Coup in Damascus

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As the guns fell silent in Palestine following the first Arab-Israeli war, a covert war was just unfolding. Espionage and counter-espionage networks were established in Damascus and Beirut. Soon enough, an insurrection erupted in the streets of the Syrian capital, and the crowd demanded the execution of the president. Some foreign agents feared the country may turn communist, and the head of the Bank of Syria and Lebanon cabled the French capital asserting that the King of Jordan could soon be crowned King of Syria in the Umayyad Mosque. In his book, Carl Rihan reveals why, on just another spring night, armoured battalions overran the Syrian capital, how the new junta's leader went on a collision course with the region's conservative regimes, and how secret negotiations, jeopardized intelligence-gathering networks, along with a substantial dose of misunderstandings, inevitably resulted in executions, assassinations, and estrangements. From discrete escapades to the Jordanian capital, to meetings in the French Embassy in Beirut, to night couriers and arms smugglers, Coup in Damascus unravels the calculations and fears of a league of officers, politicians, diplomats, and secret agents who fought in secrecy for dominion over Syria and Lebanon. It argues for a different approach for writing the contemporary history of the Middle East, through prioritizing the internal logic of local actors and their relationship with their political and socioeconomic contexts. By bringing forth previously unstudied sources, Coup in Damascus sheds the light over an obscure episode in Syria's and Lebanon's history that still bares its bitter fruits today.