American Cipher

by Matt Farwell

  Dahl had been in his office in Tacoma, Washington, at Joint Base Lewis-McChord, when he first saw the message from Army staff headquarters looking for candidates to lead the investigation (known as an Army Regulation 15-6). The Pentagon wanted a specific kind of officer to do the job: a two-star general with a recent Afghanistan deployment, available immediately, and for at least two months. To his dismay, Dahl realized he was on the short list. For senior officers, whose every promotion requires congressional confirmation, it is both military code and sound career strategy to avoid even small political controversies. Inheriting the Bergdahl case was just bad luck. After he briefly lobbied his superiors to pick one of the other generals, Dahl accepted his fate. “I pretty much saw it coming,” he said.

  Dahl flew to Washington to accept his assignment from the director of Army staff, Lieutenant General William Grisoli. His orders were unambiguous. As the lead investigating officer (IO), Dahl was responsible for establishing the official record of the facts and circumstances of Bergdahl’s disappearance and capture. “Your responsibilities as an IO take precedence over all other duties,” the orders told him. By the end of the day, Dahl’s anonymity had been shot, his appointment announced across the media, and his name forever bound to the scandal.

  The assumption at the Pentagon was that Dahl would conduct his investigation from Army headquarters—an office had already been reserved for him. But while his orders were nonnegotiable, Dahl had the autonomy to run the investigation his own way. He knew that, under Article 37 of the Uniform Code of Military Justice (Unlawful Command Influence), any political pressure from his own chain of command could invalidate his work before he even started. Savvy to the ways of Washington, he decided to conduct the investigation back in Tacoma, as far away as he could get from what he called “the noise” in Washington, D.C.

  The case consumed the next sixty days of Dahl’s life. His first call was to an infantry platoon leader to help him understand the group dynamics at OP Mest. He added nine officers, ten enlisted men, an intelligence analyst, a psychologist, and a psychiatrist to the investigative team, which in turn identified fifty-six witnesses for questioning. Dahl wanted to know everything about Bergdahl: his behavior patterns, his relationships and upbringing, and above all, his state of mind when he decided to ditch his platoon and weapon and walk into nearly certain harm. In August 2009, Major General Scaparrotti, commander of the 82nd Airborne, and Lieutenant Colonel Horton, a senior MP in Eastern Afghanistan at the time, had left their own initial 15-6 investigation open, determining that without a statement from Bergdahl, they could reach no firm conclusions. Dahl faced the same reality, but the Army had higher priorities for Bergdahl in June 2014 than his criminal case. In the interests of his health and his value as an intelligence asset, debriefing took precedence, and Dahl was told he would have to wait.

  While Dahl turned his attention to calling witnesses, Mark Boal went straight for Bergdahl himself. He contacted Kim Dellacorva, who had been listed as Bergdahl’s next of kin on his Army paperwork. Following a divorce, she had changed her name from Harrison to Dellacorva, an approximation of an Italian translation of a Wiccan concept: “of the crows.” By 2014, she had left Idaho and moved to the largest cannabis-producing region in the United States, Northern California’s Emerald Triangle, with plans to work the land. She and her daughter had been like family when Bowe deployed, and when he landed in Texas, they were some of the first people he spoke to. Three days after touchdown, on Dellacorva’s advice, Bergdahl agreed to have Boal tell his story.

  Boal had cut his teeth as a military journalist for Rolling Stone, Playboy, and Mother Jones. In 2004, he embedded with an Army bomb squad in Iraq. In 2007, Boal based his first feature film, In the Valley of Elah, on his article about Army infantryman Richard Davis, who had been murdered by his own platoonmates near Fort Benning, Georgia, just days after they returned from a heavy combat tour in Iraq. Both the story and film cast a harsh light on how the Army cares for its own. The following year, Boal and Bigelow teamed up for the first time on The Hurt Locker, which earned the Academy Award for Best Picture and established them as an industry force.

  As Boal’s star rose in Hollywood, he walked a creative tightrope, striving to tell the true and difficult stories of U.S. military personnel while cultivating sources for bigger government stories to come. But his relationships with the powerful fared better than those with his subjects. Master Sergeant Jeffrey Sarver, the explosive ordnance removal specialist whose story Boal had adapted for The Hurt Locker, sued the screenwriter just before Oscar season, claiming defamation for the film’s allegedly inaccurate portrayal of his Army career and life back home after his tour. Boal won the lawsuit on First Amendment grounds, and Sarver was ordered to pay $187,000 to cover the defense costs. Compared to the controversies that lay ahead, it would be a mere speed bump in Boal’s career.

  In December 2012, Zero Dark Thirty, the $40 million blockbuster that depicted the decade-long search for bin Laden and the final lethal raid in Abbottabad, began playing in theaters just seventeen months after the event itself. Along its path to box office success, the film irritated a wide range of political constituencies with its not so subtle suggestions that the CIA’s post-9/11 torture program had supplied intelligence critical to the manhunt. A bipartisan letter from the ranking members of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Senators Dianne Feinstein, Carl Levin, and John McCain, sought to clear up any confusion about torture that the film had created. Calling it “grossly inaccurate and misleading,” the senators reminded Sony Pictures that their committee had completed an exhaustive study that had arrived at opposite conclusions from what the film depicted. At a time when a narrow majority of Americans believed that torture worked, the filmmakers were “perpetuating the myth,” and the senators told them that they had “a social and moral obligation to get the facts right” and correct the record.

  The homage to torture was only one part of the Zero Dark Thirty legacy. The film had also blurred the lines between entertainment and propaganda. Three months after the Abbottabad raid, the CIA and Pentagon had successfully fed its own favorable versions of the event to specific print journalists, and word got around that Hollywood was next. New York Republican congressman and chairman of the House Committee on Homeland Security, Peter King, wrote a letter to CIA and Pentagon inspectors about what appeared to be a deliberate strategy to publicize (and glorify) classified information. Such collaborations between government spymasters and their chosen Hollywood partners undermined the very idea of government transparency, King wrote, “in favor of a cinematographic view of history.”

  Reporting by journalist Jason Leopold and CIA historian Tricia Jenkins would later reveal the extent to which Boal and Bigelow had plied CIA officers for access—and the mutual affection the filmmakers had received in return in the weeks immediately following bin Laden’s death. Troves of agency documents detailed the extent of the dalliance as Boal and Bigelow attempted to woo their sources and the agency repaid the filmmakers by making them feel like part of the team. This relationship peaked when Boal and Bigelow flew east from Los Angeles to attend a June 24, 2011, closed-door, classified awards ceremony at the Langley campus honoring agency personnel involved in the bin Laden hunt.

  Boal denied that any official government vetting had taken place. But an internal December 2012 CIA report told a different and more nuanced story: the agency’s Office of Public Affairs had violated CIA regulations. The audit also revealed that, as part of standard agency procedure, the creative professionals who thought that they were working the CIA for information were in fact being worked. Of the eight entertainment projects audited, one received the bulk of the agency’s attention, which included meetings with several CIA officers, “the majority of whom were under cover.” Still, the report found “nothing to suggest that the projects’ results would be inconsistent with CIA’s goal.”

  By the time Bergdahl arrived at Fort Sam Houston, Zero
Dark Thirty had grossed more than $100 million for Sony, and Boal and Bigelow had cemented their role as Hollywood’s most prolific storytellers of the country’s post-9/11 wars. This they did with amazing speed, while shrugging off the ethical charges leveled by Feinstein, McCain, and Levin. “I’ve been saying from the beginning, ‘It’s a movie,’” Boal said in his acceptance speech for best director award from the New York Film Critics Circle at a Manhattan nightclub. “That shouldn’t be too confusing.”

  Impressionable and vulnerable even before he joined the Army and spent five years in brutal isolation, Bergdahl was an easy mark for Boal. Before he had even met his own attorneys, the two began speaking regularly by phone with the understanding that the chats were background research for a movie about Bergdahl’s ordeal. Boal soon recorded twenty-five hours of conversation.

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  A SOLDIER COULD do worse than an assignment at Fort Sam Houston. What began as a frontier outpost in Indian country had grown into one of the Army’s most serene bases: a bucolic campus of Spanish Colonial–style homes and offices with terra-cotta shingle roofs on manicured green lawns. The parade grounds were dotted with ornamental husks of retired matériel: artillery pieces, decommissioned M-60 tanks, M113 armored personnel carriers, and UH-1 Iroquois helicopters. Each afternoon at 1700 hours, the cannon and bells sounded and the flag was lowered in the Army ritual called “retreat.”

  A month after he arrived, Bergdahl was assigned to a staff office job at U.S. Army North Headquarters, just off the historic Fort Sam Houston Quadrangle, a picturesque anachronism popular with tourists. Along with the base museum and limestone clock tower, the Quadrangle was also home to an Army menagerie: peacocks (blue and albino), Texas deer, and chickens roamed the grassy lawn. Army lore held that the animals were put there for Geronimo to hunt when the Apache renegade was held on Fort Sam as a prisoner of war in the 1890s. The exotic collection included a rooster of a breed that Bergdahl had been fond of as a kid. Each morning when he arrived for work before flag raising, its crowing triggered a post-traumatic flood. In captivity, his guards had forced him to watch and rewatch a videotaped beheading. Before the execution began, as the doomed man stared at the camera, the only sound was of a rooster crowing somewhere out of the video’s frame.

  Aside from the flashbacks and martial trappings, it was a typical Army desk job. Sergeant Bergdahl was accepted by his colleagues and superiors, who appreciated his work ethic and consistency. Compared to many young NCOs returning from war, he was steady and never a source of workplace drama. In the evenings, sleep was a challenge. His dreams filled with visions of his former guards standing over him with a knife, or one who enjoyed pantomiming the way he had allegedly slit an American soldier’s throat. Bergdahl’s doctors at BAMC prescribed sleeping pills, and he developed habits he had never had in his youth: sleeping with a flashlight, compulsively checking his locks, and tying string around the doorknob so it couldn’t be manipulated while he slept.

  On August 6, 2014, at 8:00 a.m., Sergeant Bergdahl and his new civilian attorney, Eugene Fidell, met Major General Dahl in a nondescript office in Building 268 on Fort Sam Houston. To ease the tension, Dahl noted the irony of their situation: more than five years after Bergdahl had set out with the goal of airing his grievances to a general, the opportunity had finally arrived. Bergdahl spoke for about eight hours over two days, providing Dahl with 370 pages of sworn testimony to supplement his team’s extensive information gathering.

  Dahl submitted his 15-6 report to the Pentagon in late September, a few days ahead of the deadline. He included Bergdahl’s sworn statement along with a two-page summary of his findings, which, in contrast with the scare headlines dominating the media, was remarkably concise, dispassionate, and clear. The consistency of the witnesses’ statements had helped. Nearly three dozen people who had known Bergdahl at various points in his life described his character, virtues, and shortcomings in nearly identical terms.

  “Overwhelming testimony from those in his unit indicates that, prior to his disappearance, Private First Class Bergdahl was a good soldier. He was disciplined, serious, motivated, and he excelled at his basic warrior tasks and skills,” Dahl wrote. Since returning to U.S. custody, he had been cooperative and helpful. Nevertheless, he had done precisely what his former comrades said: He left OP Mest deliberately and knowing that he would miss his morning guard shift. That alone, Dahl wrote, even though Bergdahl had intended to return, was sufficient basis for a desertion charge. Next, Dahl answered the question to which everyone involved—by now including several million Americans, Bergdahl’s own parents, his platoon buddies, President Obama, and a sizable audience of international news readers—demanded an answer: Why?

  Their interview had filled in the blanks. Bergdahl, reticent for most of his life, talked for the bulk of their time together, speaking in long stream-of-consciousness tangents. Where his mind needed to go, the general followed, listening patiently to Bergdahl’s analysis of the history of military strategy, the role of the U.S. Army in American culture, and, most important for Dahl’s task, the dire leadership issues that had been so evident to Bergdahl in Lieutenant Colonel Baker’s Task Force Geronimo in the spring of 2009.

  “The basis for his stated motive was incorrect,” Dahl wrote. “Although Private First Class Bergdahl may have perceived it to be so, there was no failure of leadership that created an urgent and dangerous situation.” Excessive idealism, coupled with a hyperactive imagination, “caused his anxiety to grow to a level where he believed it was necessary to act immediately to correct the perceived moral wrong and protect members of his platoon from imagined danger.”

  Dahl considered the possibility that Bergdahl had spun him a wild tale, but like Russell and Dach before him, he ultimately ruled it out. If Bergdahl had been lying, he had done so with miraculous consistency. Bergdahl’s truth was far sadder than the version that his country had written for him upon his return. His truth also matched what Coe and his friends in Idaho had believed all along: Bowe was a well-intentioned, remarkably naïve twenty-three-year-old with the impulsiveness and judgment of a kid half his age. It was an odd end to a long mystery, but with the rigor Dahl had applied, it was the closest anyone had come—and likely ever would—to cracking Bergdahl’s code.

  The Department of the Army accepted Dahl’s recommendations. Among them, he advised the Pentagon to better identify behavioral health issues in those ejected from the armed services and improve screening for those trying to get back in. As for Bergdahl’s comments to other soldiers that he had planned to walk to Pakistan or China, Dahl characterized them as bravado that could be taken seriously, but not literally. Regardless of whether one believed that he left for the reasons he told General Dahl, or to go “to India to eventually join the Russian mob,” his crime was the same: desertion. Dahl recommended that he be charged with one count of UCMJ Article 85: desertion with intent to avoid hazardous duty or shirk important service.

  Desertion charges are common in the Army, particularly in wartime. Between 2006 and 2014, roughly twenty thousand soldiers left as deserters. Since 2001, the Army has pressed charges against fewer than two thousand, of whom about half pled guilty and just seventy-eight were tried and convicted. While Bergdahl’s lawyers would later argue that their client had merely gone AWOL and was then captured, Dahl had made a clear case for pressing charges; he had also provided his superiors at the Pentagon with a solution that could be wrapped up quickly. It would be up to the Army to decide how to process his findings.

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  ON MARCH 25, 2015, six months after Dahl submitted his report, the Army, despite Dahl’s recommendation, hit Bergdahl with two crimes: Article 85 (desertion) and a second, rarely used and more serious allegation, Article 99: misbehavior before the enemy. The second charge carried a maximum sentence of death and up to life in prison.

  In those six months of deliberation, the Army had
managed the case with at least one conspicuously unprecedented legal maneuver. Three days before Christmas, Lieutenant General Grisoli, director of the Army staff at the Pentagon, had referred Dahl’s recommendations to General Mark Milley at U.S. Army Forces Command (FORSCOM) for legal processing—at the direction of the secretary of the Army. Since its founding in 1973 by General Creighton Abrams at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, FORSCOM had been designed with a specific function: to oversee the Army’s warfighting formations. Unlike Army commands that focus on training, doctrine, or institutional support, FORSCOM is all about combat, and since its founding it had never held a general court-martial. To Bergdahl’s attorneys, the decision was at once institutionally inexplicable and politically obvious; as FORSCOM built a prosecution team from the ground up for its first ever general court-martial, it would do so under the watchful eye of the Army staff. The Bergdahl case was unlike any court-martial before it, and it would be managed with a bespoke legal process tailored for Pentagon control.

  Along with its charge sheet on March 25, FORSCOM also enforced a sweeping gag order that denied Bergdahl and his attorneys the right to share with the public or the press any case evidence. This “protective order,” as the Army euphemized it, was presented as a method to shield Bergdahl’s privacy. But in practice, it was a repeat of the NDAs with which the Army had sought to contain the story for five years. As long as Bergdahl was an Army soldier, the Army would control the facts of his case.

  The surprising charges made national headlines, which led in turn to another round of high-octane media analysis.

  “There is clear evidence,” said former Army intelligence officer and Fox News contributor Tony Shaffer, “that [Bergdahl] was going over to the other side.” Shaffer, along with Fox senior intelligence reporter Catherine Herridge, cited government sources with access to a classified 2009 report. Shaffer said that while he had not seen the report personally, he stood by his sources.