Washington D.C. – Washington Post, May 01, 2025
U.S. officials have long said their effort to track down Austin Tice, the journalist abducted in Syria in 2012, yielded no reliable information as to his whereabouts.
The U.S. government had specific knowledge of the whereabouts of journalist Austin Tice, who went missing in Syria in 2012, for more than a decade, his mother said on Thursday, suggesting that more could have been done to recover the former Marine than was achieved under three administrations.
Debra Tice said her conclusion — including her belief that Austin Tice’s location was known up to the time of former Syrian president Bashar al-Assad’s ouster late last year — was based on extensive intelligence records the Trump administration recently permitted her to access. She said the effort to find her son was now much more difficult because, she believed, he had been moved around the time of the Assad regime’s sudden collapse at the hands of rebel forces.
“The effort to find him is now a real challenge, because for 12 and a half years, our government knew exactly where Austin was, and we had an opportunity to bring him home,” she said in remarks at the National Press Club ahead of World Press Freedom Day on May 3.
“I can tell you that finding so much truth after so much untruth was exceedingly painful,” Debra Tice said in a conversation with Washington Post Executive Editor Matt Murray.
Austin Tice was a freelance writer contributing coverage of Syria’s civil war to outlets including The Post when he was abducted on Aug. 14, 2012, at age 31. On the 10th anniversary of his abduction in 2022, the Biden administration said it had certainty he was being held by the Syrian regime, a claim Damascus denied.
Numerous U.S. officials have said that the years-long effort to find and recover Austin never yielded reliable information about his location. Only fleeting evidence of his status emerged early in his captivity. One former official with knowledge of his case, who like other officials spoke on the condition of anonymity to address a sensitive diplomatic and intelligence effort, said the U.S. government had not been able to credibly determine Tice’s whereabouts for at least a decade.
