American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  “[Bergdahl] is safe, and now it is time to speak the truth,” Bethea wrote from Seoul, South Korea, where he was stationed on his last duty assignment before leaving the Army. “The truth is: Bergdahl was a deserter, and soldiers from his own unit died trying to track him down.”

  Since they had returned home in early 2010, this was the story that the soldiers of Task Force Geronimo could not tell. A few had spoken to Rolling Stone in 2012, and a few others had written surreptitious online posts, but they had been the exceptions. The Army’s gag orders, including one that had greeted them when they returned from their deployments in early 2010, had done a remarkable job keeping them quiet.

  “Our families and friends wanted to understand what we had experienced, but the Army denied us that,” Bethea wrote on his way to revealing the greatest outrage of the event: that in one three-week period (August 18, 2009, to September 6, 2009), six men had died searching. Bergdahl “has finally returned,” he wrote. “Those men will never have the opportunity.”

  Some of Bethea’s Army friends told him that his story was an oversimplification. But it was well written and emotionally raw, and it had the ring of truth, at least as Bethea understood it. As the story went viral, a Pentagon spokesman promised an investigation. By the time the Army rebutted the claim five days later, it had already taken root as fact. In the years that followed, Bethea learned the extent of information that the Army had withheld: that ISAF had high-confidence reports placing Bergdahl over the border within three days of his disappearance and that CENTCOM had rejected its own internal analysis and that of the intelligence community from July 14, 2009, and for roughly two months thereafter. The truth, Bethea eventually realized, was indeed more complex, and the line he had drawn from Bergdahl’s stunt to the six dead soldiers was not as clear or direct as he had once thought.

  “Knowing what I know now, I should have shut the fuck up about it,” he said.

  By Monday morning, it had become clear that the politics of the war, the business of politics, and the seductions of an election-year scandal were converging, and the operatives were already working their own angles. Richard Grenell, a Republican strategist and future Trump administration ambassador to Germany, spearheaded the effort with a midday appearance on Fox News, where he repeated Full’s claim that Bergdahl “deserted the military and went to the Taliban.” Even in the ruthless world of political operatives, Grenell had a reputation for hardball tactics. (Roger Stone, the veteran political strategist and self-avowed “dirty trickster,” once said he considered Grenell too shady to work with.) Since 2009, Grenell had been running his own consulting firm, Capitol Media Partners, and, together with his deputy, Brad Chase, began lining up interviews for 2nd Platoon veterans ready to talk to the press.

  In one of their first, Full and Cornelison told The New York Times that Second Lieutenant Darryn Andrews and Private First Class Matthew Martinek had been searching for Bergdahl when they were ambushed on September 4, 2009. With Grenell and Chase working as liaisons, similar stories followed on CNN, NBC News, Time magazine, The Weekly Standard, the New York Post, and the Daily Mail. As the bereaved parents of the men killed were pulled into the mix, the scandal took on the power of moral injustice, and, to White House critics, an outrage bordering on treason.

  “It’s a big cover-up like Benghazi, just like everything Obama has done,” Gold Star father Andy Andrews told the Daily Mail on Monday, June 2, 2014. “We want the truth to come out.”

  * * *

  —

  THE ACTUAL HISTORY—of a dysfunctional intelligence apparatus, Bergdahl’s own delusions, and the highest echelons of the Army chain of command turning the battlefield crisis into an opportunity of war—served no political interests. Five months before the 2014 midterm elections, however, the scandal did meet the needs of the Republican Party; and as the GOP geared up for its best opportunity to regain the Senate since 2006, the timing could not have been better. L’affaire Bergdahl was an offer too good to refuse.

  The mood in Hailey quickly turned dark. Harassing emails and phone calls began flooding City Hall, the Chamber of Commerce, and any small business that had been caught on camera celebrating or had ever been listed as sponsors for Bergdahl awareness events over the prior five years. At a bed and breakfast near the airport, the first call came in on Monday at 4:30 a.m. “Someone oughta come in and shoot bleeding-heart liberals like you.” Fifty or sixty more calls followed that week, about a quarter of them death threats. At Jane Drussel’s store, typically a high-spirited hub selling birthday balloons with messages such as “So many candles, so little cake,” high school students hired for their first summer jobs picked up the phone and froze. After one older employee broke down in tears and went home for the day, a thicker-skinned manager began fielding all phone calls, listening patiently to the voices that said, “I hope you burn in hell. I hope you fucking die.” To each she replied, “Thank you. Have a nice day,” and hung up the phone.

  The mayor’s office put out its first public statement on Monday afternoon. While acknowledging that all sides of the issue deserved to be heard, Hailey mayor Fritz Haemmerle made the case for Bergdahl’s equally vital right to due process. “In the meantime, our celebration will focus on Bowe Bergdahl’s release and the relief of his family and those who live here.”

  Hours later on Fox News, network star Bill O’Reilly told his 2,658,000 viewers that Bob Bergdahl “looks like a Muslim.” At the Drudge Report, Monday’s “HERO DESERTER?” headline gave way to Tuesday’s “OBAMA SAVED A RAT?” On Tuesday, O’Reilly opened his show by asking, “Is the father of Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl an Islamist sympathizer?”

  The Bergdahls had expected a backlash, which they assumed would cycle through the media’s outrage machine within a couple of days. But in the weeks before the prisoner exchange, Bob had gained several Twitter followers who worked at the Heritage Foundation, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and other hawkish think tanks. As conservative media filled with synchronized messages about his beard, his activism, and his religion, Bob had little doubt that opposition researchers had studied him for a choreographed campaign.

  On Wednesday, June 4, CNN’s Jake Tapper reported that the searches for Bergdahl had misdirected so many assets in Afghanistan for so long that the Army had been unable to meet its scheduled date to shut down COP Keating, a remote mountain combat outpost in northeastern Nuristan Province. The battle that raged at Keating on October 3, 2009, took the lives of eight U.S. soldiers, and Tapper’s unnamed military sources told him that there was a clear connection between Bergdahl’s June 30 walkabout and one of the Army’s worst battlefield losses of the war more than three months later.

  Major Ron Wilson was shocked by that claim. “I don’t know how they can get away with saying that,” he said. Tapper had cited no evidence, and Wilson didn’t believe any existed. Nevertheless, unnamed Pentagon sources repeated the claim to the Daily Mail and Fox News. As the Bergdahl fever burned across the airwaves, Hailey police officer Jeff Gunter received calls from attorneys representing veterans’ groups in California and Texas, each of whom told him they were planning to bring a couple thousand protesters to the Hailey celebration later that month. In Boise, the Idaho Statesman received calls from the same groups with the same message. “I believed they were actually going to come,” Gunter said. As the police department pondered four thousand protesters on Harleys swarming their town of eight thousand people, Haemmerle and Gunter saw a disaster in the making. Thursday afternoon, June 4, the city put out its second and final public statement on the matter. “In the interest of public safety, the event will be canceled,” it said.

  As Gunter breathed a sigh of relief, the party cancelation triggered yet another media convulsion and fresh fodder for the news crews prowling the town for quotes. For conservative media outlets and the GOP, the signal was clear: Bowe Bergdahl’s political value had not yet been fully tapped.

  * * *
/>   —

  HOURS LATER in New York City, six veterans of 2nd Platoon were navigating Manhattan’s skyscraper canyons. Fox News had made the arrangements, flying them all in from Texas, Michigan, California, South Dakota, Washington State, and New Mexico, and putting them up in a budget hotel near Times Square. By the time they arrived at the News Corp. Building at the corner of Sixth Avenue and Forty-seventh Street, the headline about the canceled party in Hailey was already circling the red-lettered news ticker that wraps around the building’s first-floor studios. The veterans had an appointment for a prime-time interview with the network’s rising star, Megyn Kelly.

  “I was kinda overwhelmed,” Gerald Sutton said. He had never even watched Fox News, much less had any live in-studio experience. The invitation had been vague. “I had no idea I’d be going out and speaking in front of people on camera.”

  After returning from a second tour in Afghanistan in 2012, Sutton left the Army with an honorable discharge. He enrolled at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, where he majored in history on his way to earning a Fulbright scholarship to study in Seoul, South Korea. Cody Full had invited Sutton as well as Joseph Coe, Bergdahl’s closest friends in the unit, to join the group in New York. Coe turned it down; he didn’t trust the media and had no desire for the attention. But Sutton felt compelled to set the record straight. Bergdahl had been his friend, but the world needed to know what he had done.

  “In a world exclusive, this is the first time these men have been together since they left Afghanistan,” Kelly said in her introduction. They sat in a semicircle facing her and the cameras. Some were in church attire, and some had packed only sneakers. Kelly wanted their story, but first she wanted to talk about the scandal’s latest sensation: chief Fox News Washington correspondent James Rosen had just published a bombshell: “Bergdahl declared jihad in captivity, secret documents show.”

  The secret documents were raw, unvetted Eclipse Group reports, which Dewey Clarridge had shared with Fox earlier that week. Some of the Eclipse information was accurate, including the report that Bergdahl had been held “in a metal cage, like an animal.” But it was the contradictory claims—that Bergdahl had enjoyed playing soccer with his guards, who had also given him a loaded AK-47 and invited him along for target practice—that the network promoted most. In the hard light and cold electronic hum of the Fox studio, with nearly three million Americans watching at home, Kelly dove right in.

  “What do you make of this latest reporting by James Rosen that [Bergdahl] had converted to Islam, that he fraternized openly with his captors, and declared himself a warrior for Islam at least by August of 2012?”

  Sergeant Evan Buetow, Bergdahl’s team leader, answered first: “Initially after he left, we knew that he had deserted. We knew that he was trying to find the Taliban, or trying to find someone who could speak English so he could talk to the Taliban.” It was a point which Buetow had already repeated more than two dozen times that week, on ABC News, NPR, CNN, Fox News radio, and three other Fox News shows prior to the group interview. When Kelly suggested that this anecdote could be interpreted several ways, Buetow agreed that he couldn’t know the truth without hearing from Bergdahl himself. “America wants to hear what he has to say,” he said. Moments later, pushing back on accusations that he and the others were politically motivated, Buetow repeated his claim: “This is not about politics. This is about the fact that Bergdahl walked away from us, went to try to find the Taliban, and we know that for a fact.”

  Sutton told Kelly that he had considered Bergdahl a really good friend and had taken it all “a little bit harder than some of the other guys.” Now, he had just one question: “Why?”

  For several of them, the Taliban propaganda videos had been betrayals that held clues to a deeper untold story, and maybe some answers to Sutton’s question. “He doesn’t seem like a captive,” Cornelison said of the tapes. “He seems like someone who is potentially enjoying himself.”

  Kelly’s interview and Rosen’s bombshell capped a tremendous week for Fox ratings. It marked the first time Kelly bested her network rival, O’Reilly, and firmly established her as a cable powerhouse. With its week-ending blockbusters, Fox had also completed the logical and narrative arc of treason, a shocking disgrace that left many in the network’s aging audience at their agitated peak. Their anger had no better target than Hailey, Idaho, where the media’s social experiments continued. Local business owners who had been harassed told Blaine County commissioner Larry Schoen that they were afraid to be seen with their families in public. At Zaney’s, Sue Martin had gone from serving coffee and breakfast burritos to the news crews camping out in her parking lot, to feeling like a fugitive in her own town. The store’s voicemail and Facebook page filled with threats, and by the third time she was personally accosted as a “Taliban sympathizer,” Martin’s family feared for her safety and told her to close shop.

  As Martin headed for the hills and the FBI opened an investigation into multiple death threats on Bob and Jani, the vitriol flowed in both directions. When Fox News’ Jesse Watters and his camera crew ambushed the bike shop where Bob sometimes worked, he was heckled by several customers. “Turn that fucking camera off!” one man shouted at Watters. “You’re the problem with this country! Not us. You are the problem!”

  That weekend, in an interview with The Wall Street Journal, military historian Paul J. Springer said that Bergdahl’s place in American history had been determined. “Even if it turns out that he was kidnapped, I don’t think you can ever reverse the narrative at this point.”

  TWENTY

  DEBRIEFING

  In Germany, Bergdahl’s reintegration team was told that it was time to bring him home. Nearly two weeks in the hospital had him talking, walking and on the road to health. Army staff at the Pentagon had its own priorities to manage in Washington; a criminal investigation needed to begin as soon as possible. They loaded him onto a nondescript military transport jet on June 12, 2014, and shortly after midnight, 1,809 days after he had slipped off OP Mest, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl touched down in San Antonio, Texas.

  The satellite trucks had been on-site at Lackland Air Force Base, cameras at the ready for Bergdahl’s first moments back on U.S. soil. But Army public affairs had corralled them behind a distant chain-link fence. The New York Times ran its story with a photo not of Bergdahl on the tarmac, but of the media gaggle waiting in a dark parking lot.

  On the flight home, Bergdahl had been joined by the team of intelligence analysts and Survival Evasion Resistance Escape (SERE) instructors whom he had first met in Germany, including one of the special operators who had recovered him in Khost. The team was a protective bubble, a deliberate design by SERE psychologists to surround him with the first people he could allow himself to trust after years of isolation and brutality. They drove him to Brooke Army Medical Center (BAMC), the first stop for all government and military personnel captured and detained overseas, and his next station on the reintegration track that the JPRA had set for him years earlier.

  At a press briefing later that morning, Major General Joseph P. DiSalvo, the commander of Army South at Fort Sam Houston, encouraged the media to focus on Bergdahl’s well-being rather than his infamy. He called the recovery operation “the culmination of Herculean efforts” and credited the interagency teams that made it happen. The scandal surrounding his alleged crimes was a Pentagon matter, he said. As far as DiSalvo was concerned, Bergdahl was a wounded warrior returning home, and it was the job of his team in Texas to get him back on his feet.

  The program at BAMC had significantly expanded in the years before Bergdahl arrived, from what had been an Army-specific treatment center into the government’s premier reintegration facility for returning prisoners and hostages. The FBI had an agreement with the Army to conduct its own hostage debriefings there, and the Defense Department welcomed all returning civilians to participate in its post-isolation support activities, which
offered counseling, clergy, and public affairs teams to help victims and their families deal with the inevitable media spotlight.

  Bergdahl was not their first high-profile case. In July 2008, after the Pentagon recovered three contractors who had been held for more than five years by Colombian FARC rebels, BAMC had also welcomed them home. According to Terrence Russell, the lead Pentagon debriefer on their case, all three FARC hostages arrived in San Antonio in better condition than Bergdahl did. The reason was straightforward: “They were held together and had each other. They never left each other’s company,” said Russell, a former SERE instructor who later became the Defense Department’s senior expert on isolated hostages and POWs. One of the Northrop Grumman contractors held in Colombia has made the same point in his own interviews.

  “I would never wish what happened to me on my worst enemy,” Marc Gonsalves said in 2016. “But I’m glad I wasn’t alone there.”

  Russell, a tall, broad-shouldered man with sandy hair, a bushy mustache, and a booming baritone voice, passed his first combat survival course in 1977 at Fairchild Air Force Base in Spokane, Washington. Two years after the fall of Saigon and four years after Operation Homecoming recovered what the Pentagon said (but many doubted) was the last of the POWs, the Air Force was still internalizing the lessons of Vietnam; it lost more men to missing-captured status in Southeast Asia than every other military branch combined. Russell served twenty-two years as an instructor at the Fairchild Survival School, notorious among graduates for its traumatizing curriculum: wilderness survival, prolonged sleep deprivation, (naked) refrigeration, claustrophobic confinement, and an escape from the “dunker,” during which pilots are strapped into flight seats and dropped upside down into a pool in the dark.