American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  Amerine gained quick approvals at the Pentagon from the Army staff, which led him to the Joint Staff, where he was told he needed to run it by Special Operations Command (SOCOM). “This all makes sense to me,” the general at SOCOM told him, but he couldn’t sign off on it unless the State Department did. At State, Amerine met with Ambassador James Dobbins, who had replaced Grossman in May 2013. The two men had a connection: When Amerine was infiltrating Karzai into Afghanistan, Dobbins was in Bonn working with the exiled Afghan leaders who would elect Karzai president. They had, in effect, fought the same war in 2001: the soldier in Afghanistan, the diplomat in Germany. Dobbins listened to the plan receptively then told him there was nothing he could do regarding Bergdahl. “I don’t know why you’re talking to me. This is a DoD issue,” Dobbins said.

  With that, Amerine had gone in a perfect bureaucratic circle. He thought of the ouroboros, the ancient symbol of infinity, a snake eating itself, and realized he was living it in Washington, D.C.

  He pressed on by shifting focus to the civilian cases. He knew the FBI was fiercely territorial over its authorities and budgets and though he still believed that he and the Pentagon had greater resources for the task, he made his case for cooperation. He and the FBI shared the same goal and ultimately played for the same team, he told them. But if his sources and the FBI’s sources were unwittingly negotiating with the same Taliban, he needed to know before the crossed wires blew it up on both of them. No, the FBI agents replied, he did not.

  “I knew that things were bad, I just didn’t know how bad,” Amerine said later.

  Trapped in his bureaucratic stovepipe, there was a lot that Amerine didn’t know. After a series of leaks to the press that had hobbled the talks early in 2013, the State Department and White House shared their progress with fewer and fewer people within the government. Amerine had no way of knowing that when Obama traveled to Kabul earlier that year, he had privately told Karzai that the United States was committed to negotiating through Agha and did not want to introduce any new mediators. But in the months that followed, with almost zero coordination among them, Amerine’s office, Special Operations Command, and the FBI would all do just that.

  In January 2014, a new proof-of-life video of Bergdahl arrived in Washington, and it was nothing like those preceding it. He looked ghastly: emaciated, shaking, barely able to speak.

  “It looked like he was dying,” his parents recalled. “Like terminal cancer,” Bob said. The tape shattered their concepts of his living conditions. “We were under the delusion that they were taking good care of him,” Jani said. In Bob’s messages with the Taliban spokesman, he had always quoted the Koran’s teachings on mercy and vowed that if the captors lived up to their scripture, he would see to it that his government lived up to its own professed ethics. Across the federal government, the video was read as a clear signal that the Haqqanis were going to close the deal by whatever means necessary, and with whoever could make it happen. It also marked the start of a race between government agencies, each intent on recovering Sergeant Bergdahl their own way.

  The FBI had its reasons to keep its case file secret from Amerine. The Bureau had their own sources and methods to protect, which by that winter included Bob Bergdahl himself. After four years of enterprise, Bob’s network now spanned the globe, from young Western journalists living in rented apartments in Eastern Afghanistan to former ISI officers retired in posh Washington, D.C., suburbs—and in some ways it exceeded the Bureau’s. Bob had told the FBI he would do anything to speed up the process. “I said, ‘put me in Kabul as the father and see who approaches me. I’ll just move there. I’ll move next to Mullah Zaeef’s house,’” he told them.

  Bob had spent years urging the government to pay a legal ransom. With Mullen’s support, he had lobbied the State and Treasury Departments to use Haqqani money confiscated from foreign banks. He pushed at CENTCOM too, reminding the military that payoffs for hostages had been U.S. policy for centuries. No one seemed to have taken him seriously. But that winter, without his knowledge, an FBI team pursued one of Bob’s sources on their own, deemed it legitimate, and teamed up with a SOCOM unit to plan a covert joint ransom-recovery mission. Bob was not informed and later said he would not have supported a rogue plan that could have interfered with the State Department talks.

  FBI counterrorism agents, trained and geared up as soldiers, had been joining elite military units on raids in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Somalia for years. In February, Special Operations Command, of which JSOC is part, informed their Pentagon counterparts that they had found a legal method to pay for Bergdahl’s release. On February 23, as the contest between the vying efforts escalated, the Taliban publicly called off another round of State Department peace talks, citing the “current complex political situation” in Afghanistan. But the same could have been said for Washington.

  On February 27, the FBI-JSOC team in Kabul was so confident of its plan that it informed officers at ISAF that Bergdahl would be brought over the border within seven to ten days; JSOC officers had already drawn up a detailed exfiltration plan complete with its own code name. That week, a key meeting that Amerine’s team had scheduled with a Quetta Shura representative to discuss the Noorzai trade was abruptly canceled. Days passed in anticipation, then weeks. Before long, the story had spread that yet another Taliban con artist had played the FBI and disappeared with a reported $10 million.

  * * *

  —

  THE GUARDIAN’S SEAN SMITH arrived in Idaho in early March. As an embed with Blackfoot Company at OP Mest in June 2009, he was the last journalist to see Bowe in person. Bob invited him to Croy Creek Canyon that winter to continue telling the story. Smith trailed him on a snowshoe hike through sagebrush and aspen groves to the winter hut that he kept in the woods as a place for his son to come home and recuperate. The five-year anniversary loomed.

  “I wake up each morning and my first thought is, ‘My son is still a prisoner of war in Afghanistan. And I need to do something about that,’” Bob told Smith.

  On March 6, they traveled together to Dubai, where they planned to spend a couple of nights before connecting to Kabul. When Bob had first raised the idea for the trip with Smith a year earlier, he described it as a secret mission, and Smith had leveled with him: “We’re not going to track down Bowe,” he said. “We are not seeking out Taliban leaders.” Instead, he offered himself as a guide on a short orientation trip. They agreed that their most ambitious goal would be to film Bob visiting prisoners at the U.S.-run Parwan Detention Facility at Bagram Airfield.

  Bob and Jani didn’t tell their military contacts that Bob had left the country, but assumed that he would be monitored. He was let go after extensive questioning by customs agents in Dubai, and Smith took him to a budget hotel in a seedy part of town. In Idaho, Jani’s phone rang soon after with a call from CENTCOM.

  “Jani, where’s Bob?” It was Amber Dach, the lead analyst on the case and one of their most trusted handlers. “You need to tell him to come home now,” Dach said. She couldn’t explain why but told Jani that his timing was bad and it was vitally important that Bob turn around.

  In Dubai, Bob and Sean Smith had met up with a European journalist who dropped hints that Taliban leaders were also en route to the city for a meeting related to the American talks. Bob said he wanted to be included. He was convinced that if he could just sit with them and talk man-to-man, father to father, they could all solve this thing together. But when his phone lit up with a text from Jani relaying Dach’s orders, he knew he had to comply.

  “I cried half the flight home,” he said. “I thought I abandoned Bowe.”

  ACT V.

  CODES OF CONDUCT

  EIGHTEEN

  WELCOME HOME

  With about an hour’s notice, the Taliban told the Americans to meet at 4:00 p.m. local time near Batai Pass, a remote border crossing in the mountains above Khost City, about sixty miles northea
st of OP Mest and not far from Camp Chapman. The location was accessible by helicopter, but isolated enough for a clandestine operation. The Americans agreed, and a regional, one-day cease-fire was arranged.

  Bergdahl’s guards shaved his head and gave him a fresh change of clothes, some stale bread, and an orange soda. They blindfolded him with a scarf, pulled a woman’s burka over him, put him in a car, and began driving toward the border. In the days leading up to the rendezvous, the Taliban media affairs team prepared for one of its biggest propaganda opportunities of the war: the handover of the American prisoner by a well-armed Taliban security force in Taliban-held territory.

  The film opens with several gunmen standing around a beat-up silver Toyota Hilux, the near-indestructible Japanese pickup favored by generations of mujahideen. The red scrawl of a faux-spray-paint decal runs the length of the side panels, and the hood is propped open, as is the hood of an old white Corolla parked nearby—proof the vehicles weren’t rigged with explosives.

  The gunmen are in high spirits. They pass a white truce flag between them. Three fighters dressed in three different color shalwars pose, wave, and cheer for the camera. Bergdahl sits in the backseat, blinking, dressed head to foot in a white shalwar, his skin pale, his head shaved bald like a pawn’s. The camera pans to an American surveillance plane flying overhead. On the ground there are Taliban soldiers in every direction. Sentries armed with sniper rifles and a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) stand high on a steep hill above the truck. A narrator explains in Pashto: “We told them there are eighteen armed fighters, and the Americans said, ‘That’s all right.’”

  The tallest masked Taliban soldier approaches Bergdahl, who is still blinking, a reaction to the sunlight after hours in a blindfold. By the time he returned to the U.S., rumors had already spread on social media claiming the blinks were coded transmissions to his terrorist brethren. As the tall Taliban soldier points a finger and then pats Bergdahl on the shoulder, his voice can be heard on the video telling him in Pashto: “Don’t come back to Afghanistan. If I catch you again myself, you will not get away again. I won’t let that happen, even if I get killed.”

  An English message in black cartoon letters flashes on the screen:

  Don’come back

  to

  Afghanistan

  Then they appear: two UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters flying a high lazy circle above them. The sentry on the hill has his RPG shouldered. Bergdahl stands dazed, now wearing a checkered shawl draped over his shoulders, and flanked by guards whom he had never seen or met before that day, all of them watching as one Black Hawk crests the sentry’s hill and descends in a cloud of swirling dust.

  The Taliban hold the white flag high, and as the chopper touches down they march Bergdahl toward three fast-approaching commandos in civilian clothes and sunglasses. The two teams exchange quick greetings and handshakes. The Americans pat Bergdahl down for explosives, pivot, and take him by the arm toward the helicopter. He is unsteady and loses his balance several times in the thirty paces to the helicopter door, where they frisk him again.

  The handoff has the Americans on the ground for less than a minute. As the Black Hawk flies a low pattern out of the valley and recedes into the distance, the cartoon message flashes again:

  Don’come back

  to

  Afghanistan

  In the air, Bergdahl was surrounded by the kind of special operators he once believed he was destined to become, in a Black Hawk flown by one of the Army’s elite aviation units, returning to base after a highly classified mission. It was a perverse and cruel way to live out his once closely held dream. To help Bowe communicate above the roar of the rotors, the commandos gave him a paper plate and a marker.

  “SF?” Bergdahl wrote.

  They nodded. “Yes,” one soldier shouted, “we’ve been looking for you for a long time.”

  Bergdahl broke down in tears, grabbed the man’s hand, and for the remainder of the flight to the American base, didn’t let it go.

  * * *

  —

  ABOUT NINETY MINUTES after the handoff and more than eight thousand miles to the west, a U.S. security detail escorted five Qatari officials and the five Taliban detainees to one of two C-17 Globemaster cargo planes that had been inexplicably parked at the Guantanamo airfield for the prior four days. The planes had been one of the only visible examples of the secrets the administration had withheld from Congress over the preceding months.

  Following the alarming January proof-of-life video, the White House concluded that it was not going to achieve the reconciliation terms it had sought through the talks with Tayeb Agha. Officials at the National Security Council decided it was time to salvage the only part of the negotiation they could and bring Bergdahl home through the prisoner swap Agha had demanded all along. As the Taliban sensed their advantage, they pressed for more, at one point demanding that Bergdahl would not be released until every Taliban detainee in Cuba was freed. Even after the White House had made its decision, reaching a final agreement took months.

  The tortured arbitration was managed by a small cadre of senior officials at the State Department, National Security Council, on Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel’s staff at the Pentagon, and in the Qatari government. In Washington, Hagel received direct written approval to execute the trade from Secretary of State Kerry, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Martin Dempsey, Attorney General Eric Holder, Secretary of Homeland Security Jeh Johnson, and Director of National Intelligence James Clapper. (As the former Pentagon lead counsel, Johnson had been traveling to Doha to negotiate the same trade since September 2011.) Hagel would testify before Congress that, even in the final days, it was a touch-and-go operation to the final hours.

  On the morning of May 27, 2014, the final stage of the process was set in motion with a series of phone calls that began when President Obama received the personal pledge from Qatari Emir Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani to uphold his end of the deal enforcing security on the five former Taliban leaders. Hours later, Michael Lumpkin, whom Hagel had appointed to oversee the operation at the Pentagon, called John F. Kelly, the Marine general (and future White House chief of staff) in charge at Southern Command (SOUTHCOM), in Doral, Florida. Guantanamo fell under SOUTHCOM’s jurisdiction, and Kelly relayed the orders to Michael Butler, a former Top Gun flight instructor and the two-star Navy admiral in command at the detention camp. In the eighteen months since Kelly had arrived at SOUTHCOM, twelve detainees had been transferred out, and the two men had grown familiar with the process, an orderly series of legal, administrative, and medical screenings that in most cases lasted a month or longer. Kelly told Butler to have the Guantanamo Five ready to go in two days.

  There would be no time for exit interviews with the FBI or the International Committee of the Red Cross. By the time a Red Cross executive responded to Pentagon emails on the topic, the prisoners were already gone. Butler, who in 2005 had served as a flight operations director at the Al Udeid Air Base in Qatar, also learned that he would be hosting the Qatari delegation that would be escorting the detainees to their new home. Above all, Kelly told him, the entire operation needed to be kept out of public view, a particular challenge given the gaggle of civilian and military attorneys, paralegals, reporters, and Indiana University law school students scheduled to attend legal hearings on the same days the Taliban would be smuggled out.

  Butler drew up a compressed schedule. The Qataris arrived on the afternoon of May 29, finishing the last leg of their journey on a short flight from Tampa aboard Kelly’s official plane. At the Guantanamo airfield, U.S. personnel stood guard as the Qataris met the five men and presented each with statements written in Pashto explaining the conditions of their imminent release: They would not engage in militant fund-raising, recruiting, or incitement, and for at least one year, would not leave Qatar for any reason, including the Hajj. There were no objections. U.S. military personnel would join them on the
flight to Doha, a specific security request from the Pentagon.

  Together with their Qatari and American handlers, the prisoners waited eight hours at the Guantanamo airfield for news from Khost. When it didn’t come, Butler’s team improvised: The Qataris were whisked to a nearby military hotel, and the five spent their last nights in U.S. custody in a Department of Homeland Security immigration detention center. Every hour that passed with no word about Bergdahl’s location threatened operational security. The Miami Herald’s Carol Rosenberg, who was in the press pool for the military commission hearings at Guantanamo that day, saw the C-17s and knew there was only one transfer that could require such large planes. But as she pieced the story together and started asking questions, she received no answers. A leak at this late hour would not only jeopardize the entire deal, but with the special mission unit waiting for orders to fly into the isolated handover spot in Khost, it could endanger American lives.

  On the morning of May 31 around 10:30 a.m., Lumpkin called the National Military Command Center—the central node of the Pentagon matrix—with orders for the Defense Department to release the five prisoners into Qatari custody. Forty-five minutes later, with the planes still on the runway, President Obama called the Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Congressman Howard “Buck” McKeon, with the news. McKeon was stunned. His committee had been wrangling with the White House over Guantanamo transfers since Obama’s first days in office and had amended the 2011 NDAA with this exact scenario in mind. Yet here was the president informing him that the Taliban Five, as McKeon’s committee called them, had already left the prison and within minutes would be gone. The Taliban prisoners, McKeon realized, knew about their release before any member of Congress did. In the weeks and months that followed, McKeon learned that not only had the White House conspired to hide the decision, but to his greater shock, so had officials at the Pentagon. In short, they had likely broken the law, and they had done so knowingly. It was Iran-Contra logic at work in the Obama administration: Yes, we did it, and it worked. So what?