American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  When he retired from the Air Force in the early nineties, Russell went from teaching survival skills to men who might one day be captured to studying those who already had. In 1993, he joined the newly formed JPRA, an office designed by the Pentagon to manage the entire POW experience, from capture to homecoming. Following 9/11, while some of his former colleagues were reverse engineering SERE tests like waterboarding into government-sanctioned “enhanced interrogation methods,” Russell was busy writing classified instruction manuals that would prepare U.S. personnel for long-term isolation in eighty-nine separate countries, each one a potential “low-intensity” American battlefield of the future. At JPRA, Russell also launched the Pentagon’s first oral history program devoted to archiving POW stories; it grew into the largest collection of its kind in the U.S. government, and to Russell’s knowledge, anywhere in the world. Every high-profile case crossed his desk: Army Private First Class Jessica Lynch (Iraq, 2003), Army helicopter pilot Mike Durant (Mogadishu, 1993), Army pilot Bobby Hall (North Korea, 1994), as well as dozens of other citizens and soldiers, both Americans and foreign nationals who had been held alone by hostile regimes and enemy combatants.

  By the time Russell met him, Bergdahl was already a historic case. Emerging from the FATA as the longest-held American POW since Vietnam, he carried immense intelligence potential from one of the world’s most inaccessible terrorist hideouts. Not all foreign hostages return to weeks of formal questioning from a procession of intelligence analysts, FBI agents, Pentagon psychologists, and government lawyers. With Bergdahl it was all a forgone conclusion. Teams from Spokane, Tampa Bay, and Northern Virginia had been meeting in Texas for drills and rehearsals every six months for three years to prepare for his homecoming, an event that CENTCOM analyst Amber Dach and her colleagues had been referring to as “the Super Bowl” during years of anticipation. “The whole operation was planned down to the paperclip,” Russell said.

  On the flight from Afghanistan to Germany, Bergdahl had asked for paper and a pen and began drawing detailed diagrams of his prison cells. The reintegration team put him in an isolated and secured hospital wing at Landstuhl, where visitors had to be cleared by Army staff at the Pentagon, leading to yet another round of nondisclosure forms for everyone who came into contact with him, including the Army dentist. When the team reintroduced him to concepts like choice and free will, he asked for peanut butter. They gave him a private room with a bed; he chose to sleep on the bathroom floor. Bergdahl had been promoted twice in captivity. On June 15, 2011, Brigadier General Richard Mustion, Army Human Resources Command, had flown to Hailey for a promotion ceremony in Bob and Jani’s backyard attended by Idaho governor Butch Otter and his wife, Lori. But in Germany, Bowe was uncomfortable with the title of sergeant, which he did not believe he had earned, and asked people to call him private, the rank he held when he was captured. Mostly, he was fixated on providing his debriefers with intel about his captors.

  For Bergdahl’s first three days under U.S. supervision, Dach, despite having been CENTCOM’s lead intelligence analyst on the case for five years, was not permitted to see him in person. She conducted her initial debrief like a childhood game of telephone, delivering written questions to a male debriefer because SERE psychologists were worried that after his exposure to cruel women captors, Bergdahl might not trust her. (That same Army logic was not applied to the male guards who had beaten and tortured him.) In reality, Bergdahl had always been more trusting of women, and when they did meet, Dach was taken aback by his courtesy. Over days of interviews, he would not sit down until she had. “It shook me,” she said. “He was still a gentleman.”

  When Bergdahl began talking, his voice was like an instrument he had forgotten how to play. Having never met him, the debriefers didn’t realize it was an octave above his normal register. He began slowly, straining and squeaking his way through. The rhythms and cadences were all off. When he couldn’t remember a word, he made little grunts and then resumed in a jumble of clashing accents, the echoes of his guards’ voices still lingering in his mind. “It was like the absence of a cadence,” Dach said, “the absence of any language.”

  He talked a lot about his captors. The men were “prehistoric pricks” who sat around picking at their feet, shouting at the women, and watching videos of IEDs, beheadings, and suicide bombers on their cell phones. The women and children abused the American prisoner gleefully; they spat in his food, tossed cups of urine at him, whipped him with chains, and deliberately scattered his food into the puddles of diarrhea on the floor of his cell.

  He told the debriefers that he had made a point of filing away memories that he thought might be worth something to the Army one day—details about his captors’ radios, weapons, and the types of locks and shackles he had been chained with. When they asked him to describe these locations, he said that he had been blindfolded so often that his memories were useless. Dach and her team didn’t accept that for an answer and pushed him for more.

  “Did you hear a call to prayer? From what direction?”

  Bergdahl would sit up ramrod straight, a hand on each knee, close his eyes, and stay silent, as if searching for a scene in years of mental video.

  “Were there children around? Were the roads gravel or dirt?”

  In captivity, time had fused into the unbearable monotony of what he called “an Afghan minute,” more anguishing in its duration than the days, months, and years. “An empty mind is a torture chamber,” he told them. So he latched onto whatever he could: the sounds of children playing and cars driving, the number of steps to the latrine, the dimensions of the room, his guards’ routines, and when he had a window, the movements of shadows and light. “In our best work, it was the things that he didn’t realize he remembered,” said Dach.

  Before enlisting, Bowe was already a bundle of contradictions: the ballet dancer who dreamed of being a Special Forces soldier, an eager-to-please loner who yearned to fight the system as much as he needed to prove himself within it. At twenty-three, that split impulse to both satisfy and reject authority had jolted him into a trap of his own making, and his own ruin. When the Army took him back at Landstuhl, the institution became both his caretaker and taskmaster. And while Dach and the SERE officers were sympathetic to Bergdahl’s suffering, they had their own tasks to accomplish. All that ultimately mattered to their chain of command was the quality and precision of Bergdahl’s memory.

  Skepticism is the first rule of all intelligence work, and Dach prided herself on being a finely tuned cynic. But as Bergdahl spewed information that her team could compare against existing U.S. intelligence, “we knew he was telling us the truth.” They started making fast progress, identifying three of his holding locations in succession with high confidence. One was just a mud hut, one of countless like it, a needle in a haystack in a field dotted with haystacks. With each confirmation, they encouraged him to believe in himself and in the power of his memories.

  “We could show him, ‘Hey, the system works. We are working together. We make a pretty good team,’” said Dach.

  When their interviews ended, he said he wanted to keep going. Between sessions, when they thought he was resting or eating, he was drawing intricate sketches of his shackles, his cage, and an arcane symbol he had seen on a wall. His reintegration was managed in three phases in three locations: Afghanistan, Landstuhl, and BAMC. At the end of Phase III, the debriefing totaled about eighty hours of tape-recorded questioning, an influx of raw information that both Dach and Russell independently referred to as “a gold mine.” It provided new detail to the U.S. intelligence picture of the Taliban-Haqqani captor network; led to the direct creation of several SERE training products for soldiers, pilots, and spies headed overseas; and supplied the Pentagon with a dozen new intelligence reports. Those reports remain classified. What is known, however, is that eleven days after the prisoner exchange, the Obama administration ended its five-and-half-month drone cease-fire in the skies over
Pakistan’s FATA, the longest pause of its kind in nine years.

  In a June 8 interview with CNN, Mattis defended Bergdahl’s family as “salt-of-the-earth people” and “regular old Americans.” He told the media to back off its harassment and explained the tactical advantages to be gained following Bergdahl’s recovery: the Haqqani and Taliban were now newly vulnerable.

  “There’s a freedom to operate against them that perhaps we didn’t fully enjoy so long as they held Bowe as a prisoner,” Mattis said.

  Three days after Mattis’s comment, the CIA resumed its drone campaign with a series of targeted strikes in villages on the outskirts of Miran Shah, the Haqqani stronghold where Bergdahl was sometimes held and from which David Rohde had escaped. The first attack killed several Uzbek and Pakistani TTP fighters. The second hit a truck loaded with bomb-making materials parked at a house used as an explosives cache, triggering a massive, deafening explosion that shook the entire surrounding area. Among the dead were a Haqqani commander, Haji Gul, and twelve other Taliban fighters. A third strike on a Haqqani compound the following week killed between four and eight more Taliban. Before the end of August 2014, drones over North Waziristan killed roughly four dozen more alleged Taliban and al-Qaeda militants.

  * * *

  —

  EVEN AS THE U.S. government mined and processed his recollections into intelligence reports shared across federal agencies, the Pentagon was faced with managing two versions of the same soldier. The Department of the Army opened a criminal investigation even as it awarded Bergdahl with two Good Conduct Medals for his service in captivity. These were not rote awards conferred simply for showing up; by Army doctrine, the medals were an elective decision by his immediate commanders to recognize “exemplary conduct, efficiency, and fidelity.”

  In San Antonio, he adapted to the Army’s rigid reintegration routine. Every morning and afternoon, he was escorted by a security detail to U.S. Army South Headquarters (USARSO) at Fort Sam Houston for formal debriefing. In the debrief room, he sat across a coffee table from two inquisitors—one asking questions, one taking notes—while down the hall some fifteen additional agents and officers watched on a closed-circuit feed. By the end of their first day together, Russell was struck by two revelations: the totality of Bergdahl’s isolation, and the totality of the Pentagon’s ignorance about it. Over the course of his 1,797 days as a prisoner, Bergdahl did not see or communicate with a single Westerner. Of his captors and guards, only a few were conversational in English, and he saw them only rarely. Whereas CENTCOM had assessed that the Haqqanis were by and large treating him humanely, the opposite was proving true.

  Torture was the only topic that Bergdahl would not or could not address during formal questioning. “I let it go,” Russell said, knowing that he would have another chance in a more private setting. When that opportunity arose later that summer, Bergdahl shared details about the three months he had spent with his four limbs chained to the corners of the metal bed frame.

  Dach couldn’t believe how thoroughly U.S. intelligence methods had been deceived. “We thought that we had sources with placement and access,” she said. But as Bergdahl recounted the reality of how few people he had seen and spoken to, her team realized that their sources had been lying. There were many reasons to bias them toward thinking that he was being treated well, Dach said. “If we got that wrong, we got everything else equally as wrong.” More than one hundred sources claiming specific knowledge had fed false reports to the Americans over the years, and they were paid well for their stories. At the higher levels, Taliban propaganda had been more coordinated. The August 2010 story in The Sunday Times about Abdullah Bergdahl teaching bomb-making seminars was an early example of a strategy that would prove to be, at times, artfully persuasive.

  “This was an organized disinformation campaign,” Russell said. In the weeks leading up to the prisoner swap, the Taliban had a dedicated office pumping out false information, much of which was sent directly to Bergdahl’s parents, a reality Mattis described as “an extremely coercive experience.” To the Taliban, Bob was an easy mark and a tool to leverage their ongoing efforts to free their detainees.

  Taliban manipulation didn’t end at the prisoner swap. On June 5, Time published exclusive insights from a Taliban commander who had “consistently supplied reliable information about Bergdahl’s captivity.” The Taliban source explained how Bergdahl’s captors had paid a local tailor to customize the white shalwar kameez he wore at the Batai Pass. “You know we are also human beings and have hearts in our bodies,” he said and claimed that they had given it to Bergdahl as a parting gesture of goodwill. “We wanted him to return home with good memories.”

  False sentimentality was pervasive. In the May 31 Taliban video of the handoff, the narrator shared his hurt feelings about how rude the Americans had been: “They were in such a hurry, they didn’t even let us shake hands with Bergdahl to say goodbye. It was very strange.” In formal questioning, Bergdahl told Russell that he had never seen any of the men at the handoff until that day. Nevertheless, conservative commentator Glenn Beck replayed and parsed the comment on his national radio and television shows to laughter, and former 2nd Platoon soldier Matt Vierkant told Megyn Kelly how angry it made him to learn that Bergdahl and his guards had grown so close.

  “The Taliban is not doing this in isolation,” said Russell. “They are listening to the news and the chatter. They hear what’s being reported in the Western press. They reinforce the impression that he was being helpful, that he converted, that they are treating him well. Then the guy comes out, has physical evidence that he was beaten and clubbed and abused, the intel community can verify this, and it starts to run counter to what all the reporting was.”

  Toying with morale is, of course, the entire objective of wartime propaganda. “This isn’t anything new,” said Russell. But what surprised him in Bergdahl’s case was how easily—or willingly—American information systems had been manipulated to achieve Taliban goals. In the months and years following the prisoner swap, Russell watched in disbelief as a procession of former military officers took to the airwaves to disseminate the very messages that Taliban propagandists had planted years earlier.

  By the end of his first week in U.S. Army custody, an alternate history of Bergdahl’s persona and motives had already been written. Confusingly, the two versions often existed side by side, sometimes at the same time on the same network. Even as Fox News promoted Rosen’s derogatory report as a conclusive coup de grâce to end a week of speculation, his story quoted Mattis bluntly refuting the entire thesis: “We kept an eye on this,” Mattis told Rosen. “There was never any evidence of collaboration.”

  Nevertheless, with Buetow reiterating his claim that Bergdahl had gone “looking for the Taliban,” cable news latched onto it as evidence. Fox News commentator Sean Hannity answered the question even as he asked it: “If you hear on a radio transmission that you’re monitoring that Bergdahl is looking for the Taliban, that means he’s going to collaborate with the enemy, isn’t it?”

  Speaking to O’Reilly on Friday, Rosen described Bergdahl as a “modern day Lee Harvey Oswald.” But even O’Reilly saw the inconsistencies. How could Bergdahl escape twice, spend years caged like an animal, and also be a willing collaborator? “You got two polar opposite reports under the same banner!” O’Reilly shouted. Rosen explained that it wasn’t his fault, that he had never reported that Bergdahl “was actively collaborating with the enemy,” and then reminded O’Reilly that Bergdahl had declared himself “a warrior for Islam.” As the bewildering segment came to an end, O’Reilly settled the discussion around what all of it ultimately meant.

  “Right now, the president’s whole legacy is riding on this story. That’s how important it is. His whole administration is riding on it. If it turns out this guy was a collaborator, Rosen, you know what’s gonna happen. His administration is done. That’s how big this story is.”

&nb
sp; The message from O’Reilly was clear: The facts were important, but only insofar as they served the greater political purpose. By then, the GOP strategy to leverage Bergdahl and his family against Obama was working as designed. According to polls that month, twice as many Americans were following the scandal than were paying attention to that fall’s upcoming elections, a plurality believed that Obama had done “the wrong thing” with the prisoner swap, and the president’s approval rating began a three-week slide. On June 22, 2014, Gallup tallied Obama’s disapproval ratings at 55 percent, the highest of his presidency.

  When Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl landed in San Antonio, Time ran his photo on its cover with a question: “Was He Worth It?” By the time he reported to his duty assignment at Fort Sam Houston, the first batch of “FUCK BERGDAHL” T-shirts that had appeared on the internet had already sold out.

  TWENTY-ONE

  SQUARED AWAY

  On June 16, 2014, Bergdahl’s third day back on American soil, the Pentagon announced that Major General Kenneth Dahl would lead the Army’s criminal investigation, and Deadline Hollywood announced that screenwriter Mark Boal and director Kathryn Bigelow would write and direct the film version. As the powerhouse duo behind Zero Dark Thirty and The Hurt Locker, Boal and Bigelow were not a surprising arrival to the military story. Their timing, however, was a bright signal that the history of the Bergdahl affair had yet to be written. Indeed, General Dahl’s inquest hadn’t even begun.