Of Hate & Espionage

The Attassi Case, which started as just another televised Damascus spy thriller to the accompaniment of John Philip Sousa marches, came to a jarring finale last week. In the chill of dawn, naturalized U.S. Citizen Farhan Attassi, 37, was hanged in Damascus' Al Marjah Square. Attached to the white robe customary for a condemned criminal was a large poster stating the verdict. For seven hours the limp body swayed on the gibbet, watched by curious crowds, before it was cut down and taken away for burial. On the same day, Attassi's cousin and alleged accomplice in spying for the U.S., Syrian Lieut. Colonel Abdel Muin Hakemi, 43, was shot in the courtyard of a Damascus army barracks.

Hate Campaign. The Syrians charged that Attassi had obtained from Hakemi eleven shells of a new Soviet antiaircraft gun of the Syrian armed forces and had handed them over to Walter Snowdon, second secretary of the U.S. embassy in Damascus, who was expelled (TIME, Feb. 26). Washington denied the spy charges, but not very hard. Instead, the U.S. concentrated on protesting Syria's brutal treatment of Attassi. Before going to trial, he had been tortured by electricity, beaten, brainwashed and starved. U.S. officials were not allowed to see him in jail, he was not provided with legal counsel, and only carefully edited portions of his secret trial had been televised.

Syria's shaky Baath Socialist government seems determined to outdo Nasser in its hate campaign against America. Daily, the press, radio and television vilify the U.S. for what Information Minister Mashhour Zeitoun calls "America's policy of sabotage and espionage" in Syria. Attassi, although he was nephew of one of Syria's former Presidents and a cousin of Noureddin Attassi, the second-ranking man in the present Baath government, had to be hanged as a warning to all agents of "imperialism, capitalism and Zionism." In this atmosphere of hysteria, the $100 million in aid that the U.S. has extended to Syria since 1959 counts for little.

Indignant Denial. Barely was Attassi disposed of when Syria's military tribunal announced another espionage case in the offing. Billed as the master agent was Elie Cohn, an Egyptian Jew who stands accused--with no fewer than 63 accomplices, including 17 women--of spying for Israel. In neighboring Lebanon, Beirut's violently anti-Baath newspaper Al Moharren reported that Cohn had passed himself off as a Syrian expatriate millionaire named Kamel Amin Tabet, and had become a close friend of Baathist President General Amin Hafez by bankrolling his party's activities. Cohn-Tabet became a member of Baath's top leadership and broadcast coded messages to Israel over Damascus radio during programs directed at Syrians living abroad.

Syria's regime indignantly denied that a Jew could have become a top Baath leader but conceded that for years Cohn-Tabet has been passing Syrian secrets to the Israelis. According to one rumor, he was on the closest terms with three of the five members of the military court that is about to try him.

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