American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  Jeff Hayes, as a DIA analyst, knew that his military colleagues were dismissive of his new mission. As a former Army sergeant, Hayes was something of an anomaly at the Obama White House. He had gained a reputation at the Pentagon as a fiercely intelligent workaholic and an apolitical soldier who could speak plainly to power and had the ear of the principals running the war. His work with Ruggiero might have placed Hayes at the center of history, but it also landed him on the wrong side of the government’s cultural divide. At the Pentagon, his old comrades saw the State Department and White House as “peaceniks sitting around smoking dope and trying to give the farm away to the Taliban, while they were out there fighting and dying.” Hayes knew that working as a negotiator would cost him with the Army, and possibly even end his career.

  Hayes had the highest security clearance available in the U.S. government, was privy to all need-to-know matters about the war, and never believed the reports that Bergdahl was a traitor or that he’d collaborated with the Taliban in captivity. Hayes was also sympathetic to Bowe Bergdahl’s plight. Like Bergdahl’s own friends in Idaho, Hayes saw him as a clear case of “someone who shouldn’t have been in that situation to begin with,” he said. “We’re responsible as a nation and as an Army for putting him in [there].”

  On November 15, 2011, Bob and Jani took their first trip to CENTCOM on four connecting flights from Idaho to Tampa paid for by the Department of the Army. General Mattis and his staff received them warmly. “If I added up all the dumb things I did in my twenties, it would fill a roll of microfilm,” he told them. Though they had been invited to attend a formal briefing with intelligence officers and analysts, Bob took the opportunity to brief them, holding forth on what he had learned about the war. At one point he asked if anyone in the room could explain the difference between the Pilgrims and the Puritans. Silence greeted him.

  “If you don’t know the history of your own country, how do you expect to figure out the theological complexity in Afghanistan?”

  Before and after his lectures, however, Bob was affable and disarming with the military, and to the men and women devoted to their son’s recovery, effusive with gratitude. It wasn’t the individuals whom Bob had a problem with, but the institutions where they worked.

  Shortly after their CENTCOM visit, Bob sent his first message to Zabihullah Mujahid, the alias used by official Taliban spokesmen. He had found the obvious email address—zabihullahmujahid@gmail.com—right on the Taliban homepage. Days later in Idaho, he and Jani were visited by two young men from the U.S. government wearing civilian clothes and carrying computers of the same make and model as Bob’s. They wouldn’t say what agency they worked for, but explained that the family’s emails and online activity would now be monitored as part of the government effort to find their son.

  On December 7, 2011, the basic facts of Sergeant Bergdahl’s weeklong escape and recapture broke as a global news story, and Grossman prepared to make the case on Capitol Hill for bringing him home. With Ruggiero and Hayes by his side, Grossman led a classified briefing with a bipartisan group of senators from the defense and intelligence committees in a secure Capitol Building conference room.

  “They just blew a gasket,” Hayes recalled about the moment the senators heard about the proposed prisoner exchange. Across the room and the political spectrum nearly every senator was skeptical. Congress had passed the NDAA amendment to rein in Obama’s desires to close Guantanamo, and they didn’t intend to relinquish that power now. One Republican staffer sent Grossman packing with a blunt warning: If Obama went through with the trade, Republicans would frame it as his “Willie Horton moment” in the war on terror.

  Grossman continued shuttling between Kabul, Doha, and Washington, D.C., to close the deal. But when he made the abrupt decision to bring Karzai’s demands to the negotiating table, he lost Agha and the Taliban as well. With a theatrical public statement blaming their decision on the Americans’ “ever-changing position,” the Taliban officially withdrew from the peace talks in mid-March 2012.

  Days later, Bob and Jani Bergdahl were at the State Department listening to Grossman explain why the process had come to a standstill. To their ears, the senators’ rejections were a betrayal. From Foggy Bottom, they took a taxi to Capitol Hill for a meeting with John Kerry, one of the only senators supporting the deal. Kerry ended their thirty-minute conversation with a vague promise: “Leave this to me.”

  Bob appreciated the sentiment, but as he and Jani walked the marble floors to yet another meeting, this time with Idaho congressman Raul Labrador, he was losing patience with Washington. Labrador was candid about what he perceived as his own powerlessness. “I don’t know how I can help you,” he said. Bob was wearing a combat service uniform shirt bearing his son’s nameplate and hadn’t shaved in nearly two years.

  “You’re a fiscally conservative libertarian. You sit on the House Appropriations Committee. You hold the purse strings,” Bob reminded him. “There is no military solution in Afghanistan! Defund the war.”

  They returned home despondent, thinking back to the advice from Sawyer, Coffee, and Phil Butler, another former Vietnam POW who had encouraged them to go public. They were coming to see that the controversy and rumors surrounding Bowe’s disappearance were impeding his recovery.

  Marsano urged Bob to remain patient, resolute, and most important, quiet. But silence wasn’t bringing their son home, and he and Jani decided to go their own way. They sat down with Michael Hastings, the Rolling Stone writer whose work had brought down McChrystal two years earlier. Beyond Bob and Jani, Hastings found that Blackfoot Company veterans, intelligence officials, and White House staffers all had a story to tell: about the lowered standards for Army recruits that allowed Bowe to enlist in the first place, the NDAs they had been forced to sign in Afghanistan, and Bowe’s newfound role as a bargaining chip in a global game. Hastings’s feature, “America’s Last Prisoner of War,” would mark the unofficial end of the Pentagon’s three-year cover-up.

  After breaking their silence, Bob and Jani cranked the volume with interviews for several print outlets. They were prepared to break Pentagon protocol and sacrifice their privacy to save their son. But Bob still worried. “How deep is the water we are jumping into?” he wrote in an email that spring. “How hungry are the sharks?”

  * * *

  —

  THE BERGDAHLS FLEW EAST again for Memorial Day in Washington. Bob had been invited to deliver the keynote address at the 25th annual Rolling Thunder rally, where hundreds of thousands of bikers were expected to descend on the National Mall in a show of unity and support for the POW-MIA movement. The day before the rally, they were clad in black leather as they were escorted to the White House in a phalanx of Harley-Davidsons for a meeting they anticipated as little more than a photo op. When they arrived, Secret Service whisked them away from the bikers and into a small West Wing conference room where they were greeted by John Brennan and Denis McDonough.

  Bob told them he knew that the CIA had assets on the ground in the FATA targeting locations for the drone program. “We need those assets looking for Bowe,” he said, heedlessly charging into top secret territory. Brennan, a career CIA analyst with thirty years’ experience, including as Riyadh station chief in the mid-1990s, sat stone-faced in response. They couldn’t talk about Bob’s idea even if they wanted to. Instead, McDonough pledged the White House’s faithful support (a promise on which he would make good with years of handwritten updates) and assured them that their son’s case was a priority at the administration’s highest levels. Before leaving, the Bergdahls gave each man a yellow “Bring Bowe Back” wristband, which Brennan wore on national television at his confirmation hearings to become CIA director later that year.

  Bob had made the depth of his knowledge clear at the White House. What he hadn’t told them was that he needed better intelligence to inform his own nascent plans to retrieve Bowe himself. The meetings two months earlier with Gr
ossman, Kerry, and Labrador had marked a turning point, the moment when he and Jani realized with sudden clarity that they could not count on the government to save their son. They looked at the calendar. June 30, 2012, would mark Bowe’s third year in captivity, and Bob’s twenty-eighth year with UPS and the date on which he could retire with a full pension and benefits to sustain them while he committed to the new plan: flying to Pakistan on a one-way ticket and offering himself to Siraj Haqqani in exchange for his son. If anyone had a better idea, Bob hadn’t heard it.

  Jani knew there was no stopping him and supported the mission, “because it’s your child, and you’ll do anything,” she said. But as they left the White House on May 25, they had not shared the plan with anyone. Nor did they think it was so foolproof that they could suspend their efforts at home. Rolling Thunder was not only the largest POW-MIA event in the country; it had grown into one of the largest motorcycle rallies in the world. In 1988, the first Rolling Thunder drew about two thousand bikers to Washington to protest what organizers believed was ongoing government deception about American POWs still living in the jungles of Southeast Asia. The rally’s name was its own subtle protest, a double entendre tribute to the bikers’ rumble and a historic U.S. military failure. Between March 1965 and November 1968, Operation Rolling Thunder dropped more than 864,000 tons of explosives and napalm on North Vietnam, killing about ninety thousand people, including some seventy-two thousand civilians, and did nothing to change the war’s outcome.

  In 2012, the crowd gathered in front of the rally stage at the southeast corner of the Mall, flanked on the east by the Korean War Memorial. The memorial is a cluster of statues, nineteen ghost-faced infantrymen wearing ponchos and marching in patrol formation. They stand beside a highly polished granite wall, their reflections creating an optical illusion that there are actually thirty-eight statues, a reference to the 38th Parallel that separates North and South Korea and the thirty-eight months of the Forgotten War. As the biker hordes circled the Mall, the sky filled with a roar that stretched over the Potomac, a cover band warmed up the crowd with their take on Robert Palmer’s “Bad Case of Loving You,” and a double amputee in his early twenties walked out of a portable toilet on twin spring prosthetics. Nearby, a single amputee in a wheelchair struggled to roll across the grass until a Rolling Thunder volunteer in a black leather vest helped push him to the sidewalk.

  The Rolling Thunder speeches began with the symbolic POW cage presentation: Gerald McCullar, an emaciated, white-bearded, shirtless, and very tan actor wearing a khaki camouflage bandana on his head sat in a bamboo tiger cage roughly the dimensions of a refrigerator box. The cage was carried to its perch in front of the speaker’s podium by four Rolling Thunder bikers in their version of full dress: white polo shirts, black pants, black vests bedazzled with pins and patches, wraparound sunglasses, black berets, and white gloves. A color guard advanced to plant flags, the national anthem played, and the men saluted.

  The Bergdahls’ day had begun at 6:00 a.m. in the Pentagon parking lot, the rally staging ground that by midmorning had become a shimmering plain of chrome and glass baking in the Virginia sun. They had hailed a cab from Washington before sunrise, and when Bob recognized the driver as a Pashtun, he asked him, in Pashto, “Do you understand Pashto?” The driver’s head swiveled to the backseat, wide-eyed. “Did you just speak Pashto to me?!” he asked in English. The cabbie told them that he had left Afghanistan years earlier, but his family all remained. “Why does America hate my country?” he asked them, tears welling in his eyes and eliciting more from Bob and Jani as they explained who they were and what they were doing in Washington. At the end of the ride, he refused to take their money.

  Thousands of bikers treated the Bergdahls as royalty that day. Rally organizers paid for their airfare and hotel. A North Carolina Rolling Thunder chapter escorted them from the Pentagon to the Mall, where they parked at the Washington Monument and walked the length of the Reflecting Pool toward the Lincoln Memorial and the rally stage. Bob and Jani listened as Rolling Thunder executive director, former Army sergeant Artie Muller, gave his introductory remarks. Muller wasn’t happy with the progress of the long wars, noting that America was supposed to be “kicking butt, killing the enemy, and coming home” to live in harmony. “Whites, blacks, reds, and Orientals being together is what America is all about.”

  The crowd had thinned by the time Bob took the stage. “My son is not in a cage, but he is in chains,” he said, unaware that Bowe had by that time been living in a cage for nearly a year. He thanked the organizers, and then he spoke to his son: “Bowe, if you can hear me, you are not forgotten and—so help me God—we will bring you home. Your family has not forgotten you, your hometown has not forgotten you, Idaho has not forgotten you, and thanks to all the people here, Washington, D.C., will not forget you.”

  Bob knew the value of brevity; his speech clocked in at just under five minutes, most of it directed at his son. “We love you, we are proud of you. Stay strong, never give up. We pray for the day that we welcome you home,” he said.

  During the opening speeches, Bob had been watching the man in the tiger cage. He knew that McCullar was a paid actor who had done the bit for years, but he was moved by him. He also noted that the other speakers had only addressed McCullar indirectly, as if he weren’t there or weren’t real. As Bob stepped down from the podium he reached through the bamboo slats, closed his eyes, and held McCullar’s hand in solidarity. Years later, he remembered what went through his mind:

  “I wanted to start tearing the cage apart with my hands and get him out.”

  SEVENTEEN

  THE FIVE-SIDED WIND TUNNEL

  Army leadership at the Pentagon was divided on Sergeant Bergdahl. In casual off-the-record chats with the press, multiple general officers openly referred to him as a traitor. But Lieutenant General John Campbell was not one of them. As the Army deputy chief of staff for Operations, Planning and Training (known as the Army G-3), Campbell had immense global resources at his command. He saw Bergdahl as a Pentagon problem, and in late 2012, he turned to Lieutenant Colonel Jason Amerine to find a new, nonviolent Pentagon solution.

  A military rescue raid had been on the table since the DUSTWUN, and after bin Laden’s death, a handful of Pentagon officials believed a similar mission could work for Bergdahl. But at the White House, there was scant support for another, bloodier incursion into Pakistan. There was also a significant risk that Bergdahl or members of the raiding party would die in the process. Linda Norgrove, a thirty-six-year-old British aid worker who’d been kidnapped in Kunar in September 2010, was accidentally killed when a Navy SEAL threw an errant grenade during the raid to free her. Bergdahl’s parents had opposed such a mission from the start. They preferred to wait for a living son rather than rush the return of a dead one, and they told their military handlers and senior officials as much.

  Amerine had spent his career in Army Special Forces and knew what it meant to bring soldiers back from Afghanistan in body bags: He’d been among the first Americans into Afghanistan in 2001, leading the Special Forces team (ODA-594) that infiltrated Hamid Karzai into the south to foment an insurrection against the Taliban in their heartland. He’d lost three of his Green Berets and more than twenty of their Afghan allies when an American B-52 dropped a two-thousand-pound bomb on a suspected militant hideout nearby. Amerine had objected to the bomb in the first place but was overruled by his newly arrived superiors.

  In his twenty-five years in uniform, Amerine had served in the infantry, majored in Arabic at West Point, and helped topple the Taliban after 9/11. He had earned a reputation as a reliable troubleshooter, and by 2012, he was also the closest thing to a living GI Joe hero in the Army’s ranks; the Army had even modeled an action figure and video game character on him for a recruiting campaign. Eleven years after he was sent home from Afghanistan, the senseless loss of the 2001 bombing and the men and their families who had been failed by their own leade
rs weighed on him heavily. Bringing Bergdahl home alive was a shot at redemption.

  Amerine carefully maintains that when Campbell tasked him to investigate ways to get Bergdahl home, he was merely a strategist on the Army staff. In fact, that dull-sounding job was a cover for the organization Amerine led, a military intelligence office buried within the Army Operations staff whose very existence was unknown to almost all within the building. When President Truman abolished the Office of Strategic Services in 1945 with Executive Order 9621, the Army, Navy, and State Department absorbed the intelligence functions that the CIA would eventually take on when it was created in 1947. What the Army didn’t advertise was that it had quietly kept its own unacknowledged spy service in action. Identifying itself by the number on the door on their Pentagon vault, the organization was unusual not because it was so secret—there are many secret organizations buried in the Pentagon—but because it could be tasked to conduct missions that were normally the domain of the CIA.

  Amerine and his team began with a full audit of Bergdahl’s case: what happened, who was holding him, what options were available to free him. He started with the Defense Department—the Joint Staff, Central Command, Special Operations Command, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency—and then widened his scope to executive branch agencies that had touched the case, including the State Department, CIA, Department of Justice, and Drug Enforcement Administration. The answers disturbed him. Since Grossman’s negotiations had stalled, there was no alternative recovery plan in the works. Worse, Bergdahl was not the only Western hostage in the FATA: There were also six civilians, including an infant born in captivity to Caitlan Coleman and Joshua Boyle, a captive American-Canadian couple. Most troubling, there was no single official in charge and no coordinated effort to bring them all home.