False Beards & Fabrications

The night after Syrian army leaders came home from Moscow with a promise of $100 million in arms, the Syrian army intelligence service broadcast a fantastic "communique" from Damascus. "O people!" it said, "a mean imperialist plot" has just been discovered. At least three members of the U.S. embassy staff in Syria were said to be involved. "At the helm of the conspiracy," said the Damascus radio, was Second Secretary Howard Stone, "a most skillful expert" who had "hatched" plots before in the Sudan, Iran, Guatemala. Only the day before, said the communique, "this Stone" had set up meetings in Damascus between two young Syrian officers and two Syrian "reactionaries" and promised them $300 million to "stage a coup and make peace with Israel."

Beard in Hand. On the strength of this yarn, reinforced by the charge that one of the reactionaries "carried a false beard in his hand," the Syrian government next day expelled Stone, 32, onetime Library of Congress employee who has never even been in Guatemala in his life. Also expelled: a U.S. vice consul, and--though nobody had even mentioned his name before--the U.S. military attache.

Washington, denouncing the whole fantastic plot as a "fabrication," promptly retaliated. It expelled the Syrian ambassador, Dr. Farid Zeineddine, a garrulous and haughty diplomat who has never been a State Department favorite anyway. It was the first time the U.S. has declared a chief of mission persona non grata since Robert Lansing handed the Austro-Hungarian ambassador his walking papers in 1915. The State Department also announced that U.S. Ambassador to Syria James Moose (one of only three U.S. ambassadors in the Arab world who can speak the language) would not return to his Damascus post at the end of his present home leave.

And that was about all the U.S. felt able to do last week about a gratuitous insult that rose out of a scrap among young Syrian army leftists, who currently wield power but do not have responsibility in Syria. They appear so unanimously bent on turning their country into the Middle East's first Soviet satellite that to hang a big lie on the U.S. is to score a point or two in the infighting. The army intelligence crowd, led by the mysterious left-winger, Colonel Abdel Hamid Serraj, 31, put out the plot story in an apparent effort to eliminate any opposition to the big, impoverishing arms commitment that Defense Minister Khaled el Azm had made in Moscow. The army chief of staff resigned, and General Nafif Bizri, 43, a friend of Serraj and widely regarded as a Communist, was named chief of staff. Ten high officers were kicked out of their jobs.

Going Home. In Rome, where he is the Syrian military attache, Colonel Ibrahim el Husseini, accused of being the "reactionary" plotter with a false beard, denied, that he had even been in Damascus at the time. But after several days of indecision, he announced that he would go home and face his accusers. He expressed only distaste for U.S. Middle East policies. But Syria, he said, has fallen into the hands of young officers who stand well to the left of the constituted government. "The President, the ministers and the Parliament must now stand around and wait until the small group of men running the nation have made their decisions." Those decisions were pushing Syria ever closer to the Soviet orbit.

At week's end President Shukri el Kuwatly. obviously worried about his own position, flew to Egypt to consult with his friend President Nasser, who reportedly feels that things have been going too far too fast in Syria.

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