MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Austin Tice is an American journalist who went missing in Syria more than 14 years ago. A former Marine and Georgetown Law student, Tice had gone to Syria to report on the civil war there. Then, right after his 31st birthday, he vanished. Ever since, he's been one of the highest profile missing persons in the world. Now, a new podcast series from the BBC and NPR's Embedded investigates what happened to him. It's called Where Is Austin Tice? Reporter Josh Baker worked on the series alongside his colleague, Sara Obeidat. Josh, hi there.
JOSH BAKER: Hi. Thanks for having me.
KELLY: I want to pick up this story at a moment when it seemed like if we were ever going to really crack where is Austin Tice, this was it. This is December 2024, and Bashar al-Assad, the longtime Syrian president, has just been toppled by rebels. He has fled to Russia. Syrians are out in the streets celebrating. Syrian prisoners are also walking out of prisons for the first time in many years. And you decide to go to Syria. What did you find?
BAKER: Yeah, I mean, it was this - it's very hard to describe what it was like. I mean, imagine a country that suddenly has no police, no army. You can walk into their most secretive intelligence facilities. You could walk into their equivalent of MI6. And before coming, I'd been leaked this folder, which had coordinates of every location that Austin was supposedly held at. So we began searching those locations for about a month, and we didn't find Austin.
KELLY: No. But you find a file, a safe.
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BAKER: Yes. Oh, my God, it's the key. It's the key. I've done it. I've done it. Oh, my God, it's open. Oh, my God. We found Austin's file.
KELLY: So that's you narrating, Josh, in real time. What was it? What'd you find?
BAKER: So we got to one intelligence facility, and inside a locked safe, which we have to find the keys for to get inside, we open it up and we find Austin Tice's secret Syrian intelligence file. This was never meant to be seen by the public. And within that, we were able to prove for the first time that Austin was definitively held by the Syrian regime.
KELLY: You also, tell me if it was in that file or somewhere else, but just the sequence of things starts becoming more clear. For example, it had long been thought that Austin had been taken at a checkpoint. You found that wasn't the case.
BAKER: Yeah, there was a lot of, like, speculation, how had he disappeared.
KELLY: Yeah.
BAKER: And a lot of people felt like it was possibly by accident. We started looking into it, and what we discovered was there was a almost, like, concerted conspiracy that lasted for more than a month, where they followed Austin, they watched who he met, they watched what he was doing. And when the moment came, they took him, which was actually just after his birthday. And so he wasn't taken by chance. It was an intelligence operation that had been created to grab him that we've been told was sanctioned by the president himself, Bashar al-Assad.
KELLY: So stay with Assad. The U.S. government had been negotiating with him, with other Syrian officials for years, trying to get Austin Tice home. It obviously didn't work. I want to play a little bit of - this is what a man named Imad Mustafa told you. He was one of the negotiators on behalf of President Assad.
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IMAD MUSTAFA: It's amazing how interested the U.S. was in the fate of Austin. But it also confirmed what everybody in Syria thought - that Austin Tice was not just an ordinary journalist who came and disappeared in Syria.
BAKER: What do you mean by that?
MUSTAFA: With all this interest in Austin Tice, incredible interest, he must be a very important CIA operative.
KELLY: A very important CIA operative. For the record, did you find any evidence that Austin Tice was anything other than what he said he was, a journalist?
BAKER: Austin is absolutely not a CIA operative. He doesn't have the trade craft or things you would expect from a spy. And as his mother put it to me, Austin farts and calls everyone and tells them he's done it. He can't keep a secret. He's not somebody that is geared towards that. I think what the Syrians found is they found it very strange the level of attention and effort by the U.S. to try and get hold of him. And they thought, well, he must be something more than just a journalist.
KELLY: I mean, up to the very top of U.S. presidents, starting with Barack Obama...
BAKER: Hundred percent.
KELLY: ...Every single one has said, we're trying to get this person home.
BAKER: And there were other U.S. detainees. But Austin got the most attention of any of them.
KELLY: So I want to get to what we know about who detained Austin and why. The men who detained him we think were part of a militia, a militia called the NDF, which was loyal to Assad. It was funded by Iran. Some of the most senior members of the NDF are - now live outside Syria, some are in Iran. They have not faced justice. Have you been able to get to them or find out who they are, what they knew?
BAKER: Yeah, so we basically started hunting for everyone that had had contact with Austin or been around him, and we were particularly interested in somebody called Bassam al-Hassan. He was one of Assad's sort of right-hand men. We tracked him and found him in Lebanon. Now, this person is a wanted war criminal. He's wanted for crimes against humanity. And what we discovered was that he appears to be in the payroll of the CIA and FBI and Lebanese authorities and being harbored and protected there. So the very man that you would expect to be brought to justice is currently being protected by the entities that should be arresting him.
KELLY: There's so many threads to this, and I hope everyone goes to listen to the podcast. I want to ask, like, what does the CIA, what did the FBI have to say about all of this? But let me turn you back to just - this is a story about a person and the family who have been waiting and trying to get him home. You mentioned Austin's mom, Debra Tice, who has been relentless in trying to draw attention to his case, relentless in trying to get him home. I know this firsthand. I have also interviewed her and Austin's father. It fell to you to tell her what you're reporting turned up.
BAKER: It was very difficult. Debra and I spent about 9 hours together walking through everything that we'd learned. Not only her, though, I also spoke to his six siblings and the father, as well. And it's not a definitive conclusion, but it does give Debra sort of the first proper detailed account of what may have happened to her son. And it's very clear when you listen to the last episode and you hear that, you can sort of see her, if you will, processing it in real time.
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DEBRA TICE: And is that the end of the story? Like, there's nothing else?
BAKER: That's what we're up to so far. If that is the case, would it bring closure to you for this?
TICE: I don't know how to answer that question. I'm not going to accept this until I'm ready to accept this.
BAKER: It's one of the most difficult conversations I've ever had in my career.
KELLY: I can imagine. And what was the headline or what you told her? What happened to Austin Tice?
BAKER: So we can't be definitive, but we are pretty fairly confident that Austin was likely killed in January of 2013. And so then the question becomes, how did everyone come to believe that he was alive for so long, more than a decade? Now, look, it's not definitive and his family wouldn't want it to believe that it is, but it is the clearest account that's ever been there of what might have happened to Austin.
KELLY: I can't wait to listen to the whole thing. Josh Baker, thank you for coming and sharing all your reporting with us.
BAKER: Thank you.
KELLY: Josh Baker, investigative reporter and host of NPR's Where Is Austin Tice? That's a new podcast from the BBC and NPRs Embedded. You can listen to it by searching for Embedded in the NPR App.
(SOUNDBITE OF BROWN BIRD'S "SHADRACH") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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