Word: assads
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...came a seemingly offhand bombshell. Said Berri: "We are prepared to hand the kidnaped persons over to a Western embassy, Swiss or French, whichever they (U.S. officials) choose." Alternatively, he said, Amal might "send the airplane with all the hostages to Damascus." Berri attached one giant condition: Syrian President Assad, or whoever else took custody of the Americans, would have to pledge not to set them free until all Lebanese prisoners in Atlit had been released by Israel. In Washington, White House Chief of Staff Donald Regan was awakened at about 3:30 a.m. by a call from the White...
...ally, Washington was anxious to get the hostages out of Beirut and into Damascus, where the U.S. has a well-staffed embassy that would be dealing with a full-fledged government. (The Lebanese government, in which Berri is Minister of Justice, exists to a great extent only on paper.) Assad had been in contact with both Shultz and Reagan and promised to try to play a helpful role. Since his troops occupy strategic portions of Lebanon, he has influence with all factions in that nation's internal wars...
...Assad managed to extract an important clarification from each side. No happier than France or Switzerland to act as a warden over U.S. prisoners, he - persuaded Berri to stop demanding that the hostages remain in Syria until all of Israel's detainees were released. Conversely, from Washington he won an assurance that those detainees would be granted their freedom. Ironically, in the same Friday speech that evidently angered Berri, Reagan carefully reaffirmed that fact. "Israel had always intended to release them and had made that very clear," said the President...
Although it would run into unexpected delays, the arrangement had been settled on by Friday night. Assad by then had emerged as the intermediary who would take custody of the hostages from Berri and quickly set them free. Berri had agreed to hand over the Americans without any prior or even simultaneous release of the prisoners in Atlit. That would save face for the U.S. and Israel; both countries had insisted that any outright swap would constitute a payoff for terrorism. It was assumed that Israel would begin "unilaterally" setting the Atlit prisoners free as soon as the American hostages...
...first heads of state Ronald Reagan cabled for assistance in the TWA hostage standoff was not a trusted ally of the U.S. but a frequent diplomatic adversary, Syrian President Hafez Assad. As a Soviet-armed Arab state sharing a tense 50-mile border with Israel, Syria rarely, if ever, sees eye to eye with Washington on Middle East policy. But the Administration was betting that in the current crisis U.S. interests converged in many ways with Assad's. By agreeing last week to act as the mediator in the release of 39 U.S. hostages from their Lebanese Shi'ite Muslim...