by Matt Farwell
Pelton was in Afghanistan for his new venture, an information subscription service called AfPax Insider, which he had launched with former CNN executive Eason Jordan. They were looking to re-create the success they had found in Baghdad with IraqSlogger, an online compendium of “Insights, Scoops, and Blunders” written by a squad of local reporters and sources they had recruited around the country during the war. But in Afghanistan, the demand for good, raw, well-sourced information was higher than it had been in Iraq. Their timing for the Kabul spinoff was not incidental; American generals had been making public complaints for years about the lack of reliable intelligence in the region. In July 2008, after the battle at Wanat, Pelton pitched AfPax to General McKiernan as the solution. AfPax launched to an insatiable audience. “We had subscribers from every venue: media, State Department, NGOs,” Pelton said. According to one U.S. officer who worked in classified information operations under JSOC command in the summer of 2009, Pelton’s outfit was the best source at the time for fresh, clean, unprocessed intelligence.
With Pelton and Jordan’s venture thus established, Wilson was tasked by his superiors at ISAF to work as a liaison between the U.S. military and AfPax, to bridge the gap between the consumers and the purveyors of raw information in the Afghan intelligence labyrinth. The tribal leaders explained the kidnapping business model in their home provinces. They named specific individuals and villages that formed the nodes of an illicit underground ratline network that used taxicabs and safe houses to stage and move weapons, drugs, and valuable human cargo. The kidnappers would make frequent stops, never driving more than an hour or two, and they would make a predictable sequence of calls as they sought payment to process the hostage up the Taliban’s regional chain of command.
“Where would they take him?” Wilson asked.
There was no ambiguity. Every scenario led to the same destination: Bergdahl would be delivered to the Haqqanis in Pakistan.
It was as predictable as it was discouraging. Once Bergdahl crossed the border into the FATA, there would be no straightforward way to bring him back. Wilson and Pelton knew they didn’t have much time. They thanked the elders, left the jirga, and started making calls to Pelton’s network, regardless of affiliation or background. They called Taliban lawyers, friendly mullahs, and officers in the notoriously corrupt Afghan Border Police. The more people Wilson called, the more he learned. He was told which models of deception the Taliban would use to mask Bergdahl’s movement, how they would spread invented stories designed to embarrass the Americans, and how it would end: “a ransom, a prisoner trade, or a high-profile execution video.”
This was how human intelligence worked. Rather than avoid men with questionable associations, he pursued them, seduced them, and flipped them to support the American mission using the four principal motivators that case officers kept in mind when handling their espionage agents. MICE was the mnemonic, drilled into CIA, DIA, and JSOC human intelligence officers throughout their training at the CIA’s yearlong spy course at Camp Peary, Virginia: Money. Ideology. Coercion. Ego. Decipher which of these motivated an agent, use it to your advantage, and he would do what you wanted. Spies did not deal with the world’s nice people. They were tasked with protecting America from those that would do her harm. In America’s post-9/11 Global War on Terror, “We don’t negotiate with terrorists” is an oft-repeated government mantra. It’s also an idea that Wilson characterized as a political nicety, divorced from the reality in Afghanistan. Wilson cites an Afghan saying—“There are no bloodless hands”—as a truism that applied to his work. “We talked to guys who were clearly Taliban. They would tell you. They believe in the mission and the goals of the Taliban.”
By the end of the first day of the DUSTWUN, Wilson had a multi-sourced and corroborated forecast for the Army’s missing soldier. “We knew how they were going to move him, where they were going to move him. We figured it would be forty-eight hours at the most before he was across the border.”
EIGHT
RIVER CITY
On June 30, 2009, at 4:42 p.m. local time, Colonel Mike Howard punched the panic button. Howard was ninety miles away from Kabul on FOB Salerno in Khost Province, north of Paktika, issuing orders to his brigade and directing searches on the ground. Over the American satellite radio network linking all units in RC East came a message from Howard to every soldier under his command: “All operations will cease until the missing soldier is found. All assets will be focused on the DUSTWUN situation and its sustainment operations.” Translation: Everyone, stop what you’re doing—this is your new priority, your only priority. The troops were now incommunicado with anyone but each other, a condition known to the soldiers as River City.
For Howard, cutting external communications was a way to control the flow of information. For soldiers on the ground in Afghanistan, it put an even further distance between them and their families and friends back home. The troops were accustomed to the rules of River City, which were generally imposed for seventy-two to ninety-six hours after a fatality in-country, intended to prevent a mother in Arkansas or Detroit from learning of her son’s death from a careless Facebook post before the Army could properly notify next of kin by sending soldiers in dress uniforms to break the news.
Less than an hour after Howard’s message, the Navy arrived over Paktika with two F/A-18 Hornet fighter/bombers launched from the USS Dwight D. Eisenhower in the north Arabian Sea. They circled over OP Mest with bombs hanging from hardpoints on swept wings while the pilot and the weapon systems officer sat over a 20mm cannon peering out from under a bubble cockpit, waiting to kill Taliban on the ground the moment the infantry called in an airstrike. By nightfall, they were relieved by Air Force pilots in F-15s flying from Bagram Airfield, who flew under the uniquely Air Force call sign DUDE-21. Earlier that afternoon, at 2:15 p.m., a second drone, call sign PHINGSTON, had arrived to replace VOODOO, joining several intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance (ISR) aircraft already over Mest or en route. Th military’s reflexive saturation of the airspace above Observation Post Mest paid quick dividends. It lifted morale—nothing raised the spirits of weary infantrymen quite like the sight of close air support overhead—and gathered intelligence as the spy planes intercepted chatter between Taliban elements on the ground. These smaller ISR aircraft flew at lower altitudes and lower speeds, equipped with a variety of cameras and sensors sucking up cell phone and radio conversations, which were then bounced back to earth, where teams of interpreters and analysts processed and pored over the transcripts looking for clues on the missing soldier. The first was intercepted at 2:42 p.m. by a Northrop Grumman RC-12X plane (call sign GUARDRAIL) from an unidentified male:
UIM INDICATES THAT AN AMERICAN SOLDIER IS TALKING AND IS LOOKING FOR SOMEONE WHO SPEAKS ENGLISH. INDICATES AMERICAN SOLDIER HAS CAMERA.
At 8:13 p.m., the Americans intercepted a transmission from a Taliban soldier who claimed they’d captured three Afghan civilians and one U.S. soldier. Bravo Company’s quick reaction force, which Captain Silvino had launched from FOB Sharana that morning, had already hit its first compound twenty minutes before that, then raided another, and came up empty both times. No Bergdahl. No clues. “Nothing significant to report,” they had radioed back.
The Americans weren’t the only ones confused and scrambling. That night, there were more intercepts from the Taliban. The Afghan National Police gathered around the iCom radio scanner, something they did most nights, toggling through frequencies to pick up Taliban walkie-talkie conversations and trade insults and threats. At 10:50 p.m., as Billings hosted nearly his entire chain of command on the OP, the ANP chief called down to the Americans. The Taliban were on the radio. They had an American soldier and they wanted to speak with a “Son of Bush,” their name for Afghan interpreters working for the Americans. The Taliban told the ANP they would come back on the radio in ten minutes.
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EIGHT YEARS AFTER the overthrow o
f the Taliban, native Dari and Pashto speakers were in constant demand in the military and the intelligence community. One CIA case officer who spoke Pashto and worked at a black site in Paktika recalled being an anomaly; he could count on one hand the number of case officers who spoke Pashto well enough to spy in the language. The Pentagon threw money at the problem, hiring contractors to serve as translators for American troops. L3 Communications (a publicly traded multinational corporation with thirty-eight thousand employees in eight countries, headquartered three blocks from the United Nations building in Manhattan) and Mission Essential Personnel (a global outfit with offices on five continents, based out of a nondescript glass-paneled office building adjacent to Washington Dulles International Airport) were two of the largest of these interpreter “body shops.” Both organized their labor into three categories: Category I were local Afghan nationals without a security clearance, assigned to conventional units for patrols outside the wire; Categories II and III were American citizens with secret and top-secret security clearances respectively. Educated and skilled interpreters could earn incredible wages; several thousands of dollars per month was not unusual. “I didn’t go to spread democracy,” one Afghan interpreter who was assigned to Australian troops said after he moved to the U.S. several years later. “I went because they paid me so well.”
The interpreters had a dangerous and impossible job. Unlike the soldiers they served, they had no other country to call home. They spent most of their time with American forces on the FOB or on patrol, but were never fully integrated into the close-knit units. Rare was the American service member who trusted an interpreter like a fellow soldier. Because they worked for the Americans, their fellow Afghans also distrusted them. On patrol, they wore masks or bandanas to hide their faces, hoping to remain anonymous and keep their families and themselves from becoming targets of Taliban reprisals. In their downtime, most interpreters remained on American installations, happy for the protection from the constant Taliban threat, only traveling home for brief rest and relaxation visits, during which they were careful not to stay too long or say too much. A common Taliban tactic was to target interpreters for recruitment as spies or informants, and, if that failed, begin kidnapping members of their families.
When their contracts ran out, many feared that moving to their home villages put their families at too much risk. Most stayed in Afghanistan, hiding out and waiting for permission to begin new lives in the United States. That had to come from the Afghan Special Immigrant Visa office, run by four employees in New Hampshire known for turning back paperwork for typos. The situation discouraged countless qualified Afghans from working with the Americans, except for those who sufficiently hated the Taliban for their own reasons.
The interpreter who had joined 2nd Platoon on the first searches that morning went by the name John Mohammed. He was born in the north to a Pashtun man and a Tajik woman and grew up speaking both Pashto and Dari. He learned English from two main sources: his father, an English teacher in the village school, and Hollywood. Rambo III was one of his favorites. He had no prior connection to Paktika, and he never traveled alone from Sharana into the surrounding villages. If he were ever caught, he assumed he would be beheaded after the captors extorted ransom money from his family.
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TEN MINUTES LATER, John was listening to the iCom radio scanner and heard the Taliban come up on the net.
“We have one of the infidels with us,” the Taliban said over the radio. “He’s a good guy. He’s not rude, he’s not bad like the others. He’s a quiet guy. We are good hosts. We can feed him well. We will be a good host because he’s our guest.” They said complimentary things about Bergdahl’s looks, his facial features. Then they asked John what their prisoner would like to eat. John asked the men to put Bergdahl on the radio. When the Taliban said no, Bergdahl’s fireteam leader and first line supervisor, Sergeant Evan Buetow, told John to try a different tack.
“Tell him Buetow says hi,” the sergeant suggested. Maybe that would elicit something. It did. The Taliban response came: “Evan Buetow makes me happy.”
That sealed it. Using Buetow’s first name in the reply was no accident, and there was no way the Taliban could have known it without having Bergdahl. Then the Taliban began telling John awful things, boasting that they were holding their prisoner down and sodomizing him. Neither John nor the soldiers knew whether to believe it. Maybe it was part of a Taliban psych-out strategy to throw the Americans off balance ahead of negotiations for his release. As quickly as it turned dark, the conversation flipped again, lighthearted now, back to how hospitable the Taliban were to their new hostage.
“We have to feed him,” the Talib said. “He looks hungry. I’m sure he would like chicken, flatbread, and rice.” John Mohammed again asked to speak with Bergdahl. No luck. The Taliban made their offer for an exchange—fifteen Taliban prisoners for the one American soldier—promised to feed Bergdahl, and then dropped off the frequency. The conversation lasted less than five minutes, and it left Bergdahl’s platoonmates more confused than before. That may have been the goal all along.
At 7:04 a.m. the next day, July 1, a twin-engine Beechcraft King flying low over the ground under the call sign REDRIDGE recorded radio chatter between Taliban fighters:
UNIDENTIFIED MALE 1: I SWEAR THAT I HAVE NOT HEARD ANYTHING YET. WHAT HAPPENED? IS THAT TRUE THAT THEY CAPTURED AN AMERICAN GUY?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE 2: YES THEY DID. HE IS ALIVE. THERE IS NOWHERE HE CAN GO [LOL] BUT I DON’T HAVE THE WHOLE STORY. DON’T KNOW IF THEY WERE FIGHTING. . . . ALL I KNOW THAT THEY CAPTURED HIM ALIVE AND THEY ARE WITH HIM RIGHT NOW.
Three minutes later, a third Taliban entered the conversation with a brutal directive:
UNIDENTIFIED MALE 3: CUT THE HEAD OFF.
Tactically proficient Taliban used false reports on the missing soldier as a lure for baited ambushes. The concept was simple: Make the Americans think Bergdahl was in one location, plant bombs in the roads along obvious routes, and send fighters to lie in wait. On July 1, less than twenty-four hours after Billings first tapped out the message to Silvino that his soldier was missing, spy planes and ground-based sensors stole more signals and confirmed this ruse.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE 1: [LOL] THEY KNOW WHERE HE IS BUT THEY KEEP GOING TO THE WRONG AREA.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE 2: OK, SET UP THE WORK FOR THEM.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE 1: YES WE HAVE A LOT OF IEDS ON THE ROAD.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE 2: GOD WILLING WE WILL DO IT.
After the two unidentified males finished this portion of the conversation, a third Taliban voice chimed in over his radio. The Taliban, lacking the material wealth and firepower that American soldiers took for granted, did not lack initiative—particularly when there was money to be made or a bargaining chip to be seized.
UNIDENTIFIED MALE 3: CAN YOU GUYS MAKE A VIDEO OF HIM AND ANNOUNCE IT ALL OVER AFGHANISTAN THAT WE HAVE ONE OF THE AMERICANS?
UNIDENTIFIED MALE 1: WE ALREADY HAVE A VIDEO OF HIM.
The next morning two tribal elders from Mest met with Task Force Geronimo’s third-highest-ranking officer, Major Jeff Crapo, just east of the Yahya Khel district center. The elders came with a message for the Americans: Their lost soldier was alive and unharmed. They also explained that their status as spinghira—white-bearded wise men—gave them prestige in the Taliban’s eyes, and they could help broker a deal for the soldier’s safe return. The Taliban who held Bergdahl had already contacted them, they said, and were ready to negotiate. They wanted fifteen of their Taliban brothers held in American prisons released and an unspecified amount of cash. Crapo had no authority to release prisoners on his own, and no one up the chain of command took the elders seriously. Crapo’s superiors told him to make a counteroffer of MREs, medical supplies, and blankets. When he did, the elders laughed, and the meeting ended with no deal.
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IN THE E-RIN
G of the Pentagon, Secretary of Defense Bob Gates was briefed on the DUSTWUN. He would be updated for several days on the situation via secure video teleconference from leadership in Kabul and CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa. It was only a few minutes out of his day, but to Defense officials on Gates’s staff, who were already working overtime to manage the surge, even that was unthinkable.
“It doesn’t sound like much, but in a war like that, two to five minutes is a lot of goddamn time,” one former Gates staffer said. “It was a distraction of the highest order.”
Bergdahl’s disappearance brought an entirely different war to Eastern Afghanistan. Within hours of the DUSTWUN call, half of the U.S. military’s airborne assets in the country were redirected to Paktika. Colonel John White, a career Army aviator and commander of a FOB Salerno-based helicopter unit, later testified that in his career he’d only seen that much airpower amassed one other time, during the opening salvo of Operation Desert Storm in 1991.
No sector of the Army saw their lives more radically altered than soldiers on the ground in RC East, where Colonel Howard had a clear mission with a new name: Operation Yukon Recovery. Gone were the days of relaxed afternoon shuras with elders over tea, or of sergeants fighting boredom by going on missions to the village bazaar to buy goats to roast for dinner back on the FOB. That hearts-and-minds COIN mission was over. The DUSTWUN brought on an entirely different war, and in the span of just a few days, Task Force Geronimo was cranked into a manic tempo none of the soldiers had ever before experienced. Suddenly, their once nebulous mission snapped into clarity: They were looking for Bergdahl.