The Cover-Up: Inside the Plot to Conceal Assad’s Crimes

The heads of the security agencies arrived in convoys of black S.U.V.s to Bashar al-Assad’s presidential palace, a maze of marble and stone on a hillside overlooking Damascus.

Leaks about his regime’s mass graves and torture facilities were mounting — and top Syrian leaders wanted them to stop. So in the fall of 2018, they summoned Mr. al-Assad’s feared security chiefs to discuss how to cover their tracks better, according to two people briefed on the meeting.

One of the security officials proposed scrubbing the identities of Syrians who died in secret prisons from their records, the two people said, recalling what participants in the meeting had told them. That way there would be no paper trail, said the official, Kamal Hassan, who ran an infamous arm of Syria’s secret police, the Palestine Branch. Mr. al-Assad’s top security chief, Ali Mamlouk, agreed to consider the suggestion.

Months after that meeting, security agencies began interfering with evidence of the regime’s crimes, an investigation by The New York Times found.

Some security officials doctored paperwork so deaths of detainees could not be traced back to the security branch in which they were imprisoned and died. Some omitted details like the number of the branch and the detainee’s identification number. And top government officials ordered security agencies to forge confessions of prisoners who had died in their custody. Written confessions, they reasoned, would give the government some legal cover for the mass deaths of detainees.

The Times reviewed thousands of pages of internal Syrian documents, including memos marked “Top Secret,” many of which we photographed inside Syria’s most notorious security branches after rebels toppled the Assad government last year. Many of those security branches — which were known by their numbers — housed prisons inside their facilities.

Thank you for your patience while we verify access. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.