ziam assured the CIA that if the country recognized his government when he took power, he would fulfill America's agenda on oil and the Arab-Israeli conflict. Horrified that Syria went to Russia for arms, America appears to have agreed to "pull off the coup to get Syria to align with Israel," as Landis puts it.Beginning in November 1948, CIA operative Stephen Meade met secretly with Zaim at least six times to discuss the “possibility [of an] army supported dictatorship," declassified records now show. And Zaim kept his promise. After overthrowing Quwatli, he agreed to a truce with Israel, the pipeline across Syria, and arrested hundreds of communists and banned the political party, compared to the democratically-elected Quwalti, who, in America's view, should have been trying to block its rise.
The coup puts the army in control, which is made up of a lot of Alawite minorities. "This is the beginning of opening the way for Alawite rule, which is Assad rule," Landis says, referring to when Bashar al-Assad's father Hafez al-Assad, assumed power in 1970-1 and consolidates power around his family. "The reason there is a civil war today is because much of the Sunni majority rose up in protest and wanted to get rid of this Alawite military dictatorship. (The regime ordered the security forces to) shoot at the demonstrators and demonstrators got arms and began to ask America and the Gulf countries, which were trying to counter Iranian and Shiite influence in the Arab World for assistance and America helped them.”
One aspect of discussions over the events of the 1949 coup revolves around whether it made sense to overthrow democratic institutions to get these short-term benefits because, the long run, the coup is thought to have fostered anti-American sentiment and exacerbated the ethnic and religious sectarian problems and political instability that continue to this day.
In 1956, Syria signed a friendship agreement with the USSR. The U.S. attempted a coup in 1957.
"The coup attempt was not to get Syria to align with Israel, but to align with the West against the USSR," says Landis. "T he US did this because they needed arms to face Israel. The U.S. refused to sell them arms so long as they had not signed peace agreements with Israel. Washington feared that they would both use those arms against Israel."
It would be much harder for America to pull off a coup as secretly as it did during the Cold War. As Little summs up the difference between the political situation then compared to now: "Syria had weak political institutions, and b eing newly independent from France after World War II , it had no strong external patron. What's different now is that Assad has got a strong, external patron in Russia."