by Matt Farwell
THIRTEEN
MEANS OF ESCAPE
Bergdahl’s guards feared that he would escape again. He had done it twice in the first week they held him, and the second time he proved that he could break out of a locked cell. It was just two or three days after he had left OP Mest. After they had hiked him through the night to Pakistan and presented him to Mullah Sangeen, his guards brought him to a low-ceilinged cell on the ground floor of a private home. In broken English, they pointed to the corner of the dirt floor and told him he could relieve himself there.
Once they were gone, with his blindfold off, he realized that he could see their comings and goings through the cracks in the wooden door. Whenever water was delivered to the home, his guards would leave his area for about ten minutes. They had chained his hands and tied his feet with rope, but he managed to twist and wriggle his way free of both. When the guards left for water again, he squeezed his hand through the door jamb, unwrapped the heavy wire they used as a lock, and, as quietly as possible, pushed the door open and ran. He was, for the moment, free.
Outside Bergdahl’s cell, life went on. Children were playing. He saw a woman with a broom, and she saw him too, freezing in place before she began screaming. He kept running, cutting his bare feet as he reached a road and picked up speed before darting into a thicket of short trees and thorny bushes. His feet now punctured and bleeding, he realized that he wasn’t fully concealed, and sprinted to a nearby single-story home and climbed to the roof, which was puddled with mud from a recent rain. He got down and rolled in the muck to camouflage himself, but it was all for naught. A few seconds later, a man climbed to the roof, followed by another with an AK-47. They seized him, punching him as they chained his hands behind his back and stuffed him into a waiting car. He had been free for less than fifteen minutes.
Blindfolded again, Bergdahl heard his captors talk among themselves and then yell out in a group cheer. They drove him to a larger compound, fortified with iron gates, metal shutters, and bars across the windows. In the middle of the room that would become his cell was a stripped bed frame—just pipes held together by string. There was no mattress, just bare springs. They shackled his wrists to the top of the frame and padlocked his leg chains to the sides. Aside from trips to the latrine and filming propaganda videos, he would remain splayed this way for the next three months.
When the Pentagon’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) compiled the official government record of his captivity five years later, it divided Bergdahl’s treatment into three distinct categories: torture, abuse, and neglect. The torture was concentrated in the early months. At night, an English speaker carrying a length of rubber pipe came in to interrogate him. He asked who had helped him escape. Was it the woman he had seen? They also wanted to know about America. Why were so many Americans so fat? Is Obama gay? Where do the U.S. officers in Afghanistan get their prostitutes? When he couldn’t answer, the man twirled the hose in the air, making it whir before striking him, the sound becoming a feature of the routine. Guards held AK-47s to his head, took off his blindfold to show him videos of beheadings, and told him that he was next. They whipped his feet and legs with copper cables and plastic pipes, gradually rendering them useless. One guard entered each night with a razor, kneeled on Bergdahl’s chest, and made small slices—eventually hundreds of them—in his torso.
The first months were designed to initiate him into the long-term captivity that awaited him, breaking him physically so he could not escape again. Sores opened on his ankles and wrists where he was chained, and on his forehead and eyelids under the blindfold. His muscles atrophied, as intended, and when his captors saw that he could no longer stand on his own power, they unchained one arm so he could sit up to eat. They fed him elbow noodles, rice, and a bottle of water twice a day. Later recalling the chronic dysentery that started then, Bergdahl suspected that they had also poisoned him. Looking at the sores on his ankles, he thought that his staph infection from the prior winter had returned. He cut away the dead flesh with scissors borrowed from his guards and packed his wounds with sand before they shackled him to the bed again.
In Pakistan, Bergdahl would spend four years and eleven months in isolation. He only knew that he was an American soldier held by the Taliban, and that he needed to escape.
* * *
—
THEY WOULD MOVE him over that time to at least nine locations: rural and urban, single-story mud huts, and forty-foot-tall concrete compounds. When it was time to move, his guards blindfolded him, dressed him as a woman in a burka, or bound his wrists and ankles and stuffed him under blankets and rugs. He was always accompanied by at least one man carrying a pistol or an AK-47 as they drove in circles to disorient him. When he arrived at a new location, a new set of people would cycle through to ogle and taunt.
“I was the new, shiny thing, and they’d come and try to talk to me,” Bergdahl said later. Women and adolescent children were among the guards assigned to feed him and to walk him by his chain, handcuffed and shackled, to a toilet each morning. They were no more lenient than the men and, in some ways, more cruel. The women would spit in his food and slap him. The kids would whip him with his chains and toss cups of urine at him. One school-age boy was kinder than the rest, and he scolded the others for their pranks and shooed them away. He wanted the prisoner to teach him English. Bergdahl had nothing against the kid, and they exchanged words when they could.
“It was usually about a week before they started getting bored, before they started getting careless and forgetting about me,” Bergdahl recalled. Whether intentionally or from negligence, his guards would leave glaring electric lights on in his cell for days, then leave him for even longer periods in total darkness. The perpetual light was worse, but most maddening was the random flickering between light and dark that destroyed his sleep patterns and concept of time. Seldom was there a guard who spoke conversational English. But when Bergdahl motioned that he wanted a flashlight after days of darkness, his guards refused and explained by running in place, a charade of their fear that he would escape again. When they brought food, they would toss it on the ground and deny his requests for a plate or bowl for the same reason and with the same pantomime: he might somehow use it to escape.
Into his cell walls, Bergdahl scratched the evidence of his time: his initials, the letters P-O-W, and his unit’s name and insignia. The guards gave him a blanket or a mat to sleep on mud or concrete floors. “Mud [floors] were easier. It allowed me to dig holes to try and escape, and to dig holes to hide diarrhea,” Bergdahl later testified. His illnesses had become chronic, and when his diarrhea was impossible to control, his guards grew furious. They threatened to cut off his nose and ears if he did it again. Some days they told him that he would be freed imminently. Other days they told him that he would die there.
As his body wasted from dysentery, they denied him access to a bath or shower for about four months, and he lived in his own filth. But he realized that the fouler he smelled, the less often his guards came to see him and the more time he had to work on escaping. In one compound, he spent months digging a tunnel into a mud wall at night, replacing the loose dirt by morning, and urinating on the debris to smooth away all traces of disturbance. He hid the evidence of his excavation in his clothing and deposited what he could carry to the toilet each morning. After several months, he had dug four or five feet into the wall and was worried that he had produced too much dirt to hide. But just then, they moved him again.
* * *
—
BERGDAHL ENDURED HIS ISOLATION by focusing on the smallest details of his surroundings and the largest unseen powers of the universe. He blocked his mind from heading down paths of nostalgia and sentiment. Early on, he realized that his friends and family back home could not save him and that thinking about them would only cause more pain.
“You can’t go insane if you’re talking to God,” he would later tell Pentagon debriefers. But for the m
ost part, “what helped keep my mind occupied was the effort of constantly trying to solve the puzzle of getting out.” The idea that his guards could go on tormenting him with impunity and denying him his freedom enraged him. “In so many ways, letting them win was not an option,” he said.
As he had done in the Army, he scrutinized the system that held him for seeking out even the smallest flaws. He listened to footsteps to learn his guards’ routines. He studied his chains and shackles for spots of rust and the ropes for frayed places that he could work over until they broke. By spitting on a link in his hand shackles for a few months, he rusted it until it snapped, then hid the damage by piecing the mechanism back together with shreds of wood and fabric. Later, when a small boy unknowingly dropped a key from a ribbon, Bergdahl grabbed it and discovered that it opened most of the cheap padlocks that were used on his chains. He hid the key in the cuff of his pants, and when he was taken to meet Badruddin Haqqani, Jalaluddin’s son and the operational commander for his captivity, he swallowed it, knowing he could retrieve it later in his own cell.
In early 2010, the Haqqanis moved him to his sixth location, a large, remote home that he and his Pentagon debriefers would later call the Mountain Fortress. Here, he was kept on an upper level in a spacious room with a fire pit in the middle of a dirt floor, and was chained to a wooden column that stood next to his blankets and mat. There was no latrine for him; the guards pointed to the floor. They left him alone for longer and longer periods until he realized that on some days the only people present were women, children, and old men. Dysentery had withered him, and as he looked at his protruding ribs and bulging joints, he decided there were only two ways left to die.
“I said to myself, ‘I can either die here from illness, or escape. You have to try.’”
He began preparing by collecting tools. Pulling a nail from the wall, he sharpened it with a rock and stuck it in the sole of his rubber sandal. He found a piece of plastic pipe and hid it in the nest of linens that were so filthy he knew no one would touch them. When his guards brought bread, he set aside rations for his journey. Night after night, he rehearsed opening his shackles and tying his bedding to the pipe as a makeshift rope. As the day approached, he unlocked himself from the chain and walked to the window: He could see that he was in the mountains and hear the distant whine of U.S. surveillance drones. When a boy spotted him at the window, Bergdahl leapt back and hurriedly rechained himself.
“I let my guard down too much,” he recalled thinking as an old man entered his room with an AK-47. The boy shortened his chain and the old man motioned that he would shoot him if he tried to get loose again. It was now apparent that aside from the boy and the old man, the house was empty. Bergdahl decided that he would have to leave that night.
“There was no doubt in my mind that jumping out that window and trying to run for it was suicide,” he said later. Dying from exposure was likely, he figured, but that was better than “sitting in a locked room at someone else’s mercy and dying that way.”
When the house was quiet and dark, he removed his shackles quietly, hands first, then his ankles. He lashed the purloined PVC pipe to a stick, tied a rope around this improvised grappling hook, and wedged it into the window frame. Carrying his blanket, sandals, and the plastic soda bottle they put his water in each morning, he climbed to the sill, stood there for a moment, and then rappelled to the ground. For the first time in a year, he was free.
Bergdahl walked through a night so dark he didn’t realize that he had come to the edge of a deep wadi until he was already falling. He fell for so long, he had time to be surprised that he was still falling—and hit the ground with such force that some nearby dogs started barking. He struggled to his feet, walked to the creek in the riverbed to fill his bottle, and realized that he couldn’t open his left hand. Limping far up the hillside away from the dogs, he dug a trench at the base of a tree and buried himself in dirt and pine needles as the gray light of dawn broke on the horizon. He remained there for the day and rose to walk again at night, the same schedule he had laid out when he had left Mest more than a year earlier. For the next eight nights he continued this way, his face camouflaged with mud, steering away from signs of people as he searched for water and food. The saved bits of bread had turned to mold. He saw berries growing on bushes, but didn’t trust them. With no other options, he started eating grass and drinking putrid water. Disoriented, he walked in wide circles that brought him back again and again to where he had started. Throughout, he heard the drones buzzing, and, one day, saw six of them in the sky.
Lost alone on a ridgetop in the most surveilled sector of South Asia, Bergdahl knew that at that moment, on the other side of the world, American pilots and intelligence officers were scanning real-time video of the ground where he stood. If only he could get their attention—if only someone would notice him. But as he searched the sky where his salvation hovered obliviously overhead, there was no way to reach out.
His body began to fail. Trying to stand, he would black out and fall over. One time as he came to, he heard a sound approaching and saw a lone Taliban emerge from the nearby bushes. Thirty seconds later, some fifteen or twenty more men followed behind him. Bergdahl assumed that they would kill him. Instead, they grabbed him, slung him over their shoulders, and moved quickly off the mountainside, fearful of drones. They slapped and punched his face and tore at his hair and beard. Then they loaded him into a truck and returned to the Mountain Fortress. When they saw his condition—ribs and clavicles protruding, feet cut open and full of thorns, big toenail ripped off—they stopped beating him.
They drove him to a new place and fitted him with heavier chains and bigger shackles. Then they brought the cage: elevated eight inches off the ground, constructed of quarter-inch iron bars crosshatched and welded about three inches apart. There was a small door at one end. A Haqqani commander who spoke English arrived to inspect his most valuable prisoner in his new home.
“He told me the cage was specifically built for me.”
ACT IV.
BRING BOWE HOME
FOURTEEN
PAWNS
The United States does not negotiate with terrorists. This has long been an effective bit of American political rhetoric, but it’s never been accurate. The first U.S. president to pay ransoms for hostages was George Washington, in 1792, and the practice of negotiating, paying, and bartering for prisoners has continued ever since, regardless of the label applied to those who held them. Washington and the 2nd Congress appropriated $642,000 to free forty-two American sailors held in Algiers by the Barbary pirates, the Ottoman Empire’s non-state terror proxy. Seven years earlier, before the Constitution had even been ratified, the Continental Congress had paid $80,000 to appease the pirates and bring home the captive crew of the merchant ship Betsey.
In the centuries of American wars that followed, few prisoners’ lives were valued that highly again. The Revolutionary War was the most brutal; some twenty thousand soldiers and patriotic insurgents were held captive, more than half of whom perished in squalid British prison ships anchored in the estuaries of New York Harbor. Roughly eleven thousand men died inside those ships, more than the total killed in the war’s seven years of fighting. Twenty years after the war ended, as President Thomas Jefferson ordered the dredging of the Brooklyn shoreline to build a Navy yard, thousands of skeletons were found and collected from mass graves in the tidal muck.
The parlay over prisoners of war is as old as war itself. In Greek mythology, the ten-year Trojan War of Homer’s Iliad began with the kidnapping of Helen of Troy; it was expected that prisoners would be treated humanely and ransomed after conflicts had ended. During the Middle Ages, when war became an occupation of the landowning nobility, non-heir sons were sent away to fight external enemies, lest they threaten the internal order. These young noblemen were coveted hostages, and their capture resulted in handsome profits. If their families could not or would not produce paym
ents, execution was common.
Prisoners, hostages, and detainees—whether military or civilian, active participants in the conflict or innocent bystanders—have almost always found their lives commodified. Sacrifices to the greater conflict, they live in chains while distant scales measure their worth, whether in cash, as barter for political concessions, human shields, or tools of propaganda. As the United States gained power and prestige, the early practice of paying ransoms to pirates was deemed less and less politically acceptable and presidents sought out alternative methods. They often settled on military rescues. When those failed—as with the elaborate April 1980 unraveling of Operation Eagle Claw in the Iranian desert—several presidential administrations have made political compromises and paid secret ransoms to bring Americans home.
Civilian hostages lucky enough to be freed rarely faced any sustained scrutiny. But for returning POWs, American attitudes shifted from war to war. After World War II, POWs who had been held in German and Japanese camps were respected, if pitied, for their service and their suffering. It wasn’t until the Korean War that perceptions changed. GIs captured in Korea were seen as tainted by a distant conflict in an obscure nation that, so soon after the victories of 1945, few Americans had paid attention to. The Forgotten War, as Korea would be called, took the lives of more than 36,000 Americans, and some 4,714 were held as POWs. Their plight was severe: More than a third died in captivity. By September 1950, three months after the war had begun, the CIA estimated that there were five hundred American POWs in Seoul, held in makeshift detention centers. They were visited daily by agents of the North Korean Internal Affairs Office, who worked to indoctrinate their American captives with Communist ideology and forced them to sign confessions and read propaganda scripts. When prisoners refused, they were beaten, tortured, and eventually moved en masse to Pyongyang.
