Syria Makes Overture To U.S. -- Washington TimesSyria is reorganizing its foreign intelligence operations and sidelining officials with unsavory pasts in an effort by President Bashar al-Assad to consolidate control and improve Syria's relations with the United States, Middle East specialists and former and current U.S. officials say.
Richard Norton, a Levant specialist at Boston University, former CIA counterterrorism chief Vincent Cannistraro and two serving U.S. intelligence officials who asked not to be named because they are not authorized to talk to the press told The Washington Times that the task of overseeing Syria's foreign intelligence operations has been transferred from the heavy-handed military intelligence agency, known as the Mukhabarat, to Syria's General Intelligence Agency (GI), which formerly handled domestic matters and now oversees relations with the United States and Saudi Arabia.
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My Comment: For as long as I can remember, news reports that the Syrian Government wants to get closer to the West gets circulated every year or two. But with each news cycle, there is also a followup of demands and conditions from Syria that the U.S. and most Western nations do not find acceptable.
I expect the same thing to happen when this current flow of news comes to an end.