American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  Discretion and diplomacy would be essential. “None of this was kicking in doors and saying, ‘You’re fucked up,’” Amerine said. “Everything we did was with a light touch.” Amerine sent one of his deputies to meet with Mattis’s staff in Tampa, where he was presented with detailed plans for Bergdahl’s reintegration once he was home. Dozens of government personnel from bases across the country had been put on the case and were meeting twice a year to refine and rehearse the script, a procedure that Amerine found as impressive as it was baffling. With such meticulous plans for Bergdahl’s care upon his return, he wondered, “How can nobody know that there is no plan to actually get him here?”

  Amerine didn’t buy the rumors that swirled after Bergdahl’s capture. The intelligence reports—most of them filled with unverified tales bought from Afghan story shoppers—were no better. If he had actually joined the Taliban, his captors wouldn’t have missed the propaganda opportunity; they would have paraded Bergdahl’s alleged conversion publicly, just as the mujahideen had done with Soviet defectors. Amerine didn’t care why Bergdahl had left; his job was to bring him home. Still, he understood the skepticism he encountered in the military. One general officer refused to talk about it and told Amerine to leave his office. Traitor or not, Amerine said, “Bergdahl walked off base, and a lot of people went through a lot of hell for a long time.”

  With each government door he opened, Amerine saw another view of the jurisdictional crack into which Bergdahl had fallen. As a soldier, he belonged to the Army, but the Army had no legal authority east of the Durand Line. Held in the FATA, he fell under the CIA’s domain, but he was not a CIA priority. The FBI claimed that since Bergdahl was a U.S. citizen beyond the war’s legal borders, he was an FBI concern, which they refused to discuss. The State Department was committed to its negotiations—and had no known contingencies should they fail.

  Nearly every person Amerine spoke with assured him that someone else was handling it. He had a surreal conversation with W. Montague Winfield, a retired general serving as deputy assistant secretary of defense for the POW/MIA Accounting Agency. Winfield told him that CIA had Bergdahl covered. “That’s not the CIA’s job. They’re not working on this,” Amerine said; he had already talked to agency personnel about it. He and Winfield had a polite argument as Amerine explained that the Taliban and Haqqanis wouldn’t let their hostages go for nothing.

  The civilian cases shocked Amerine the most. They ranged in age from the captive infant to the septuagenarian Warren Weinstein, a USAID contractor who was working in Lahore mentoring farmers and craftsmen when he was kidnapped by an al-Qaeda affiliate. Colin Rutherford and an unnamed American were also languishing. The FBI had jurisdiction, but as Amerine probed, it became clear that the Bureau was ill equipped and underresourced for the task. If the CIA struggled in the FATA, there was no reason to think that the FBI would fare better. As years passed without progress, some families had even been threatened with prosecution should they attempt to pay for their loved ones’ lives. “I had no concept of how little regard we have for our own citizens until I worked my way through this,” Amerine said.

  When he briefed his findings to his superiors, Campbell was incredulous and told him to do whatever he needed. “I said, ‘Okay, we’re bringing everyone home,’” Amerine recalled.

  For non-American hostages, ransoms were the most common solution. The French, Swiss, and South Korean governments didn’t discuss it, but all had evidently paid cash to bring their people home. There were gray areas in U.S. law that federal agencies could have exploited to do the same. After a missionary couple had been abducted by Islamic militants in the Philippines in 2002, the Bush administration had loosened the rules on facilitating payments. But Amerine ruled out ransoms early in his process. Any cash destined for Siraj Haqqani, no matter how elaborate the delivery scheme, carried immense risk not only for Amerine, but all of his superiors.

  The precedent for a national political disaster had been set by another lieutenant colonel granted top-level authorities to find innovative ways to end a protracted hostage crisis. But when Amerine studied Oliver North’s case and the history of the Iran-Contra affair, he also found some helpful lessons.

  “Iran-Contra was a completely out-of-the-box way to deal with a crisis,” Amerine said of the secret plan to sell anti-aircraft missiles to Iran and transfer the proceeds to right-wing Nicaraguan guerillas. “Out-of-the-box is good,” Amerine said. “But to fight the system you have to play by its rules.” In Pakistan, he decided that the boldest move was to play it straight. He would take his plans through the appropriate channels, inform every agency, and rally support within the U.S. government. Within months, he learned that that mission would be impossible.

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  IN THE FALL OF 2012, General Jim Mattis had a problem, and its name was Bob Bergdahl. Mattis had learned from his staff that Bob had retired from UPS and was making plans to move to Pakistan in a wild scheme to trade himself for his son. He had been doing whatever he could to convince his son’s captors that he was serious, including trying to enroll at one of the largest hard-line madrassas in northwest Pakistan, the same religious school where Jalaluddin Haqqani and Mullah Omar had studied. Mattis knew that Bob was desperate and determined, but didn’t know if it was a cry for attention.

  “I wasn’t trying to hide anything,” Bob said years later. “The primary message was, ‘Look at what the father is doing. What are you doing?’ The idea was to push the bureaucracy into action.”

  But his stated plan to move to Pakistan wasn’t a mere bluff. Certain in his belief that the government would fail, Bob applied for a tourist visa at the Pakistani Embassy in Washington, D.C. He would fly to Islamabad and approach the first uniformed soldier he saw with a simple message, which he had memorized in Pashto and Urdu: “Where is the ISI office? I need to talk to somebody.” He would then demand to see the chief of the Pakistani Army or the director general of the ISl. They already knew him from Mullen, who had passed along his messages, and from YouTube. He would ask for their help. “I honestly think that Kayani and Pasha would have been sympathetic,” he said later. Regardless, Bob had tried for three years with his own government. It was time to seek mercy from the other side.

  Just as Bowe had hinted at his plans to Sutton and Coe on FOB Sharana the night before their final rotation at OP Mest, Bob started to broadcast his ideas to his military contacts, including CENTCOM’s director of intelligence, Lieutenant General Robert Ashley. On October 3, 2012, Mattis and a plainclothes bodyguard arrived in Hailey, Idaho, in a large black SUV. Mattis had by then spent several hours with the family in Tampa. Now, in their home, he told them what others already had: The Haqqanis didn’t play by Bob’s rules and would simply kidnap him as well. He stayed until he could see that Bob had been swayed from his plans.

  Like Sybil Stockdale’s ally in Naval Intelligence, the Bergdahls’ active service military advisers encouraged them to take their lobbying up the civilian chain of command. For the generals and admirals at the helm of the war, it was partly an admission of their own powerlessness in Pakistan. But in late 2012—with Grossman stepping down as SRAP, the talks in Doha on indefinite hiatus, and Amerine’s audit underway—it was increasingly apparent that nothing was being done to bring Bergdahl home. At CENTCOM in late 2012, General Ashley put it to Bob bluntly: “If it were my son, I’d be asking harder questions.”

  More than three months later and no closer to answers, Bob spoke at a National League rally on the east end of the National Mall on April 9, 2013. He and Jani were in Washington for meetings at the State Department, Capitol Hill, and the Pentagon, none of which had produced any discernible progress. As he gestured to the Capitol behind him, rage flowed from every pore as he demanded diplomacy in Afghanistan, calling it “a moral obligation placed upon the American people” after decades of Cold War meddling. In June, he and Jani prepared for the fourth Bring Bowe Home rally, the la
rgest the town had hosted. Main Street closed for a procession of hundreds of Harleys led by police cars and Bob, riding solo in an all-black uniform of protest and mourning, complete with a POW-MIA headscarf, and John Lennon–style rose-tinted glasses above the blond beard that had taken over his face. Prior to the event, Bob had learned that a reporter from BBC Pashto Radio would be attending, news he saw as a strategic opportunity.

  “Let me say something directly to the Taliban,” Bob told the crowd of Pocatello bikers. He began speaking in Arabic with the bismillah—“In the name of God, the most gracious, the most merciful”—then quoted the Koran for about twenty seconds, translating for the crowd:

  “As time goes by, as history passes, humanity is at a loss, humanity loses, lest those who believe encourage one another to do good works, encourage one another in patience, and encourage one another in truth.”

  Bob seemed on the verge of tears. Few in the Idaho audience knew how turbulent the days leading up to the rally had been. “U.S. to Launch Peace Talks with Taliban,” The Washington Post had declared on Tuesday morning, June 18. But when the Taliban opened its coveted office in an ornate, high-walled compound in an upscale Doha neighborhood hours later, it broke several agreements with Karzai that Obama, Kerry, Lute, Rubin, Hayes, and the Qataris had been attending to for months. Specifically, the office flew the white flag of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan and had affixed a metal plaque to an exterior wall bearing the emirate’s name. Karzai went apoplectic at the appearance of a legitimate Taliban Embassy, and the Americans scrambled to mollify him. Rubin, already in Doha, arrived at the compound and did not leave until the plaque had been removed. Kerry called him several times, and for two days global headlines traced the seismograph of Karzai’s mood. “The flag remains,” the BBC reported Thursday, “albeit on a shorter flagpole.”

  But it was too late. The talks were off again, and as Bob spoke Pashto in Idaho to what he hoped was a radio audience in Peshawar, his belief that the U.S. government was incapable of diplomacy was reaffirmed, as was his determination to finish the job himself. He amped up his digital activism; he had come to see Twitter as a platform equally suited for antiwar protest and rogue intelligence operations. In a few months, he amassed a following of journalists, policy analysts, diplomats, and Pakistani military officers.

  “Twitter was a battlespace,” Bob said. If CENTCOM could run Twitter bots to influence the War on Terror in 2012, he saw no reason why he couldn’t play the game too, but as an avatar for peace. With targeted messaging and retweets, his NSA-monitored account attracted an audience of suspected militants, Pakistani military officers, and even a few accounts flying the black flag of ISIS. “Finally, a smart American,” one wrote. English speakers called him out for talking to the enemy, but Bob saw every follower as a potential intelligence source, and his military handlers didn’t disagree. Calling on the sympathies of his Muslim followers with quotes from the Koran, he broadcast his message of radical peace on every channel, including in handwritten letters that he and Bowe began exchanging through the International Committee of the Red Cross in 2012. Bob assumed the letters would be screened by the ISI and the Taliban, and he reassured Bowe and any other readers that Washington was closing in on the prisoner exchange deal.

  Uncertain of that claim himself, he continued to pursue his own plans. In Washington, he visited the All Dulles Area Muslim Society, a thirty-year-old mosque and interfaith center in northern Virginia, and sought counsel from the imams. They taught him how they prayed, and then they prayed together. It fed Bob’s mind, prepared him for his planned travels, and offered a quiet place for his fury to rest. It was also strategic: Bob reasoned that spreading the rumor that Sergeant Bergdahl’s father was flirting with Islam could inspire the captors to show his son some mercy.

  “Know your enemies,” Jani said of Bob’s transformation. “The Taliban was now a part of our family,” said Bob. They knew that Pashtuns followed strict patriarchal codes. To have any credibility with the Quetta Shura, Bob needed to act like them too. “I don’t want to look like some soft American man,” he told Jani as his beard reached biblical lengths. In every message to Zabihullah Mujahid and his other contacts, Bob reminded them that he was the head of his own clan. “I am the father. Za abba yem. .” Even at church in Ketchum, when Jani would bring her Bible, Bob started wearing a kufi, a Muslim prayer cap, performing ablutions in the bathroom, and removing his shoes at the end of the pew. They didn’t care what anyone thought.

  In August 2013, Bob and Jani heard an unexpected knock on the door. The man introduced himself as working for OGA, or “other governmental organization,” the acronym alternative for the CIA. He had recently returned from the Durand Line, he told them, and he was struck by the similar climate and terrain in Southern Idaho. For an hour, he sat with Bob’s Google Maps, showing him the various ratlines one could use, were one so inclined, to infiltrate the FATA. Bob committed the routes to memory. He would go from Kabul to Khost and finally to Miran Shah. He would go slowly, spreading word of his intentions and gaining permissions for safe passage. Or he could go with a group of former Special Forces A-Team members who had served in RC East, where they had flown the POW flag on their trucks and collected their own intelligence on Bowe’s location. They were angry about the way their war had been fought and had always wanted to take the fight to the safe havens. They offered to bring Bob to the region while they activated their own off-the-books armed rescue in North Waziristan.

  Bob thanked the veterans, but said he was after a peaceful resolution. One of Bob’s journalist advisers had put him in touch with a State Department employee who had moved to Washington, D.C., after working for ISAF as a language instructor. Before that job, he had been a member of the Taliban. Bob met him for tea in Falls Church, Virginia, where the man explained the intricate feudal hierarchies that govern the border region. He wrote Bob a note of safe passage to carry with him and deliver to a Taliban commander in Logar Province, south of Kabul. That commander could get him to Khost. A Canadian journalist offered to put him up in Gardez. The plan was coming together.

  “Was I gullible? Yeah. Whatever. It didn’t matter,” Bob said later. “I was going to die trying. I wasn’t going to live the rest of my life with woulda, coulda, shoulda. How do you live that way?”

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  AT THE PENTAGON, Lieutenant Colonel Amerine’s plan was also moving forward. Through civilian intermediaries and at least one ISI contact, he opened what appeared to be a new diplomatic channel to the Quetta Shura. The message from the other side was unchanged from what the State Department had been told all along: The Taliban wanted to make a deal, and it was American disorganization that was delaying the process.

  A serious trade proposal emerged from the Taliban’s wish list. It would have freed all seven U.S. and Canadian hostages—Bergdahl, Weinstein, Rutherford, Coleman, Boyle, their child, and another unnamed American—in exchange for one prisoner in U.S. custody.

  In Helmand after 9/11, Haji Bashar Noorzai had been one of the first and most powerful tribal leaders to defect from the Taliban. He was one of the wealthiest men in the country, a successful opium trader like his father and grandfather before him, and in the late 1990s had been one of Mullah Omar’s earliest financiers—“the Sheldon Adelson of the Taliban,” Rubin called him. In late 2001, Noorzai rekindled his relationship with the CIA, began reporting on Taliban operations, and ultimately delivered more than a dozen truckloads of regime weapons to U.S. forces.

  By May 2002, however, the veil had fallen from Karzai’s promises of Pashtun unity. Rather than bringing the south together as Washington had expected, Karzai and his allies were using the American military to eliminate their rivals. When a U.S. raid killed one of Noorzai’s closest mentors, an elder who had also pledged his support to the Americans, Noorzai feared he was next and fled with his family to Pakistan. Two years later, he was once again talking to U.S. elements and of
fering his help on diplomacy. He was an optimist, and if Afghanistan had a chance of a better future, he wanted to be a part of it. In April 2005, Noorzai flew to New York with guarantees of safe passage from his American handlers and the understanding that he was being groomed as a Taliban informant. No one told him about the sealed drug trafficking indictment waiting for him in federal court.

  The U.S. government was as divided on Noorzai as it was on the rest of the war. The CIA and Pentagon wanted him cultivated as an asset, while the DEA agents who picked him up at JFK airport saw him as a historic catch in the global heroin trade. As the agencies squabbled, for nearly two weeks the DEA put him up in a cushy hotel, encouraged him to order room service, and questioned him on Taliban activities. When they were done, they arrested him.

  When his name surfaced during Amerine’s negotiations, Noorzai was serving a life sentence in a California prison and reiterating his desires to work for the U.S. government as a Taliban informant, diplomatic mediator—anything to get out. To Amerine, he looked like the perfect tool of diplomacy.

  “We would release a guy that never should have been in jail in the first place, who is an ally to Afghanistan, who could help bring stability to southern Afghanistan, and in return I could at the very least get Bergdahl and some or all of the other hostages,” Amerine said. His sources in Afghanistan and Pakistan found widespread support among the Noorzai tribe and their Taliban contacts. Indications from the Haqqanis were that the hostages, and Bergdahl in particular, had become a burden. Even the ISI offered indirect help to close the deal.