How Syria Media Advisers Decided Who Would Speak to President Assad

Last Monday, ABC’s George Stephanopoulos got the call that virtually every journalist wanted to get this week. Come to Syria, he was told, and President Bashar al-Assad will talk to you about the country’s civil war and the West’s threats to attack.

A reporter from the Russian State TV channel Rossiya 24, left, interviewed President Bashar al-Assad on Thursday in Damascus. 

The Syrian government wanted an American morning show to televise an interview with Mr. Assad on Wednesday, as a rebuttal of sorts to President Obama’s Tuesday-night address to the nation, according to ABC staff members. Mr. Assad’s previous interview, with Charlie Rose of CBS and PBS, had received international attention on Monday. So Mr. Stephanopoulos secretly flew to Beirut, Lebanon, just as Mr. Rose had before the CBS crew drove across the border to Damascus.

But Mr. Assad must have had a change of heart, because once Mr. Stephanopoulos was in Beirut, the interview was called off. Mr. Stephanopoulos returned to the United States empty-handed. (On the bright side, he quickly scored another big interview, this time for real: he sat down with Mr. Obama in Washington on Friday.)

Mr. Stephanopoulos’s 11,000-mile journey demonstrated the Syrian government’s sometimes-effective, sometimes-confounding strategy toward communicating with the West through major news media outlets. Mr. Assad’s circle of media advisers is said to include two women, Bouthaina Shaaban, a Western-educated interpreter and author who has occasionally appeared on television to defend the government, and Luna Chebel, a former Al Jazeera anchor who arranged Charlie Rose’s interview earlier last week.

David Rhodes, the president of CBS News, said Mr. Assad’s media team is small, loyal and often effective. “It’s not like they’ve hired Howard Rubenstein,” he said with a laugh, invoking the name of the famed public relations man. (The American registry of companies doing business with foreign governments shows no public relations or lobbying firms with current ties to Syria.)

Ms. Shaaban has been mostly unreachable by Western reporters since the Syrian uprising in early 2011 â€" “no contact” is how Jon Snow, a veteran anchor for Britain’s Channel 4 News, put it, much to his chagrin. But that changed shortly after reports of a massacre of civilians outside Damascus on Aug. 21. She surprised Mr. Snow by granting him a live television interview on Sept. 4.

Richard Roth, a former staff correspondent for CBS News, said of Ms. Shaaban, “I don’t know that she ever made a convincing case for Assad’s policies in any broadcast of mine, but she was swell TV: articulate, indomitable, official and â€" crucially â€" English-speaking.”

Ms. Shaaban, who has a Ph.D. in English literature from the University of Warwick in Britain, is often described as a Syrian government spokeswoman and has presented herself to reporters as, in Mr. Roth’s words, “someone who could pull strings in Syria.”

She had been a liaison for Mr. Rose’s interviews of Mr. Assad in 2006 and 2010. But when Mr. Rose returned to Damascus for the interview last weekend, Ms. Shaaban was not present, according to Jeff Fager, the chairman of CBS News, who accompanied Mr. Rose on the trip. This time it was Ms. Chebel who arranged the face time with Mr. Assad.

In the last few weeks, Mr. Assad has also spoken with reporters from newspapers in France and Russia, allowing him to influence public opinion in those two countries. But it was the interview with Mr. Rose, televised by CBS and PBS last Monday, that was the most widely picked up by the international media. The Syrian government calculated correctly that a sit-down with an interviewer like Mr. Rose would be perceived as credible and would receive universal attention.

Mr. Fager said he came away with the impression that Ms. Chebel was “a serious player” who speaks with Mr. Assad several times a day. Mr. Rose had never met her before this month’s interview.

It was important to Ms. Chebel and Mr. Assad’s other advisers that the interview be televised in its entirety somewhere, sometime. And it was â€" by PBS â€" after excerpts had been shown on “CBS This Morning,” the weekday newscast that Mr. Rose co-hosts.

Ms. Shaaban and Ms. Chebel did not respond last week to repeated interview requests.

Mr. Rose may also have had an advantage over other interviewers because his PBS program, “Charlie Rose,” is seen all over the Middle East and elsewhere through a distribution arrangement with the Bloomberg cable channel.

“It helps to be able to do unedited interviews and to have a reputation for being tough, fair, curious and informed,” Mr. Rose said.