by Matt Farwell
Sutton and Coe and 2nd and 3rd Platoons were ordered to blocking positions in far-flung parts of the province they had never seen. They were instructed to stop passing cars and question civilians about Taliban activity and the missing American and to continue doing so all hours of the day and night until they were told to stop. They drove to locations where battalion supply trucks didn’t hold enough fuel to reach them, and when they ran out of food and water, deliveries arrived from wild-eyed Russian pilots flying vintage helicopters that were older than most of the soldiers themselves. Or they shopped in nearby villages, where Sutton assumed the local fare would bring another round of the diarrhea that plagued their deployment, but found instead that living on orange soda and fried potato cakes was an unexpected DUSTWUN highlight.
They were told to stop civilians, but the blocking positions were so isolated there was no one around to question. At one, Sutton saw a single Afghan over the span of three days. With nothing else to do, they sat inside their trucks playing video games on their handheld PlayStation Portables. Monster Hunter was the most popular. They slept on the ground, and when they were called back, they drove ten, fifteen, or twenty hours to the FOB, where they were given ninety minutes to shower, devour hot meals, and stock up on gum, candy, and cigarettes before heading back into the desert to start again. They held this pace for thirty-five days straight. Sleep deprivation set in, and time passed in blurs of confusion. With five men packed into a truck that had lost power to its ventilation system after it was shot up by Taliban bullets, temperatures hovered in the low triple digits, and things stopped making sense. Coe was behind the wheel when he began hallucinating and asked Sutton where they were and what was happening. “We’re looking for Bergdahl,” he said.
The soldiers hypothesized about why he had done it. Maybe Bergdahl’s weird shtick was an act; maybe he was CIA or a JSOC operator on a covert mission. They agreed that Bergdahl was peculiar, but he wasn’t dumb. He knew the danger outside the wire. Everyone knew that what he’d said about walking to India was nonsense. The idea wasn’t just stupid; it was so absurd that it didn’t rise to the level of discussion. Except . . . it was Bergdahl. They remembered how he had talked, his fantasies about shedding his gear and uniform to join the Kuchis in their giant tents and learn their ancient goat-herding ways. It was all ridiculous. There were so many ways to get out of the war; walking alone and unarmed into Taliban territory was not among them. There was no explanation. But Coe knew his friend, and his gut told him what Bergdahl had done. Bergdahl had something to prove, and he would show the rest of them that he was what he claimed to be: a warrior and survivalist without peer who could withstand any hardship.
“He thought he was Lone Survivor,” Coe said, referring to Navy SEAL Marcus Luttrell, who, four years before Bergdahl’s walk, had found himself alone, wounded, and helpless on a Kunar Province mountain in enemy territory after a SEAL reconnaissance mission had gone wrong. In reality, Coe figured that Bowe had “grossly underestimated what he was doing,” stepped outside the wire, and then realized, “Oh shit, I made a monumentally horrible decision.”
Now that Bergdahl had shown everyone what he could do and how insane he could be, it seemed to the men in his platoon that questionable decisions were being made all around them. They were sent on their endless drives to futile blocking positions, Coe thought, because leadership needed to please their own superiors. If the Army had an actual idea where Bergdahl was, Sutton said, they would send in another unit like the SEALS for the recovery. Coe felt it was all for show.
At least one officer above him was more skeptical than that. Lieutenant Colonel Stephen Smith was thinking about his retirement and was preparing for a routine day at FOB Salerno when the DUSTWUN came in. Smith, who commanded the Task Force Steel artillery battalion out of Salerno, told his driver that their usual thirty-minute convoy had been rerouted to Camp Clark, a base on the high road carved into the mountains just south of the Khost-Gardez Pass. They sped along the newly paved stretch of highway to get there on time, but within minutes of their arrival, Smith stormed out of the meeting, kicking rocks as he hoisted himself into the passenger seat and told his confused driver to turn back the way they’d come. For the ninety minutes back to Salerno, Smith ranted about the crisis unfolding around them.
“If they knew the kid was fucked up, why didn’t they send him home?” Smith asked, not expecting an answer. He had gone into the briefing at Clark knowing that a soldier was missing; what he had not expected to hear was that Bergdahl had been informally discussed as a potential mental-health case months before he ever arrived in Afghanistan. If his leadership knew it then, Smith said, then Bergdahl “had no business being here now.” An unstable particle within his own unit, Bergdahl had broken loose and triggered a chain reaction explosion. People were going to get killed, he said. The search teams would be turned into so many Taliban targets. If Geronimo battalion leadership had been so incompetent as to bring over a kid who never belonged here in the first place, Smith said, then it should be Geronimo soldiers out there looking for him.
Sergeant Johnny Rice—Blackfoot Company, 3rd Platoon—had already started. Rice had been awoken early at Sharana, ordered to drive south immediately, and was halfway to OP Mest before he knew why. That afternoon and in the marathon that followed, he led search patrols in an expanding radius that brought him to villages where Afghans told him they hadn’t seen an American in more than a year. Operation Yukon Recovery was an all-hands-on-deck event, and as Colonel Howard’s troops swarmed the farthest reaches of their territory, his staff called on a psychological operations team to design and print single-page leaflets as simple tools of communication. Several editions were printed, each carrying a different message: One showed the blank silhouette of a U.S. soldier sitting with a group of smiling Afghan children. Another had Americans kicking down a door. “If you do not release the U.S. soldier, then you will be hunted,” the caption read.
Where COIN had made cultural sensitivity a priority for years, the DUSTWUN replaced such niceties with sustained aggression. The soldiers stormed impoverished villages and fortified qalats to search for weapons, signs of Taliban activity, and information about Bergdahl. When they found locked doors, they broke them down. In most cases, they only found old men and children, bags of rice, and huddles of women cowering in corners, shielding their faces. The interpreters told the women to show themselves. When they didn’t comply, soldiers acted on orders to check behind every veil. The Taliban, they had been told, might be hiding Bergdahl in a burka.
Sergeant Rice had never met Private First Class Bowe “Special Forces” Bergdahl, as the guys in his platoon called him, but he had seen his type in the Army before. The nickname told him everything: In Rice’s experience, the guys who start out super gung-ho are usually off balance to begin with. He figured Bergdahl was one of those who wanted to re-create his identity by carrying a gun, and the Army was the only institution willing to let him try. Nor did Rice think they would actually find him; if the Taliban hadn’t killed him, then Rice assumed they had already whisked him far away. “Common sense dictates that they aren’t going to keep him around for long.” As Rice stood guard on one patrol after another, he looked around and didn’t see any-place where a deserter could even desert. He saw a wasteland, where every Afghan he met hated him and no American could possibly survive on his own. Hopefully he’s dead, Rice thought about the soldier who had abandoned his own platoon. But he’s not here.
NINE
DIVERSIONS AND DECEPTIONS
Less than forty-eight hours after he took the call at the jirga, Ron Wilson was coming to the same conclusion: If Bergdahl wasn’t already dead, he was on his way to the wrong side of the border and out of reach of the U.S. military. On July 2, the Taliban identified Bergdahl’s captor as the Haqqani-linked commander Mullah Sangeen Zadran, confirming what Wilson’s contacts had predicted. The soldier had been sold by a local gang that had captured him in Paktika,
fed him into a sophisticated network of safe houses and taxis, and would deliver him to the Haqqani doorstep in Pakistan as quickly as they could. But as the days ticked by, Wilson kept reading overly optimistic statements from ISAF officials spinning the information he had been passing to his superiors about tracking the Army’s missing soldier.
U.S. and Afghan forces had “fanned out” across Eastern Afghanistan “to shut down routes the kidnappers could use,” unnamed officials told The New York Times. One anonymous senior defense official said that the Army had the Taliban “pretty boxed in, with not a lot of room to maneuver.”
For two days, Wilson worked his contacts to find out how to stop Bergdahl’s captors from sneaking him over the border, and he soon realized that his question was absurd. “It’s the Silk Road, for God’s sake,” Wilson said. “It’s been a smugglers’ transit route for thousands of years. So the Taliban better be pretty good at it. And they are.” Sangeen was a known quantity, a wily commander and Taliban shadow governor who had survived targeted airstrikes—false reports of his death had merely fed his legend. With Sangeen in charge of the operation, Bergdahl was as good as gone.
During Bergdahl’s first thirty-six hours captive, Taliban gunmen shuttled him between multiple holding locations. On the night of July 1 or 2 and into the early hours of July 3 or 4, they hid him under blankets in the flatbed of a pickup truck, parked, took him out, and hiked him through the darkness into Pakistan, where they met Sangeen. By the third day after the DUSTWUN, Furlong was privy to the classified updates that search units had detained Afghans in RC East whom the Taliban had provided with cell phones, scripts, money, and instructions for acting out calls designed to outmaneuver the American surveillance dragnet.
One of the first tips shared by search units on July 1 was that the Taliban was planning to move him northeast, to the provincial capital in Gardez. Before noon the next day, there was a report of a sighting of Bergdahl’s body, just east of a search patrol. A flood of tips began pouring in that afternoon, sending ground units, air-assault teams, and reconnaissance aircraft chasing down intel placing Bergdahl in Kuchi tents and Afghan trucks scattered across Paktika. On the afternoon of July 4, Task Force Geronimo thought they finally had a breakthrough: A report came in that Bergdahl had been spotted in a village near Ghazni, about fifteen miles northwest of Mest, with a bag over his head, dressed in dark clothes, and riding in a black Toyota Corolla with a conspicuous entourage of Taliban motorcycles.
Five years later in Texas, General Dahl explained to Bergdahl and his lawyer, Eugene Fidell, how the Army had been misled. Within twenty-four hours of the DUSTWUN call, Taliban in the area knew that the Americans were searching for a soldier, and as soon as they did, the intelligence was “all over the map,” Dahl said. Dahl’s team determined that most of what ended up in U.S. intelligence reports was unreliable. A report from the day he went missing said that “an American soldier with a camera is looking for someone who speaks English.” This mistranslation—produced by an analyst’s read of an interpreter’s translation of overheard Taliban radio chatter—would be cited for years as proof that Bergdahl had sought out the enemy. In reality, it was the kidnappers who were looking for an English speaker with a camera. Bergdahl was blindfolded and bound on the backseat of a motorcycle racing across unmapped dirt tracks southeast of OP Mest when he heard their excited calls. They needed someone who could speak to and record a video of their new prize.
With each day the DUSTWUN dragged on. As Colonel Howard’s Task Force Yukon called in additional assets, the dubious intelligence reports multiplied. It wasn’t just Blackfoot Company platoons searching now; every available unit in RC East was mobilized, spanning the Army’s spectrum of preparedness, from teams of multi-tour Green Berets to freshly arrived National Guardsmen still adjusting to the altitude at the start of what they had been told would be COIN-oriented missions training Afghan National Army soldiers.
“Unequivocally—all of my sources, all embedded forces, all trainers—stop what we are doing, pivot, and devote every asset we had to this search,” said Michael Waltz, an Army Special Forces major in-country before Bergdahl went missing. Between deployments, Waltz had worked in Washington, D.C., on counternarcotics and counterterror policy, and in one job as an adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney. During the DUSTWUN, Waltz said he was not given time for proper source vetting. Faced with conflicting reports that had Bergdahl on either side of the border, Waltz ordered his men to track down leads in Afghanistan, the only territory where they were legally permitted. When he ordered his men to search a compound in Ghazni, they walked straight into an empty building booby-trapped with packs of C-4 explosives lining the ceiling.
“By the grace of God, it didn’t go off,” Waltz said later, but the close call left him with no doubt that the Taliban were spreading false information to lure American soldiers into baited traps.
In other parts of the province, Task Force Geronimo soldiers driving million-dollar MRAPs and carrying briefcases of cash arrived in villages that had never had running water or electricity and doled out money in exchange for information. Even somewhat credible indicators could fetch thousands of dollars, and U.S. intelligence was soon overwhelmed with hundreds of tips from Afghans claiming to know something about the missing soldier.
“The data was a nightmare,” said Amber Dach, the CENTCOM lead intelligence analyst on the case. “He’s here, he’s there, he’s dead, he’s not. There was no way to find two validated pieces.” Within hours of the DUSTWUN call, Dach and her team of analysts at CENTCOM had already arrived at an unofficial conclusion that Bergdahl would be smuggled over the border as fast as his captors could get him there. The analysis was based on recent kidnappings, open-source reporting, and common sense. On May 4, 2009, a front-page New York Times story had announced: “Porous Pakistani Border Could Hinder U.S.”
Bergdahl’s abduction also played out against the backdrop of the high-profile kidnapping and stunning escape of New York Times reporter David Rohde. Rohde had been captured in November 2008, but his employers, the government, and his family had kept his captivity secret as they attempted to negotiate his release. On June 20, 2009, the dramatic details of his escape were plastered across newspapers around the world. Eleven days later, the galling reality of Rohde’s imprisonment in Miran Shah was still fresh in Dach’s mind. Nevertheless, her superiors told her that her team’s analysis on Bergdahl would not be accepted until it was corroborated by two independent, validated sources, and she returned to sifting through the unending flow of contradictory tips.
At the highest levels of the U.S. command, the crisis was amplified by an organizational lag. McChrystal’s team was in the first month of his second war in three years. Iraq had been the gravitational center of the U.S. military for more than six years, and in Kabul, commanders had done the best they could with limited assets and personnel. When Bergdahl triggered the DUSTWUN, there was no designated personnel recovery (PR) cell on the ground in Afghanistan to manage the event. His capture should have been processed through the same clear hierarchies that worked to find missing soldiers like Private First Class Jessica Lynch, who went missing in Iraq in 2003. But absent a PR cell in Kabul, the crisis ascended the chain of command and then dispersed into ad hoc, hydra-headed disarray. Without the proper intelligence architecture in place to coordinate efforts, Dach said, the DUSTWUN turned into an “organized free-for-all.”
At ISAF Headquarters, Pelton watched the spiral in disbelief. He was invited into military offices to discuss the situation. “They had maps on the wall,” he said, “and I would point to Pakistan and say, ‘He’s going that way.’” Meanwhile at ISAF, Wilson was told to drop his efforts four days after the first call. The lost puppy was someone else’s problem now. As an “unconventional warfare” officer who rode around Kabul in unmarked cars, dressed in civilian clothes, and called lists of Taliban contacts from his flip phone, Wilson knew that there was a finite number of U.
S. government entities doing similar work, and an even smaller number operating under Pentagon authorities. When Wilson heard that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) had also been told to stand down on the DUSTWUN, he knew that Bergdahl was in Pakistan.
In Washington’s post-9/11 era, and particularly under McChrystal and Flynn in Iraq, JSOC had become the Pentagon’s cleanup crew for the Global War on Terror’s messiest problems. But there were some places that even JSOC couldn’t go; according to the federal laws governing military and espionage, Pakistan was strictly CIA territory. As far as the Army was concerned, Wilson thought to himself on July 5, the search for Bergdahl was over.
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BY THE JULY 4TH WEEKEND in Kabul, Furlong also had corroborating reports from Pelton’s AfPax and Clarridge’s Eclipse that Bergdahl was across the border. He updated Flynn with these reports on a daily basis. But the CIA disagreed; at classified meetings, they told Furlong that they had cell phone intercepts indicating Bergdahl might still be in Afghanistan. Furlong knew they were wrong, but said nothing.
By the summer of 2009, both Furlong and Flynn had come to see the CIA not only as incompetent, but also as their nemesis. At Langley, the feelings were mutual. CIA officers who crossed his path had seen Furlong as a threat for years, a once-Army-always-Army former ranger who believed in his bones that the military was better at intelligence than the Central Intelligence Agency and who was habitually conjuring new ways for the Pentagon to do the CIA’s job. But between Furlong and the generals he worked to please—McKiernan in 2007 and 2008; McChrystal and Flynn in the summer of 2009—it was widely accepted that the CIA was being outmaneuvered by the ISI. To the procession of frustrated generals in Kabul, Furlong was an appealing, if mystifying, government creature: a useful minotaur in the Pentagon’s labyrinthine bureaucracy. As one officer who worked with him said, Furlong spoke at Pentagon meetings in such complex jargon that “nobody would ask any questions because they didn’t want to appear dumb and admit that they didn’t know what he was talking about.”
