American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  From the beginning of truce talks on July 11, 1951, and for more than a year that followed, the U.S. government sought an agreement to bring home sick and wounded POWs, raising the issue a dozen times in both formal and informal negotiations. As the prisoners were gradually released and debriefed by U.S. intelligence, concern grew within the CIA about Communist brainwashing, which, in the era of McCarthyism, was understood as an insidious psychological infection that could spread like a virus within the American public at large. The Communists, the logic went, were sending back our own men as mental time bombs with fuses lit by masters in Pyongyang and Beijing.

  A shadow fell over the POWs, and men were judged harshly for their behavior in captivity. But how much was treason and how much was coercion? What should be expected of soldiers or sailors under duress? To answer those questions, the U.S. military drafted a code of conduct and adopted a range of training programs falling under the rubric of Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE). The training was often brutal. Even when they knew that their SERE training was a simulation, most men broke, proving that the code of conduct itself was unrealistic.

  The modern movement to rehabilitate the American POW began with the wives of the men held in Vietnam, and most prominently with Sybil Stockdale. Her husband, naval aviator Commander James Bond Stockdale, had been shot down and captured in North Vietnam in September 1965. He would spend seven and half years in the colonial-era stockade known as the Hanoi Hilton, and as its highest-ranking prisoner, he was in command, teaching newcomers the coded alphabet of coughs and taps the men used to communicate. When Commander Stockdale learned about his captors’ plans to film him for propaganda, he slit his scalp with a razor and bashed his face into a fifty-pound stool until his eyes were swollen shut. For these and other insubordinations, he was routinely tortured and spent about four years in “Alcatraz,” a separate block of six-by-nine solitary confinement cells.

  Despite her husband’s rank, the Pentagon stonewalled Mrs. Stockdale, offering opaque statements and instructions not to talk about him—not with her friends, not with other military wives, and definitely not with the press. Making a fuss, they told her, would only delay her husband’s homecoming. Seeking special attention would only bring him worse abuse, even torture.

  In May 1966, more than eight months after her husband had disappeared over North Vietnam, Sybil found her first Pentagon ally in Naval Intelligence officer Commander Robert Boroughs, who encouraged her to go public, organize, and lobby the chain of command. She quickly recruited a network of wives, including Evelyn Grubb and Shirley Stark, whose husbands had also been shot down. The Army had denied benefits to Grubb and her four children until it was convinced that her husband had not been brainwashed in captivity into a Communist sympathizer. To Stark, it was the Pentagon that appeared to have been brainwashed into madness. “We were bombing their country, and they were shooting us down,” Stark said. “What was the big secret?”

  Withholding information from POW families was standard government procedure, and it triggered the rise of one of the largest and most successful grassroots lobbying campaigns in U.S. history. By the time Operation Homecoming brought 566 POWs home from North Vietnam in 1973, the issue had become one of most politically charged of the war and carried a legacy of betrayal that would haunt the Pentagon for decades. Gradually, and for reasons both noble and politically expedient, the Defense Department spent thirty years after Vietnam writing policy and building agencies to address the issues first raised by Stockdale. The reforms would be far from perfect—and the Pentagon would never lose its taste for secrecy—but the changes helped ensure that POW-MIA families of the future would not be ignored. But Stockdale, Stark, Grubb, and the families who joined them only won these concessions after years of persistent lobbying and an excruciating struggle against their own government.

  Ahead of the 1968 election, President Lyndon Johnson saw no political upside on the issue. Young Americans he had sent to war were captive in unspeakable conditions. Why publicize it? It looked especially toxic ahead of the 1968 election, with even Republican challengers like Michigan governor George Romney promising a radical reassessment of the war. (Romney had been for the war before he was against it, but he told a television reporter that he had been “brainwashed” by American generals into thinking Vietnam was a good idea.) As the war’s chaos spread that fall, Sybil Stockdale and Evelyn Grubb formally organized the National League of American Prisoners and Missing in Southeast Asia, taking their plight and claims of government deception mainstream. In the name of patriotism, the National League accused the military of hypocrisy: Leave no man behind?

  By the time Johnson left Washington for his terminal exile in the Texas Hill Country, more than three hundred men were confirmed captured and nearly six hundred were missing in Southeast Asia. Four years and two heart attacks later, Johnson was dead, and Nixon abruptly turned the POW-MIA crisis into a political opportunity. In the spring of 1969, Nixon directed the Pentagon to take the lead on what the administration would call the Go Public campaign. On May 19—four days after police killed one college student and sent dozens more to the hospital during antiwar riots in Berkeley, California—Nixon’s secretary of defense, Melvin Laird, unveiled Washington’s new POW policy in an emotional presentation. Building his argument from the bedrock of universal human rights, he declared that the North Vietnamese were guilty of war crimes and holding POWs in violation of the Geneva Conventions. The U.S. government demanded a large-scale prisoner release.

  Wire stories from the Pentagon press conference ran nationwide. The Chicago Tribune reported that demands for prisoner releases had actually begun years earlier, when W. Averell Harriman, as Johnson’s envoy to the Paris Peace Talks, had threatened American retaliation if the prisoners were mistreated. But when Harriman—a former New York governor, ambassador to the USSR, and founder of Idaho’s Sun Valley Resort—heard about Nixon’s plans to use the POWs to his political advantage, he was appalled. He called Laird at the Pentagon to lobby him against parading captured Americans into the political arena.

  But Nixon and Laird’s Go Public campaign was already in motion, and the May 19 press conference kicked it off in the most explosive terms possible, displaying a series of poster-size photos of captured men in Hanoi starving and disfigured behind bars. In a savvy move, Laird had hired Dick Capen, a San Diego Tribune reporter, to help sell the Pentagon’s new policy. In his prior newspaper job, Capen had already interviewed the families of almost fifty captured servicemen; following the press rollout, Laird sent him on a forty-five-stop tour to lavish publicity on POW families nationwide and bring them onto the right side of Nixon’s domestic battle lines.

  Where the Pentagon had only recently used threats and fear to discourage Sybil Stockdale and her allies from talking, now the Defense Department encouraged them to protest Hanoi in the most public ways possible. Prisoners’ wives traveled to North Vietnamese embassies to deliver morose personal pleas, preferably on camera. Congress followed Nixon’s lead and passed unanimous resolutions condemning Hanoi for its treatment of prisoners, and in a burst of creativity, even hijacked a Communist holiday to further the cause. Congress declared May 1, 1970—International Workers Day in the Communist sphere—as “a day for an appeal for international justice for all the American prisoners of war and servicemen missing in action in Southeast Asia.” POWs were honored with a week of remembrance, a day of prayer, a commemorative postage stamp, and an Air Force flyby over the Super Bowl. Letter-writing and petition campaigns were launched by the American Legion, the American Red Cross, the Veterans of Foreign Wars, and local chapters of the Jaycees, Rotarians, and Elks. The Air Force grew especially fond of POW-wife Mrs. Shirley Odell of Mount Clemens, Michigan, and her letter-writing campaign; it even published her phone number in promotional newsletters, encouraging other families to reach out and join Odell’s cause.

  On April 28, 1970, President Nixon approved a full invasion o
f Cambodia, justifying American expansion into a third Southeast Asian country in an April 30 television address. He then declared May 3, 1970, a National Day of Prayer for all American soldiers missing or captive in Southeast Asia. At the Paris talks, North Vietnamese negotiators agreed to begin releasing American prisoners as soon as Nixon set a firm date for withdrawal. Nixon replied to the offer with a public tautology: “As long as the North Vietnamese have any Americans as prisoners of war, there will be Americans in South Vietnam.”

  Following the news of the North Vietnamese offer and Nixon’s refusals to negotiate, Mrs. Odell stopped sending her letters to Hanoi and started sending them to the White House instead. “How many more men must die before you make a decision?” she wrote on July 17. A few weeks later, she mailed the president a care package of toothpaste, soap, vitamins, hard candy, and a personal note—the same supplies she sent to her husband every other month. “I hope you can survive on this till I can send you another package,” she told Nixon.

  The movement she had started would eventually have five million remembrance bracelets on American wrists, bumper stickers on about fifty million cars, and, twenty years later, a black flag of mourning at every federal building in the country. But in the fall of 1971, Stockdale still had no idea whether her husband would ever be free. “I’ve never left Washington without someone taking me aside and telling me in confidence, ‘In two or three months we expect a development of a substantive nature.’ Now I say, ‘Don’t tell me. I don’t believe it.’ But I don’t believe the Vietcong either.”

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  JANUARY 2010 BLANKETED CROY Creek Canyon and the high Idaho foothills in several feet of fresh snow. Bob and Jani had spent Christmas with a harrowing video of their son, pale and gaunt and reading anti-American screeds on a Taliban propaganda tape. They hung a Christmas wreath on the metal rungs of their cattle gate. In front of it, one of Bowe’s friends left candles half buried and glowing like lanterns in the snow.

  The Army hadn’t provided his family any new information in months. Sky Bergdahl had been a Navy wife for nine years, and she watched in amazement as the Pentagon shut down requests even from her husband, a naval aviator with a top-secret security clearance. She was torn between the informed opinion that “the Army has been feeding us a whole lot of doublespeak” and the sense that the secrecy was in the interest of protecting those sent to rescue her brother. She remained optimistic.

  “We have to hope,” Sky said. “I believe that we were created by a loving God. I know everything happens for a reason and for the good of those who believe.” This is how the months passed—Bob driving his delivery route, Jani talking for hours on the phone with family and their pastors in Boise. Prayer carried them through.

  They had also been lifted by support systems that they never saw coming. Three weeks after Bowe’s name was first broadcast on July 18, 2009, the first hundred bikers rolled into Hailey for what the Pocatello POW-MIA Awareness Association had named the Bowe Prayer Run. Saturday, August 8, carried the first chills of autumn in the Idaho desert, and the black-leather-clad bikers rode for three to five hours from Pocatello, Elko, and Boise through the cold needling rain and temperatures in the high forties. They crested Timmerman Hill in formation and rode north into Hailey, converging at Zaney’s.

  Word had spread that the captured soldier’s parents were wary about attracting much attention; they were private people, and the Army had already warned them against it. But the bikers felt compelled to do something. Many had fathers, uncles, and brothers who had served and never returned from the jungles of Southeast Asia. Some had lost family to more recent wars.

  “We live in an NFL and an American Idol world, and people don’t even realize there are soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines out there,” Roy Breshears, one of the Pocatello organizers, said later. The men fighting the War in Afghanistan and the families who waited for them had been forgotten, he said. “If nothing else, we needed to show his parents and each other that we still have the humanity to care about that.”

  The bikers parked in formation in front of Zaney’s with “colors out”: the POW-MIA, U.S. Marine Corps, U.S. Coast Guard, and U.S. flags flapping in the cold August wind. Bob and Jani had only just begun to process the reality of their ordeal. They put on black clothes that morning and the bikers pinned yellow ribbons on their chests. Bob hadn’t shaved in more than five weeks, and the stubble on his chin had grown almost as long as his moustache. He said a few words of thanks to a huddle of bikers and friends that tightened around him and his family, and when they asked if he knew anything beyond what they could read in the news, Bob said he did not.

  The Bergdahls’ brain trust of politically connected Vietnam veterans told them not to believe what they heard from Washington. But there was no avoiding the Pentagon. It is the node through which all U.S. military stories must pass. And things had changed since the 1970s. For all of its flaws, the Defense Department had evolved and internalized the lessons of Vietnam in this regard: The families of the missing and captured could not be ignored.

  Even as Sky and her husband marveled at the familiar modes of military obfuscation, her parents were provided with support plans and personalized attention that would have been unheard of in earlier wars. The Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) was designed to track down all missing and captured servicemen and women, and it was equipped to help their families for the duration. A family assistance team flew to Idaho, laid out the logistical and medical plans for reintegrating Bowe back into the Army, and treated their son’s homecoming as a guaranteed outcome.

  The team was headquartered at Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC) in San Antonio, Texas, and led by Colonel Bradley Poppen, the Pentagon’s senior SERE (Survival Evasion Resistance Escape) psychologist. Poppen, whom everyone called “Doc,” had been through these cases before; he exuded an academic and professional calm. In 2003, his team had managed Jessica Lynch’s recovery during the Iraq War; and in 2008 they welcomed home three Pentagon contractors held in chains for more than five years by leftist rebels in the mountains of Colombia. Even in darkness, Poppen would tell Bob and Jani, the human animal—and surely a young man as independent as their son—is more resilient than most people think.

  Bob and Jani felt they were in good hands and were comfortable in the military community. In addition to his brother-in-law pilot, Bowe’s maternal grandfather had served in the Navy, and one of Jani’s cousins was an Army helicopter crew chief who’d been killed in Nicaragua. Bob’s grandfather had served in the Merchant Marine, and his great-uncle, Corporal Frank Powers, had fought with the 3rd Armored Division near the German-Belgian border, where he was killed by an artillery shell in 1945. Before he died, Corporal Powers had written a letter home about an incident with a German officer who crossed Allied lines to negotiate an off-the-books prisoner swap. To Bob, it was an instructive artifact of history; if only some commander in RC East had had such clout (and a briefcase full of cash), his son might have been freed within days. Instead, he was in a true no-man’s-land, trapped by a non-state actor inside the disputed borders of an unconvincing ally. The very fact of his being located in Pakistan, obvious to anyone with an internet connection, was classified, its very discussion by anyone in the military or intelligence community punishable by federal law.

  Bob and Jani didn’t know what had happened at Mest, but they knew their son. Despite the tension between them, Bowe had written to his parents from Afghanistan, and over the course of six weeks, emails that had started out with humor and aplomb quickly turned dark and dispirited. They worried that he was psychologically isolated and ethically confused about his purpose there. Bob saw clues in the videos shot by The Guardian’s Sean Smith, who had embedded with 2nd Platoon at Mest in June 2009. He watched them over and over: Bowe digging out a bunker while the other soldiers stood around watching, Bowe speaking with a young Afghan from a nearby village, Bowe posing with a pipe on the hil
ltop at sunset. In one scene, the soldiers talked about the Taliban planting IEDs in the road at night. Bob suspected that his son might have been slipping off the OP on solo missions to gather his own intelligence. “Maybe that’s how it went down,” he said to Jani.

  All of it had Bob torn. On the one hand, he was proud of the all-or-nothing resolve that had driven Bowe to volunteer twice for the U.S. military. At the same time, he couldn’t shake the feeling that if Bowe didn’t survive this, it was somehow his own fault as a parent.

  Before Bowe had deployed, Bob followed the news and emailed him stories about the war he was headed into. After the DUSTWUN, Bob’s reading consumed him. He was a lifelong autodidact, and he dove into fathoms of academic and historical research and contemporary policy analysis. In the evenings after his work shift and in the mornings before, his studies grew into his own all-or-nothing mission. He read nineteenth-century British writers who surveyed the tribal dynamics of the Raj’s North-West Frontier Province, and he pored over colonial maps that laid out where each tribe had lived. Comparing these with present-day analysis, he was struck by how little had changed.

  In 2009, the Obama administration devoted countless hours and hundreds of millions of dollars to shore up the partnership with the Pakistani military and ISI. But the expected outcome of that effort—that the Pakistanis would restrain the Taliban and promote reconciliation in Kabul—had not materialized. After a decade of war, Washington still had no viable diplomatic channel to Mullah Omar and the Quetta Shura. And after Chapman, the CIA and the Pentagon were in no mood to talk.

  Plenty of Americans communicated with the Taliban, but not at the levels where policy was decided and applied. Clandestine Army officers like Major Ron Wilson had Taliban contacts, but no authority to negotiate. The CIA had the authority but was focused on droning Haqqani commanders and finding bin Laden, not Bowe Bergdahl. Aside from firing missiles from remote-controlled robots in the sky, the United States government had no power over the men who held Bergdahl, no method of contacting them, and only vague sketches of a plan to begin trying. When a reporter at a White House press conference asked if the president or his staff had contacted the family, Obama replied, coolly, that he would, when he had good news.