Bidding for a Bigger Role: Syria seeks to become the prime Arab power

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nuclear reactor and several major airfields.

Assad's wily relationship with Moscow is very much in character for a politician Richard Nixon once described as having "elements of genius." A onetime jet-fighter pilot, Assad is a cautious and pragmatic leader who nonetheless appreciates the uses—and limits—of brinkmanship. Unfailingly courteous, the Syrian President inevitably begins meetings with a disarming jest before buckling down to what can become six hours of hard negotiating. "He gives his thoughts away bit by bit, like peeling an onion," says a Western diplomat. "He will just keep talking until you get tired." Assad has a superb grasp of detail and rarely refers to notes. On the other hand, he prefers to speak in generalities that sometimes are so ambiguous that diplomats leave his presence scratching their heads.

His decision making can be equally mysterious. After listening expression-lessly to his small knot of Western-educated advisers, Assad usually retires to read voraciously about the question at hand, then flatly announces a decision, often by telephoning an aide late at night. Sometimes Assad holes up at his vacation home near the Mediterranean port of Latakia for several days and then returns with a series of directives. Neither a smoker nor a drinker, Assad, the father of five children, lives quietly with his wife Anisa in a heavily guarded villa in Damascus, 100 yards from his office. So enigmatic is Assad that his aides have dubbed him "the Sphinx."

Even before he fell ill, the President was rarely seen in public. A joke is told in Damascus about the father and son who wait for days outside the presidential compound to catch a glimpse of Assad. Suddenly, a motorcade with sirens wailing roars down the street. As a Mercedes with blacked-out windows whizzes by, the beaming father turns to his son and says, "Now you can say you have seen the President."

Born in an Alawite farming town near

Latakia in 1930, Assad grew up keenly aware that he belonged to what was then the country's poorest and least-educated minority. The oldest son in a large family, Hafez credits his peasant father with instilling a strong nationalistic fervor in him, but at the same time reminding him to take pride in his Alawite heritage and the family name, which means "lion." Hafez plunged into political activism in high school, delivering fiery speeches against French rule. By about the time Syria gained full independence in 1946, Assad had joined the Baath Party, which preaches a mixture of socialism and Arab nationalism.

Few career paths were open to a nonSunni in those days, so Assad's ambition led him to enter the air force college in 1952. His flying talent won him the best-aviator trophy upon graduation, but Assad's real interest remained politics. Disgruntled over Syria's union with Egypt in the late 1950s, an arrangement that he felt relegated Damascus to a secondary role, Assad and his colleagues founded a secret military group that helped the Baathists seize power in 1963. Assad became commander of the air force the next year and Minister of Defense in 1966. Though the Alawites ran the government, the 1967 Arab-Israeli war was followed by a split within the party that pitted relative moderates like Assad against radical reformers seeking stronger ties with the