suhail hamoud remembers when his Free
Syrian Army (fsa) brigade got its first arms ship-
ment from the cia. The delivery, made along the
Turkey-Syria border in January 2014, included
24 pickups and six large trucks full of weaponsand ammunition. Most of it was Russian-made
mortars, artillery shells, and heavy machine guns.
But what caught his eye were the tow (tube-
launched, optically tracked, wireless-guided) anti-tank missiles, the only American-made weapons
in the load. Hamoud had been an anti- tank
The Secret War
Hamoud used
cia-supplied
missiles to
take out Syrian
government
tanks.specialist in President Bashar al-Assad’s special forces before
he defected in 2012, and he had never seen these weapons in
Syria before. The opposition occasionally captured Russian-
made anti-tank missiles from regime troops or bought them
on the black market for $110,000 each. If the cia’s shipments
kept coming, it would be the first steady supply of anti-tank
weapons to the anti-Assad opposition. With these, they
could hold back the regime’s well-equipped ground forces.
It might even change the course of the conflict.
In the early years of the Syrian civil war, the cia had
assisted Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Jordan in their efforts
to arm the anti-government rebels. But in late 2013, the
Obama administration decided to start sending weap-
ons and ammunition directly. The cia operation was
dubbed Timber Sycamore. It would cost $1 billion, one
of the agency’s most expensive programs since arming
Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s.
Initially, the Obama administration had hoped the
war would lead to what Alexander Bick, the director for
Syria at the National Security Council, called a “wholesale
renova tion of the government,” in which Syrians friendly
to the United States would come together to shape a new
government in Damascus. But as the war expanded and
more Islamist groups joined the opposition, that idea
became “extremely worrying,” according to Bick. “We did
not want a military victory by the opposition,” he recalls.
Former officials say the White House hoped to press the
Syrian government and the rebels into a stalemate, forc-
ing them into UN-led negotiations in which the United
States and Russia would have a high degree of influence.
Until then, the United States would provide aid to the
rebels, but it would also try to “fine-tune and calibrate