Patrick Seale

Patrick Seale wrote the standard biography of Hafez al-Assad with the subject's cooperation, and spent his career being accused of getting too close to the people he explained. He was born in Belfast and raised in Syria, where his father was a missionary and journalist, and grew up speaking Arabic; he read at Balliol and joined Reuters and then The Observer, covering the Middle East from the 1950s. The Struggle for Syria, published in 1965 out of his Oxford thesis, is still cited as the account of how the country was fought over by Egypt, Iraq and the great powers between 1945 and 1958. He reported the Algerian war, the Six-Day War and the Lebanese civil war. Asad of Syria, published in 1988, was written with dozens of hours of access to Assad himself and to his commanders, and remains the fullest account of the regime's inner workings; critics argued that the access had been paid for in sympathy, and Seale answered that no other book had the material. He also wrote a life of Abu Nidal, arguing on evidence that the group had been penetrated and used against the Palestinian cause it claimed to serve. He acted at times as an intermediary, carrying messages between Syrian and Israeli officials, which he did not conceal. He was a columnist widely syndicated in the Arab press. He died in London in 2014 as the country he had spent sixty years explaining came apart. He edited and published books through his own imprint in London. He was married three times and his son Orlando is a photographer. His obituaries divided almost exactly along the line his critics had drawn in his lifetime.

MyHistorian
A causal knowledge graph of history