by Matt Farwell
That Sunday, July 26, Sawyer chartered a jet to fly in retired Navy pilots Jerry Coffee and Render Crayton, both of whom had spent more than seven years as prisoners in and around Hanoi, to meet with Bob and Jani and speak at another smaller vigil. Coffee and Crayton didn’t soften the hard realities of the situation. They told Bowe’s friends the same thing they told his parents—to steel themselves for what would likely be a long and painful process. No matter what they heard on TV, bringing Bowe home was not the Army’s top priority. Later, away from the crowd, they encouraged Bob and Jani to lobby the military brass and plead their case on a personal level, as parents of a soldier who had volunteered (twice) in service for his country. They also warned them: Do not trust the Pentagon.
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ON JULY 19, the confusion and anger that coursed through the ranks burst onto the national airwaves and out of the mouth of Fox News strategic analyst, retired Lieutenant Colonel Ralph Peters.
“We know this private is a liar. We’re not sure if he’s a deserter. But the media needs to hit the pause button and not portray this guy as a hero,” Peters told Fox anchor Julie Banderas. The July 14 video was proof, Peters said, that Bergdahl was not only lying but guilty of “collaborating with the enemy, under duress or not.”
Banderas looked stunned. The network had decided not to air the video in full, she said, because it was deemed to be enemy propaganda. “They wanted that message to get out there, and we’re not going to do the Taliban any favors here,” she said. Banderas referred to emails from viewers who wanted to know how something like this could happen, how a soldier could simply walk away on his own. It sounded like a failure of leadership, or at least of the military’s buddy system. But now that Bergdahl was confirmed captured, she asked Peters, “How do we get him back?”
Peters, who in addition to his two decades of military service was also a popular writer of spy novels, assured Banderas and Fox viewers that Bergdahl was too valuable for the Taliban to kill. Special operations and surveillance would track him down, but actually retrieving him would come only at great expense and effort. That outcome did not sit well with Peters, so he shared his vision for a simpler remedy.
“If, when the facts are in, we find out that through some convoluted chain of events, he really was captured by the Taliban, I’m with him,” Peters said. “But if he walked away from his post and his buddies in wartime, I don’t care how hard it sounds. As far as I’m concerned, the Taliban can save us a lot of legal hassles and legal bills.”
It was a historic moment in television punditry. Banderas, taken aback, reminded her viewers that Bergdahl was “one of ours” and that Fox News did not, in fact, wish to see him harmed. Wars may create their own cruel logic systems, but Peters’s call for peremptory judgment was, at the time, far outside political norms—and it did not go unnoticed. Two days later, a group of twenty-three veterans serving in Congress wrote an open letter to Fox News CEO Roger Ailes to lodge an official public complaint. The congressmen had watched Peters “with incredulity and disgust,” accused him of behavior unbecoming a former officer, and attacked his apparent historical ignorance.
“Soldiers are often forced to make statements contrary to their beliefs simply to stay alive,” they wrote. The most obvious reminder of this fact was the most powerful veteran in Congress. “Perhaps Mr. Peters would choose to question [Senator John McCain’s] patriotism as well,” the congressmen wrote.
For the fourteen Democrats and nine Republicans who signed it, the Ailes letter was low-risk theater, a signal of patriotic virtue against Peters’s toxic noise. If anyone had provided aid and comfort to the enemy, they wrote, it wasn’t Bergdahl but retired Lieutenant Colonel Peters. Following the brief controversy, Peters found himself on the receiving end of some “screwball death threats from ‘patriots,’” as he deemed them. While he later conceded that he had spoken out of anger, Peters was a reliable advocate for the rank and file, and the mission he had set for himself that day had been clear: to speak for voiceless soldiers, men he saw as the real victims of Bergdahl’s mess. “Julie, think about his buddies,” Peters said, wagging his finger at Banderas at the end of the segment. “Remember his buddies.”
By July 19, these sentiments were already widespread. From OP Mest to Sharana to CENTCOM headquarters in Tampa Bay, men in uniform struggled to defend or even explain what Bergdahl had done. In the absence of facts, a swirl of rumor and grievance filled the void. In Paktika’s villages, intelligence gatherers bearing cash rewards asked Afghan sources leading questions: Is it true that the missing American soldier wanted to join the Taliban? Soldiers were warned that if they found Bergdahl, he was unlikely to go with them peacefully. Some of Bergdahl’s own self-aggrandizing tales, spread from the guys who had met him, mingled with the rumors.
“He was very good with knives and trained to throw and fight hand-to-hand with knives,” one anonymous soldier wrote in an email to the conservative commentator Michelle Malkin during the DUSTWUN. They didn’t know anything about Bergdahl’s mental status, but it seemed safe to assume that it was not stable.
In civilian society, a person’s reputation is a complex and constantly evolving composite. In the Army, Bergdahl’s character had been settled. “The U.S. Army is an organism, like any organization,” said David Sedney, a senior Pentagon official who was in Kabul that summer. “And it rejected Bowe Bergdahl. It rejected Bowe Bergdahl as an alien object from the very beginning.”
Sedney’s official title was deputy assistant secretary of defense for Afghanistan, Pakistan, and Central Asia. He had spent the decade following 9/11 on the diplomatic front lines. In 2002, he first went to Kabul as the deputy chief of mission—rebuilding the U.S. presence for the first time in the twelve years since the Soviet withdrawal—and returned to Washington to join George W. Bush’s National Security Council as the director for Afghanistan. As Sedney’s government postings continually intersected with Bergdahl’s five-year captivity, he viewed the case through a lens of social anthropology. To Sedney, the loner private with the Kiplingesque fantasies was doomed from the start.
Bergdahl might have forged real bonds with Coe and Sutton, but more relevant was the fact that “he was surrounded by scores, hundreds of thousands of other people who were not his friends.” What struck Sedney most was the speed and consistency with which even the false rumors spread. “It’s a real testament to organizational groupthink. I talked to a lot of people in the Army, almost the day after Bergdahl left his post, who were just convinced that this guy was a traitor.”
There was never any reliable intelligence to back up the claim. As another Pentagon official pointed out, it was based on nothing more than wild speculation, and stories from Afghan sources who knew they could make the most money by regurgitating tales that American soldiers most wanted to hear. And yet the smear was irrepressible, quickly spreading from the conventional infantry units patrolling RC East to military leadership in Kabul. There, General Mike Flynn told a reporter during the first year of Bergdahl’s captivity that the captured soldier was “a jihadi.”
In the fall of 2009, the Pakistani journalist Ahmed Rashid was in Kabul meeting with American officials about a range of topics, including the captured soldier. To Rashid’s surprise, no one he spoke to seemed to care about Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl.
“I met with people in the U.S. military who were extremely dismissive of him as an individual,” Rashid said. “One wonders, if he had been a SEAL or a Special Forces guy, whether the attitude would have been different.”
Though the hive mind had rejected him, Bergdahl remained CENTCOM’s responsibility, and even after Ron Wilson was told that JSOC had been called off the search, the Pentagon ordered special operations commanders to draw up options for cross-border recovery missions. It was inevitable that they would be given the task; hostage rescues were this secret army’s origin story. JSOC was created after the failure of Ope
ration Eagle Claw to rescue fifty-two Americans held in Tehran in April 1980. Following 9/11, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, angry that the CIA had taken the lead at the start of the War in Afghanistan, oversaw the buildup of Special Operations command (SOCOM) of which JSOC is part. By the end of the decade, JSOC was a bigger and more capable paramilitary than what the CIA could muster on its own.
JSOC was home to the military’s best-trained killers, “operators,” known by their secret, color-coded units: SEAL Team 6 (Task Force Blue), Army Delta Force (Task Force Green), and JSOC’s intelligence support activity (Task Force Orange). They functioned as Washington’s secret army in countries where the United States was at war—officially or unofficially—including Yemen, Somalia, Nigeria, Mali, and the Philippines. Lethal missions in different countries required authorization at different levels of government. To go into Pakistan, JSOC required direct approval from the president.
Any cross-border mission would have confronted the “10–50 dance,” as covert operators in Kabul called the legal lambada wherein Pentagon and CIA lawyers found workarounds to the federal codes that govern overt military action in Afghanistan (Title 10), and covert paramilitary operations run by the CIA in Pakistan (Title 50). When President Bush had ordered a handful of such raids in 2008 and helicopters full of elite operators crossed the border, the military personnel became employees of the CIA in midair, a practice known as “sheep-dipping.”
JSOC mission planners drew up two options for rescuing Bergdahl—one “high” and one “low.” The high option called for eight MH47 Chinook transport helicopters carrying upward of two hundred special operators. The low option would have sent a small SEAL team over the border in stealth helicopters. One Navy SEAL team involved in the planning nicknamed the low option Objective Cat Stevens, after the British pop star who became a Muslim, changed his name to Yusuf Islam, and sold all of his guitars. From what the SEALs knew, it seemed like an apt description. Their commanders were less amused.
Both options carried huge risks—a diplomatic crisis with Pakistan at worst, or a limited but bloody shootout against Haqqani or Pakistani soldiers at best. No one at the Pentagon believed either was worth the gamble.
“We’re not going to utilize all of our resources to save Bergdahl and lose the War in Afghanistan as a result,” said Sedney. At the very least, a rescue mission would have risked the lives of elite operators, which no commander deemed acceptable.
According to Sedney, not a single mission order, for either the Army’s conventional units or JSOC’s special operators, was ever sent out with the specific order to find and rescue Bergdahl. “It was never the primary purpose or one of the top two or three purposes of any operation that took place,” he said.
Still, the Pentagon always plans for every contingency, and the classified Bergdahl rescue missions were put away in a locked file. Less than two years later, the plans were updated, adapted, and re-tasked again, this time for Operation Neptune Spear, the May 2, 2011, mission to assassinate Osama bin Laden.
ELEVEN
THE PAKISTAN PARADOX
Pakistan is the pivot of the world,” Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Pakistan’s founding father and first governor-general, declared in 1947. More than six decades later, the country’s pivotal status would make everything connected to Bowe Bergdahl’s captivity and recovery vastly more complicated and difficult.
Jinnah had made his pronouncement to Margaret Bourke-White, the Life photographer and journalist who had traveled to South Asia to interview the leaders of the world’s youngest and largest Muslim nation. Documenting the vast emigration of India’s Muslims that followed the partition of British India, she captured the iconic images of the time: Mahatma Gandhi sitting cross-legged with his spinning wheel, scenes of disease and death among the refugees, and an arresting close-up portrait of Jinnah, Pakistan’s severe, skeletal leader.
“America needs Pakistan more than Pakistan needs America,” Jinnah told her. He was speaking then of the exigencies of the developing Cold War, when Pakistan could serve American interests as a counterweight to the Soviet and Chinese Communists to the north and India’s leftist regime to the east. But Jinnah also understood that his country’s spiritual role transcended its geographical borders. To a fragmented and dispossessed Muslim world partitioned by Western powers after every great war, Pakistan was an inspiration. For the international Muslim community, the Ummah, it was an organizing principle.
In 1949, the Constituent Assembly, Pakistan’s first parliament, made this purpose explicit: The nation would be a refuge for the persecuted Muslims of South Asia to live their lives “in accordance with the teachings and requirements of Islam.” That same year, the president of the Muslim League party took it one step further, proclaiming that his country would unite the Muslim world—if not in space, then at least in spirit—by renaming itself “Islamistan.” The passions of these Muslim identity politics were often expressed as grievance. The country was less than a year old when, in May 1948, following Israel’s formal declaration as an independent state (and another refuge for a persecuted religious minority), three thousand Pakistanis descended on the U.S. Embassy in Karachi to protest American recognition of Israel.
Nevertheless, Pakistani officials were confident that the United States would finance their country’s defenses. At diplomatic meetings in both countries, they reminded the Americans that if Washington didn’t step up and help build Pakistan’s military and intelligence infrastructure, Moscow would. Educated Pakistanis vouched for the sanctity of their democracy, as had Jinnah—“Of course it will be a democratic constitution,” he told Bourke-White, “Islam is a democratic religion”—while downplaying the fervor in their streets and the clerics who clamored for the rule of Sharia law. While hard-liners at home called on their government to send troops to liberate Palestine from the Jews, diplomats traveled to Washington to lobby the Truman administration for military aid.
Jinnah, keenly aware of his geopolitical advantage, leveraged both sides to his benefit, a strategy that became a staple of Pakistani politics. Rather than commit one way or the other, generations of Pakistan’s political class stoked the fires of anti-American Islamic populism, all the while relying on Washington’s largesse to build a massive military and spy agency designed to deter India, its original and eternal foe. Less than a year after Truman signed his own National Security Act, the legislation that formed the Defense Department and the CIA, Washington bankrolled the founding of Pakistan’s Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI).
The country’s main Sunni party, Jamiat Ulema-e-Islam, ran on platforms of domestic “Islamization” and regulations of everything from women’s clothing to music and entertainment. Over the years, the terminology changed—from “Islamic constitutionalism” to “Islamic democracy” and “Islamic socialism”—but the reactionary fervor persisted. When it raged out of control, the Pakistani government could point to its domestic political unrest as just cause for increased American aid.
Washington complied, and Islamabad continued to rely on foreign money to build out its defense and intelligence capabilities. By the early 1950s, the country was spending 60 percent of its annual GDP on defense. A civilian and military ruling class lived affluently, while most of the country remained mired in poverty. The contrast wasn’t lost on American jazz trumpeter Dizzy Gillespie, who visited Karachi in 1956 on a State Department–sponsored goodwill tour. Gillespie was appalled that tickets to the Pakistan show were priced so high that “the people we were trying to gain friendship with couldn’t make it,” and he refused to play until the doors were opened to the lower classes and street children gathered outside.
The following year, James Langley, President Eisenhower’s new ambassador, challenged Washington’s prevailing assumptions about Pakistan shortly after his arrival. A newspaper publisher from Concord, New Hampshire, and an outsider to the culture of government policy groupthink, Langley asked whether his colleagues wer
e accepting Pakistani reports about their own affairs “as gospel truth without sufficient periodic scrutiny.” He described the popular notion that the country was pro-Western as “wishful thinking.” In Pakistan, Langley wrote, “We have an unruly horse by the tail and are confronted by the dilemma of trying to tame it before we can let go safely.”
Pakistani turmoil over American influence came to a head in November 1979, when a mob stormed the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad. It was just three weeks after Iranian students had done the same in Tehran and one week after Saudi fundamentalists took over the Masjid-al-Haram in Mecca, taking hostages at the holiest site in Islam during the Hajj. When Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini spread the rumor that the Americans were behind the attacks at the Hajj, protests erupted throughout the Muslim world. The next day, the mob in Islamabad burned the American Embassy to the ground as police stood by.
Over the course of the Cold War, Washington’s leniency enabled Pakistan’s worst impulses. Islamabad learned to stop worrying about its own economic output (or repaying foreign loans) and to start loving high-tech weaponry. The national quest for nuclear parity culminated in the 1998 test of the Muslim world’s first atomic bomb. Indulged by American dollars and complacent about its internal dysfunctions, Pakistan at the end of the Cold War had grown into the West’s problem-child state, perpetually oscillating between its roles as Washington’s military vassal and a quasi theocracy that wielded Islamic populism as a weapon it couldn’t fully control.
September 11, which was masterminded by the Pakistani terrorist Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, only amplified these dynamics. Even as President Pervez Musharraf vowed to be Washington’s indispensable partner in the War on Terror, bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri were provided safe passage through the tribal areas. In March 2004, Secretary of State Colin Powell designated the country as a “major non-NATO ally,” a label that, as New York Times reporter David Rohde noted at the time, “added diplomatic prestige and greater access to American military technology, surplus defense equipment, and training.” Between 2001 and 2011, Islamabad received more than $20 billion in U.S. aid, the bulk of which was earmarked for the FATA, which, after decades of neglect and political disenfranchisement from the British Raj, India, and most recently Pakistan, had emerged as the nexus of global terror. Assistance from Germany, the U.K., Japan, the World Bank, and the Asian Development Bank added about $10 billion more. Still, the Pakistani military was not content.