Last week, with the White House in full-throated outrage over House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s ill-starred trip to Damascus, a senior Syrian official placed a discreet call to Texas.

Edward Djerejian, a former American ambassador to Damascus, picked up the telephone in College Station.

The official told Djerejian that Syria wanted to keep its backchannels to Washington working beyond the flames of the Pelosi firestorm.

“I think . . . they were reaching out,” said Djerejian, who now heads the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy at Rice University.

“They’re generally looking to re-establish points of communication, to re-establish dialogue,” he said in a telephone interview, declining to elaborate.

“The channels are not broken off, nor are our communications,” he added. “And, of course, [James] Baker and I saw Walid Moallem [the Syrian Foreign Minister] in September 2006 in New York as part of Iraq Study Group deliberations. So, no, the channel is still very much open, informally, with the U.S.”

The use of back channels like Djerejian, who has also been ambassador to Israel and Assistant Secretary of State for Near Eastern Affairs, has been a hallmark of Middle East diplomacy, and with Syria in particular.

The erstwhile diplomat can be counted on to forward Syria’s concerns privately to Foggy Bottom, and vice-versa.

The CIA has also been a useful conduit to Damascus on a range of issues in years past, according to knowledgeable sources — and still may be, despite what looks like an accelerating White House campaign to isolate Damascus as a state sponsor of terrorism.

The players know each other well: In 1990, the CIA, with French help, played a key role in bringing Syria into the U.S.-led regional coalition that drove Saddam Hussein from Kuwait.

But official contacts between Washington and Damascus, always cool at best, froze with the February 2005 assassination of Lebanon’s former premier Rafik Hariri and 22 other officials in Beirut.

Syrian agents were blamed, the U.S. withdrew its ambassador to Damascus and ordered Syria’s ambassador to the U.S. to go home. Currently, the U.S. and France are pressing for an international tribunal to bring whomever was responsible to justice.

Even then, however, with little notice last month, the Bush administration sent Assistant Secretary of State for Refugee Affairs Ellen Sauerbrey to Damascus to discuss the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who had fled to Syria.

Before February 2005, Djerejian had made four discreet trips to Damascus, ferrying messages back and forth.

“My last time there was in January 2005, a month before the assassination of Hariri,” he said. “And I decided after that I wouldn’t go back in the aftermath of that assassination in February. I had four private meetings with [President] Bashar al-Assad previously, but that was my last meeting with him.”

Djerejian called the meetings “certainly cordial,” but “focused.”

“There was a host of issues, such as the border of Iraq, the situation in Lebanon, plus their support for [Iranian-backed] Hezbollah, plus their support for Hamas,” the militant Palestinian organization.

Flights arrive almost daily from Iran, chocked with arms and supplies heading west for Hezbollah camps in Lebanon. Hamas also has offices in Damascus.

Foreign Islamic “holy warriors,” meanwhile, crisscross Syria en route to killing Americans in Iraq.

All that activity provides ample targets for U.S. intelligence assets and U.S. spy satellites whirling overhead.

Through all this, however, the adversaries have not only maintained discreet backchannel contacts but collaborated on issues of mutual concern in one way or another.

“The relationship has always been kind of funny,” says Hisham Melhem, a Washington-based Lebanese journalist who has been a tough critic of the Syrian regime.

“Even when the Americans and the Syrians were shooting at each other in the 1980s, when the Americans were in Beirut, the old man [the late Syrian President] Hafez al-Assad never burned the bridges with the Americans,” he said. “And he always tried to tell the Americans he could be useful in the region.”

Hafez died in June 2000 and was succeed by his son, Bashar, who “is not a smart as the old man,” he said.

Still, right after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to knowledgeable sources, Syrian intelligence gave the Americans files on al Qaeda. They handed over a half-brother of Saddam Hussein who had fled to Syria. And they warned American intelligence of an impending al Qaeda attack on a U.S. warship.

A year later, perhaps as a way of saying thanks, U.S. security agents in New York intercepted a Canadian citizen of Syrian descent, Maher Arar, and, wrongly suspecting him of ties to al Qaeda, shipped him off to Syria for interrogation and certain torture. Released after his yearlong ordeal, Arar was eventually exonerated by Canada, which paid him about $11.5 million for his troubles.

It’s that old diplomatic saw at work: The enemy of my enemy is my friend, if not permanently, when it’s convenient.

The Syrian regime, led by the minority Alewite Shiite sect, has long been a target of the Sunni-based Muslim Brotherhood, al Qaeda’s spiritual fountainhead.

Al Qaeda, of course, attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11 and says it remains committed to America’s utter destruction.

“The Syrians collaborate with the Americans when it comes to Islamist groups, mostly Sunni groups,” Melhem said, “al Qaeda, or like-minded or affiliated groups. . . . Of course the Americans want information about other groups like Hezbollah, but they are not going to get it. They are very selective” what they tell the Americans.

But that may be past.

Joshua Landis, assistant professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Oklahoma, said sources told him that “intelligence cooperation ended a year ago.”

Bush administration hardliners, who want the White House to abandon engagement with Syria, aren’t shedding any tears over that.

Engagement, they argue, has failed to curb Syrian intrigues in Lebanon or wedge the regime away from Iran.

Pursuing alternatives, the Bush administration has been wooing a London-based Syrian exile group led by high-ranking defectors, with the aim of destabilizing the Damascus regime, according to knowledgeable sources, and blunt its ally Iran’s drive for Shiite hegemony across the Middle East.

But the fly in the ointment is the group’s close ties to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The White House’s flirtation with the exiles, not surprisingly, has triggered another round of forehead slapping among many in U.S. intelligence.

Counterterrorism officials are already struggling to keep Bush administration officials focused on al Qaeda, which they see as America’s immediate mortal threat. Going after Syria full bore holds little attraction for them, especially considering the regime’s past collaboration against al Qaeda.

But like a house with a new coat of paint, appearances can be deceiving, especially when it comes to Damascus.

Djerejian, who spent many years in the thick of Middle East intrigue, says he wouldn’t be surprised if the CIA is still playing footsie with the Syrians.

“But to be honest with you, I don’t really know — and let me be clear on that,” he said. “But I wouldn’t be surprised, because it’s too damned important.”

He laughed.

“It’s goddam important,” he repeated.

“I think it serves our national security interests, if those relations could be maintained.”

The Syrians, he said, “have a lot of information.”

Jeff Stein can be reached at jstein@cq.com.

Hastings Conclusion: Judicial Watch has quietly dropped its suit against Rep. Alcee L. Hastings, D-Fla., chairman of the Helsinki Commission, an independent federal agency that monitors human rights. The conservative watchdog had charged that Hastings, who recently resigned his chairmanship of a House Intelligence Subcommittee, had “violated federal law by attempting to improperly terminate the employment” of Mark Milosch, and three other Republican-appointed employees of the Helsinki Commission. Late Friday April 6, Milosch resigned, according to a Hastings aide, “thus rendering his wrongful termination lawsuit moot. His attorneys [and ours] indicate that the case will be dismissed next week.”

The British are Coming! Retired MI5 chief Dame Stella Rimington is joining the board of the Spy Museum, Washington’s repository of cloak-and-dagger paraphernalia and once-secret tales, the museum announced last week. Rimington joined the domestic counterespionage, countersubversion and counterterrorism force in 1969 and eventually headed all three branches before becoming the service’s first female boss. She retired in April 1996. In a press release Rimington said she was “delighted” and so forth, but who can believe anything a spy says?