The Baathists and Hafez

Hafez was an incredibly smart hard-fisted political operator. Henry Kissinger considered him a cunning opponent at the negotiating table. He established an intricately interwoven net of 15 security agencies, all of them tasked one way or another with monitoring and crushing dissent. We'll be referring to this tangled web of secret and not so secret police as the mukhabarat - that's the Arabic word for intelligence.