For Years, U.S. Collected Tips About Austin Tice’s Disappearance in Syria

Nongovernmental workers and journalists have scoured prisons for clues about his fate in the absence of an official American presence in the country.

For years, the United States has collected tips about the whereabouts of Austin Tice, an American journalist who was abducted in Syria in 2012, briefly escaped and then vanished in that country’s gruesome prison system.

The list is long. A notorious security complex known as Branch 235, or Palestine Branch, where he was possibly held in solitary confinement. Sednaya prison’s Wing C. An underground facility in Latakia Province. Some of the most recent information about Mr. Tice indicated that he was in the basement of a Syrian Air Force Intelligence building.

After the Assad government collapsed this month, nongovernment organizations and journalists began scouring prisons and other secret sites for signs of Mr. Tice as the United States tries to aid the search with no official presence in the country.

The rebels who now control Syria have promised to help find Mr. Tice. But documents holding potential clues remain untouched at prisons and military locations in Damascus, or they were destroyed.

“We need to get in there and run down all possible leads,” said Andrew J. Tabler, who was the director for Syria on the U.S. National Security Council in 2019. “Of course they wrote all this stuff down. You’re going to find tons of stuff.”

“They wrote everything down,” he added. “It’s a sick regime.”

Former Syrian officials who were possibly involved in Mr. Tice’s abduction and captivity have fled along with others who could provide information. Syria’s ousted president, Bashar al-Assad, and key aides escaped to Russia. The location of others remains unknown.

Mr. Tice’s disappearance in Syria has frustrated administrations hoping to win his freedom. At each turn, their questions about Mr. Tice have been met with silence.

President Biden has pledged to bring Mr. Tice home, and the United States is in direct contact with the Syrian rebel group Hayat Tahrir al-Sham, which overthrew the government.

The United States cut off diplomatic relations with the Syrian government and shut down its embassy in Damascus in 2012. The U.S. government designated Hayat Tahrir al-Sham a terrorist organization in 2014 and still has a $10 million bounty for information about its leader.

The State Department said last week that Roger D. Carstens, the special presidential envoy for hostage affairs, had traveled to the Middle East. But Mr. Carstens, a retired Special Forces lieutenant colonel, is in Amman, Jordan, despite Mr. Biden’s promise to do everything possible to bring Mr. Tice home.

“No, there is no one there; there is no one on the way,” Matthew Miller, the State Department spokesman, said on Monday. “We will continue to assess the situation and when we decide it’s appropriate to send personnel in, I’ll come out and make an announcement about it.”

While the Biden administration remains on the sidelines, reporters and others now in the country are trying to find the prisons and negotiating to get into them. The New York Times has searched a handful of sites but found no signs of Mr. Tice.

Investigators learned at one point he might have been taken to a military intelligence site known as Branch 248.

Times journalists examined the location and another also on the list known as Branch 215. Both have offices upstairs and detention facilities or cells in the basement. The cells were cramped, dark and damp, with gray wool blankets scattered around and writing — mostly praying to God for relief — scrawled on the walls in soap. Both also had small solitary confinement cells the size of a closet. Mice and cockroaches scampered about. The air smelled of sewage, and feces were smeared across the floors and walls.

Some of the most recent reporting about Mr. Tice involved the nondescript Syrian Air Force Intelligence building, but no clues were found there. Inside was an industrial paper shredder.

Investigators believe that Mr. Tice might have been lured to Damascus and abducted by Syrian government forces in August 2012. A month later, Mr. Tice appeared blindfolded in a video that shows masked men with assault rifles. Looking scared and disheveled, he spoke part of a prayer in Arabic and uttered a few words in English before vanishing.

Former American officials believe that the video was a crude ploy to blame militants for his abduction.

Several weeks after he was captured, former and current U.S. officials believe that Mr. Tice managed to escape through a window of a prison cell but was caught by Syrian intelligence — possibly by Branch 215, which handled foreigners as well as Syrians.

Mr. Carstens has spent years trying to unravel the Tice mystery. In 2020, he traveled to Damascus and met with Ali Mamlouk, then Syria’s feared intelligence chief. Mr. Carstens was accompanied by Abbas Ibrahim, who was the head of Lebanon’s general security service, and Kash Patel, President-elect Donald J. Trump’s current choice to run the F.B.I.

Mr. Mamlouk was pleasant but revealed nothing about the case. He said if the United States lifted sanctions and pulled American troops out of the country then the Syrians would be willing to discuss the matter, according to former U.S. officials familiar with the episode.

Less public efforts have also taken place. During the Biden administration, F.B.I. agents met with Mr. al-Assad’s father-in-law hoping for more information. To encourage him to talk, the United States unfroze a bank account with a small sum of money that had been placed under sanctions. It essentially amounted to a good-will gesture, but the United States received little in return.

Former officials said the Syrians might have been suspicious of Mr. Tice because he was a former U.S. Marine.

Some Americans held by Syria’s government were released, such as Kevin Patrick Dawes in 2016 and Sam Goodwin in 2019. Mr. Dawes was known as an adventurer, and Mr. Goodwin was a traveler.

Others were killed.

This spring, the family of Majd Kamalmaz learned he was dead. Mr. Kamalmaz, a therapist from Texas, disappeared while visiting Syria in 2017.

Layla Shweikani, an American aid worker, was arrested and executed in 2016. The Justice Department is investigating her killing as a war crime carried out by Syrian intelligence officials.