Walters Slips Quietly Into Syria for Meeting With President Assad

President Hafez Assad met on Monday with veteran U.S. envoy Vernon A. Walters, who arrived quietly in Damascus from Moscow for talks on U.S.-Syrian relations and other Mideast issues, a senior Syrian official said.

Assad spokesman Jibran Kourieh said Foreign Minister Farouk Shareh also attended the talks, which focused on “Middle East developments and issues related to the Middle East as well as relations between Syria and the United States.”

Walters was accompanied by David Ransom, the U.S. charge d’affaires, the highest-ranking American diplomat currently stationed in Damascus. The United States withdrew its ambassador to Syria, William L. Eagleton, seven months ago after Britain severed relations with Damascus over alleged Syrian involvement in an attempted bombing of an Israeli airliner.

The Walters meeting with Syrian officials coincided with two days of talks in Geneva by U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Richard W. Murphy and Vladimir Polyakov, chief of the Soviet Foreign Ministry’s Middle East Department.

A spokesman at the U.S. Embassy in Geneva said the two sides met at the Soviet diplomatic mission and would meet again today at the U.S. mission. The spokesman declined to comment on the substance of their discussions.

During his visit to Damascus, Walters is expected to discuss with Syrian officials the fate of nine American hostages believed held in Lebanon. Syria, the main power-broker in Lebanon, has been helpful in the past in gaining the release of three American hostages and has been pressing Muslim militants to free American journalist Charles Glass, abducted by Shia Muslim gunmen in Beirut on June 18.

Syrian sources said it was not immediately known how long Walters, the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, would stay in Damascus. They gave no details of his schedule. In Washington, State Department officials would not even confirm that the diplomat was in the Syrian capital.