American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  Their meeting had been scheduled that morning to address the sorry state of U.S. intelligence. Now that they had a fresh crisis, Flynn and Furlong formed an unlikely yin-yang duo. Flynn, who was intense, thin, and wiry verging on gaunt, woke up every morning at 0430 for five-mile runs around the ISAF compound with McChrystal. Furlong was built like a former NCAA lineman gone to seed and was perpetually patting at a pack of Marlboros in the chest pocket of his rumpled shirtsleeves. Where Flynn was all confidence and edge—like a “rat on acid,” as one of his own staffers put it—Furlong had the desperate staccato delivery of a used-car salesman. McKiernan had called him, with no disrespect intended, “the fat sweaty guy.”

  With a mind that sparked in rapid-fire bursts, Flynn had little patience with colleagues who couldn’t keep up with his bang-zoom thought processes. In Furlong, he found a man tuned to the same wavelength, and one of the best bureaucratic knife fighters the Pentagon had produced in years. In the 1980s, when Furlong was an OPFOR (opposing force) officer with the 11th Cavalry (“Ride with the Blackhorse!”) at the National Training Center, he won so many mock battles in the Mojave Desert that the Army named part of Fort Irwin after him. Furlong Ridge was one of the terrain features that Private First Class Bergdahl had studied in California, a procession of linked hills that Furlong used to conceal his men as they moved into place for a counterattack. It also didn’t hurt that Furlong, Flynn, and McChrystal had known each other as young lieutenants at Fort Bragg. McChrystal’s brother even bought a house in North Carolina from Furlong. This was before Furlong moved into a series of strange jobs he wasn’t supposed to talk about.

  In the early 1980s he parlayed a yearlong tour helping out the Defense Department’s end of the Russian nuclear talks into a series of odd jobs. From there, he helped rebuild a clandestine Army unit called Yellow Fruit, which served as a sort of ultra-secret Army/CIA front during the Iran-Contra affair. He then worked on the Joint Staff and in special technical operations centers, where black ops coordination cells were embedded in a general’s staff in a way that ran both under the radar and under parallel command circuitry to the rest of the military. He returned to the regular Army in 1995 as the commander of a Psychological Operations unit at Fort Bragg before retiring from active duty as a colonel.

  For Furlong, rank didn’t really matter, because he had something better: He knew secrets and he knew the sources of those secrets. His power came from the information he knew, the information he had access to, and the sources of that information. In the intelligence community, access depended on three things: security clearances, needs to know, and higher-ranking officials approving undercover proposals. Furlong’s power was ascendant. He’d come back into the federal government as a GS-15—the civilian equivalent of a colonel—after trying his hand at government contracting by running an American-backed Iraqi media company into the ground post-invasion. He did it in style, though, tooling around Baghdad in a civilian Hummer he imported from Maryland, the same model that Arnold Schwarzenegger drove to the ski slopes in Sun Valley.

  When Furlong had worked for General McKiernan, he was often one of the last people to speak in daily briefings in the secure room at ISAF Headquarters in Kabul. The briefings continued according to sensitivity, and as the classification markings on the PowerPoint slides became longer, the mandatory fine print specifying the punishment for revealing the information became increasingly severe: UNCLASS. For Official Use Only. Confidential. Secret. Top Secret: Special Compartmented Information. Special Access Programs. Top Secret: NOFORN (No Foreign Nationals). Top Secret: Five Eyes Only, and on and on. Some information the U.S. government considered so sensitive that even the code names designating the clearance levels required to view it were classified. An information security officer in the room had access to each briefing officer’s clearance level through a networked computer system called JPAS (Joint Personnel Adjudication System) and monitored who could listen to what, inviting those without the proper clearance to clear the room. As the room emptied, Furlong stayed, sometimes until only he, the general, and a trusted aide remained. After Colonel Thompson delivered the news, Flynn looked at Furlong.

  “What can you do for me?” Flynn asked, the implied question lingering in the air: What can you do for me, Mike, that the others can’t, that the CIA won’t? He wanted an answer by 9:00 p.m.

  “I was going to be there for the rest of the summer to build the strategy, and then this happens, my first meeting,” Furlong said. He worked his phone and poured over his classified spreadsheets all afternoon. A missing U.S. soldier could have catastrophic consequences. At best, it would be a public relations nightmare that could embarrass the Army. At worst, this DUSTWUN could have political fallout that reached all the way to the White House—a captured hostage soldier could be a devastating domestic distraction and cripple McChrystal’s efforts to turn the news of this war around. They needed to contain the story, find the soldier, and get back to the mission at hand.

  One of Furlong’s first phone calls was to another major general, this one in Tampa, Florida, at the headquarters of the Special Operations Command (SOCOM). The general had an idea of who might be able to help. He told Furlong to call a retired CIA officer, Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, who was now running a private intelligence company, the Eclipse Group, from his home in San Diego, California.

  Clarridge was a living legend, aging but still in the game, receiving raw intelligence reports poolside from agents in the field and from his extensive network of contacts in foreign governments via encrypted email, which he read, collated, and sent off to his clients in the U.S. government and private industry. Furlong told Flynn he was bringing Clarridge on board. There was just one problem: Clarridge would arrive with heavy political baggage, and Furlong wanted some guidance on how to proceed.

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  —

  CLARRIDGE’S BAGGAGE, as fate would have it, came from cases like Bergdahl’s. While he was a CIA officer in the 1980s, hostages were at the center of his most notorious missions. Clarridge was the first chief of the newly formed CIA Counterterrorism Center in 1986, where he planned and supervised the 1987 ruse that brought Hezbollah operative Fawaz Yunis, one of Imad Mughniyeh’s soldiers on the TWA 847 operation, to American justice via “extraordinary rendition”—government-sanctioned kidnappings of foreign nationals from third-party soil that even a federal appeals court had deemed within the bounds of U.S. law. When Clarridge was head of the CIA’s Latin America Division, he was a key player in the Iran-Contra affair. He was investigated by Special Counsel Lawrence Walsh and indicted on seven counts for lying in his sworn testimony about his role helping Oliver North arrange a covert shipment of Hawk missiles to Iran in 1985 in a scheme designed to free American hostages in Iran and Lebanon. Clarridge was indicted but never convicted; President George H. W. Bush pardoned him in 1992 before his case went to trial.

  In the written pardon statement, President Bush justified executive leniency for Clarridge and other senior officials involved in Iran-Contra on the grounds that the “common denominator” of their motivation—“whether their actions were right or wrong”—was “patriotism.” He explained that no one charged with a crime related to Iran-Contra was corrupt, as none of the indicted government officials he was pardoning (which included a former secretary of defense, a former national security adviser, a senior State Department official, and two CIA executives) made any money for themselves or personally profited from the illegal weapons transfers. That part of the case was arguable (the finances were murky), but it was clear the weapons were sold at enormous markup, some of which made its way to the U.S. Treasury, while most of the profit was consumed by payments to arms-dealing middlemen contracted by the five men pardoned. Bush, a former CIA man himself, argued that Clarridge and the other indicted men had long records of service to the country, and for that reason, “all five have already paid a price—in depleted savings, lost careers, anguished families—grossly dispropor
tionate to any misdeeds or errors of judgment they may have committed.”

  Seventeen years later, Clarridge was still in the game, running a network of human intelligence assets on both sides of the Afghan-Pakistan border. Eclipse was a small organization, and an unusual crew ran its intelligence-gathering operations. There was a plastic surgeon from Texas who did overseas charity work repairing cleft palates in Kurdistan and the FATA. Another Eclipse operative was Tim Lynch, a retired Marine lieutenant colonel who’d become a private security contractor in Jalalabad and maintained a blog devoted to Afghanistan called Free Range International. Lynch was a Marine Corps princeling—his father was a retired major general—with connections throughout the military and the FATA and a sideline smuggling alcohol through Haqqani-controlled territory. He’d once appeared on the cover of Soldier of Fortune. Eclipse also used a Pakistani national as what Furlong described as a NOC (Non-Official Cover Agent), and who was as capable as any CIA officer.

  Flynn had no objections to Furlong’s plan to recruit and pay the old spymaster for help. “I’ll do this on good faith right now,” Clarridge told Furlong, but reminded him that he had his needs too. “I’ll get my guys working on it, and you see what you can do on the contract.” Tracking Bergdahl became the priority on the pool deck of the once-in-never-out spy legend in San Diego, but that legend needed concessions. Furlong scoured his spreadsheets for the black budget money he needed. He diverted $200,000 from another contract and was ready to get Clarridge, a retired, indicted, and pardoned ex-CIA officer, on the Pentagon payroll. Furlong recalled how easy it was; he would eventually scrape together $24 million for Eclipse and his other private intelligence operations, deliberately keeping it under the threshold of $25 million that would trigger congressional oversight. Pentagon lawyers could parse whether this was technically legal. They had a soldier to find and a way to do it. It was legal enough for Furlong.

  * * *

  —

  BERGDAHL SAW THE MOTORCYCLES turn off the main road. His first thought was, “There’s nothing I can do.” If he had a gun, if he had taken Cross’s 9mm, maybe there would have been a chance to escape. But he hadn’t, and there wasn’t. There were five motorcycles and six guys in their early twenties with AK-47s and one with a longer rifle. They blindfolded Bergdahl, tied his hands behind his back, put him on the back of one of the bikes and drove him to a two-story home where they emptied his pockets, and refastened his wrists with heavier, tighter straps. They drove him to a village, where it sounded to Bergdahl like the whole town had turned out to see their quarry. The villagers laughed and shouted. Children threw rocks at him. Then they were moving again and his captors made what sounded like excited radio calls looking for someone who could speak English. Finally, they found someone, and met an educated man by the ruins of a mud-built compound.

  “How are you?” the man asked pleasantly. Through the cracks in his blindfold, Bergdahl saw that the man wore glasses.

  “I am fine,” Bergdahl replied.

  The man with glasses looked at Bergdahl’s swollen hands and told the gunmen to loosen the straps. Bowe felt the blood flow back into his hands, which the men then wrapped in a metal chain and fixed with padlocks. The gunmen produced the wallet they’d taken from his pockets earlier and handed it to the man in glasses. He examined it, saw the Army ID card, and told them what they already knew: They had hit the jackpot. Their hostage was an American soldier.

  Next came another townsite, where the elders gushed over the young captors to such a degree that Bergdahl suspected it was their home village. Here, they threw a blanket over his head and left him kneeling on the dirt outside, while the men presumably discussed the opportunities and dangers their precious cargo represented. As Bergdahl knelt in the dirt and children gathered and again threw rocks, he worked his eyebrows and cheeks to budge his blindfold. He bent his face to his knees, nudging the fabric until he could see that the village was surrounded by steep hills. Maybe he could make it.

  He stood and ran, and cleared about fifty feet before a gang of men tackled him mid-sprint and began beating him. One struck him with the butt of a rifle with such force the weapon broke, wooden stock shearing from the metal receiver of the AK-47. Now knowing he would run, Bergdahl’s captors took precautions. They locked him in a small room where he was watched over by an old man with a gray beard. From there they drove him to a tent, where they used a cell phone to record a ten-second video: Bergdahl, cross-legged, hands bound behind him, leaning over. It was their first proof-of-life video, saved on a SIM card, which soon after was delivered via courier to Major General Edward M. Reeder Jr. in Kabul, along with a message seeking a ransom and the release of prisoners in return for the American hostage. At dusk, the gunmen stashed Bergdahl in the bed of a pickup truck under layers of blankets. “If you move, I am going to kill you,” a man said to him in broken English. “But don’t worry. We take you to another place.”

  * * *

  —

  THE AMERICAN OPERATIONS OFFICER, Major Ron Wilson, sat cross-legged and barefoot on woven rugs at the Tribal Liaison Office in Kabul when he felt his flip phone vibrate in his pocket. He was there for the day’s jirga, a traditional assembly where leaders gather to discuss the issues facing their tribes and make decisions by consensus and according to the codes of Pashtunwali. Wilson wore his usual work clothes for Afghanistan—jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and a ball cap—and the tribal elders sat in a wide circle around him, wrinkled men in black turbans with flowing dark beards, and for the oldest men, white beards dyed with henna. Back home Wilson was clean-shaven. Here he grew his beard to show respect—not as long or full as the elders’, but a small gesture to the people whose trust was the currency of his work.

  The jirga was held in the big room on the building’s second floor. Tribal leaders arrived in little yellow taxis. The larger the gathering, the farther they traveled. Some had been driving for days. After they arrived, they performed wudu—ablutions of their feet, faces, and hands—they prayed, and then they talked. They talked about the new school being built, the well being dug, the goat that was killed by the American bomb, the government collaborator who was killed by the Taliban. Talking was why they were there, along with the tea and the food, a generous spread of dried fruits, nuts, and sweets to fuel the hours.

  Wilson was there to listen. About fifty tribal leaders were gathered, many of them Kuchis from the violent border provinces of Paktika, Paktia, and Khost—the “P2K” of ISAF parlance. There were some Zadran leaders too, recognizable by their jet-black hair and dark eyes. Based in the southeastern provinces, their tribe was one of the country’s most mercurial. They shared ancient ties and kept strong ongoing relationships with the Afghan Taliban and the Haqqanis. (From 1994 to 2001, Jalaluddin Haqqani, a Zadran, had served as the minister of tribal affairs for the Taliban’s Islamic Emirate.) Wilson knew the Zadrans at the jirga were “friendlies,” and they seemed more interested in the hashish and scotch stashed in an upstairs room than they were in him.

  Wilson stood up and walked out of the main jirga, past the pile of plastic sandals the Afghans left by the entrance, and stepped into the hallway to take the call.

  “Hey, we got a lost puppy,” his boss at ISAF headquarters said on the other end.

  He listened to the news and peered down to the courtyard where the younger men helped with chores while their elders met upstairs. The competing smells of burnt goat fat and hashish mixed in the air. A twenty-three-year-old Army private lost near the Pakistani border was bad news. Receiving the call at the jirga, surrounded by tribal leaders from the districts where kidnapping was a thriving business—that was just good timing.

  Wilson walked back into the room and got to work. He raised the subject of kidnapping for profit with the elders. Was it a problem they were familiar with? Wilson didn’t mention the missing soldier; he didn’t need to. The elders had an unparalleled institutional memory, and if they didn’t know the a
nswer to Wilson’s questions, they would help him find someone who did. A Kuchi elder from the east told his story about how three of his own men were recently taken hostage as a moneymaking venture for a local criminal gang. When the captors killed one of them, the elder paid twenty thousand dollars apiece to save the other two. Wilson posed a hypothetical: “If an American was kidnapped in Paktika, what would happen to him?”

  Wilson was joined at the jirga by Robert Young Pelton, a Canadian writer who had been traveling to Kabul since the mid-nineties, attending all manner and makeup of tribal jirgas and shuras (smaller, routine meetings like American town halls) and befriending everyone from foot soldiers to national power brokers. Charismatic and built like a lumberjack with a mop of salt-and-pepper hair, a musketeer goatee, and twinkling blue eyes, Pelton lived and worked like a conflict-zone wizard, appearing and reappearing over the years whenever there’s trouble to document, dangerous groups to study, powerful men to chase.