The following is a transcript of an interview with Roger Carstens, Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs, on “Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan” which aired on December 22, 2024.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Roger Carstens is the presidential special envoy for hostage affairs, and he’s joining us now from Amman, Jordan. This was a high-risk visit to Damascus, the first since the fall of the Assad regime. Why was it important to be face to face and go?
ROGER CARSTENS, SPECIAL PRESIDENTIAL ENvoy FOR HOSTAGE ISSUE: Margaret, thank you for having me today. You know, I think it was important because we’ve been in the area since about December 9th, shortly after the fall of Damascus and the departure of the Assad regime. We flew to Beirut, later we flew back to Amman, and our job has been really to cast a wide net to work with partners, allies, NGOs and even members of the media to try to cast that wide net to find places that we believe Austin Tice may have been in custody for the past 12 years. But there is something about coming face to face with the people who have been searching, and certainly something about coming face to face with the provisional authorities to determine what has been seen, to what extent they’ve cleaned up these sites and you might find bits of information that you won’t get by phone or email.
MARGARET BRENNAN: You told reporters that you were surprised by the number of secret prisons that Bashar al-Assad had, more than 40 of them. Have these prisons been searched, and do you know if reporter Austin Tice was held there?
WITH. CARSTENS: So I won’t be surprised to find that there are prisons that have yet to be discovered and searched. I think obviously a lot of them have been, not only by the general public, but by members of this conglomeration of people who are on the lookout and looking for not just Austin Tice, but people like Majd Kamalmaz and others americans that have disappeared So if another, I would say, we discover another underground prison compound even tomorrow or three days from now or three weeks from now, I won’t be surprised at this point. I would say that if anything surprises me, it’s just the amount of prisons. I mean, you’d almost think that if you ran a country and wanted to imprison your enemies, you’d have a prison, and it wouldn’t be secret. But having like 35 or 40 secret prisons, I find that horrifying, disturbing and yet somehow fascinating. But really, the bottom line is that we have to help, or rather work with our interim authorities, officials, to make sure that we do a good search so that one day I can look Debra Tice in the eye and tell them that our the research has been – it has been exhaustive. Now, in a perfect world, we would find Austin Tice. I think I’ve gone in numerous times saying that I think he’s alive and waiting for you to find him. And the president not long ago said he believes Austin is alive. Our job in the US government is to keep pushing and pushing and pushing to find out Austin’s location, his disposition, his condition, and bring him home.
MARGARET BRENNAN: You refer to them as provisional authorities. Ahmed al-Sharaa, the head of HTS, also known as Mohammad al-Jolani, was described by State Department officials as “very pragmatic” in these meetings today, but his group and himself still they are technically designated as terrorists under US law. for previous affiliation with Al Qaeda. Do you trust that they are being useful in the US now?
WITH. CARSTENS: So, Margaret, I’m — I’m not one of the people who make some of these decisions, that’s done by people who spend years perfecting it. Most of them are lawyers, and I wasn’t smart enough to get a law degree. But what I can tell you is that we have been treated well in terms of our research. I’ve been talking to them for, I mean almost, probably nine or ten days, and they’ve been helpful in doing the research. They definitely came in handy today. We did a joint search for a facility that we all thought would probably have some kind of connection to Austin Tice. So I understand of course his past. What I can tell you for sure is that right now they are being helpful in the search for Austin.
MARGARET BRENNAN: So today you did a joint search with HTS of a prison. Do you think that’s where Austin was being held?
WITH. CARSTENS: You know, Margaret, we’ve had a lot of information over the last 12 years that pointed to a variety of facilities. And after 12 years, we created a priority list of about six places, and of those six places, we thought we had the highest probability of having Austin at one time. But really, the long run, I guess I’d say the best way to describe it is that we’re not sure. You know, you can get information out of Syria, which to some extent has been a black box in terms of gathering information on Austin, and with all the things, I guess I would say the reports are overlapping, it’s clear that some places have a higher probability than others. And that, with the time we had on the ground, seemed to be our best shot. So we gave it a good look. We’ll review all the information and evidence we’ve gathered and hopefully make more decisions about the likelihood, but really, our job is to keep looking. You know, sometimes it takes a while to determine if the information is valid or not. And when we get down to the hard work of checking that, but of all the places we could have looked at, of the forty prisons that we’ve identified, and of the six priority prisons, we went to the one that we thought had the best chance of giving- us some kind of evidence that Austin had been there.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Assad’s intelligence ministries were known for scrupulously keeping detailed records, counting prisoners, living and dead. Do these records still exist? Have you gone through them for evidence of Austin and the Virginia doctor you mentioned, Majd Kamalmaz?
WITH. CARSTENS: So we have had the opportunity to find several documents, or I would even say file folders, that contain information. Again, in the joint search we did today with the provisional authorities, we came across numerous documents. This will have to be returned. It will need to be translated from Arabic to English. And sometimes these documents have evidence of it. They may have fingerprints, they may have DNA traces. So, we are still in the, I would say the research phase, but the bottom line is that we have found some documents. We look at them carefully.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And that was a search that you did in conjunction with JSOC special operators?
WITH. CARSTENS: I’d never like to talk about who I was with, but I’ll tell you this. He was with members of the FBI. The hostage recovery fusion cell takes precedence in such cases. My office SPEHA is involved because of the diplomatic angle and aspect. So today, on the ground, we were working with members of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, people who are experts in looking at crime scenes, and they did a wonderful job sweeping it up, using all their skills and talents and abilities to to bear, to find the right documents that could make sense to gather the evidence that they believed could give us more security. But that’s… I’ll probably just leave it at that. We were with members of the law enforcement community, the FBI and I think they were the ones who were able to give us that good look that we wouldn’t have otherwise.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Debra Tice, Austin’s mother, sent a letter that was made public to the Israeli prime minister, asking the Israeli military to stop bombing prisons, because she believed her son might be in a d they Has this bombing complicated the search?
WITH. CARSTENS: I would say that, as far as I know, no. Now I may not have a complete picture. You talked earlier about the dis- or the difference between being in Beirut and talking to people on the phone and texting, WhatsApp, signal messages, or being in Amman and doing the same thing. When you get down on the ground and get face to face, you can suck in or suck in a lot more information. From the information I’ve received, the bombing hasn’t really hindered any of Austin’s search efforts. However, I wouldn’t want to be too firm about it because there are bits of information that I may not have.
MARGARET BRENNAN: This was not your first trip to Damascus. I know you went there in 2020 under the leadership of then-President Donald Trump-Trump, along with Kash Patel. The regime at the time never admitted to the United States that they had Austin Tice. Do you think they were lies then, and that the regime did have it?
WITH. CARSTENS: Well, what I can tell you is that the regime, when we spoke to them in 2020, issued maximalist demands. They- they asked for the world. They didn’t really give anything. They never admitted to having Austin Tice. They never promised to give us any proof of life, POL, as we call it. They basically asked a lot and said, if we- the United States could hand over everything, they might be willing to have a discussion about this, this person we’re asking, or to talk about our interests. At that time, they didn’t even mention his name. So they weren’t, they were asking a lot and giving almost nothing, and that made the conversations very frustrating. I would say that at some point we came across information and that, as President Biden and Secretary of State Tony Blinken pointed out, led us to believe that at one point, the Syrian government actually had Austin Tice. Did they have it – did they have it all the way? This is information we are still trying to sort out. But at one point, we’re pretty sure the regime took Austin Tice into custody.
MARGARET BRENNAN: And before I let you go, the family of Dr. Majd Kamalmaz was informed by American intelligence that his father probably died while in captivity. Is there any reason for them to keep waiting? Did you discover anything about him?
WITH. CARSTENS: I would say if I were in his shoes, I would always want to push for — until I get something that’s very conclusive. And my role is: being part of the US government, my job is to pursue-pursue as rigorously as possible, the truth. And my- I would probably tell the family, and I actually have, I- I’ve met the family numerous times, I’ve been to their house, I’ve had the opportunity to- to break bread with them. And I always tell them that no matter what Majd’s condition is, one day we will bring him home. I think if I were in the shoes of the family, I would always hope that he was alive. I think the US government has been firm, at least with the information they’ve been able to provide about his condition. But regardless, we will continue to follow Majd’s case. And one day, at some point, I think we’ll be able to drop it and take it home.
MARGARET BRENNAN: Roger Carstens. I know it has been a very long day and a very long effort. Thanks for sharing details with us.
WITH. CARSTEN: Margaret. Thank you for having me.
MARGARET BRENNAN: “Face the Nation” will be back in a minute. stay with us