Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT

Twitter Musings in Syria Elicit Groans in Washington

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton praised two State Department employees for their efforts at “21st-century statecraft.” Credit...Luke Sharrett/The New York Times

WASHINGTON — When two young State Department officials took a delegation of Silicon Valley executives to Syria recently, they billed it as a chance to use the promise of technology to reach out to a country with which the United States has long had icy relations.

Instead, the visit will be remembered for a series of breezy Twitter messages that the two colleagues sent home, riffing about how visitors can buy an American-style blended iced coffee at a university near Damascus and how one of them had challenged a Syrian communications minister to a cake-eating contest.

The messages raised hackles on Capitol Hill, where some Republicans were already leery of the Obama administration’s efforts to engage Syria. They also embarrassed the State Department, which normally conducts its dealings with Damascus behind a veil of diplomatic politesse.

The two staff members, Alec J. Ross and Jared Cohen, were rapped on the knuckles for generating what two State Department officials called “stray voltage.” Yet despite the youthful indiscretion, their broader goal of using technology to further diplomacy enjoys enthusiastic support from the highest levels of the department, notably Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“We have a great team of really dedicated young people — primarily young people — who care deeply about connecting people up,” Mrs. Clinton said last week to a Russian audience during a visit here by President Dmitri A. Medvedev. “And I’m very proud of the work they’re doing.” She singled out Mr. Cohen, 28, and Mr. Ross, 38, saying they symbolize the drive to create “21st-century statecraft.”

They are the most visible of a small band of new-media evangelists who are trying to push a pinstriped bureaucracy into the digital age — some on leave from jobs in Silicon Valley, some from nonprofit organizations and some, like Mr. Cohen, barely out of graduate school.

Mr. Cohen and Mr. Ross were chagrined that the Twitter messages distracted from what they thought was a meaty trip. Their delegation, which included representatives from Microsoft, Dell, Cisco Systems and other companies, met with Syria’s president, Bashar al-Assad, and other senior officials, as well as younger entrepreneurs who are bucking their country’s tight control of the Internet.

Syria is still classified by the United States as a state sponsor of terrorism and is subject to sanctions. But under a waiver passed in 2004 by the Bush administration, American companies can export some software and hardware to Syria, though in practice, few take advantage of it.

The delegation told Mr. Assad that companies would invest more in Syria if it stopped blocking social media Web sites like Facebook and YouTube, and did a better job of protecting intellectual property.

“What the companies did was to paint a picture of what Syria could have: how they would invest, what they would invest in, how it could potentially grow,” Mr. Cohen said in an interview.

While the Syrians promoted a new law that would make it harder to block Web sites, the Americans are under no illusions. “We’re not naïve, and we’re not utopians,” Mr. Ross said. “We understand that progress in Syria and in that region of the world is incremental at best.”

Before Syria, Mr. Cohen and Mr. Ross led technology delegations to Russia, Mexico and Iraq. The visits yielded some results: in Mexico, Americans helped develop a network that enables people to report drug-related crimes on their cellphones; in Baghdad, Google undertook a project to make digital copies of 14,000 artifacts in Iraq’s National Museum.

Along the way, the two sent Twitter messages tirelessly, becoming cybercelebrities. Mr. Ross, who was a technology adviser to the Obama presidential campaign, has about 287,000 followers on Twitter; Mr. Cohen, who has written books about jihad and genocide, has 305,000 followers.

Mr. Cohen first came to wider attention last year when he asked Twitter to delay plans to take its network down for maintenance because Iranians were using it to publicize antigovernment demonstrations.

Their pithy musings raised no objections until they did it from Syria, a country that has not had an American ambassador since the last one was recalled in 2005. President Obama has made cautious overtures to Damascus, appointing a new envoy, Robert S. Ford. But several senators have put a hold on his confirmation, saying that engagement is naïve.

In that context, Mr. Cohen’s June 16 Twitter message, typos and all — “I’m not kidding when I say I just had the greatest frappacino ever at Kalamoun University north of Damascus” — seemed off key, officials said, as did Mr. Ross’s report about Mr. Cohen’s proposed cake-eating contest (he called it “creative diplomacy”). The messages caught the State Department’s attention after they were posted by Josh Rogin of The Cable, a blog on the Web site of Foreign Policy magazine.

Twitter communiqués aside, experts said the trip was a worthwhile exercise. Martin S. Indyk, a longtime Middle East peace negotiator, said it was a way to encourage Syria “to see the light at the end of the tunnel and engage their high-tech sector of young, middle-class business people, which presumably will support peace with Israel and stronger relations with the U.S.”

It is less clear what the companies got out of it. Microsoft and Cisco declined to discuss the trip, beyond issuing statements saying they abide by export restrictions. A spokeswoman for Dell said its executive on the delegation was traveling and unavailable for comment.

Syrian officials seemed satisfied, though Syria’s ambassador to the United States, Imad Moustapha, said he wished the visit had been strictly a business-to-business exchange. “These two gentlemen wanted to discuss politics,” he said. “We did not want to discuss the sanctions.”

In the end, the trip may prove most useful as a lesson in the risks of using social media as a tool for diplomacy. The State Department assigned one of Mr. Ross’s staff members to film Web videos and send Twitter messages about Mrs. Clinton’s recent trip to China, and the department’s spokesman, Philip J. Crowley, uses Twitter daily to report on Mrs. Clinton’s activities.

But Mr. Crowley said he was careful to get the tone right. “I’m not going to tell everyone what I had for lunch,” he said. “Ever.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section A, Page 12 of the New York edition with the headline: Twitter Musings in Syria Elicit Groans in Washington. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

Advertisement

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT