by Matt Farwell
“I’m going, ‘How much intel do we have in that area? How is this going to be reconciled? Is CIA going to be in on this? Is ISI going to be in on this? Can we trust the Pakistanis?” Bob didn’t need a classified briefing to tell him where his son was, but after six months, he and Jani did need something they were not getting: reassurance that the U.S. government would or even could do anything about it.
Retired Navy captain Jerry Coffee and his wife, Susan Page, had been wondering the same thing, and the meeting they had with Bob and Jani in July 2009 had spurred them to action. From Idaho, Coffee and Page had traveled east to Annapolis, where the former POW had made speaking at the Naval Academy Plebe Summer a yearly tradition. The couple also made plans for lunch with an old friend, Senator John McCain. They knew John, as they called him, as a man with a conscience and a code.
“I don’t have the authority or the information to tell John McCain anything,” Page said later. “But I could just feel for these parents. My son is a Marine. I would feel so desperate.”
McCain was skeptical. From what he knew, he told his old friends, Bergdahl had “just walked away.” Coffee and Page couldn’t speak to that. But they believed that the Bergdahls were good people, that they were being left in the dark, and that they were suffering. McCain said he would look into it. The next Page heard from Jani Bergdahl, it was in an email that winter, thanking her and her husband. The Bergdahls had been invited to the Pentagon.
As Bob and Jani prepared for the trip in February 2010, the backdrop of the war was grim. In February, the Dutch government had collapsed over the future of its two thousand troops in Afghanistan and became the first major NATO ally to announce a pullout. Then, in March, British journalist Jerome Starkey published an exposé in The Sunday Times about a botched February 12 night mission in Paktia Province that left five civilians dead. U.S. Special Forces acting on false intelligence had stormed a home in Gardez and opened fire on two pregnant women (one a mother of ten, the other of six), a teenage girl, and two men working for the Afghan government, killing them all. At first, ISAF claimed that the women had been found in an apparent Taliban murder scene. Starkey’s reporting revealed the story of an American atrocity, complete with U.S. soldiers digging their own bullets out of the walls of the home and the dead women’s bodies.
The incident in Gardez capped off months of bad news for McChrystal and the Pentagon. Obama’s surge had sent civilian deaths into record numbers, and even though the Taliban was responsible for the vast majority, perceptions tilted against Western troops. “We’re going to lose this fucking war if we don’t stop killing civilians,” McChrystal had barked at an early-morning staff meeting in August 2009. Six months later, ISAF was caught in a lie about why five innocent people in Gardez were dead.
Bob and Jani weren’t expecting a cheerful reception at Army headquarters. But a strange thing happened in Arlington. They walked under the twin flag poles at the building’s entrance (one flying red, white, and blue; the other POW black) and came out with something they hadn’t anticipated: a real human connection with the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Admiral Michael Mullen invited his wife, Deborah, who’d worked for years as an advocate for military families, to join him for the meeting, and the two couples quickly bonded over their common roots: Bob and Mullen had graduated from rival Catholic high schools in Los Angeles, and both men’s parents had long careers in the entertainment industry. Whether McCain had pulled any strings was not discussed. Rather, the two couples marveled at a more uncanny connection. The day Bowe’s identity had been released, Bob’s uncle had called up Mullen’s mother; the two were old friends from Los Angeles.
The Bergdahls saw the coincidences as providence, proof that a higher power was guiding them. Mullen had expected a relationship defined by compassion for suffering parents, but as time passed, he grew increasingly impressed by Bob’s research and analysis of the FATA. “There were many times when he knew more about it than I did,” Mullen said.
After they left, Mullen called then Joint Forces commander General James Mattis, and the two agreed to give the family a security clearance. Mattis and his staff took the lead on managing the relationship, which, as with Mullen, grew into a bond based on common histories. For Mattis, it was growing up without a television and surrounded by books in the farmlands of Washington State’s Columbia River Valley. On a 2012 trip to CENTCOM, Bob brought Mattis a horseshoe that belonged to his son. “Good luck, sir,” he said, handing it to him. “You’re gonna need all the luck you can get to fix Afghanistan.” Mattis hung it on a prominent wall outside the operations room at CENTCOM headquarters.
Mullen reminded Bob that their relationship, and the quiet arrangement with Mattis’s staff, was not unconditional; he needed to keep a low profile and show them that he could be trusted. Bob understood. “I give Bob a lot of credit for this,” Mullen said. “His commitment to not be out in public with everything we were telling him facilitated a long-term comfort with each other.”
Mullen had heard the rumors about Bowe’s allegedly nefarious motives and considered it a matter that the military courts would resolve. On this issue, Mullen and the parents agreed: “Nobody is going to be able to tell us exactly what happened until we hear from Bowe Bergdahl.”
They all heard from him just a few weeks later. On April 7, 2010, the Haqqanis released their first proof-of-life video since Christmas. Their prisoner was skinny and bearded, wearing camouflage pants and a gray long-sleeved Army PT shirt. In the seven minutes of footage, he performed a few push-ups, deep knee bends, and leg lifts for the camera. In stilted language, odd syntax, and, to those who knew him, exaggerated emotion, Bowe pleaded with the U.S. government.
“Please! I’m begging you, bring me home!” he said with his hands clasped in front of his face. “Let me go! Get me to go. Just . . . release. Get me . . . to be release.”
He didn’t look good, but he looked alive. The Haqqani’s April 2010 video ended the same way as the July and Christmas 2009 videos had before it, with a call for a prisoner swap. Taliban spokesman Zabihullah Mujahid told the Americans to “use their rationale and show readiness to release our limited prisoners in exchange for their prisoner.”
There was fresh diplomatic momentum following a UN conference in London that winter, where Karzai made a bold call for the Taliban to enter peace talks. The Pentagon visit had brought some solace to Bowe’s parents, and as the one-year anniversary of his capture loomed, the calls for negotiations brought them hope. Strangely, so, too, did the propaganda videos of their son, conveniently uploaded to YouTube. Bob would stay up all night watching them, thinking about how to get his son home, and about what, if the Pentagon failed, he alone would do to make it happen.
* * *
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UNBEKNOWNST TO HIS FAMILY the video of Bowe doing push-ups and deep knee-bends was just the public half of a two-pronged Haqqani negotiation strategy. The same week the video was released, a private letter from Mullah Sangeen arrived at a U.S. military base, delivered by one of the only couriers still trusted by both sides.
Sangeen had written the letter himself. The ISAF interpreters took one look at his messy scrawl and could see that the powerful Taliban commander had little formal education. At the upper right-hand corner, he wrote the date as “10/4/15”—a confused mash-up of the Europeans’ day/month/year and Pashto’s right-to-left.
“I have something with me from the Americans,” Sangeen wrote. “We will talk about it.”
Sangeen had done nothing prior to this letter to ingratiate himself with U.S. forces. In his last public statement, a September 2009 interview with al-Qaeda’s main propaganda channel, he had declared that the Taliban and al-Qaeda were fully united. “Just as the infidels are one people, so are the Muslims, and they will never succeed in disuniting the mujahideen,” Sangeen had said.
It remains unclear how far up the chain of command Sangeen�
��s letter was reported. (The White House was not aware of it until years later.) A U.S. government entity in Afghanistan responded with their own letter, written in Pashto script by an interpreter, but it was not the reply that Sangeen—or Siraj Haqqani—had hoped for:
Greetings and peace and Allah’s blessing be upon you, Moulavi Sangeen,
Many innocent Afghans and your friends get killed because of your activities and their children become orphans. You are the only one responsible for all these deaths. Because of your activities against the Afghan National Army and Coalition Forces, we are very obliged to kill and/or capture your friends.
If you don’t decide to quit your activities, we will target you and your friends.
You still have one last chance to make your choice to abandon your activities.
Now this decision is in your hand to make.
The reply didn’t tell Sangeen anything he didn’t already know; the Americans were hunting him and his comrades from the sky and didn’t care what he wanted to talk about. Nine years after George W. Bush first explained it, U.S. policy toward the Taliban remained unchanged: no negotiations. Shortly after the letter exchange, a U.S. drone strike killed the courier, and along with him, one of the only open channels between the Americans and the Taliban.
* * *
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WHEN BOB ACCEPTED an invitation from the Idaho Republican Party to speak at a fund-raiser at the Sun Valley Resort on June 10, 2010, he knew that his son’s captors wanted to make a deal. He did not know that Sangeen had reached out with a personal letter, or that the U.S. government had followed up by literally killing the messenger. But he was a lifelong Republican and had been invited to speak alongside RNC chairman Michael Steele and Idaho senator Jim Risch. Though wary that the party was using him as a political prop, Bob was more concerned that the Pentagon was intentionally suppressing his son’s case in Washington.
Spring had been full of the usual up-and-down news from Afghanistan. In late May 2010, ISAF airstrikes had killed the ranking al-Qaeda leader in the FATA and another Taliban commander in Kandahar. President Karzai had successfully convened the largest peace summit in years, a massive loya jirga that gathered roughly sixteen hundred delegates under a giant tent at Kabul Polytechnic University. Security ahead of the June 2 event was tight; homes in the area were searched, Afghan police were positioned at the top of a hill overlooking university grounds, and a Turkish commando team was in the neighborhood on standby. But just minutes after Karzai began his opening remarks, a rocket attack issued its rebuttal.
The ranking Americans in attendance, McChrystal and U.S. ambassador to Afghanistan Karl Eikenberry, were hurriedly escorted out, and Karzai pleaded with his audience to remain calm. The Taliban was not his enemy, he said in the spirit of the day. “They are the sons of this land,” he said, and repeated his standing invitation for Taliban leaders to return from Pakistan and join his government. The attack was quickly contained (four would-be suicide bombers disguised in burkas had not detonated; two were shot and two were captured), but it was an embarrassment nonetheless. That weekend, Karzai accepted resignations from his interior minister, Hanif Atmar, and, more worryingly for U.S. observers, from Amrullah Saleh, the Northern Alliance veteran who had gained the Americans’ trust as Karzai’s steady intelligence director since 2004. To Washington, Karzai’s shakeup looked like an act of vanity, more proof that the “Mayor of Kabul,” as Vice President Joe Biden had dismissively called him, was not a reliable partner.
Bob had been immersed in Karzai’s struggles for nearly a year, but as he walked into the Sun Valley ski lodge his mind was on his own government. In addition to Steele, Risch, and the Idaho GOP, he knew that several wealthy and connected donors from his UPS route would be in the audience. These were the people he and Jani needed to mobilize.
A small table had been set in front of the speaker’s podium with a white tablecloth and the symbols of the Vietnam-era POW-MIA ceremony: empty chair, empty glass, burning white candle, one red rose, one Bible, and the POW-MIA black flag. Bob hadn’t shaved in eleven months and ten days, and as he approached the podium his audience went completely still. He paused, gazing into the distance with a sad, heavy gaze. Then, in a low steady tone like an incantation, he began a meandering sermon on the vast suffering of war and the shame of wounded American soldiers who return home only to fall through the cracks of government-run Department of Veteran Affairs health care. He broke into a wry smile explaining how his own background had led him to accept the invitation to speak at a partisan fund-raiser. “I grew up in a conservative family in Los Angeles,” he said. His parents were for Goldwater and Nixon. He was the only surfer at UC Santa Barbara who voted for Reagan. Bob might have found his crunchy libertarian side in Idaho, but he was still a Republican. As for Bowe, he told them, “Everything that can be done has been done. I have Admiral Mullen’s cell phone number on me right now.” Several people in the audience began to cry.
From there, Bob made his pivot: “The man who we believe holds Bowe grew up on the lap of his mother learning the Koran. He is a powerful man, a man of faith. We pray for him. He recently lost a son to a CIA missile drone strike. The fact that he didn’t kill Bowe right then is incredible. So we pray for him.”
The room’s silent respect turned to quiet confusion. A prayer for the Taliban? A secret CIA assassination? No one knew what he was talking about. The failed February attempt to kill Badruddin Haqqani—which ended up eliminating his younger brother, Mohammad, instead—was not public information. But Bob and Jani had spent months talking with their pastor about the unappreciated overlaps between Calvinism and Islam. If Bob was going to lend out his family’s suffering for political exploitation, he would do it on his own terms and deliver his own message: Peace would not come without understanding the men who held his son, and without peace, his son would never come home.
After the event, Risch and an aide asked to speak with Bob in a private corner of the room. The senator told him that he shared his concerns, particularly regarding Pakistan. Though Risch sat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, he could not publicly discuss it. “You just informed the entire lodge what I can only say in a secure and classified room,” Risch confided. Bob was dismayed. It confirmed his suspicions that the Pentagon was burying the central facts of the war and hiding the truth even from lawmakers. By reading Pakistani news websites in his own home, Bob was more informed than the average congressman.
FIFTEEN
THE NO-NEGOTIATIONS NEGOTIATIONS
In the summer of 2010, the Haqqanis’ golden sparrow had begun to look like a long-term investment. Taliban officials, spokesmen, and military commanders had been broadcasting a consistent message to the Americans—let’s negotiate a prisoner swap—through every available channel for more than a year, with no signs of progress.
Robert Pelton flew into Kabul in August 2010, and as he had done on most of his trips to the country since 1996, he paid a visit to his old contact, Abdul Rashid Dostum. After several years of political exile in Turkey, Karzai had invited Dostum to return in the summer of 2009, just before that year’s Afghan national elections. Karzai needed the Uzbek strongman as an ally and peace broker in the north. The day Pelton arrived to see him in Kabul, Dostum’s guards escorted him to an ornate waiting room where he joined two men with jet-black beards and tremendous pastel pink turbans and who were also waiting for a meeting. Pelton recognized them as members of the Zadran tribe from Khost, and likely Taliban. He felt the men glaring at him, and the air grew tense until one barked out an angry question in Pashto.
“Why don’t you want your American back?” a translator asked. It was nearly Eid al-Fitr, he said, the feast days that mark the end of Ramadan, and Siraj Haqqani needed money for the holiday—$3 million dollars. They gave Pelton their phone number.
Pelton did not officially work for the American government, much less represent Washington in high-level negotiations; he
was a contractor and explained that he was not the right person to talk to. The Zadrans fumed. After the meeting, Pelton called his U.S. military contacts to pass along the phone number and the latest Bergdahl update: Siraj Haqqani was so eager to negotiate that he had his henchmen putting out feelers to any random Westerner they bumped into.
Not all of Haqqani’s attempts to open dialogue were so clumsy. That same month in Kabul, Miles Amoore, a British journalist with London’s Sunday Times, secured an interview with a midlevel Taliban commander who went by the name Nadeem and claimed to be one of Sangeen’s lieutenants. Amoore had built a reliable roster of Taliban fixers and sources during his five years in the city, and he had been asking around about Bergdahl for months. Nadeem said he knew Bergdahl’s captors and said that he had personally spent time with the American soldier.
Amoore and his fixer met Nadeem in a safe house in Kabul, where he told them an incredible story: In the year since Bergdahl had walked off his base, Nadeem said, he had become a fully integrated Taliban collaborator. The U.S. soldier had converted to Islam, taken the name Abdullah, and was leading Taliban strategy seminars. Nadeem had attended one himself, a two-hour training session in Sar Hawza District, just southeast of FOB Sharana. He said Abdullah Bergdahl had taught him how to turn a Nokia phone into a remote control for roadside bombs.
