Inside Assad’s secret police headquarters: Reporter’s notebook

The Stasi Museum in East Berlin is amazing, not least because it’s the actual former headquarters of East Germany’s secret police. You can go into the actual offices where files on millions of East German citizens were stored. Into the cells where dissidents were kept. You can walk the halls where those at the very center of a sinister police state spied on, intimidated and planned violence against their own people.

That’s what we did Friday in Damascus, Syria. Except we were in one of the most notorious divisions of the Syrian intelligence services.

It was called Branch 235, and its job was to spy not only on the general population but on the other parts of government as well.

The power of the Assad regime was the paranoia it planted in the minds of everyone who worked for the state. No one knew who to trust and anyone could be taken at any moment, resulting in guaranteed absolute fealty to the Assads. Until it wasn’t.

In the burned-out building, we come across a room full of files still intact. A file for each person the regime had spied on.

I open one file – a simple green document wallet – and find it to be on a colonel in the Syrian army. The cover note advises “Continue monitoring his behaviour, because he’s acting suspiciously.” It is like reading a spy novel. Except this is real life. The file is dated 2015 – the height of the protest movement against the government and when regime paranoia would have been at its highest. Behind the cover note, page after page of reports from informants on this one man.

We find multiple other files, all on individual soldiers, with very detailed observations. The regime fell so quickly and the looting and burning followed with such ferocity, that much of the evidence of Assad’s crimes is lost. But in this one room, saved from the fire that had burned much else, we got a small glimpse into Assad’s system of fear.

In the courtyard, we meet Mohammad, a former prisoner who is taking his chances and coming back to the cell he was held in 12 years ago. We walk together down into the basement, and he shows me where he was kept.

Tiny, coffin-like cells that four men were made to share. We see the simple games scratched into the wall where detainees had tried to pass the time. I recognize Tic-Tac-Toe. We trace the poetry written on the back of one of the doors, “I’m scared to die, my love, without seeing you again,” says the Arabic verse, scratched into the black paintwork.

I ask Mohammad how he feels being back. He smiles. “I can breathe now,” he says.