American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  But Furlong’s prior approval from McKiernan to fund AfPax had done little to assuage Langley’s concerns. Agency officers in Kabul knew that Furlong had schemes that went beyond AfPax; by the time he hired Clarridge and tried to package all of his intelligence efforts into a top-secret program he called Capstone, the agency considered Furlong not just reckless, but dangerous. If he were permitted to run a parallel spy ring in Pakistan, CIA assets could very well be killed in the process. And if he succeeded, it would prove that the CIA had fallen behind and endangered their share of spook funding in Washington. In July 2009, after years of tension, meetings that sometimes blew up into screaming matches, and an exchange of terse memos from Langley to the Pentagon, Furlong knew he needed to choose his battles. In Kabul, he was finally doing what he had set out to do. As the CIA and CENTCOM pored over the intelligence reports that Furlong already knew were Haqqani deception tactics, he decided not to press his case. Rescuing Bergdahl wasn’t worth triggering the battle with Langley that could bring it all crashing down.

  Pelton was confused. He had thought Furlong and Flynn wanted to find their missing soldier. But when he passed along AfPax reports that Bergdahl had arrived in North Waziristan, Furlong told him to stop. “We have natural enemies because we are good,” he wrote to Pelton on July 17. The next day, as he sensed the walls closing in, he wrote Pelton again: “Keep doing what you are doing. . . . I am building an enduring program that will continue without me. . . . Move forward even if I am fired.”

  Furlong’s insistence that his operations were legal enough didn’t satisfy everyone. That summer, Furlong had invited an ISAF colonel to lunch at the ISAF Joint Command (IJC) headquarters in Kabul. He was hoping to persuade the colonel’s boss, Lieutenant General David Rodriguez, who as IJC commander ran day-to-day operations for ISAF, to support his projects. Furlong started telling the colonel about this “intel ring” he was running. The colonel, who had spent his career alternating between regular infantry duty and classified staff assignments, grew concerned. It was unclear what authorities Furlong had secured for his “intel ring”—but the law (i.e., Title 50 of the U.S. Code), was clear: Outside the powers granted to the CIA and the Department of Defense, there were strict limits about who was authorized to engage in espionage in countries where the United States was not at war. Eclipse was clearly engaging in espionage; the Eclipse Group helped Furlong build a parallel target list—a kill list complete with phone numbers, physical addresses, and email addresses—to rival CIA’s while still meeting the agency’s criteria for extrajudicial killing. Furlong claims he passed his spreadsheet to Flynn with the intent that it be merged into intelligence databases as if it had come from a CIA or military case officer. Furlong thought it was a model spying system: “It’s brown people talking to brown people—it ain’t a bunch of white Special Forces running around.”

  “Mike, are you SOCOM?” the colonel asked.

  Furlong told him he wasn’t.

  “Mike, are you working with the CIA?”

  Hell no, Furlong wasn’t working with CIA; if anything, he worked against them.

  “Mike, who are you working for?” the colonel wanted to know.

  To run such an operation, Furlong would have needed a signed authority from a high-ranking official—the secretary of defense, the director of the CIA, or the president. But Furlong wouldn’t say who provided his authority, and to the colonel, who had worked with three secretaries of defense, it sounded like a rogue program. The colonel ended the lunch and went straight to his boss, Lieutenant General Rodriguez, the ISAF joint commander, who in turn called Flynn and asked him to handle the problem, assuming that Flynn would send Furlong home. But he didn’t; he sent him south to run operations in Kandahar. When the ISAF colonel learned years later that Furlong was allowed to continue operating, he was stunned. “If Mike Furlong’s not in jail—and he’s not in jail—that means this program was sanctioned. So who the fuck sanctioned that negligence?”

  Eventually, the CIA finessed its Furlong problem with a series of apparent leaks to The New York Times. The best way to eliminate shadowy figures was to shine a light on them, and after the front-page story broke about his secret spy ring in March 2010, Furlong was shut down and sent home.

  Despite the bad press, Furlong was proud of what he had pulled off—cobbling together a spy organization in the FATA, feeding the data back to Flynn in a deliberately byzantine way that made everyone assume it was authorized. Under the cover of the “white” (unclassified) contract for media support from Robert Young Pelton and Eason Jordan, Furlong funneled money instead to the “black” (classified and unacknowledged) portion of the contract. The AfPax work was a diversion to get funding to the real mission: using Eclipse to gather names for the kill list. It was a crafty scheme, but it was dangerous. If no one knew Eclipse was feeding data into the kill list, one of the dead targets could turn out to have been innocent, or an agent of another intelligence service. After it went public, an alphabet soup of federal agencies investigated Furlong and several Eclipse agents for years. One, a former Green Beret turned security contractor, was sent to prison for procurement fraud in 2015. Furlong, however, was never formally charged, and the investigations into his activities remain classified. For the Pentagon, the best thing to do with Furlong was pretend that he hadn’t existed at all.

  * * *

  —

  ON JULY 13, Bergdahl’s captors dressed him in a light-blue salwar kameez and sat him cross-legged in front of a small table with a black microphone and a glass of neon-yellow soda. While the camera rolled, an unseen man asked him questions in accented English and held his dog tags up to the camera lens. When the Taliban released the video for worldwide broadcast six days later, U.S. intelligence analysts noted that his captors had had time to dress him in clean clothes, shave his head, make a show of feeding him on camera, and record, edit, and distribute a twenty-eight-minute video. Clearly, they were in a safe place.

  The day after the video aired, ABC News cited military sources involved in the search who said that Bergdahl was already in Pakistan. The Pentagon insisted that he was not, and in an interview later that day in New Delhi, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton dodged the question entirely. “We are attempting to do everything we can to locate him,” she told ABC’s Martha Raddatz. By July 18, nearly all U.S. intelligence agencies monitoring the case updated their assessments to reflect the new reality: Bergdahl was in Pakistan. CENTCOM was the only holdout.

  At Bergdahl’s court-martial more than eight years later, Dach testified that when she updated her team’s assessment after the video’s release, her superiors at CENTCOM did not accept her analysis and instead demanded an unprecedented level of certainty. Dach had joined the Army shortly after 9/11, and in a sixteen-year career that had taken her to assignments at the Pentagon, Guantanamo Bay, and Afghanistan, this was the only time her chain of command had rejected her analysis. She was frustrated.

  “You pay us to tell you what we think, then you tell us you don’t want to know what we think,” she said.

  Dach started getting calls from analysts at other agencies, grilling her about CENTCOM’s balking. The implications were obvious. The War in Afghanistan was being fought in Afghanistan, and when all available intelligence pointed to the fact that Bergdahl had been moved to the wrong side of the border, into a country where the Pentagon was not at war, CENTCOM withheld its own analysis and continued to carry out searches for the missing soldier in the only battle space where it legally could.

  * * *

  —

  AS THE SEARCHES CARRIED on past the time when military and government leadership knew that Bergdahl was almost certainly in Pakistan, the Army began focusing on information control. Task Force Geronimo soldiers were given nondisclosure agreements (NDAs), agreeing to never discuss the DUSTWUN searches. Joshua Cornelison, the platoon’s medic, remembers being in a manic haze, rushing around Sharana for food and a s
hower when an officer told him and his comrades to line up and sign the agreements. The contract was written in awkward legalese, but the point was clear: “We weren’t going to talk about it.” In the weeks and months that followed, the NDAs would reach thousands of personnel. Some men were told that if they didn’t sign, they wouldn’t fly home.

  As the DUSTWUN spun into its third and fourth weeks of what most soldiers saw as sustained madness, Sergeant Rice discerned the logic at work. He was leading his men into raids, air assaults, and “hard knocks”—kicking down doors and stirring up Taliban before sunrise. Early on in his deployment, Rice had been frustrated by COIN’s stringent rules of engagement, the extensive intelligence needed to detain suspected Taliban. But during the DUSTWUN, his superiors approved every raid.

  “If it was a mission to retrieve Bergdahl, it was an instant green light, get it done as fast as you can,” he said. “From an infantryman standpoint, we were doing our job for once.”

  Rice was hit by eight IEDs in two months, and the brain injuries sidelined him from a month of patrols.

  “It was extremely tiring. It was terrible. But it was the right thing to do as far as using the opportunity,” he said. “They took the opportunity and I one hundred percent stand behind it.”

  For officers and mission planners, the vanished soldier had taken on a new life as an internal military tactic. “‘Bergdahl’ became a language tactic to get assets,” one former Blackfoot Company officer explained. For officers sending their men on dangerous patrols in a confusing war, “it was easier to say we’re looking for a guy, rather than another pointless order mission.” He said the ruse went on for months.

  For the men in his own platoon, Bergdahl became the war’s central unreal reality, the embodiment of the contradictions and confusion that had surrounded them from the start. But even when they knew the DUSTWUN had become a sham, they embraced it.

  “We tried to do every mission to the best of our ability,” Cornelison said, “even when we knew that Bergdahl wasn’t even in Afghanistan.”

  ACT III.

  TRAPPED

  TEN

  NOT THE WORST NEWS

  Jani Bergdahl heard Rufus, the family sheepdog, barking and looked out the window to see three soldiers at the gate. But he just got there! she thought as she opened the door and greeted them, an officer, a sergeant, and a chaplain, all in their Class A uniforms: polyester green suits with multicolored ribbons on their chests next to precisely arranged badges and coded epaulets. It was almost four in the afternoon in Idaho, less than twenty-four hours since the DUSTWUN call had gone out from OP Mest.

  “Is your husband home?” the soldiers asked.

  He was not.

  “Do you have anybody home with you?”

  She did not.

  “Is there some way to get in touch with your husband?” Bob didn’t carry a cell phone on his delivery route, but she could reach him in an emergency through UPS central dispatch. She told the men from the Army that she would make the call, but first she needed to know if her son was dead. They would not say. “You can’t tell me anything?”

  Army policy was to not break the news to unaccompanied next of kin. After notifying thousands of soldiers’ families that their sons and daughters were dead, the Pentagon learned that people break down in different ways. “It’s not the worst news it could be,” one of the men offered, finally, and then refused to say another word.

  Jani decided to drive into town and meet Bob at the UPS lot. The soldiers followed her in their government car on the drive she had made countless times before, down the gentle grade toward the Big Wood River, past the alfalfa fields, with the jagged and still-snowcapped peaks of the Pioneer Mountains looming above the valley to the east. Bob saw the message flash on his UPS terminal—“Jani wants you to call her”—and turned the truck back to the distribution terminal, about a fifteen-minute drive from the other side of town. “Oh crap,” he said to himself as he pulled into the dusty gravel lot. Jani was already there, the soldiers by her side.

  “Are you ready for this?” he asked as he walked to her. “Do you know what this means?”

  “No, not yet,” she replied.

  As of that morning, the Army men told them, their son was “DUSTWUN.”

  “That was the beginning of the endless acronyms,” Jani said later.

  The soldiers explained as best they could. He’s missing. That’s all they knew, their information no more or less complete than the radio calls still going up at that moment from the Blackfoot Company elements seven thousand miles to the west, raiding compounds, looking for Bowe, telling their superiors “Nothing significant to report.”

  Not knowing what else to do, Bob climbed back in his truck and finished his route. That was his job. He told himself what he had told his son at Christmas before he deployed: “You’ve gotta stay in the game.” Bob had delivered boxes with a broken rib and with pneumonia. He could work, and the work needed to be done, so he did it. That night they called their pastor in Boise, Glenn Ferrell, who drove two and a half hours across the Camas Prairie the next morning so Jani wouldn’t be alone while Bob was at work. They showed Ferrell the last batch of emails Bowe had sent from FOB Sharana. Even before the Army’s green suits arrived, the Bergdahls’ “greatest concern about Bowe was his spiritual condition,” Ferrell said.

  They didn’t tell anyone else at first, and it was a lonely four days. They knew this was going to ruin Sky’s 4th of July party in Twin Falls with Jani’s mom, the kids’ grandmother. Still, Independence Day seemed like as good an opportunity as any to break the news to family and friends: Bowe had gone missing in Afghanistan. Now he was a hostage of the Taliban. It would be all over the news soon.

  Jani said later, “We thought they’d get him within the week.”

  As that hope vanished, they knew their anonymity wouldn’t last. Bob prepared for unwanted attention. He took down the big Ron Paul yard sign facing the road. He received a call from Lieutenant Colonel Tim Marsano, a former Air Force intelligence officer and Idaho National Guardsman who volunteered to work as the family’s on-loan military public affairs officer (PAO)—Bob dubbed him “the media mediator.” Bob and Marsano decided they needed someone from the community who could speak for the family, and they chose Sue Martin, the owner of the popular local coffee shop, Zaney’s, where Bowe had last worked before he deployed. Bob had known her for years.

  Martin understood inexplicable tragedy; she had opened her shop with her son, Zane, a Ketchum firefighter and EMT, in 2004. Zane’s namesake business had quickly become an institution when, in 2006, he was killed in a motorcycle accident north of Ketchum. Sue decided to keep the business running. It was a scrappy operation where every employee was at some point called on to do every job. Bowe’s quiet aptitude was a good fit. He only needed to watch her balance out the register and make a soy decaf latte once, and he knew it cold.

  Bob knew that putting Martin in this position was a big favor to ask, but he trusted her as a neighbor with solidity, grace, and grit. She agreed, and from then on, Zaney’s served as the town’s ad hoc Bergdahl shrine and media operations center. Soon, Martin found herself taming all manner of creatures and queries at the center of the family’s media circus, a spectacle that brought phone calls from Oprah Winfrey and Christiane Amanpour, a bouquet of flowers from producers at Good Morning America, and news correspondents by the dozens.

  While they avoided the press, the Bergdahls began building a local network of military and government connections. Bob’s UPS customers included two retired Navy admirals and a family that had made a small fortune in commercial real estate in Washington, D.C. Jani cleaned houses in Sun Valley as a side job and knew that one of her clients was a former Marine Corps captain who had been wounded in Vietnam and stayed close with a circle of veterans, including several POWs. After surviving the war that killed two-thirds of his Marine Officer Candidates School cl
assmates, Hayward Sawyer had traded in his fatigues for a suit and tie in the insurance industry in Connecticut. He became wealthy and settled into a gentleman rancher’s retirement in Sun Valley. The day the Taliban posted its first proof-of-life video, Jani was cleaning Sawyer’s house and saw him watching the news.

  “I know you’re a praying man,” she said to him. “That soldier you heard about on TV this morning is our son.”

  Stunned, Sawyer started making calls to his cadre of former POWs. Bob and Jani knew that they needed friends who understood the military but weren’t beholden to it. Sawyer was the perfect advocate, down to the Purple Heart ribbon he pinned on his blue blazer and, when in Idaho, his Purple Heart belt buckle. “We knew we were going up against the military complex,” Bob said. “We brought [Sawyer] for shock and awe,” Jani added.

  Once the first proof-of-life video was broadcast and Bowe became the most famous soldier in the world, his hometown rallied. A July 22 vigil in Hailey was one of the largest impromptu town gatherings in memory. Hundreds of locals turned out, most of them on bicycles, to honor the local boy who was perpetually riding his. They carried homemade signs that said “Support Our Troops” and “Bring Bowe Home,” and they fixed American flags to their handlebars for a mass walk from Zaney’s, past Bob’s UPS lot, and down the hill to Hop Porter Park, alongside the Big Wood River.

  It was a somber Idaho night, and as the crowd walked into the park under the tall cottonwoods and the cool shadow of Carbonate Mountain, the mood was serious but upbeat. “We’re a very small community. We’re very tightly knit,” Chamber of Commerce Director Jim Spinelli said. “If you don’t know Bowe, the person you talk to knows Bowe.” They lit candles, prayed in silent unison, and hoped that positive thought would bring a positive outcome.