American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  If Lashkar Gah and the flowing waters of Helmand’s irrigation canals stood as goodwill monuments of American influence, Operation Cyclone brought more complex dividends. Before the Soviet withdrawal in 1989, Washington would funnel somewhere between $4 billion and $5 billion into the effort. The majority poured into the tribal territories along the Afghan-Pakistani border, where, along with rifles and bullets, it also funded religious propaganda and the construction of Islamic schools (or madrassas) to help spread the strains of a violent, and at the time, fringe Islamic ideology.

  Before its end, the Russian occupation would trigger one of the largest refugee crises in recorded history. About six million Afghans (roughly one-third of the country’s total population) fled in the exodus, most of them to refugee camps in Iran and Pakistan. In southeastern Paktika Province, at least 77,000 refugees crossed the border to camps in Miran Shah and Peshawar. The Soviets attempted to win over those who remained by building roads and funding development projects, including a dam in Mota Khan, just north of a Soviet Army garrison outside of Sharana, the provincial capital. But their efforts were doomed from the start: Paktika was crisscrossed by mujahideen “ratlines,” the supply routes that sustained the insurgency. Moscow learned the hard way that no overarching authority, and certainly not one imposed by a foreign empire, could secure those smuggling routes or win over the allegiances of villagers living alongside them.

  The Soviet war’s most enduring legacies, however, could be found in western Pakistan. With money and assistance from wealthy Saudi families (including the bin Laden construction dynasty) and the GID, the Pakistanis turned the Afghan refugee crisis into a strategic opportunity. Young Afghan men were recruited from the overfilled settlements along the border in Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas (FATA). Properly indoctrinated in mujahideen camps and madrassas, they were sent back to infiltrate the Afghan battlefields. No matter how many insurgent fighters the Soviets killed, the Pakistani operation supplied more. It was a simulacra of the Soviet and Chinese efforts in the Vietnam War’s safe havens of Laos and Cambodia, an irony not lost on the Pentagon. A 1989 Army report made the point clear: The Soviets’ failure to learn from the U.S. example “caused them to make many of the same errors.”

  The seed Brzezinski planted with Carter grew into the largest and longest covert operation in U.S. history. Who Washington recruited to the Afghan insurgency, or by what methods, was secondary to what Brzezinski identified as the greater purpose: “to make the Soviets bleed for as much and as long as possible.”

  Half a world away, his ambitions stymied by geopolitical events beyond his control, Bob Bergdahl decided it was time to move on from his Olympic dreams. He was back in Santa Barbara and working in construction when he and his high school girlfriend, Jani Larson, heard from a friend who had moved to Ketchum, Idaho. There was a crew from Santa Barbara there, outdoor junkies like them, intoxicated by the open spaces and abundant cheap land. With a job building a log cabin waiting for him, Bob and Jani packed his pickup truck and a horse trailer and drove north for a new life.

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  WHEN THEY ARRIVED in the fall of 1980, Idaho’s Blaine County was home to just ten thousand people scattered across an area larger than Delaware—a rugged and picturesque stretch of valleys and canyons carved by the clear rivers that flow from the peaks of the Pioneer and Boulder Mountains in the north to the irrigation canals on the Snake River Plain in the south. They settled in the Wood River Valley, a thirty-mile artery of former mining camps and sheep-ranching towns: Gannett, Bellevue, Broadford, China Gardens, Hailey, Bullion, Greenhorn, Triumph, Ketchum, and Galena. After weathering the early 1980s recession, the valley started growing fast, splitting into two identities defined by the land as much as its people. In the south, where the valley walls taper down to an open prairie and the car radios could pick up the AM stations from Boise and Idaho Falls, it was alfalfa and barley, horse and cattle ranches, churches and churchgoers. After payday at local ranches, cowboys in chaps and spurs stood in line at the liquor store.

  At the valley’s north end, the resort towns of Ketchum and Sun Valley were something else: seasonal playgrounds for people from the coasts who played golf and bought private, daylong ski lessons for their kids, for families who would come and go on private jets and schedules determined by things other than work. The towns had been dependent on outside money since they were settled in the 1880s, when the gold bugs and bankers from California and London turned them into the biggest boomtowns in Idaho Territory. The second boom came in 1936, when Union Pacific chairman W. Averell Harriman built his vision for an Austrian-style ski berg deep in the Rockies, and Sun Valley became a magnet for generations of self-styled American aristocracy. But as much as their cash supported the economy and their sensibilities rubbed off on the locals, the wealthy had always been a minority, interlopers in a community that both needed and distrusted them.

  “The youngsters get a big kick out of seeing the movie stars and rich people,” Ketchum’s Jack Lane, who owned the biggest ranch supply store in town, told a reporter in 1938. “But many of the older folks don’t exactly approve of those who spend their time playing, drinking, and dancing.” Tourists were a good thing, Lane said, “but our main interest is still sheep. That’s where we make our money.”

  By the late 1980s, sheep had given way to real estate brokers, and Lane’s grandkids had turned the family business from saddles and wagons to ski boots and goggles. After a trip home to get married, Bob and Jani decided to stay in Idaho for the same reasons as the ten thousand or so other Californians moving there each year: elbow room, postcard views, and a simpler, more affordable life. Bob took a job at the Elephant’s Perch, a mountaineering and bike shop where his coworkers knew him as an easygoing natural athlete with a serious work ethic and a spark in his blue eyes. He tuned skis and bikes, worked construction, and provided the steady voice at the other end of 911 calls as a dispatcher with the Ketchum Fire Department.

  In 1983, the year they had their first child, a daughter they named Sky, the family’s combined income was seven thousand dollars. They were paying the hospital bills with twenty-dollar deposits and living in a rent-stabilized, plywood-sided starter home in a former immigrant enclave known as China Gardens, when Bob decided it was time for a salaried job. He got lucky and was hired as a delivery driver for UPS, which offered a decent wage and benefits in return for long shifts and military-style diligence. Drivers were expected to follow strict codes of conduct and efficiency that dictated how to pack the truck (front to back), how to lift heavy packages (bend the knees), and when to put the truck in reverse or make a left-hand turn (never). In twenty-eight years, Bob missed two days of work.

  His ski and bike buddies saw a more serious side of Bob as he settled into life as a homesteader in an isolated canyon west of Hailey. His father had helped him buy forty acres of rangeland for $50,000, and Bob started building fences and horse corrals and improving irrigation ditches in the sagebrush and high grass. He and Jani had both grown up around horses and had visions of a working ranch. But no bank would give them a construction loan for a house on such an isolated property, so paycheck by paycheck they built a 1,600-square-foot, metal-roofed barn outfitted with electricity and a wood stove to accommodate the horses and their growing family. Their son Robert Bowdrie Bergdahl was six months old when they moved into the converted barn full time in the fall of 1986. Ten feet of snow fell that winter; just getting into town could be a day’s work.

  They had named their son Robert after his father and grandfather but called him Bowdrie, a tribute to Chick Bowdrie, the Texas Ranger hero of Louis L’Amour’s pulp westerns. In Croy Creek Canyon, Bob started Bowe with guns early, first with BBs and pellets when he was still a shy, towheaded toddler, and then with a .22, which he could handle and sight in by age five. They chopped and stacked wood for winter and shot target practice when they felt like it. They had a chicken coop, six
or seven horses, a sheepdog named Freckles, and half a dozen cats. They taught their children that the goal of life wasn’t to acquire material things. Bob put two hundred thousand miles on his blue Toyota pickup truck, then drove it for another ten years.

  “We don’t have safe deposit boxes; we keep ammo boxes,” Bob once said. Beyond their home, the dirt road rose west toward the open range, where a boy could walk eighty miles without seeing another person—just rocks and dirt, sage and tumbleweed, and the occasional abandoned miner’s cabin. They packed the green metal ammo boxes as backcountry kits for weekend camping trips into the Smoky Mountains with some church friends who had a son Bowe’s age. They brought picnic lunches, fishing poles, and extra meals for the shepherds who spent the summers in the high country, Peruvian Quechuas who followed the same grazing routes as their Basque predecessors had a century before—north to the alpine meadows in the summer, south to the Snake River Plain in the fall. Neighbors were few, and the shepherds became their close friends. Bob and Jani invited them in to shower, do their wash, and call their families in Peru. Bowe and Sky grew up listening to their broken English and sending them off with secondhand clothes when they returned to the range where they slept by their flocks in horse-drawn wagons, went weeks without seeing another soul, and didn’t seem to mind.

  Like the shepherds, the Bergdahls spent more time outdoors than in. On camping trips, they hiked for days through meadows of wildflowers that bloomed in Technicolor each June. They caught the dry, sweet smell of sage rising from the sunbaked hillsides and listened to the sounds of the high desert soundlessness—a lone bee buzzing in a patch of lupine, the Mormon crickets clicking from rock to rock, and the lodgepole pines groaning in the wind. At six thousand feet above sea level, they looked up to a night sky that filled in with a dense screen of stars and the slow, steady crawl of satellites. Sometimes, on a cold, clear winter night, they could see the green and yellow ribbons of the Northern Lights spilling across the black horizon. It wasn’t the frontier, but it was close. In the silence and the space, Bob focused his energy and his children’s attention on what he saw as life’s essentials: work, God, ethical living, and self-reliance.

  They decided to homeschool the kids. Jani led them through six hours of daily lessons, and while Bowe had trouble spelling, Jani encouraged his tendency to get lost in wry comic-strip books like Calvin and Hobbes, Heathcliff, and Garfield. One of his favorites was Beetle Bailey, the 1950s strip that follows the travails of an Army private bumbling through life in the service. Bob supplemented the comics and homeschool curriculum with readings from his favorite Christian philosophers, Thomas Aquinas and St. Augustine. They taught their children that their conscience was their most precious and sacred possession.

  On Sundays, they drove to Bellevue Community Church, a small congregation south of Hailey. Families who recognized Bob learned that their UPS driver was also a religious man, an active church volunteer, and a Sunday school teacher who led Bible study groups from well-thumbed volumes of writings by Christian thinkers. Jeff Gunter, a Hailey police officer who also attended Bellevue services, saw Bob as a devoted father of well-mannered children held to higher standards than most kids. Gunter watched Bowe and Sky at church potlucks, compared them to his own nieces and nephews of similar age, and wondered how Jani and Bob raised such polite children.

  Bob shielded his children from the world but also insisted that they learn how it functioned. As had his own parents, he encouraged his kids to keep up with current events and analyze history with a critical eye. On a road trip to Big Hole National Battlefield, fourteen miles west of Wisdom, Montana, Bob explained that in 1877 the U.S. Army had attacked an encampment of Nez Perce at dawn. After a pitched battle, upward of ninety Nez Perce lay dead—men, women, and children. The tribe had been headed toward the national border, which they called “the Medicine Line,” after being chased for months by battle-hardened veterans of the American Civil War and earlier Army campaigns against the Apaches, Kiowas, and Comanches in the Southwest. “They were just trying to get to Canada,” Bob told his children.

  Bowe came to understand that his history textbooks presented just one version of the story. When his parents taught him about colonialism, Bowe joked that the United Kingdom should have been called “Not So Great Britain.” At home and at church, he was told to place the word of God above the claims of powerful men. Bowe had worn out his first Bible by the time he was a teenager. In his second, he drew a box around Ephesians 2:10: “For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus for good works, which God prepared beforehand, that we should walk in them.”

  Bowe worked as a teenager, earning his own money doing maintenance at the private jet hangar in Hailey and at a motorcycle shop in Ketchum. The job he took to best was at the Blaine County Gun Club, a public shooting range tucked halfway up a cul-de-sac canyon next to the county dump. He didn’t talk much at work, but he liked working. He knew more than the other teenagers on staff about how things operated—how to load the clay pigeon traps, how to set and clear the rifle range, and how to keep everyone safe. The younger kids looked to him for guidance, and after a couple of summers he was the one showing them how to do things.

  Aside from when he biked to work, his parents didn’t like his going into town on his own. The valley had a seedy side that they had known about since they’d moved there in the early eighties. About fifteen miles north of Hailey, professional (and successful) drug dealers lived in Ketchum’s Warm Springs neighborhood. Some got away with it and bought homes in Fiji and Kauai; others got caught. The valley’s moneyed north end was snow-dusted in ways that didn’t make the travel brochures. There was always a party to go to, the bars were crowded six nights a week, and the town was protective of its rougher edges. When cowboy pranksters Sheldon Yonke and Pat Ryan rode their horses through the swinging doors of the Pioneer Saloon during dinner hour, the well-groomed young ladies from Connecticut gasped, the bartenders told the cowboys to ride out the way they’d come in, and the next year they did it all over again.

  Valley kids grew up around partying as a way of life, and in turn many started early. Booze, sex, and weed for twelve-year-olds wasn’t uncommon. On the front porches of his delivery route, Bob heard casual talk about drugs and infidelity, and he didn’t like it. He and Jani hadn’t moved to Sun Valley to do cocaine with supposedly glamorous people, and Bob hadn’t built his own home miles down a mountain canyon to watch his only son be corrupted.

  When Bob read his Aquinas—“Better to illuminate than merely to shine, to deliver to others contemplated truths than merely to contemplate”—he acted on it too. He shared a disturbing story at church one Sunday: The convenience store on the north end of Hailey, a popular teen hangout that sold candy, slushees, and cigarettes, was openly displaying raunchy pornography. Wasn’t this the creeping moral sickness they had all sought refuge from? Were they as Christians supposed to roll over and accept it? Bob started a petition, recruited church friends to help gather signatures, and persuaded the storeowner to get rid of the smut. Most of the congregation applauded Bob’s selfless efforts. But one congregant grew tired of the pious displays and vented to his own family: “Bob thinks he’s the only one going to heaven.”

  Bowe was impressionable. And while Bob saw in his son a soulful seeker who reminded him of his younger self, he also saw a child whose imagination and impulses sometimes ran wild. At thirteen, when Bowe started hanging with a crowd of bad-seed local kids—as different from his church friends as he could find—Bob came down on him hard. Bowe needed clearer boundaries. The family turned to religion for answers and began driving to an Orthodox Presbyterian Church in Boise—five hours round-trip—every Sunday whenever they could make it. A Calvinist sect with an austere reading of scripture, the OPC holds every believer and nonbeliever to the same unforgiving standard: Mankind arrived on Earth depraved and riddled with sin, and there are few paths to grace and God’s mercy. Bob translated the message for his so
n: Hard work and humility are mandatory and nonnegotiable.

  At the end of Croy Canyon, there was the right way to live, there was the wrong way, and then there was what Sky called “the Bergdahl way”—the hard path of taking on the most work and the biggest challenges and never complaining. In a valley full of clashing values and temptations, Bob would keep his son on the narrow path of what was right, good, and in God’s plan.

  TWO

  BLOWBACK

  The United States is now at war. But not a war that can be fought or won by conventional military retaliation or diplomatic negotiation,” Ketchum’s Idaho Mountain Express declared in an editorial on September 12, 2001. One week later, President George W. Bush addressed a joint session of Congress and the nation. He condemned the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan for harboring bin Laden and al-Qaeda and issued a set of nonnegotiable demands: The Taliban would hand over the terrorist leaders, release imprisoned foreign nationals, protect foreign journalists, diplomats, and aid workers, immediately close every terrorist training camp, and give the U.S. the right to send inspectors to freely and safely travel the country and verify that these demands were met. For the first time since its founding in 1949, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization invoked Article 5 of the NATO Charter—an attack on one is an attack on all—and approved a campaign against the Taliban for all nineteen member nations.

  Two days after Bush’s speech, the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia withdrew the Taliban’s diplomatic credentials, leaving the Islamic Emirate with only one diplomatic home, in Pakistan. The Taliban offered to turn bin Laden over to Pakistan, but leaders in Islamabad said they could not guarantee bin Laden’s safety. The Taliban made a final offer: They would detain bin Laden themselves and put him on trial according to the legal codes of Islam, but only if the United States provided evidence that bin Laden had in fact been responsible. The Bush administration rejected the overture on October 7, 2001. American bombing began that night.