Deep Dive
Shownotes Transcript
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Before we get on with episode two, some news. A few days ago, the Army announced that it will take Beau Bergdahl's charges to court-martial, to trial, basically. He's charged with two crimes, desertion and something called misbehavior before the enemy. That second one, it's not used very often. It carries the possibility of a life sentence, which it doesn't seem likely that would happen. That'd be so extreme. But it does mean Beau could face some amount of prison time if he's convicted.
The Army's decision to go to court-martial, it's not that it's so surprising. I mean, this was always a strong possibility. It's just that for a lot of people watching Beau's case, it's been hard to handicap. All outward signs have pointed to an Army that is of two minds about how to deal with what Beau did, whether to throw the book at him or whether to say, okay, yes, he screwed up in a huge way, but five years with the Taliban, enough is enough. On the one hand, the Army leveled pretty severe charges against Beau.
But then at a military hearing in September, the two-star general in charge of investigating Bo's case, a man named Kenneth Dahl, who took a 371-page statement from Bo, who assembled a 22-person team, who coordinated with 24 government agencies, interviewed 56 people, he said he believed that Bo told him the truth about why he did what he did, that Bo was remorseful, that Bo recognizes, quote, that he was young and naive and inexperienced, unquote.
When asked on the stand whether he thought Beau should go to jail, Major General Dahl said, quote, I think it would be inappropriate, unquote. Likewise, the officer in charge of that hearing, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Visker, in his report on what to do about the charges, he apparently recommended a lesser proceeding called a special court-martial, more like a misdemeanor trial. He also recommended no confinement.
In response to which, Senator John McCain, arguably our country's most powerful former POW, he was held for five years during the Vietnam War, McCain told a Boston Globe reporter that if Bowe got no punishment, he'd hold a congressional hearing to look into Bergdahl's case. And then this week, the announcement that the Army will pursue the charges in the most serious way possible, a general court-martial.
It's almost as if those military officials who've come into close contact with Beau are ready to forgive him, while the Army as an institution continues to be furious. A few months ago, filmmaker Mark Boll was talking to Beau on the phone, and they were discussing the possibility of a plea deal, of whether Beau would take an offer for, say, one, two, three years in prison in exchange for pleading guilty.
Beau said he didn't think he would, even though the basic facts of the case aren't in dispute. Beau admits he walked away from his post of his own volition. But Beau told Mark he worried that if he took some plea offer, he'd never get to explain himself, and people would continue to hate him, and it's true, a lot of people hate him, without ever fully understanding his reasons for doing what he did. That was his fear, that after all of this, he'd end up misunderstood. Yeah, as exhausted as I am, and
You know, it's just scary as it is going through all of it. You know, I made it through the last five years. It just kind of seems stupid to lose whatever it is that's been keeping me going. Yeah. Well, I can respect that. I mean, I think that to give that up now would almost be like kind of almost make the whole thing pointless. Yeah. Basically turn it all into a really stupid joke.
From This American Life in WBEZ Chicago, it's Serial, one story told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig.
Good evening everyone. Ordinarily the release of an American serviceman after five years in wartime captivity would be called... Pentagon sources tell NBC that Bergdahl vanished under mysterious circumstances. ...Bergdahl, hero or deserter? ...Soldiers are engaged in a political smear campaign by raising questions... ...Parents of some fallen soldiers say their sons would be alive if Bergdahl had not gone missing from his post. In the old days, deserters were shot. The very last thing is...
Just, I'm a prisoner. I want to go home. Bring me home, please. Bring me home. I was talking on the phone recently to this Taliban fighter. I'm calling him Mujahid Rahman, not his real name. He told me that when they got Beau Bergdahl, that when they caught him, the Taliban knew they had scored. Rahman said, quote, a dead soldier is worth nothing, but he was captured alive, and he was like a golden chicken, unquote.
In the weeks and years, really, following Beau's capture, during the tactical push and pull between the insurgents and the U.S. forces, each side would ask itself over and over, what is Beau worth to us? What is Beau worth to our enemy? How much will we get? How much will we sacrifice? Mujahid Rahman described one raid by U.S. forces not long after Beau disappeared. He said something like 15 Taliban were killed. An American special operations commander I spoke to described a similar raid, 15 enemy killed.
I asked Ramon through an interpreter who was sitting next to me, was it worth it? Fifteen of your guys in one raid for Bergdahl. I don't know.
Some people are worth more than a thousand other individuals, and he was worth maybe more than 5,000 individuals.
So exactly how did the Taliban get Beau in the first place? And what did they do with him once they realized who he was? Mark Boll looked into this too. And it was his company, Page One, that got in touch with a guy named Sami Yousafzai.
Sammy is Afghan. He's a reporter, a very brave reporter. He's based in Islamabad, but he travels around a lot for his work covering the war in Afghanistan. He writes for Newsweek and other publications. And about a year and a half ago, Page One hired Sammy to interview whomever he could and report back what he found. And he did. He didn't record these interviews on tape, but Sammy found about a half dozen people who said they'd either been part of the kidnapping or had interacted with Beau while he was being held.
One of the first people Sami found was this guy named Halal. Halal is a Taliban fighter, part of a group that was running missions in Paktika province where Bo's battalion was based. What Halal told Sami is that the Taliban had gotten word from the local people in the area that sometimes a Westerner was coming close to the village taking photos and also that they'd seen a soldier sitting on top of a hill near a U.S. checkpoint.
So Halal and a few of his guys had come to the village to see if it was true, and if it was, to work out a plan to grab him. Kidnapping foreigners, journalists, aid workers, missionaries. This was big business for the Taliban at the time, and it still is. I interviewed Sami about what Halal told him.
According to Halal, they've just gotten to this village, to Mest, in fact, where Bo's unit was manning an outpost. And they're taking a rest at the mosque. At that time, suddenly somebody shouted and said, there is a foreigner in a coochie tent. A foreigner in a coochie tent. Coochie is a word for nomads. They keep flocks of animals and live in these big tents. In summer, they open up the sides of the tent for fresh air. And...
He's asking about Kabul or asking about police. And Hilal said, we were unexpected. Let's find out what is this. And then we said, okay, let's go and find out. So Hilal and his guys go to this Koochie tent. They drive up on their motorbikes and see this foreigner. Sami tells it from Hilal's perspective. And we told him that we are police. I mean...
Right.
So is Hilal saying that we said, oh, we're local police, so to come with us or whatever, and Bergdahl seemed to believe that and think he was maybe in safe hands? Yeah, that's why, because the Koochie already told him that this guy, we don't understand his language, but he's asking about police in Kabul. That's what they understand. Maybe he was asking for something else, you know. He was asking for a bus or something, a road. And that's why they came and he said he was...
in a white dress and sandals, and he had something in his pocket. He said there was a pistol or knife or something, but we don't know really exactly. Okay. This coochie tent thing comes up in various ways. The Taliban say either Beau walked into a coochie tent or near a tent. The Americans got some intel at the time to the same effect, and that nomads tipped off the Taliban.
For his part, Bo says he was never in a coochie tent. He says he was out in the open when armed men rode up on motorcycles and grabbed him. This is one of those discrepancies, and there will be others, where I feel like it's worth mentioning, because if Bo did walk into a coochie tent, as Halal is saying, well, then it makes his own explanation sound less solid. Maybe he wasn't really trying to cause a dust one by running from OP Mess to Fab Sharana. Maybe he was simply deserting.
But I also can't tell how much weight I should really give this Coochie Tent story because the Taliban bring up all kinds of rumors, like that Beau was in the village to meet up with a woman or that he was looking for drugs, rumors pretty much anyone who's ever met Beau can easily dismiss. And maybe the truth is somewhere in between. It's possible Beau was near a Coochie camp and just didn't know it and that the nomads saw him out in the open and alerted the Taliban and Beau was never the wiser.
Probably we're not going to get to the bottom of it because we can't fact check the stories these guys told Sami. We can't be sure everything they told him is true. And the details of what happened do shift around depending on who Sami's talking to, which isn't unusual in any kind of reporting. What I can say is that the overall chain of events, the major plot points that the Taliban describe, are pretty consistent person to person.
In Sammy's interviews with these guys, they don't seem that interested in pinning down exactly how Bo ended up in or near a coochie tent. More what they want to talk about is how incredible it was that it happened at all.
To Rahman and Halal, to everyone involved, this was just miraculous that Kuchis, nomads, people they consider unsophisticated and uneducated, snagged this Westerner. And not just any Westerner, but an American, an enemy of the Koran, of the Pashtun people. And not just any American, but a soldier.
Rahman said the whole thing, the way they got him and just being up close with your adversary like that, it was one of those lifetime strange experiences. And it came into our custody so easily in Afghanistan, amongst all the provinces and districts. We were blessed. Alhamdulillah, Mufaditi, Kamyabasou,
We were blessed. In Sammy's interviews, they use this expression, they call Beau a ready-made loaf, a gift from God. They felt so lucky that Beau came to them, that of all the desert joints in all the provinces in all of Afghanistan, he walked into theirs.
— Halal told Sami that Beau fought at first, but they subdued him. And then once they got him on one of their bikes, they took him back to the mosque. At one point, Halal says Beau was again resisting, throwing punches, or maybe his captors were beating him up. It's not clear. — He said that, like, Bargadal was kind of resisting, you know. He start, like, not giving up, and he was a good punching guy, and he was a boxer kind of guy. And suddenly one Pakistani Taliban
I'm laughing here as if I get the joke. I don't.
In some of Sami's conversations, the Taliban describe Bo as strong and aggressive. Other times he's meek and pathetic. The adjectives they apply to this mythic captive changing to suit the scene. Halal told Sami that for them, for these Kuchis, who'd maybe never been up close with a Westerner before, or maybe not even with an infidel, a non-Muslim, Bo was exotic.
Halal said he was like an animal captured by kids. His pale skin was weird. The way he spoke was weird. His eyes were blue, which Sami says is somewhat suspicious in Afghanistan. There's a saying that you should keep away from blue-eyed people.
In the mosque, Hilal says people had gathered to discuss what to do with Bo. I have Sami's notes from these interviews. In this one part, Hilal talks about how Bo was sitting in a dark corner of the mosque, and another Taliban fighter said to him, quote, see, you look like a small cat baby with shining blue eyes, unquote. I asked Sami what that meant. I think this is something explaining somebody's weaknesses.
But I think he said he was very kind of weak. He was not like big Americans, you know, like big heavy Americans. They thought he was like weak Americans. Yeah, I'm just looking at a note that you wrote that says Bergdahl was weak and I think brainless.
Yeah, what does he mean by that? Oh, like he, yeah, like he was a dummy. Oh, okay. Okay. Was he scared? Like, did he say...
Well, then he said he was scared. Sometimes he was crying. Sometimes he was smiling. And we thought, what's happened to this guy? But most of the time he was silent. Anybody give him water, he was not drinking. And they said he was like a Buddha. Buddha is like, you know, the famous Afghanistan Bamiyan Buddha, you know, statues. So he was like silent, not really reacting to what was going on around him.
Halal told Sammy that, to be fair, he'd never actually seen a drunk person. But apparently they tend to think all Westerners are drunk. From that point forward, that was survival mode. And I knew I had to...
That's Beau talking to Mark on the phone. Of course, yes, Beau was scared. It was only rational to be scared. When the Taliban guys explain to Sammy how they kidnapped Beau, they kind of wax romantic sometimes or crack jokes. There's a swashbuckling quality to Sammy's notes from these interviews.
But then you remember Bo himself. He's completely at their mercy. He's terrified, for excellent reason. He's in the hands of people who conduct public executions, mass beheadings, and often film them for propaganda. Sure, yeah.
You know, these people, they have no hesitation. They have no problem killing you. Yeah. They will kill you just for the amusement of being able to shoot you. Yeah. Beau says there was one guy in the convoy who spoke a little English, and he asked Beau questions. Was Beau a big commander? Was he an intelligence officer? You said no. You said, no, I'm not.
Yeah. No, I said, no, I'm not. Did you tell, did you explain to them why you were out there? Like the exact reason why I was out there? Yeah. Yeah, that came out more or less in a version that was more suitable for the situation. What did you say? I told them I basically was fed up with the commanders. You have to remember this is kind of going through
This is being filtered to the point that I'm trying to get guys who barely speak English to understand what I'm saying. Yeah, totally. So this story was basically along the lines that you guys set up for American commanders because they were disrespectful, but that didn't work.
because they didn't understand what disrespectful was. So I came up with rude, and they didn't understand what rude was for some strange reason. Beau says his memories from that time are sort of thin, in large part because he says he was blindfolded.
He was focused on what was happening to him, minute to minute, trying to comprehend his circumstances and how he could possibly reverse them. They rode me around from a couple different places, and then finally they got me to a small village, I guess. They pulled me off the motorcycle and sat me down on the ground, and one of the guys came
came up, I guess, I don't know. I'm guessing it was like his younger brother or his like younger buddy or something like that. And he had his cell phone out and he's like taking a video of me and his buddy was like, you know, sitting off to the side and he's like, you know, didn't say anything else. He's just like American. And I just shook my head and then he slapped me. Um, and, um, did that a few times all they wanted was a video. Um,
And then, well, after they were done, then they put the blindfold back on and they threw a blanket over my head. And then they, I don't know where they went, but then like little kids started throwing rocks at me. And so I kind of pretended to like flinch from one of the rocks hitting me in the head, which kind of allowed me to shift my weight. I was like trying to get my hands from behind my back and pull them around, you know, so that I could get them in front of me.
That didn't work, so then Beau tried to lean forward so he could use his knee to move the cloth off of his face. I kind of got it to a point where it was like half off my left eye, almost. I still had a blanket on my head, you know, and nobody was really stopping me, and I didn't hear any voices, so I was just like, yo, this is the best it's probably going to get. So I just stood up and bolted.
Beau says he didn't get more than maybe 20 or 30 feet before he was tackled by what felt like the entire village. That was day one of his captivity. By 2009 in Afghanistan, the U.S. forces and the Taliban had been fighting for seven years. And in all that time, there had never been a situation like this: an American soldier captured. It was a new kind of crisis. But each side also knew who they were dealing with. They could anticipate what each other's moves would be.
In those first few days, the U.S. knew that whoever had Beau would be moving him constantly because the longer you stay in one place, the more likely you are to get caught. And they also knew that the Taliban's goal would be to get Beau to a hideout in the tribal region of western Pakistan because Pakistan is like home base. Or to put it in Tom and Jerry terms, Pakistan is the hole in the baseboard where Tom cannot go.
Pakistan is a sovereign nation, our purported ally. We are not at war with Pakistan. So once Beau's in Pakistan, we can't do much about it. In Afghanistan, U.S. forces can go anywhere they want, can do almost anything they want. But in Pakistan, it's much, much harder for the U.S. military to operate. Here's the other thing that happens once Beau gets to Pakistan. He becomes much more valuable because his captors don't have to get rid of him in a hurry. They can take their sweet time making the deal they want to make.
But of course, the Taliban knew that the U.S. knew they'd head for Pakistan. So the Taliban did the opposite. Instead of heading straight east to the Pakistan border, the Taliban guy Sami talked to said they first took bow west to Ghazni province, where Mujahid Rahman lived.
Yeah, can you hear me or I should move? Sami Yousafzai put us in contact with Rahman. He'd already interviewed him a year earlier for Page One. For this interview, Sami had a car pick Rahman up, and they talked to me on a burner cell phone from inside the car, which is parked in a residential neighborhood known to be fairly safe. Did he disappear? Yeah. The call dropped about a half dozen times during our interview.
Mujahid Rahman told me by the time Bergdahl came to him, the plan was already set. A Taliban commander named Kari Ismail Suleimanzai had taken charge of Bo and had arranged to deliver him to a group known as the Haqqani Network in Pakistan.
In the meantime, Mujahid Rahman's orders were to keep Bo alive and out of sight for a couple of days and nights until the pressure on the border eased a little and they could sneak Bo across. By the time Rahman took charge of the motorcycle convoy, about eight people, he said, it was obvious to the Taliban that U.S. forces were pouring into eastern Afghanistan to search for Bo.
Of course we could see this massive surge, the ground surge and also the airplanes. And that was the reason we were moving around hour by hour. We were changing location and we were even changing Bergdahl's dress. We were changing our dress.
— And at one point, we came in close contact with American ground forces by 500 meters while Bergdahl was with us. — Hillal told Sami that at one point his convoy had come within a kilometer of Fabshrana, where Bo's own battalion was based.
But even if Beau had wanted to scream or make a commotion, he couldn't have. His hands were tied, and Roman said he had a large cloth wrapped around his head, partly to disguise him, but partly just to keep the dust off his face. They all wore them against the dust. Roman says these were probably the most stressful two days of any mission he'd ever done.
Kari Ismail stayed in constant contact with his guy in Pakistan from the Haqqani network. Rahman said they used fake names and locations over the walkie-talkies to confuse the Americans, but that U.S. forces tracked him anyway. There were occasions we stayed in a location, and then two, three hours later, American forces came to that place, to that house, and searched that house.
By this time, of course, word had spread all over the region that a U.S. soldier had gone missing. The military airdropped leaflets saying, quote, one of our American guests is missing and gave a phone number to call. Another one, handed out about two weeks after Bo disappeared, was less gentle. It showed armed Western forces kicking in a door. A news report translated the text as, quote, if you do not free the American soldier, you will be targeted. The Army claimed the leaflets said hunted, not targeted, which actually sounds scarier to me.
They also distributed chocolate. Sami Yousafzai interviewed some of the people who lived in or near Mestin Sharana at the time, and they remember the chocolate, wrapped in shiny paper. They also remember helicopters all over the place, and that the Americans were saying Bergdahl's name, or at least a word that had a B sound in it.
The people Sammy talked to said they'd heard the missing soldier had been wandering around drunk when the Taliban grabbed him, just as Halal had suspected. That was a common rumor, that Beau was drunk, or that he'd gone to a holy site, or that he'd tried to fight off the Taliban with karate.
In classified U.S. military communications released to the public by WikiLeaks, there's all this chatter on the ground that first week after Beau went missing. On July 1, 2009, the day after Beau disappears, an LLVI traffic report— LLVI stands for Low Level Voice Intercept—
It's technology we use to eavesdrop on enemy voice or data communications. It picks up this conversation, quote, Is that true that they captured an American guy? Yes, they did. He is alive. There is nowhere he can go. LOL. I asked a former soldier who regularly read such messages what LOL means in this context, and he said the only meaning that seemed plausible to him was laugh out loud. Then a few hours later, there's this intercept, quote,
Mujahid Rahman, of course, understood Bo was a U.S. soldier, but he didn't know precisely what kind. He said the intensity of the search did suggest Bo was a big shot, since why would they put all that effort and money into looking for him if he wasn't important?
Rahman said he'd heard foreign soldiers were sometimes trained in martial arts. So at first, he and his men were very careful around their prisoner. But pretty soon, Rahman says his main impression of Bo was that he was just really scared. He couldn't even eat, he couldn't drink or sleep.
And then because he was thinking that what type of people we might be and what are we going to do with him? Are we going to kill him? Are we going to behead him? Or what are we going to do with him? So that was his situation. He was very scared and weak and confused.
Rahman said he didn't feel sorry for Beau. He didn't think of him as innocent. From his point of view, Beau was like all U.S. soldiers. He'd traveled halfway around the world voluntarily to invade their country and kill Muslims. But Rahman and most of the guys Sammy interviewed, they also talk about how Beau was their guest, how humane they were with him, which is a little jarring to hear. I mean, tying your guest to the back of a motorcycle against his will doesn't sound like great host behavior.
But Sami explained to me they're not being ironic, that in Pashtun culture, a guest is always treated with generosity and respect. And so the fact that Beau was labeled a guest in this situation made it clear to the lower-down guys under Karius Miles' command that they're not allowed to kill him or even beat the crap out of him, which Rahman said was a real concern that some al-Qaeda or Taliban fighters, especially if they'd had family members killed by Americans, might try to kill Beau or to kidnap him for themselves.
One of the LLVI messages from July 1st, the day after Beau left, reads, Unidentified male says, quote, cut the head off, unquote. Rahman himself had been a prisoner of the Americans. He said he was held at Bagram for about two years, and he said he made sure to treat Beau better than he'd been treated. Quote, someone who is in your custody, he said, you treat him nicely, unquote. At one point, Rahman says they stopped the convoy in what he calls a wine field, like a grape orchard.
They'd gone there to hide from U.S. helicopters. And Rahman said while they were there, they tried to help Bo out to make him feel better. Just to boost his morale and to cheer him up, we stopped at this winery and we did this little dance, traditional dance called a tan for him so he can...
And they start eating. An Atan is an Afghan dance where typically there's a drum and you move in a circle in unison. So, yeah, apparently they did one for this frightened American soldier in a grape orchard. Did it work? Did it boost his morale and get him to eat?
No, it did not help. It did not help at all. Even it had an adverse effect on him because he did not know why we were doing that.
In a grape orchard? That's Beau. Uh, no. Beau says he has no memory of this event, that he's never seen in a ton, except in a video the Taliban showed him much later. Kenneth Wolfe was command sergeant major of the 501st back when Beau disappeared, the battalion's highest-ranking noncommissioned officer. He said at first he thought they'd find Beau. And I told the colonel, I said, you know what? I'm going to stick around here for a few days because if we find him...
I want to be on the helicopter that picks him up. And he was like, why? And I go, they're going to whip his ass. Meaning Bo's fellow soldiers are going to whip his ass. Wolf wasn't wrong to worry about that. If we would have found him, I think a lot of us would have shot him, if that tells you anything. That's Daryl Hansen, one of Bo's platoon mates. I truly say that with sincerity that we had that much hate towards him. We hated him. Absolutely hated him.
That's Mark McCrory, a specialist in the 501st, but a different company from Bo. I was like, well, if we see him, he's not going to last, you know? Like seriously or just kind of blustery, like I'm really pissed? Or do you really think like it's possible he could have gotten? You do? Yeah. Wow. I mean, I don't know what kind of light that sheds on us, but it was one of those things where the conversation had come up.
I found this shocking and disturbing that some of these guys were saying they might have killed Beau if they'd found him. But now, after interviewing more than a dozen soldiers, I still don't sympathize with wanting to kill him. But I do understand why their anger was so extreme. I get it. The Dust 1 search and recovery operations lasted, officially, for 45 days. And some people contend it went on even longer. But the most frantic time, the soldiers said, was those first few weeks.
They told me the search for Beau started in the immediate vicinity of where he went missing, from OP Mest in eastern Afghanistan. Right away, a nine-man foot patrol headed out from the OP toward a boys' school in Malak. Lieutenant J.P. Billings, Beau's platoon leader, said they came across a boy who told Billings, yes, he had seen an American in a field that morning, and he gave a specific time, 6.02 a.m. He pulled up his sleeve to show his Casio watch.
There are a bunch of reports like this, of boys saying they'd seen an American low crawling on the ground or nearly fainting from dehydration. A couple of reports noted that they were also giving out candy to the kids. In one instance, the kid got some Pop-Tarts.
Which is notable. An Army report on Beau's disappearance suggests maybe it was our initial search, maybe even this first patrol, that led to Beau's capture. That the soldiers handing out candy and asking these questions tipped the kids off, and ultimately the adults and then the Taliban, that an American was missing. And so they went out looking for him and grabbed him. Which supports what Beau says, that the Taliban rode right up to him on motorbikes.
Bo says he hadn't told anyone what he planned to do, so no one in his unit or his battalion has any idea why he left. How could they? All they have to go on is whatever early intel is coming in. I don't remember where I heard it from, but I remember hearing that he was in the town asking if people spoke English, and then that's where he was nabbed. That's Austin Lanford, another of Bo's platoon mates.
A bunch of people I spoke to remember a report like this coming over the transom. Here's where I think they probably got it. In the WikiLeaks release from the day Beau went missing, there's an entry saying they'd picked up LLVI traffic indicating, quote, that an American soldier is talking and is looking for someone who speaks English. American soldier has camera, unquote, which conjures an image of Beau seeking contact or maybe help.
But several people who know how military intel works told me these LLVI reports can be tricky. They're quick translations of overheard chatter, nuances lost, mistranslations are not uncommon. So for what it's worth. The search for Bo was enormous. By the late afternoon of June 30th, 2009, it had ballooned. Word goes out that, quote, all operations will cease until missing soldier is found. All assets will be focused on the Dust One situation and sustainment operations, unquote.
They would search all of Paktika province and neighboring Paktia province too, and into Ghazni province and coast, thousands of square miles. Anything they needed to make it happen, they got. Planes, helicopters, drones, interpreters, elite units, special forces. Hundreds of people stopped what they were doing. Even if your job was to look for Osama bin Laden, now you were going to look for the dust one. They were snapping into action because of a basic ground floor principle of the army.
You do not leave anyone out there in a war zone. The military knew that the first 24 to 48 hours would be the most critical period if they were going to find him. Based on some fancy intel, they understood pretty quickly that Beau had been captured. And they knew whoever had him would be on the move, and therefore talking on radios or phones the whole time, trying to figure out their own next steps. So if you can intercept that chatter, you can maybe geolocate where Beau might be.
So battalion command requests as much signals intelligence as it can get. And then, of course, needs more soldiers to check out all that intel. Five more platoons join the search, then eight more platoons. The entire brigade gets pulled in. One commander told me it was like a mini-surge. Well, our operational tempo went from sort of, you know, casual presence patrols, driving around, handing out stuff—
cordoning IEDs till EOD came out. This is John Thurman. He was in Blackfoot Company, Bose Company, different platoon. To, I mean, nonstop. It was around the clock. We'd be kicking in doors one minute, setting up a blocking position and searching every single car an hour later. A blocking position was basically a roadblock.
The official mission in Afghanistan in 2009 was counterinsurgency, COIN for short. American forces were supposed to be containing the insurgents but also training Afghan security forces. They were supposed to be engaging the locals, gaining their trust, improving infrastructure. All that pretty much stopped now. Here's Mark McCrory. Sure, there had been fights that had been going on, but, you know, they weren't fights that we were picking.
the bad guys would come to us and we'd fight them off, you know. Whereas this was us going out every night looking for a guy, smashing down their door. We were just looking and looking and looking. John Thurman again. I mean, towns, I don't even know if these towns had seen Americans ever.
Okay, now we're going to fly you into this Bedouin village, and you're going to go check every single building or room and check all the women's faces to make sure that they're not hiding him in women's clothing. That's Ben Evans, a specialist from Charlie Company. He said there'd been intel that they'd dressed Beau as a woman, which at times Beau says they did. And so we, you know, went into this house, and whenever you would go into a house to do a search, all the women would typically huddle into one corner together, and normally we wouldn't pay them any mind.
just to leave them a B, you know? But at that point, we kind of had to walk over, and I mimicked, you know, removing your veil. Remove your veil so we can see. This kind of stuff, making women lift their veils or kicking in doors, doesn't exactly endear you to the local populace. But they didn't have time to worry about that right now. Any little fragment of actionable intelligence, they're moving him in a white truck, they're handing him over to someone at this location, they didn't have the luxury to ignore any of it.
You can see on paper in those WikiLeaks releases all the scrambling that was going on those first few days.
From June 30th, 2009, the Debo left. "Update: 140 Cav has intel that Taliban is planning to move the U.S. Pax to Gardez." Next day, July 1st, "Delaware 36 reports they have received intel that the body of the missing U.S. soldier is due east of their current position." July 4th, "Spot Report: Missing U.S. soldier was last seen in a village at grid location VB611818. A bag was covering his head and he was wearing dark khaki apparel.
and so on, day after day. Here's Mark McCrory. - Apparently at one point, these guys said they intercepted a phone call where it was one member of the Taliban speaking to another and they said, "Hey, the Americans are right outside, and we've got this guy with us." And so like that goes all, trickles all the way up and then all the way back down. Everybody freeze, hold what you got, you know, stay where you are.
set out an outer cordon and search wherever everybody is. But by the time the information had traveled all the way up the chain and all the way back down, it was already too late. Despite the massive resources at their disposal, the Americans were at a certain disadvantage in that landscape because any movement of U.S. forces in giant armored trucks or in helicopters or whatever makes a lot of noise, kicks up a lot of dust.
The Taliban could be more nimble, skirting around on small roads or paths, often on motorcycles, as soon as they saw or heard that the enemy was coming their way. I mean, like, literally, like, we were charging into these towns, just running out of our trucks. Like, he's in here, we're running to this kalat. That's Daryl Hansen again. A kalat is a kind of compound. Just going in with guns. In fact, I'll never forget, we ran in...
And as we're running in, this freaking cow has a baby like right next to me. Just out coming. I mean, he was scared the hell out of the cow. You know, it just had his baby right there. So, yeah, it was it was very intense. Yeah. Just, you know, we were always seem like one one one day behind where he's at.
The Americans were certainly on the right track. The battalion leadership met with a local Afghan leader who reported that Bowe had been turned over to the local Taliban leader, Kari Ismail, just like Hilal told Sami. And the U.S. was pretty sure those Taliban guys would turn Bowe over to the Haqqanis in Pakistan, in North Waziristan, to be precise. They'd also gotten intel that Bowe might be in Ghazni, just like Mujahid Rahman said.
In fact, Rahman told me that a few days after he returned from delivering Beau to Pakistan, he got rolled up by the Americans, detained, and questioned about Beau. Rahman said everyone was getting questioned about Beau, people from down south in Kandahar and from out west in Herat. But here the U.S. had in front of them the very man who had shepherded Beau to the Haqqanis —
Here's what Rahman told them. Pulling into towns you're unfamiliar with, based on single-source intelligence or conflicting intelligence, with almost no time to prepare your team for what's awaiting them — it's risky.
In a more typical operation, you mitigate the danger, maximize the chance for success, by doing everything you can in advance to do what's called shape the battlefield. And you might take a few days to plan and prepare. Now commanders were lucky if they got a few hours. Sometimes they felt like they were winging it. A special operations commander told me his team went on more than 50 missions looking for Bo, and many of those were during the day rather than at night when his guys have the advantage. Quote, "'We don't work in the day,' he said."
Major Mike Waltz was commander of a special forces company. He was in charge of seven Green Beret and one Navy SEAL team. He took over the command on June 30th, the same day Beau left.
While infantry soldiers were out searching cars or going house to house in villages, Walt says his teams were conducting raids, usually at night, targeting specific compounds or houses where they had intel Bo either was or had been. Any shred of evidence that Bergdahl had been there, we thought he was there, a sighting, it wasn't really vetted. It wasn't buttressed by other types of reporting. There was just no time to check on it. We just went. And I can't emphasize...
I can't overemphasize how dangerous that is. Walt says there's one mission that still freaks him out. His men went to Ghazni. He says most of his missions were ordered in Ghazni. And they'd had information that a young white male surrounded by fighters had been seen in a particular compound that day. So as fast as they could, they got the helicopters together, they headed out there, didn't have time to substantiate anything.
They arrive and walk into the compound to find the whole thing is booby-trapped. The team went in and looked up and saw the ceiling lined with C4. And then there was also a car bomb with the trunk packed with explosives sitting in the middle of the compound. Now, by the grace of God...
They evacuated before the thing could go off, and it never did. But I would have easily lost 20 to 30 American Green Berets that night had that thing go off. And it quickly became very apparent to us that the Taliban knew, and our sources began telling us, that the Taliban and the Haqqani Network knew that we were pulling out all the stops to find him and were feeding false information into our informant networks.
All right, you've got the most advanced military in the world throwing all this effort, all this expertise and technology at trying to find one person. They do pull out all the stops just to get one soldier back. That's really something. But then they can't find him. And not only that, in some instances, they're being played by the enemy, lured into traps. What is going on? I don't quite understand if we should be impressed by this operation or dismayed. I asked a guy named Jason Dempsey to answer this question for me.
At the time Beau disappeared, Jason was a major in the 10th Mountain Division, an operations officer, meaning he planned military operations for a battalion based in Logar Province, just north of Paktika and Paktia. I've interviewed Jason a couple of times now, and what I've learned is that he's very smart and that he can't stop fidgeting, can't sit still. If we're ostensibly conducting counterinsurgency in 2000, sorry about that, I forgot the background noise. Are you washing dishes? Yeah.
Jason's got a PhD and is taught at West Point. He's done tours in both Iraq and Afghanistan. And he's thought a lot about what we did and didn't accomplish in Afghanistan. He is not surprised we didn't find Beau. When I think about what was happening, I just have this image of, like, this big...
machine, you know, that's like moving around in this region in Afghanistan. And there's just like a mouse running through the legs of the machine, like, or like, I don't know, like an ad ad on Star Wars, you know, Luke comes with his little thing and he's just like ties up the legs and it falls over. I mean, I know that's not fair, but, but. That's absolutely true. And it's a great analogy, right? You've got this big lumbering machine moving through, um,
It can destroy anything face on, but it can't get, it has no idea on a granular level what's below it. Jason says what's down there on the ground are towns we don't understand, where regular people and government officials and the Taliban are impossibly enmeshed.
Where civilians might hate the Taliban, but they might hate the Karzai government even more. So it's not clear at all that the U.S. is the team to root for, to help. It's not as simple as these people are loyal to our side and those people are loyal to their side. It's fluid. And at that time, in that part of Afghanistan, we just didn't understand the incredibly complicated politics of these towns. You know, we can target or track...
individual networks, but we never really were able to tie in, okay, which towns and villages and people who, you know, their relatives who are happy to give them safe passage or, you know, communities they can walk through easily. Even after seven years of war at this point, we don't know the networks well enough? No. And remember, when you say seven years of war, it means we rotated a
A few thousand dudes through there every seven to 12 months. There is no institutional knowledge with the U.S. military in Afghanistan. Nearly none. We never were there long enough to actually get engaged with. And this applies, unfortunately, after 2010 as well. We've never had anybody fully engaged at all levels with Afghan politics.
But Jason said, "That's the whole thing right there. This spider web of connections we never could untangle." We had come into Afghanistan in 2001 and ousted the Taliban, and we did a pretty good job of that through 2003. But then afterwards, Jason said, our mission languished, and the Taliban used the intervening years to refresh and regroup, to learn how we operate, how we track them. And now they were pushing back into the country in a big way, in exactly this region.
Paktika, Paktia, Coast. Right where Bogo's missing. So that's what the soldiers of the 501st were up against. They were total outsiders looking for their guy and knowing their chances of finding him were diminishing every day that passed. Clint Baker, commander of the 1st Battalion of the 501st, said it was as high risk an operation as he's ever had, in part because there was no clear end point.
At a military hearing, he testified, quote, and I mean, frankly, I felt a bit at a loss on, you know, what to do. In my entire time in the Army, I can't think of a time where I felt that kind of adversity, just period, and really did not, you know, wasn't able to overcome it, unquote. The relentlessness was what was so crushing. Here's John Thurman and then Daryl Hansen. It got to the point where sleep, I mean, sort of became a...
A distant reality. Just 24 hours a day, seven days a week, no sleep, no nothing. You just ran out of juice. All the guys are just miserable, and it's just like hell on earth, you know? Of course, Afghanistan was dangerous, and conditions were rough before Beau left also. But now, because Operation Tempo was roughly doubled or even tripled in some cases, there was just more contact with the danger.
Blackfoot 3rd Platoon, for instance, hit three IEDs in one day. Major Silvino S. Silvino testified that the battalion's MRAPs, those huge armored trucks that are built to sustain IED explosions, that about 80% of them were damaged during this search period, and about half the damage was caused by IEDs. Their four mine rollers, all destroyed.
And those numbers are one way to quantify the danger and the damage. But a full reckoning of the consequences, including the enormous question of whether people were wounded or died looking for Beau, would come publicly much later, after Beau came home. I saw some pictures Daryl Hansen took from that time. One shows him and another guy standing next to a carcass on a spit. Is that a goat?
Yes, that's a goat. What was going on in that picture? What's going on is they were tired of MREs, so they'd buy a goat off a local farmer, have some meat that wasn't vacuum-packed.
Some of these units couldn't go back to their fobs for what's called refit, where you clean and resupply your equipment, you shower, you get a hot meal, for weeks on end. Second platoon, Bo's platoon, they got sent out for 19 days straight. So that's outside the wire, living in trucks or just on the ground for nearly three weeks, doing nonstop missions. Another platoon from Charlie Company was sent out for 37 days straight.
You've got all your gear on, full battle rattle, and it weighs between 60 and 100 pounds, depending on what kind of weapon you're carrying or whether you're a radio operator who has to have extra batteries. It might be 90 degrees during the day or 100 degrees. At night, the temperature might drop by as much as 30 degrees. Major Silvino said in a military hearing that the men would huddle together at night to keep warm. Quote, they would literally, I'll call it spoon, unquote.
J.P. Billings was one of the people who was out for 19 days straight. He testified that he'd gotten diarrhea early and, quote, you know, I'd shit my pants, unquote. He did have an extra pair, but it had ripped up the inside leg on some concertina wire, quote, so knowing that I was going out and talking to locals, potentially females and whatever, in villages, I couldn't necessarily have an exposed region like that on my pants, unquote. So Billings wore the shit pants for 19 days.
People's T-shirts got shredded. Their socks rotted. People got sores on their skin. They could only wash with baby wipes and maybe bottled water. Undergarments falling off of them. Oh, really? Yeah, clothes, you know, like something you would think of in Malaysia or Burma, you know, clothes just falling apart. That's Ken Wolfe, the command sergeant major.
The hard part was they hadn't planned for this. No one knew how long the search was going to go on. I mean, eventually, because we had to start figuring it out. How are we going to rotate guys back in? How do we resupply them? Because they're everywhere. Our guys are everywhere. They're spread out everywhere. I mean, it was just a logistics nightmare. And then also, it wasn't just our battalion.
the other battalions within the organization were looking for him too. And so what, you know, how does it make you feel when you've walked for 15 days straight looking for a guy who walked off and he's not even in your unit? And so you see somebody and they're like, "Hey man, fuck you. We're out here looking for this guy?
Maybe you're thinking, all this complaining about how hard that time was, cry me a river. They're soldiers, and it's war, and this is what they signed up for. Well, yes and no. Their job was to go find and rescue one of their own. They knew that, and they accepted it. It was the right thing to do, to go look for him. And they genuinely wanted to find him. But they also knew, or were at least pretty confident, that Beau had left Mesto P. voluntarily. And now they felt like they were going through hell on his behalf.
And it wasn't just Beau's own platoon doing it, but other platoons from other battalions. Most of the people I talked to about this time, they said the search inflicted such major damage on morale, which can be a delicate thing to maintain in the best of times.
At the end of July, about a month in, Major Larry Glasscock, the battalion's executive officer, went on leave back to Fort Richardson in Alaska, where the battalion is based. His boss had asked him to meet with a group of soldiers' family members who knew that their soldiers were out looking for Bergdahl.
The families knew that we were conducting significant operations and that we were stepping up our kinetic activities against insurgents to try and find him. So they knew that the risk in Afghanistan for our battalion had increased.
And it was a tough, tough meeting. There was a lot of concern. There were a lot of scared wives, rightfully so. They wanted answers and they wanted comfort. They wanted to know that their husband was going to be okay. And, you know, I'm not in a position to make those kinds of promises. Shane Cross was in Beau's platoon. He was friendly with Beau. Yeah, I still, I'm still, I think I'm still angry about it.
Shane was out on that 19-day stint with the platoon. When they finally made it back to the FOB on July 20th, it would be for only a few hours, it turned out, rather than the day or two they'd hoped for, Shane shot himself in the foot with his 9mm pistol while he was in the bathroom and got sent home. Shane said it was an accident. He said the Army agreed. But the other guys saw it as a statement about how beaten down they all were, how they'd had enough.
Commanders said they could see in their faces how emotionally busted their soldiers were, how angry. They were starting to bicker with each other. Major Slavino testified that he'd given them pep talks, but, quote, I could hear, well, you know, mumbling, mumbling, grumbling, grumbling, expletives, blah, blah, blah, unquote. As the weeks went on, they started to hit more and more dry holes. They'd air assault into some village or target, and they'd find nothing. I asked Ken Wolfe how he tried to keep morale up.
Ken, to me, seems like the kind of guy who can scare the crap out of you and also hug you in the same encounter. Ken told me he tried whatever he could to get his soldiers through, including asking his wife to send over Copenhagen snuff from the States, which she did. She bought rolls and rolls of it, and Ken passed it around. I remember talking to a group of guys, and I go, hey, we don't know everything at this point. We don't know.
And, you know, this is our mission. He's one of our guys. We got to find him. We're going to do it. So that was one way. The other way, you know, giving out cans of Copenhagen, telling dirty jokes, putting people in the headlock. That's how you do it. Just being affectionate with them, basically. Yeah. And saying, hey, what you're doing is good and honorable, and we just got to keep looking. Yeah. And knowing in the back of my mind, this is fucking bullshit. Yeah.
In what way was it bullshit? Because he's in Pakistan. It's true. Beau was in Pakistan. What's the date today? It was July 14th, 2009. This is the first hostage video the Taliban released of Beau. What's your name? My name is Beau Vertigo. Beau would spend the next year figuring out how to escape. Next time on Serial.
Thank you.
Kristen Taylor is our community editor. Production help this week from Nancy Updike and Nora Kogesta-Hirstein. Other serial staff, Seth Lind, Emily Condon, Elise Bergersen, and Kimberly Henderson. Special thanks this week to International Mapping, Thomas Barfield, Dr. Conrad Crane, Bill Marsh, Leo Jung, Jonathan Marks, David Raphael, and Mark McCreary. And special thanks to Pandora, where you can now also listen to Serial Seasons 1 and 2.
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Hey, serial listeners, go deeper into one detainee's story in Letters from Guantanamo on Audible. Mansour Addaifi was 18 when he was kidnapped by Afghan militia and sold to the CIA. As one of the first prisoners at Guantanamo, he endured unbearable
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On the next episode of Serial... Like, the best description I could probably give you is you took a literally not even an animal picture of someone taking a bag, throwing it into a closet, shutting the door, and just forgetting about it. Right. That was basically how they treated me.