American Cipher Read online

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  Copyright © 2019 by Matt Farwell and Michael Ames

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  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Farwell, Matt, author. | Ames, Michael, author.

  Title: American cipher : Bowe Bergdahl and the U.S. tragedy in Afghanistan / Matt Farwell and Michael Ames.

  Description: New York : Penguin Press, 2019. | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018046632 (print) | LCCN 2018058587 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735221055 (ebook) | ISBN 9780735221048 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Bergdahl, Bowe, 1986- | Soldiers—United States—Biography. | Afghan War, 2001- | Bergdahl, Bowe, 1986—Trials, litigation, etc. | Trials (Military offenses)—United States.

  Classification: LCC DS371.43. B47 (ebook) | LCC DS371.43. B47 F37 2019 (print) | DDC 958.104/78 [B] —dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018046632

  Version_2

  To Dr. Hannah Tyson and Michael Hastings

  —MATT FARWELL

  For my mom, my friend:

  Elyse Ames (1941–2017)

  —MICHAEL AMES

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Maps

  Prologue

  ACT I. A FANTASTIC PLAN

  One. Little America

  Two. Blowback

  Three. Adjustment Disorder

  Four. An Army of One

  Five. OP Mest

  ACT II. LOST

  Six. DUSTWUN

  Seven. The Lost Puppy

  Eight. River City

  Nine. Diversions and Deceptions

  ACT III. TRAPPED

  Ten. Not the Worst News

  Eleven. The Pakistan Paradox

  Twelve. Fixing Intel

  Thirteen. Means of Escape

  ACT IV. BRING BOWE HOME

  Fourteen. Pawns

  Fifteen. The No-Negotiations Negotiations

  Sixteen. Bob’s War

  Seventeen. The Five-Sided Wind Tunnel

  ACT V. CODES OF CONDUCT

  Eighteen. Welcome Home

  Nineteen. Fox Nation

  Twenty. Debriefing

  Twenty-one. Squared Away

  Twenty-two. The Noise

  Twenty-three. Guilty

  Epilogue

  Photographs

  Acknowledgments

  Image Credits

  Notes

  Index

  About the Authors

  PROLOGUE

  Five years and five weeks after he walked alone and unarmed into the Afghanistan night, Sergeant Bowe Bergdahl was scheduled for an interview with the U.S. Army general investigating his crime. They met at eight in the morning in Building 268 on Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. Bergdahl’s civilian attorney, Eugene Fidell, a Yale Law School professor and military justice historian, accompanied him. Major General Kenneth Dahl sat across from them. In an adjoining room, the Army stenographer began the recording.

  “Sergeant Bergdahl, obviously I’m reading you your rights warning certificate because I am the investigating officer conducting an Army Regulation 15-6 investigation. You are the subject of that investigation. Your suspected offenses are absent without leave and desertion.”

  Bergdahl listened, motionless.

  “Before I ask you any questions, you must understand your rights. Number one, you do not have to answer my questions or say anything. Do you understand that?”

  “Yes,” Bergdahl said.

  “If you would just initial number one,” said Dahl, pointing to the form. Bowe Robert Bergdahl wrote his initials—BRB.

  “Number two, anything you say or do can be used as evidence against you in a criminal trial. Now do you understand that?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t mean to insult your intelligence, but it’s better to be thorough up front,” the general explained.

  “Understood, sir.”

  With the paperwork complete, Dahl continued, “It’s great that you’re home, welcome home. Everybody is glad you’re home. And now there is an opportunity to hear your story.”

  Bergdahl sat up straight. His square frame filled the shoulders of his drab green civilian shirt. Even in street clothes, he looked every bit the soldier. “Let me just start by leaving it open-ended and ask you to relax, get comfortable,” Dahl tried. “You have to be eager and anxious to tell your story. . . . So here’s an opportunity for you, and I will turn it over to you.”

  The twenty-eight-year-old sergeant did not move.

  “Relax,” said Fidell.

  “Yes, absolutely,” Dahl said.

  “You look tense,” Fidell said.

  “Take as much time as you want,” Dahl offered. “You can lean back and relax.”

  “If I lean back, it hurts my back,” Bergdahl said, but did not explain why.

  The country seemed to have already made up its mind. Bergdahl was a national disgrace, the loudest voices said—a coward and a deserter at the very least, a traitor to many, and probably a de facto member of the Taliban. (“Tali-Bowe” was a popular moniker on social media.) The prisoner swap that freed Bergdahl in exchange for five high-value Taliban detainees at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, was a rotten deal; according to one poll, 43 percent of Americans felt it was “the wrong thing to do.” The night of Bergdahl’s release, Donald Trump, whose political aspirations were only hypothetical at the time, tweeted: “At some point Sgt. Bergdahl will have to explain his capture. In 2009 he simply wandered off his base without a weapon. Many questions!” Bergdahl’s hometown of Hailey, Idaho (population: 8,000), announced a celebration party. When the city hall and several businesses were deluged by hundreds of threats by phone and email, and after the local police chief was warned of an imminent invasion from two thousand protesting patriotic bikers, the party was canceled. Bowe wasn’t the only target—his family was placed under FBI protection as rumors swirled that his father, Bob Bergdahl, was a closet Muslim. Time magazine asked, “Was He Worth It?”

  To the Pentagon, Sergeant Bergdahl was a public relations disaster. After fourteen years of war, the last thing the Army needed was for all the soldiers who thought the war was dumb to walk off. Dahl was a fifty-two-year-old career officer and a two-star major general expecting a third star. The Army was his life—his West Point sweetheart and wife of thirty-one years, Lieutenant Colonel Celia FlorCruz, was a decorated helicopter pilot—and this investigation, a once-in-a-generation event for the Army, had the potential to ruin his career. His report would be scrutinized at the highest levels of the Pentagon and amplified by the loudest megaphones in the media. But “the 15-16” was also a formal, legal process codified by Army regulations. In short, it was his job, and Dahl intended to do it right.

  For the prior fifty-two days, since the chief of staff of the Army had assigned him this task, Dahl had been trying to get inside the head of the enigmatic twenty-three-year-old Army private who was now a tr
aumatized twenty-eight-year-old former prisoner. Dahl talked to dozens of government and military officials who had worked the case; he conferred with teams at the Pentagon and at Central Command (CENTCOM) in Tampa and with Army personnel in Germany, Afghanistan, and San Antonio. He read Bergdahl’s psychological evaluations and met with his doctors and the experts who debriefed him. He studied classified FBI analyses. He watched the proof-of-life videos filmed by the Haqqani Network in Pakistani safe houses and videos recorded by U.S. intelligence officers in Afghanistan and Germany after Bergdahl’s recovery. He spoke with officers at the United States Coast Guard, with whom Bergdahl had briefly attended basic training in 2006. He met with Bergdahl’s older sister, Sky, and her husband, Lieutenant Commander Michael Albrecht, an Annapolis graduate and naval aviator. He spoke by phone with Bergdahl’s parents in Idaho and also met Kim Dellacorva, the soldier’s surrogate godmother. He chatted for hours with Bergdahl’s friends, twentysomethings working at coffee shops in Oregon and Idaho. He questioned the soldiers who went to Army basic training with him at Fort Benning, and he spoke with his company and battalion commanders from Afghanistan.

  Why had he just walked off? Who was he? There were no clear answers. Bergdahl was a code no one had cracked. When Dahl interviewed each of the twenty-three soldiers in 2nd Platoon, Blackfoot Company, who were on OP Mest when Bergdahl vanished, he heard twenty-three theories:

  He was going to walk to China, or to India, where he would be “a shadow in the mountains and kill bad people and help children.” Or he wanted to walk to Russia, so he could join the mob. One soldier couldn’t recall the details, but knew that Bergdahl “was going on an incredible adventure.”

  As General Dahl neared the deadline to submit his report to his superiors at the Pentagon, he confronted the same impasse as the officers assigned to the case five years earlier: Motive was the mystery.

  “If you want to stand, you can stand. If you want to get up and stretch, you can stretch,” the general said to Bergdahl. “This is not intended to be a miserable experience. It’s not an interrogation. . . . This is an informal investigation; it’s a fact-finding mission.”

  Bergdahl had cooperated up to this point. At Bagram Airfield north of Kabul, at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany, and at the Brooke Army Medical Center in South Texas, he gave answers that satisfied, and in most cases impressed, the survival experts, intelligence analysts, and FBI agents who questioned him.

  “Don’t feel like this is about catching you,” Dahl said. “I don’t expect you to have a perfect memory.”

  “I understand,” Bergdahl finally replied. “Just a question: Is there a specific point where you want to start, because if you want the story, it doesn’t just start that day.”

  “Sure,” Dahl said. “Does it start before you joined the Army, or does it start when you joined the Army?”

  “I’d say it probably started before I joined the Army.”

  ACT I.

  A FANTASTIC PLAN

  ONE

  LITTLE AMERICA

  After a couple of semesters at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Bob Bergdahl knew that college wasn’t for him. His parents had taught him to read widely and stay informed, and though he had plans to major in anthropology, he was also a nationally ranked cyclist with his eyes on the Olympics and didn’t see much sense in spending more time in classrooms listening to professors explain what he could learn on his own. The Bergdahls of 1960s Santa Monica were a family of brainy athletes—all-American California Republicans. Bob’s mother volunteered for presidential candidate Barry Goldwater, and in their liberal, Jewish Santa Monica neighborhood, Bob’s father was the only guy on the block wearing a Nixon button. Robert Bergdahl Sr. had been an all-star blocking back for the UCLA Bruins, played in two Rose Bowls, and returned to coach eight seasons after he graduated. Bob’s sister was a nationally ranked swimmer and an alternate for the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich when she was just sixteen years old.

  Bob was on a similar path. By his senior year in high school his family had moved to Santa Barbara, and he had become one of the fastest road and track cyclists in the country. After qualifying for the U.S. Junior World team in 1978, he trained alongside future three-time Tour de France champion Greg LeMond and Chris Carmichael, who would go on to a career as Lance Armstrong’s personal coach.

  As much as he liked road racing, Bob was better on the track, where the velodrome and the track bike’s fixed gears demanded intense focus. At seventy miles per hour, one uneven pedal stroke could send him careening into the walls; just slowing down required a coordinated resistance against the inertia of the machine. After winning several Olympic development races in California, the U.S. Cycling Federation invited him to Colorado Springs, Colorado, to train with the development team ahead of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow. He was more focused than at any time in his life, and it looked as if he might qualify, until Friday night, January 4, 1980, when current events collided with his Olympic dream.

  Networks cut away from prime-time programming for President Jimmy Carter’s live national address from the Oval Office. On Christmas Day, fifty thousand troops of the Soviet 40th Army had invaded “the small, nonaligned, sovereign nation of Afghanistan.” Moscow, Carter said, was “attempting to conquer the fiercely independent Muslim people of that country.”

  Protests, many organized and encouraged by American and Western intelligence agencies, erupted in capitals across Europe and the Muslim world. In Bangladesh, a mob stormed the gated campus of the Soviet Cultural Center. Muslim demonstrators marched with dirty sandals tied to placards threatening Soviet Prime Minister Leonid Brezhnev’s life. In London, the crowds carried signs that read:

  RUSSIANS ARE INVADERS

  LET AFGHANS CHOOSE THEIR OWN GOVERNMENT

  NO EAST NO WEST—ISLAM IS THE BEST

  Publicly, the White House shared in the outrage. From the Oval Office, Carter warned the Soviets about the dangers of empire building: “History teaches, perhaps, very few clear lessons. But surely one such lesson learned by the world at great cost is that aggression, unopposed, becomes a contagious disease.” Claiming that Soviet militarism endangered the lives of athletes and spectators in Moscow, Carter threatened an Olympic boycott. The White House was already preoccupied with Afghanistan’s neighbor to the west; at Christmastime, more than fifty Americans remained hostage inside the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, and Carter didn’t have many good options in either country.

  Four years after the fall of Saigon, another American war in Asia was unthinkable. Looking for any political leverage they could find, the White House and CIA saw potential in Islamic fundamentalism, and framed the anti-Soviet sentiments spreading across the Muslim world as inherently pro-democracy. By summertime, Carter’s Olympic boycott had swelled to sixty countries.

  But privately, in the corridors of the Pentagon, the CIA, and Capitol Hill, the Soviet invasion was a welcome development, and had come as no surprise. Six months earlier, on July 3, 1979, Carter’s national security adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, had encouraged the president to begin arming a network of loosely affiliated Pashtun tribal militias already fighting the Soviets from their homeland along the Afghan-Pakistani border. In notes Brzezinski handed Carter that day, he predicted that the Muslim rebels could lure the Soviets into an “Afghan trap.”

  Brzezinski saw cycles of history at work. Afghanistan was a storied battleground, the “graveyard of empires” where the great powers of nineteenth-century Europe played their Great Game. If the Russians were foolish enough to drift into an Afghan quagmire, Washington was happy to pull them in deeper. Weeks after the Christmas invasion, Brzezinski flew to Pakistan to recruit and coordinate a wider international effort. Afghanistan’s eastern neighbor had a vital self-interest in the American plan, and its spy agency, the Inter-Services Intelligence (ISI), was the only government entity in the world with influence over the Pashtun tribes in its west
ern provinces. The U.S.- and Pakistani-led coalition recruited support from Egypt, the U.K., China, and Saudi Arabia. The Saudis agreed to match American investment dollar for dollar.

  The CIA had its assignment. Working with Britain’s MI6, Pakistan’s ISI, and the Saudi General Intelligence Directorate (GID), Langley initiated what would become an unprecedented covert war. Operation Cyclone, as the agency named it, was a hit with the incoming Reagan administration, which began funding the secret program at $700 million per year, or roughly 80 percent of the entire annual budget for the agency’s paramilitary operations. The money was spent on everything from arms and training to propaganda and bundles of cash for the tribal warlords the CIA and ISI identified as their most effective proxies. The CIA sourced weapons for the mujahideen—Arabic for “holy warrior”—from a variety of black markets, eventually including the Soviet Army itself, which, as Brzezinski later noted, became so corrupt that Moscow could not keep track of its own profligate war machine.

  Decades earlier, Afghanistan had also been a laboratory for gentler experiments of American Cold War influence. The primary example could be found in Lashkar Gah, the capital of Helmand Province and, from the mid-1940s to the late 1970s, the site of an economic, agricultural, and social engineering project known as “Little America.” On the bleak southern desert flatlands, a Levittown-esque housing development blossomed by the confluence of the Helmand and Arghandab Rivers. A vast irrigation plan, built around two earthen dams, would bring water to farms and villages across more than five hundred square miles of desert. The American initiative with the New Deal–inspired name—the Helmand and Arghandab Valley Authority—included more than a thousand miles of new roads, three hundred miles of canals, and a town that featured a Bollywood movie theater and the country’s only coed high school. For the heavy construction and dam building, USAID contracted with the Boise, Idaho–based engineering firm Morrison-Knudsen. Southern Idaho, like Afghanistan, is a land of high-mountain rivers flowing into desert plains, and before the state was settled, it, too, had required hundreds of square miles of irrigation—the federal government had hired Morrison-Knudsen for those as well.