“This is either gonna be wildly successful or a complete disaster,” Austin Tice wrote in May 2012, on the eve of a dangerous journey to bear witness to history. “Here goes nothing.”

Tice, a physically towering former Marine and fledgling journalist, threw himself with grit and resolve into war zones, friendships and the injustices he cared deeply about.

But he is yet to return from that journey. Tice disappeared in Syria two months after setting off to cover the country’s crippling civil war, sparking a 13-year mystery that has tortured his Texan family and plagued Washington’s relationship with Syria’s brutal former dictator, Bashar al-Assad.

For more than a decade, nobody has seen or heard from Tice. His family has never lost hope that he is alive, even as successive administrations – from President Obama to President Trump – failed to bring him home.

But in December, Assad’s repressive regime – which had always denied capturing or killing Tice – collapsed in an instant. And in the chaotic months since, clues about Tice’s fate have begun to seep through the walls of Syria’s once-impenetrable prisons and palaces.

Now, a CNN investigation has revealed a remarkable development. Bassam al Hassan, a four-star general close to Assad, told CNN’s chief international correspondent Clarissa Ward that Tice was killed in 2013, the year after his capture. The order came from Assad, he said. But Hassan failed an FBI polygraph test, CNN has confirmed, and it is unclear which parts of his story remain a lie.

“Austin is like a bridge between America and Syria,” Waseem Enawi, a Syrian activist who hosted Tice in his home in Yabrud for three weeks, told CNN. “Through what happened to Austin, people can understand what happened to hundreds of thousands of Syrians,” he added.

“It’s the only good thing I can think of to come out of all of this.”

Debra Tice, Austin's mother, has campaigned for 13 years to secure her son's freedom. Evelyn Hockstein/Reuters

Long before his journey to Syria, Tice knew he wanted to make an impact.

The oldest of seven siblings, Tice was home-schooled by his devoted Catholic parents, Debra and Mark Tice, in Houston. The family loved to travel; they would visit Mexico at least one a year, took several cross-country road trips, and spent three months in E