She was working with British intelligence. Documents reveal Hafez al-Assad’s opposition to Bashar’s marriage to Asma
According to what Nayouf shared on his Facebook page, Assad Sr. assigned former military intelligence director Ali Douba to monitor Bashar while he was studying in Britain. A report dating back to 1992 stated that Asma’s mother, Sahar Al-Otri, was organizing secret meetings for Bashar with officers in British intelligence and special forces.
Nayouf pointed out that there is an archive containing dozens of documents on this subject, the most prominent of which are two documents: the first dating back to 1992, related to monitoring Bashar upon his arrival in London, and the second from 1998, dealing with the transfer of Asma al-Akhras from New York to London to take up a banking job for British intelligence.
The first document, dated 12/14/1992: Its content indicates that Bashar had lunch in a private suite in the restaurant of the Chestfield Mayfair Hotel on the afternoon of Saturday, November 21, 1992, in the company of Sahar Al-Otri (his future mother-in-law) and her daughter, Asmaa. With them was a woman named Eliza Manningham-Buller, whom the report described as the head of an important department in British domestic intelligence (MI5). About two weeks later, a private social evening took place at the home of Dr. Fawaz Al-Akhras (his future father-in-law) in the Acton neighborhood. It was attended, in addition to family members and the aforementioned lady (Eliza Buller), by Dr. Ghaith Armanazi and a number of British civilian and military figures, among whom Raymond was known. Asquith, whom the report described as an officer in the Foreign Intelligence Service (MI6) and a former head of its station in Moscow, and that he was involved in the case of recruiting and smuggling a Soviet intelligence officer (meaning the case The famous Oleg Gordievsky, which prompted the Moscow authorities to expel him in 1985). A person named John Holmes also participated in the evening, whom the report described as a senior special forces officer in the British Royal Air Force. The report indicates that the British guests, despite the social nature of the evening, asked Bashar questions regarding his position on peace with Israel and the negotiations that had begun in the summer of that year, and whether he knew Dr. Muwafaq Al-Allaf (the head of the Syrian delegation in those negotiations).
The second document dated 11/27/1998: In this report that Ali Duba submitted to Assad Sr., the officers and diplomats, who were assigned to positively monitor his son and his relations with the Al-Akhras family and their daughter, reveal that Eliza Mueller (the intelligence officer mentioned in The first document secured a job for Asma Al-Akhras at the American Morgan Bank in London, and asked her to leave the German Bank in New York and return to London to join it. Her new job in London was to monitor Asian investments, especially Chinese ones, in the chemical and pharmaceutical industries. She would have to report confidentially to someone named Colin McCall, who was then a member of the advisory board of Oxford Analytica. As the report rightly states, this person was the Director of British Foreign Intelligence Service during the period 1989-1994.
He added: “What draws attention, administratively and security-wise, in all the reports that Douba was submitting to Assad Sr. about positive monitoring of Bashar is that they were all without a number, and were limited to the dates of transmission. This means that it was not recorded in the outgoing mail records. What confirms this is that all of them were addressed with the phrase “Top Secret,” delivered by hand by the officer in charge and opened in person.” This means that an officer was charged with transmitting these private “family” reports from Doba to the Assad family. But Duba was keen to place copies of it in the division’s archive, which – as someone told me recently – the regime burned in the incinerator of the Military Intelligence Division at the Maysloun Intelligence School in the Damascus countryside after Bashar’s return from Moscow on December 1 of last year. This is what other agencies did (the National/National Security Office, the Air Force Intelligence Directorate, the General Intelligence Directorate, the Republican Palace, some civilian departments, etc.), as they burned their sensitive paper archives during the same period in the General Intelligence Directorate and the Chief of Staff incinerator, In addition to destroying the folders (external hard disks) that preserve digital documents after the automation of civil and military state institutions. (Al-Quds Al-Arabi)
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