American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  He started down the backside of the hill toward the village of Mest Malak, an enemy way station where Taliban troops bivouacked in private compounds for a night of rest before moving on. He skirted the edges of the village, crossed through an alleyway, and then sped away from any buildings he could make out in the darkness on a parallel track to the north-by-northeast arc of Route Audi. He had his camera and his disguise and his bribe money in his pockets, along with his water, food, and tools. He would tell Major General Dahl that it took him about twenty minutes to fully appreciate the gravity of his situation. Bowe slowed to a walk.

  “You just gotta stay in the game,” his father would say. He had said it when they last saw each other in Croy Canyon at Christmas. It was a family mantra from his grandfather’s days as an all-star running back for the UCLA Bruins. Don’t get in your own head, it meant. Be alert to what’s happening around you. Always know the score. The score, right now, was not in Bergdahl’s favor. He was AWOL in a war zone, and if he made it to Sharana, the Army was going to come down on him hard. It struck him that he needed to prove himself beyond the plan’s basic elements. He needed something more—a piece of intelligence or information collected outside the wire, something he could parlay into leniency. He thought about other soldiers who had been in situations like his own: the Office of Strategic Services’ (OSS) Jedburgh teams, men and women who had parachuted into France to organize insurgencies against the Nazis with nothing but their courage, skills, and savvy. The OSS had been Special Forces and CIA before Special Forces and CIA even existed. They didn’t have night vision or GPS. He thought about the snipers sent into the Vietnamese jungle. They were told to do a job and they got it done. They succeeded by adjusting their mission plans as necessary. He needed to adjust his.

  Bergdahl changed directions and went back toward Route Audi. If he could do some scout work and collect information about the greatest threat 2nd Platoon faced—IEDs—maybe he could change his circumstances again. He needed to stay calm, use his skills, and get lucky. He might spot a Taliban team planting bombs in the night, track them from a distance, and see where they stored their explosives. He would take pictures, draw a map of the spot. When he brought this irrefutable intelligence to the general on FOB Sharana, the Army would have no choice but to forgive him.

  More than five years later, he marveled at the simplicity of it. “Stupid actions. Stupid young man,” he told Dahl. “I had always been a failure. I knew the Army. I knew weapons. I knew soldiers. I knew how to do that. This was my chance to prove I wasn’t just a failure.”

  The old plan was to stay on flat ground, hide during the day, and run again at night. The new plan required sneaking around the hills and gulches where the Taliban hid waiting to plant their bombs. He climbed to the top of a high ridge, descended, and then climbed another. After a few hours he checked his compass. He wasn’t lost, but he was growing disoriented. He looked toward the night sky to find his polestar and navigate by its light.

  He was still following the stars when the gray light of the approaching dawn broke over the valley. Bergdahl put on his headscarf and shalwar. He was now more than ten kilometers, or six miles, from the OP. He walked at a steady pace, and as the inky sky surrendered to the brilliant reds and yellows of daybreak, he knew his plan was failing. He was in over his head, and now he was lost. He scanned the ground for footprints or vehicle tracks, any clues in the dust. Conscious that he was now visible to anyone passing by, he focused on not looking around too much or acting suspicious. In the distance he saw a shepherd. Keep moving, he told himself. It was close to noon when he heard the motorcycles.

  * * *

  —

  CAPTAIN SILVINO SILVINO was drinking his morning coffee in the Blackfoot TOC at FOB Sharana when Billings’s message came through. The TOC was Silvino’s domain, a concrete building wired with FM and satellite radios and a hardened computer terminal called the “Command Post of the Future,” on which he could read all of his platoons’ Blue Force Tracker messages in one place and keep track of their movements. On the morning of June 30, 2009, his men were spread out over five districts and twelve hundred square miles. Leading Blackfoot was a hard job, but Silvino was no amateur. He’d commanded the same company at the tail end of its 2007 Iraq deployment, the tour that had given Gabe Trollinger and Evan Vela so much grief. All told, Silvino was Blackfoot Company’s commander for thirty-four months, an extraordinarily long time for a captain to spend in command of the same company. He took the job so seriously that he declined a promotion, because it would have meant moving into a staff position and leaving his men just as they headed back into combat in Afghanistan.

  “Sir, you’ve got to take a look at this,” his radiotelephone operator (RTO) said, pointing at the emergency message from 2nd Platoon on the Command Post of the Future.

  “Looking for one more person. We’re not up,” Billings wrote.

  “Check again,” Silvino typed to Billings over the Blue Force Tracker. “Must be a mistake.”

  “Not a mistake,” Billings typed back. He identified the missing soldier by his battle roster number, sending his initials and the last four digits of Bergdahl’s Social Security number over the encrypted FBCB2 link. Silvino’s RTO checked the battle roster and filled in the gaps. Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl was a late deployer and somehow already missing after less than two months in-country. Silvino called in his first sergeant, his company staff, and 3rd Platoon’s leadership and issued orders: Get the men and the trucks ready, have everyone mount up, do it double-time. They were going out to OP Mest.

  Next, Silvino walked over to battalion headquarters, the Task Force Geronimo TOC, where most mornings he would find Lieutenant Colonel Baker barking orders at troops or briefing Colonel Howard at FOB Salerno over the satellite radio. But this morning Baker was absent, out on patrol near an outpost south of Mest called FOB Kushamond, overseeing a gravel delivery to a new OP. It was a first sergeant’s work, not a typical mission for a lieutenant colonel in command of hundreds of infantrymen, but after an earlier logistics patrol that he had sent to deliver the gravel was hit by thirty-seven Taliban bombs in succession, Baker decided to accompany this one himself. Sharing the danger with the men under his command helped morale and made sure things were done right. When he left Sharana, Baker put his executive officer (XO), Major Larry Glasscock, in charge.

  Glasscock looked Silvino dead in the eye when he heard the news. “You’d better be damned sure that this is what you’re saying it is,” Glasscock said. He knew that once the battalion activated DUSTWUN protocols, there would be no way to stop the cascade of events that followed.

  “Sir, it is. Unfortunately. I’m going to go out there. We’re going to look for him.”

  Back at OP Mest, the men of 2nd Platoon were already looking. After alerting higher headquarters, Billings called together his men and delivered the morning’s mission in a quick burst briefing called a FRAGO (a fragmentary order): He needed a nine-man squad to head outside the wire and start looking for Bergdahl. Maybe a dirt farmer saw something from his dirt field and invited him in for tea. It wouldn’t be much to go on, but they couldn’t just sit on their hands.

  They marched down the hill, skirting the edge of Route Audi, and made their way to the American-built school in the village, where they met an Afghan boy. Their interpreter, an Afghan from Baghlan Province who had taken the Americanized name of John, asked if the boy had seen an American. John was careful about phrasing the question, fearing that the news of a missing soldier would spread through the village. Who knew how many degrees of separation there were between this child and the Taliban? “A soldier went out for milk this morning,” John lied. “Did you see him?”

  Yes, the boy replied. He had seen an American. In fact, he saw an American today, as he was walking to school. He even knew the exact time: 0602. “How does he know the exact time?” Billings asked. John said a few words and the boy pulled up his sleeve
to reveal a digital Casio watch strapped to his wrist. Billings thought it was strange, as such luxuries were rare in this part of Afghanistan, even for adults. But it gave him hope. Bergdahl was alive and they were on his trail. Inside the school, the students were less helpful. A preteen boy warned his classmates not to talk. “No one has seen anything,” he told John. Facing a wall of adolescent silence, they moved on to another class, where John bribed them with coins from his pocket until finally another boy spoke up.

  “Yes! He was there,” the boy said, pointing to a spot of green in the fields away from the village. John asked the boy to describe Bergdahl. Tall, blue eyes, carrying a flashlight, the boy recalled. Did he have a gun? No, the boy said, and stopped talking, silenced by another student. The foot patrol left the school, circled through the surrounding fields, dropped in the wadi toward the intersection of Routes Audi and Dodge, and headed back to the OP with no real leads.

  Billings couldn’t help but think this wasn’t how the morning was supposed to go. He’d planned for it as a rest period, an opportunity to organize and relax before they returned to the FOB. Now everything was chaos. On the OP, Billings’s Blue Force Tracker was lit up with messages from higher headquarters, and his mind was abuzz with the implications of the clues from the Afghan school boys. He wished the children were more reliable, but he understood the Taliban’s proclivity for reprisals against those who cooperated with the Americans. His commanders demanded updates, issued new orders, and when he responded, asked follow-ups that he could not answer. To Billings’s growing horror, his little outpost had become the focus of his entire chain of command.

  Command’s eyes were already watching Billings through the orbital cameras and sensors on a Predator drone buzzing ten thousand feet overhead, call sign VOODOO—it had come on station at 11:37 a.m. The military and CIA had dozens of different unmanned aerial vehicles flying over Afghanistan with sinister names attached to bland alphanumeric designators: MQ-1 Predators, MQ-9 Reapers, RQ-7 Shadows, RQ-4 Global Hawks, and others that only a select few with high security clearances knew even existed. If a drone’s designator began with an R, it was unarmed and strictly a reconnaissance platform. R drones could look but they couldn’t kill. M drones were armed with the AGM-114 Hellfire (heliborne, laser, fire, and forget) missile, a weapon originally developed so gunners in AH-64 Apache helicopters could destroy Soviet tanks without exposing themselves to antiaircraft fire in the process; once locked onto its target, the Hellfire adjusted course along the way until impact. Armed or not, drones would stay overhead Mest and western Paktika for weeks.

  Lieutenant Billings received his new orders: Command wanted him to set up blocking positions—essentially traffic stops, like a DUI checkpoint with fourteen-ton vehicles mounted with machine guns and grenade launchers—on Route Dodge past the graveyard. To do that, he would have to split his platoon, a security risk well outside his usual comfort zone. He was sending the men out when the first helicopter landed near his truck, coughing up a soldier who ran over to Billings and began shouting. The man was a pathfinder from the 101st Airborne Division, sent by division headquarters. Billings couldn’t hear him over the roar of the rotors, but nodded along anyway before the soldier ran back to his helicopter, lifted up, and flew away.

  Billings didn’t know what the man had said, but he knew what it meant that he was here. The pathfinders were under the direct control of Colonel Howard’s boss, Major General Curtis Scaparrotti, commander of the Combined Joint Task Force 82. If the pathfinders were already at Mest, that meant Scaparrotti had sent them. If he knew about the DUSTWUN, then that meant everyone else knew, right up to General Stanley McChrystal, who was settling into his second week on the job at ISAF Headquarters.

  SEVEN

  THE LOST PUPPY

  It was a sunny Tuesday morning in Kabul as Major General Michael T. Flynn arrived for a meeting in one of his two new offices at ISAF Headquarters. In his previous job as director of intelligence for the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, Flynn had sat through endless meetings and briefings, which he learned to hate, and it didn’t seem like Kabul would be any better. Staff officers presented classified PowerPoints, briefing slide after briefing slide, that all seemed to say the same thing: The war was going badly, the structures and strategies in place to fight it weren’t working, and the Taliban were growing stronger and launching more deadly and sophisticated attacks from their sanctuary across the border in Pakistan, where U.S. troops could not venture. Nothing came from these meetings—if good ideas did emerge, they were stymied by an unending bureaucracy. “I spend 80 percent of my day, easily, fighting our own system,” Flynn would tell Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings in 2010.

  Flynn was just two weeks into his new dual-hatted job—as both the war’s senior U.S. military intelligence officer and as the director of intelligence for NATO’s ISAF coalition—and he was just now developing a clear picture of the war’s dysfunction, which he discussed in late-night chats and on early-morning runs with his boss, General Stan McChrystal. In March 2009, President Obama had tapped McChrystal to replace the previous commander, General David McKiernan, the first four-star general in the field relieved of duty since Harry Truman fired MacArthur during the Korean War. Obama had given McChrystal total discretion to assemble his command staff, and McChrystal had known and trusted Flynn for years, since they were paratroopers in the 82nd Airborne. They’d grown even closer over their shared deployments to Iraq, where McChrystal commanded the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) black ops units that included Delta Force and SEAL Team 6, and Flynn served as his senior intelligence officer. In Iraq, Flynn deepened the wild-card reputation he’d had since Operation Just Cause, the 1988 invasion of Grenada, when he’d flown his signals intelligence platoon into the fight without authorization. After the four-day operation was over, Flynn escaped punishment because he, by chance, was setting in eavesdropping positions on the coast and spotted two soldiers flailing in the Caribbean Sea. Flynn, who’d been a lifeguard and passionate cold-water surfer growing up in Rhode Island, jumped into the water and dragged the men back to the beach. Flynn’s colonel admonished the young lieutenant for disobeying orders and sneaking into Grenada, but thanked him for saving the soldiers. Flynn was a good officer with the makings of an excellent leader—the kind of officer who deserved to be protected, even from himself.

  Over the course of his career, Flynn demonstrated a knack for cutting against the grain of both the Army and the intelligence community, angering his civilian counterparts in the CIA and its military analog, the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) in the process. He kept getting promoted into better and better assignments because sometimes Flynn’s brand of crazy was the only way to get things done. He was lauded for putting together the team that developed rapid-fire targeting and intelligence gathering methods for the special operations strategy that allegedly decimated al-Qaeda in Iraq during the 2006–2007 surge. There was some merit to the argument: JSOC kills included Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the founder of Iraq’s preeminent terror franchise, AQI (al-Qaeda in Iraq). Yet these oft-repeated claims that McChrystal, Flynn, and JSOC were incredibly successful in their secret war against AQI were rarely scrutinized. Instead, politicians on both sides of the aisle repeated their praise ad nauseam as they sought any good news from a bad war that could dazzle and distract their constituents from the coffins coming into Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The role that McChrystal and Flynn played in pacifying Iraq was further exaggerated by a breathless national security press seduced by the mystique of special operations. Al-Qaeda in Iraq was never destroyed and would eventually rebrand itself as ISIS. By the time he arrived in Afghanistan in 2009, McChrystal had a reputation as a snake eater, a killer, a tough guy who could sell the gentler aspects of the Army in Afghanistan’s new old way of war: counterinsurgency.

  McChrystal knew how to sell the war, but that didn’t mean he could win it. Now, as the director of intelligence for ISAF, Flynn would oversee NATO
and the U.S. information operations and intelligence gathering in both the acknowledged battlefield (Afghanistan) and the unofficial war in Pakistan, where only the CIA was authorized to capture and kill.

  As wanting as the Pentagon was for reliable intelligence in Afghanistan, the situation in the FATA was worse. Nearly eight years after Osama bin Laden disappeared into the mountains of Tora Bora, Flynn inherited what looked to him like a dysfunctional intelligence apparatus. It was the same CIA that had lost a U-2 spy plane after it took off from a CIA airfield in Peshawar in 1960, missed the Pakistani underground nuclear tests in 1998, and failed to stop Islamabad from using nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan as a cutout for proliferating weapons-grade plutonium and nuclear technology to aspirational regimes in North Korea, Iran, and Libya. Pakistan was a mess, and Flynn believed it was predominantly CIA’s fault, and that he and the Pentagon could fix it. If he could show up his CIA rivals, like Kabul Station Chief Greg Vogle, all the better.

  Flynn’s meeting on the morning of June 30 had been called to address these exact concerns. A retired Army colonel named Michael Furlong, now a civilian in a position funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency, was in from San Antonio, Texas, pitching unconventional solutions in Afghanistan. Furlong had ideas that would fill the tactical intelligence gaps that bedeviled the troops on the ground. Tactical intelligence—the type that saved soldiers’ lives on the battlefield, rather than the type that informed politicians of the price of barley in Bahrain—was why McChrystal’s predecessor had signed Furlong on in the first place. After an American outpost in Wanat was nearly overrun in July 2008, General McKiernan had demanded new approaches. Furlong had plenty of ideas, including information operations, kill/capture campaigns, and deception operations. Furlong was just getting started with his pitch when Flynn’s executive officer, Colonel Andrea Thompson, came to the door with the morning’s news: A soldier was missing. It was one of the Alaska paratroopers assigned to work with the Afghan security forces in the Eastern Provinces, a twenty-three-year-old who vanished overnight from a small observation post in Paktika, leaving his weapon behind.