Serial S02 - Ep. 5: Meanwhile, in Tampa
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for details previously.

not serial.

This is a medal cage or woods cage, or what like an iron bar cage made for a what purpose? Or give me in IT.

And I know we'd walked into the tribal ler is over the mountains, the worst place you can be taken in the afghanistan.

pakistan region. How kind of animals? And drawn is four, making birds, birds, birds. Something that the military perspective, from a lot of people perspective, is is unforgivable.

The word just like immunity is just jumping into my head.

say, you know, something to take a video of you and you need to think about what you might to say. 你 要 pressure 吗？

From this american life and W B E Z, chicago is cereal. One story told week by week. I'm saracenic. In very early july of two thousand nine, just a few days after bowed missing, a woman named kim Harrison went to her local police department in portland and organ.

And I had to up to the microphone because I don't have A A person out in front, is a pretty big police department. I think that part .

of that you like a button on.

excuse me, can I talk to somebody? I need to report a missing person. And so, yeah, I mean, at the time I knew this, is there gna think i'm instated because you're .

what you're saying them is i'm reporting a missing person out of mst, afghanistan. Well.

I didn't really want to say that right off the bat because I knew I wouldn't get very far.

The person missing was bow, of course, person missing from a place roughly seven thousand miles away.

Who is this person? And as well is soldier. what? He's a military personal. Why would you do? Well, complicated.

So complicated. Here's what happened. Kim is a close friend of bows. They're like family to each other. He's friends with her kids.

Bolted kim in army forms as a person to notify if something happened to him. So on june thirty eighth, two thousand nine, army officials came to kim's house to tell her he was missing. Kim is not a person to sit by. That is not her nature.

That first day, he thinks, how can I fix this? What can I do? Who can I call? And then SHE thinks in paul, her friend who happens to be high up at inner poll, the international police force SHE calls him and he says, maybe poe can help.

They're non military, non political. They have CoOperative agreements with police in more than one hundred and eighty countries, including pakistan. They've been helping investigate the mumbai terror attacks that had happened about seven months earlier, which meant theyd been looking into taliban activity in india and pakistan.

Interpol can actually move around in pakistan in ways the U. S. Military cannot. So interpol worth a shot to get an investigation underway for bow, interpol would need to issue something called a yellow notice, interpose version of a missing person report that gets distributed to police departments all over the world.

To get that going though, you need to establish the situation as official police business somewhere, anywhere, apparently, which is why kim ends up at the portland P. D. SHE needs them to file amazing person report so that interpol, in turn, can generate the ello notice about bow.

And they do. They make the report, kim sense interpol photographs of bob, some stuff with his fingerprints on IT DNA samples. The best thing he had for that was a halloween mask.

ID warn. They all went as Alice wonderland characters. And bow was the cheshire cat.

So he sent the cheshire cat mask to intercom. It's already to go. The last thing they need before interpol can issue the yellow notice is permission .

from the department of defense to say.

can we do this really?

They have to get permission because he was a military personnel, and they denied permission instantly.

Kim has notes SHE took from that time, and in them IT says the D O D denied the yellow notice. Twelve hours after IT was requested, a certain kern nel calls her and tells her the D, O D was working in concert with the F, B, I in the C, I, A, and that interpol involvement could complicate, jeopardise and delay the investigation in the search and PS that IT was quote in her best interest to not get involved and quote, i'm coding kim's own note here but the point is SHE was annoying.

SHE says they were just like, incredible that I was just causing so much problem for them. I mean, that's what how they saw. I'm like this where, you know, like squeaking aggers, you know, not behaving female.

And so he keeps going women. Later that same day, a sunday, kim calls the kernel back. SHE somehow gets his home number, and he reiterates he does not foreseen the yellow notice going forward.

Kim calls her congressman. He calls a senator. Maybe they can pressure the military to change the decision. No days. That was that. The question him is left with to this day is, what if the D O D had said to inner poll, yes, go ahead.

Could I have worked? Could both possibly gotten home sooner? When I heard this story? The question I was left with was, what the heck truly, kim hoving IT to the port land? Pd is not the way this is supposed to work. So how is this supposed to work?

I talk to a bunch .

of people who worked on behalf of the military to get go home, some on the record, some on background, and they all talked about how much of a dozy this one was, how there was just no handbook.

A us. Prisoner of war there is being held in the friendly nation of pakistan by the designated terrorist group of the haki on behalf of the lawful combatants of the taliban.

It's not like there was a codro of people inside the united states government who had experiences on how to entire this particular. Not nobody had done this before.

How do you, how do you manipulate an entire country to to get a an enlisted soldier home? You know, I mean, how do you do that?

How do you do that?

You don't.

Of course, IT wasn't a .

military Operation that finally got go home. IT was diplomacy. We negotiated with the taliban and traded him for a five men out of gmo. And that in itself is a fascinating story, and we'll get into all that.

But for this episode, i'm gonna lay out the twisty tourney and often emotional path that came before the president signed off on that trade because before the most powerful person in the united states took cold of both fate, he was in the hands of well meaning people. Much, much lower down the chain or not in that chain at all, because that's where the search for boo lived for years. The same day, by walks away, the dust one goes into effect for about a month a half.

There's this intense, no holds barred military and intelligence effort inside afghanistan. All this equipment and hundreds of people redirected to search for bow. The nerve center for all that activity was back in the states in tampa, florida.

That's where U. S. Central command is headquartered, known as cent com.

Cent com has a group of people whose whole job is define missing or captured people there in P. R. Not public relations, but personal recovery.

I talked to two people who worked in the P, R. Office at that time, their intel analysts, and they might search for anyone who's been reported missing from a conflict zone, not just U. S.

Military personnel, and not just americans. Could be a contractor, someone working for an N, G, O, A higher foreign nationals reporters imagine their office as a super high tech workspace. Like the way NASA looks in the movies.

It's not that sexy.

It's definitely .

not sexy. That's Andrea, not her real name. And shell, also not her real name. They told me the office is cubicles, computers, telephones. Andrew machine did not want to talk specifically about bose case since its ongoing in military court, but what they told me applies to his case into lots of other cases they worked on.

Also, these women didn't want to use their real names because anything bow related is so sensitive, so hot, they worry they might suffer percussive just personally, if the public knew they tried to bring both home anyway, their job didn't stop when the dust one was called off. They kept going until IT was over five years later. Again, Andrew, Michelle can't talk about the particulars of both case, but they were pretty candidate about what made their job especially tRicky.

They said there were a bunch of factors. First of all, at that time, Andrea and the machine were kind of IT for afghanistan in terms of personal recovery. D, O, D had a good system for recovering down pilots in afghanistan, they said. But other than that, there was no solid system in place to track people who went missing. Here's Andrea.

They should have had two people or more sitting there in afghanistan waiting to just support personal recovery events but instead everyone in the theater were dull, hated or triple hated you know they had different jobs and so when an event occurred they did you know they could help but they certainly .

weren't experts and we and that different from say, Operations in iraq and er like what the how do you compare like sort of what was in place in afghanistan is what was in place in iraq for a processor.

different. So iraq had a personal recovery division set up and they had upwards of fifteen people sitting in the same room with the only job, full time job, of recovering hostages. I mean, I was my only wish that we could have had something like that. afghanistan.

We ask for many, many times .

that machine .

that can even began describe the bleeding of establishing a style like that, aware that would have helped us immensely.

Many more people had gone missing from iraq than from afghanistan. So IT made sense to iraq was much Better equipped for these events. But still what that man is.

At a certain point, Michelle an. Andrew realized we can do this job from tampa. They started rotating in and out of afghanistan, usually for months at a time, so they could manage our cases from the ground.

When someone goes missing, the P. R. Team turns on every intelligence asset they can. Those assets might be people that's called human for human intelligence or sign signals intelligence, communications you pick up from cell phones or electronic messages, or g int. Geospatial intelligence, such as images of the landscape. And their job ideally is to layer all this intel to get the clearest picture they possibly can of where the person is.

And then if you can get that far, hand that information off to the people who can actually do something about IT, either military, can we send in special forces, for instance, can we engineer and escape of some kind or drone strike to set the hostage free? Or diplomatically, can we get our ambassador and whatever country to try to negotiate for a hostage or a civilian action member? When bill clinton went to north korea, two thousand and nine got those reporters at a prison there.

In both case, all of that work, all of those potential avenues, were stayed by the defining fact of his geographical situation. He was in pakistan, in afghanistan. D O D, which entered in Michelle, part of D O D, owns the battle space, meaning they have control, they have authority to direct Operations and use whatever assets they need.

That's why the dust one for bow could be as far reaching and aggressive as IT was. But once you no longer on the battle space, you have to start relying much more on other U. S. Government agencies that might be Operating in pakistan, pretty much any three litter agency that has a personal recovery element.

N, G, A, D, I, A, C, I, F, B, I, N, S, A.

It's a CIA that has authority for U S. Operations in pakistan though. So you really need the CIA.

Now IT becomes the more we're doing a lot more asking for help and and all of .

us back to the priorities well, are all the other things that are happening inside of that country um less important than this thing that we need right now? Or are you trumped trump?

T for instance, by current events that often happens that current events in politics, on the ground, in whatever country, gets in the way of your P. R. mission.

During both case, we had some very rough patches in our relations with pakistan. Take two thousand eleven as one former counterterrorist analysts told us, quote, you couldn't possibly have a busiest backdrop than in pakistan at that time. And quote, that year started with the rayman Davis tobacco.

Remember that one was bizarre. Davis was a CIA contractor who opened fire on two guys riding a motorbike in middle of crowded intersection in the hall. Several people were dead by the end of the cause, a huge upward pakistan.

He was thrown in jail. Then you had the U. S. LED. Nato air strikes on the afghanistan pakistan water that killed twenty eight pakistani soldiers.

The hacon is based in pakistan, attacked our embassy in cobo and nato headquarters. Sixteen people died. And that same year, the U. S. Raids in a bottle that killed the summer in ladon.

You know, you really can't go to the table and start talking about maybe humAnitarian releases on the tail ends of unilateral person into a sovereignties. Usually not the best time to ask for help.

Both friends and family were also agitating on their own, and at certain points, their unofficial al efforts became intertwined with official search business in curious ways, in ways that actually approach success. Kim, for example, back to kim. Kim lived in idaho when both a teenager, he spent years hanging around with her family, and they were sort of home base for both.

For long stretches. He'd stay with them, work at the tea shop they ran. Kim is the audio t who actually loves teenagers, and he loved bow.

SHE understood him. He worried about him. SHE would do anything for him, just as he would for own kids. Pretty early on in the search for boat, kim was shut out by the military. But you kept scheming, kept calling people SHE studied maps like.

how can I get in afghanistan? Or how can I get in the pakistan? I can. I get my back at my passport.

You really felt I go.

I am going to go like i'm going to go over there. I'm talk to do pxi please. I'm you can work with peace organizations.

I'm going to go there and trying to go on the television. Stupid nave, I don't know what i'm thinking at this point. There's got to be something that can be done like .

how far you get with the like. I'm gonna go to pakistan.

And to the point where I cancel my passport, yes, for my own safety, I am cancelling your passport. Yes, I can tell you IT .

wasn't a minister moved by the government or anything like that, just someone concerned about her safety. Both parents were also active throughout, trying to figure out what they could do. They decided not to speak to me on tape for this story.

And in aside here, I read nothing into that decision, apart from their best intentions for their own family and for other hostages still in captivity. They've been completely gracious to me throughout this process, and i'm grateful to them for IT end of a side, perhaps things like what am about to tell you about kim. We're happening to both parents to, I just don't know for sure.

Anyway.

kim says in november of two thousand nine, SHE did something in which .

I can't talk about, which would sort of paid off in one way that was got my name and telephone to someone very in afghanistan. And he turned out to be someone that worked with the taliban.

About six weeks later, kim at home in portland and her cell phone rings it's a weird number SHE doesn't answer brings again.

there's a message but didn't understand a single single of IT. IT is a message, the message. A boy smell on my, I, I wasn't answering the phone OK first. The first call, he didn't leave a message, then called, left a message. In the third call, I picked up, I thought IT was so much, well that weird is a wrong number direct mall fuit not my phone myself phone this is weird so anyway I did pick up um and he's speaking in passed to was very obser not I was not not able to understand except he said so a Better doll doll so that's when I went on crap you know this is what is going on and my room and was irm like this person you know making faces .

at am always listened to passionate .

so I like you um so I told him I said email email you know and he's going email, email okay so he hangs up, I hangs up. I go online. I try to find ways of pronouncing like fanatically letters right for my email like how I say, kate, I am ba ba ba um where he'll get stand the case A K and I and I and M M, right but he called back like ten mons later.

And i'm trying to give him my email addressed with an accent we've over like three or four times. And IT IT worked. I had no hope that this was going to work. Hang up thirty seconds later, playing again, an email unfortunate and passed to, it's not a single letter of of our letter forms except her, but all the rest .

is in casto. So SHE cuts and paces the message into one of those online translate sites.

to the complete. The translation .

was like, horrible was IT like those sweaters .

ers that say, like, you know, you happy, happy celebrate Victory the bridge tomorrow bergdoll that's not what .

had actually said, just different instance. Kim understood the gist. This guy had information about bow, and he wanted something in return.

So I said, I, I cannot help you. I will find someone right now. I will make phone calls. I will find someone very simple english. Soon kim calls .

a friend. What should I do? The friend tells her you need the F, B, I.

SHE contacts the FBI. And eventually the FBI translates the message. He was proposing a deal, and the deal was .

to share when he, when he, he had access to where the locations, where where ebo would go and where he was at any given time, he had access to that.

So he said, I can give you information where both gonna be so that you guys can go get him in exchange. I want out of the country. I.

how many many eight family members?

IT sounds too good to be true, right? But incredibly, this guy checked out. Kim can't say how the guy was connected to both situation or what proof he provided, but apparently he checked out. To the extent that the FBI began exchanging .

emails with him, they would do red and copy vegal tell me what I meant. I had to trust them Carry in ped IT in my email incident from my email address on my my computer and not, uh, different location because if they're, she's watching my happy and then he would know with somebody else.

So you were basically the FBI at this point is communicating with this guy through you.

through me. He he making very clear that I have to get the emails if i'm not getting the emails and he's going to stop. So forced me, you know, I I was willing to do whatever. Now this is just released.

but he knew he was also communicating with the government. Yeah, he had to know when he got that first call. Boo had been a prisoner with the taliban for about six months.

He was going through the worst winter of his whole five years. He was the coldest, the sickest, the hunger est. Of course, km m didn't know any of that, but he was hopeful maybe this could spring him.

The, the, the best scenario. yeah. They'll give him the location of flying and super up and take him home, you know, fancy, yeah, yeah.

So over we. And that would win. great. And then so what happened?

Kim doesn't entirely know, because our communication with the FBI was a one way proposition. The monitor to her was need to know for good reason. All kim does know is that for two years running, SHE signed releases so that the nsa could monitor her phone, her computer 和 TV could follow if they wanted， or hang out in front of her house. And then after that, two years was up nothing. So I just kind of fizzled away after a while.

For my prospect.

I found out what happened. The F, B, I cultivated the source for a while and then passed him along to the department of defense. And IT turned out this guy who called kim on hr cell on one day because of some secret thing he did on her own to get her number to the taliban.

This turned out to be one of the best leads they ever had. In both case, one person test with finding go told me, quote, I thought for sure that was the answer. And quote, but they could never quite make that happen.

The guy wanted to bring his relatives over. And if you bring nine people to the us. Under some version of witness protection, a government agency is gona have to take care of them for their whole lives, maybe.

And my source told me, none of the agencies raised their hand. Even so, VISA paper started to be drawn up just in case, and then the guy withdrew. He didn't respond when asked for details about his family members for the paperwork over the years when they go back to the drawing board at D, O, D, trying to think up solutions for finding bow.

Someone would always write this guy on the list. What about him? He was willing once he's still there, still active, or try again. But no one .

pursued IT.

One intel expert told me, if you have all the tools you need, you can find someone in less than thirty days. Just had to say, you can rescue them in thirty days, but you cannot least find them in both case. D, O, D, did not have all the tools they needed, and was never able to say with one hundred percent certainty where are bow.

Was the U. S. Didn't have reliable human intelligence sources on the ground, and was zero stand the hacked oni's have that area locked down so tightly and are so good at propagating this information that they either couldn't get until or couldn't trust what until they did so to figure out those exact location, which neighbourhood, which compound they needed, for instance, drone.

And the drones have to be what's called unblinking. You can't look away, but D, O, D doesn't have drones Operating in pakistan. So you have to ask other agencies to take a look for you, such as the CIA.

And occasionally they would they might give them a few hours here there. But IT wasn't nearly enough because unless, say, bow happens to get escorted to latrine on that day, at that time, you're gonna see him. You need to watch and listen solidly for, say, a week to catch, choose, going in and out with.

They're saying, maybe you follow one of those people. In other words, the drones give you a much Better chance of pinpointing his location. And with a location, you can at least plan a rescue Operation.

One former D O, D employee told me, quote, IT was literally two years of asking for drones and quit. The CIA declined to talk to us for this story. They referred us to the dod, but here's what was going on, the CIA or the nsa or other agencies.

They have their own bosses, their own priorities. These priorities aren't general and a therefore, they're specific. They are written down. They must be approved by the president for the CIA. Their priorities are things like targeting top alki ta and colony members.

And while host recovery might have been on the less on their radar, IT certainly went at the top and burned out specifically wasn't on anybody's list. So it's understandable that the C. I, A can just turn over their resources and manpower to A P.

R. Mission that isn't their own. In some instances, these other agencies were doing the best they could under the circumstances.

This tension is shut through all of these hostage cases, not just bows. Are we doing enough? The answer to that depends in part on where you're sitting. If you're Andrea, Michelle, this is all you think about all day is getting your hostages home. What else can we do? They said they had to fight complacency, malaise because their priority wasn't everyone's priority, even if on paper, IT was supposed to be micelles said they d have to get Willy sometimes just to get the meetings they needed.

I needed time with a specific general in his exact, and I had been talking back and forth and he's like, I just don't know if I can get that done. And one of our counterparts was really good friends with that exact at the time. And he worked with D, I, A.

And kind of put the bugging as here hey, we we have our own list out there and he needs time with this general. And can you make that happen? So SHE calls me.

She's like, I I think I can get that done for you, but he really likes john I Walker black label, if you can. Facilities maybe put that on his desk and maybe threw some beef turkey. I think we can make that happen. So I did, and I get the time I needed just things like that. You're like unbeliever, just to get in front of someone to talk about significant personal recovery events you know you have to and i'm sure i'm sure um under a has mini stories is very similar to what I .

just told you. They do the most basic things just to remind people that yes, there are american hostages in syria, afghanistan, pakistan. They'd put up posters, make those rubble bracelet. Ts.

here's Michelle under and i'd gone to A, I can't remember that was veterans day or appeal W. M. I. A day, but we should made shirts for us. And we went to this event. And when we came back to the building that day, we're walking in and a kernel stopped as and he's like, what who is that on your shirt?

Like this is burn ball .

and he's been missing, for example. Why had no idea about that really? You know, and you are you education bullets.

I can believe that story that is not easy. It's it's insane.

And it's, you know, the one that breaks my heart is called man. SHE gave birth in captivity. Why are we not talking about that?

That's Andrea kan. Coleman and her husband, josh w. Boil disappeared in afghanistan in twenty twelve. Klin was pregnant .

at the time. Like IT just makes IT makes my heart hurt, you know? And you ask the the average american on the street who he is no, no, no.

I just want to talk for a second about this very human thing that overlays, again, not just those cases, but all these hostage cases. Take Colin rutherfurd. He's a Younger, a canadian. He was freed from the taliban last week after more than five years he'd been traveling in afghanistan when he went missing. And the day he was released, the canadian press covered at not the details of how and why, just the fact of his return.

And the online comments immediately were things like this, who goes on vacation to afghanistan? Bonne head or this headline should read idiot rescued, who cares about the details? And when i'm tempted to be all pandemonium and say, that's awful. How can people be so awful? The truth is, I thought things like this.

I mean, it's great, their home, but you know, also in their own damn fall, I admit IT and our wager, we've all thought things like this, right? It's not unconvicted, which makes us no different than a lot of the people charged with finding, say, kEllen colman or Colin rutherfurd or bob doll. The only differences, those people are not supposed to think like that circumstances of capture are not supposed to come into play.

Andrey melle told me repeatedly, they really do not care about circumstances of capture. First to get the person back, and then come consequences, judgment, punishment, not the other way around. Because there isn't a hostage situation out there that doesn't involve some aspect, a wrong place, wrong time, some element of human error. The surprise of their job was their colleagues didn't always feel the same way.

I think the bigger shock for me was the salesmanship. I didn't realize that I was gonna have to. Convince them that supporting my mission was something that that they should do.

I just I didn't think that, that would be an issue, and I was when you're standing before your peers and addressing the meeting in, first and foremost, you have to get over the misconceptions of circumstances of capture. And this rings true to a lot of cases. You'll know you will hear the comment, oh, he's just a journalist of in there anyways.

Why should we help? Or, oh, they were just hiking. Why would they be hiking there? They could hike and collor ado, oh, even like the kid that walked off base.

Yes, I can't even even tell you the amount of times that we heard. Well, why should I care? He did that to himself, for he did this or his sist some .

of unbelieved on.

in certain cases, with the level of leadership in the backgrounds of these people just can't believe they just said .

that in both case, of course, the why should I care attitude was doubled, maybe even cubed, by the information that he had walked off on his own, by the hardship he d put other soldiers through, by the rumours of treachery. Luted kernel Jason emery, now retired, also worked on both case.

You know, if you ask people about bird doll, if they were completely uninformed, IT was, oh, that's the trader. If there were somewhat informed, that would be, oh, that guy, yes, I heard he was a treasure. And if there are a little Better informed, that would be, well, people say this, but I hear he was a trader. I mean, the refrain was was almost always that the guy was a trader, even though there actually wasn't any evidence who was a trader. I and so that attitude was everywhere, up and down the chain of command.

Jason said he was once in a meeting with a general, and they had to cut IT short because the general got so worked up about the fact that boy had walked off. The general was emotional about IT, Jason said. It's not that people refuse to help or refuse to do their jobs.

Everyone I talk to who is involved in both case said, so many people tried so hard on this one is just that you start to wonder if this attitude is lurking all the way to the top, then what ideas are not getting through, but is not even getting proposed because someone low down fear, saying something unpopular. Several people told me that for quite a while, both case languaged because no one working on IT was influential enough to make big decisions about who are you? Who are you?

Well, how you?

How can we describe who you are?

You, I am an intelligence analyst. I been since nineteen ninety nine. K.

this is a person i'm going to called Nathan. That is not his real name. He wasn't wanted use his real name because although he's no longer in the military, he's still working for the military sometimes. And what he did in both case was so out of school so not done that he worries about the consequences for his current job. Anything did not work directly on those case, not officially, but he was very close to IT watching from the sidelines, watching all these people not be able to accomplish much of anything.

They were times along the way where they were various plans, options to get him freed, but nobody could make that decision, or at least they could. They didn't want to.

Again, we're not talking about why they thing got so personally frustrated, but know that he did, especially when I came to what officials were saying to both parents, bob, and this whole .

telling them every day or once a week or once a month, we're doing everything that we can, right? It's not enough. You need to do more. You need to be doing what IT is. You can't.

The only way to make that happen in nathian estimation was to push the topic up higher than the captains and majors who are working on both case. I needed to go as high as IT could go until I reach someone who could afford to expand political capital on boo, meaning ultimately the president himself had to get involved. So anything start thinking about this, how do you catch the president's is attention.

He did what an intel analyst does. He thought, what assets haven't we tapped? And IT came to him the world doors. He thought, if he could get both parents to push some button, maybe bose case could get unstuck about a year and a half. In a the case, Nathan sent a message to the birth doors on facebook. He said to them the things that nobody else seem to want to say, like what were the blunt things you could say .

that we wouldn't get set in a brief shit bad you know that I listen it's it's not as this is difficult and here's why it's difficult. Nobody wanted to. They wanted a tip to around them.

bathin said. Contacting them was the scarious thing he'd may be ever done because he wasn't a high up guy. He wasn't even his job to look for you. And while IT wasn't illegal, he wasn't telling them anything classified. Contacting them was so unprofessional in the world he comes from.

It's you don't want to get personally involved typically with an analyst, you definitely want to keep your personal feelings out of IT. You start injecting bias in there and starts becoming a problem in most cases. This was definitely a case, though, that you needed to be personal. You needed to there needed to be a face on this.

the bird goals where the sad, scared, fierce, determined parents of A P. O W. Davin says he made a plane to them.

You have more power than you know. People will take meetings with you. People will turn your calls.

They're going at least give you five minutes. And bar was no snow. Ch, he knew, had to use his five minutes. He had studied the kendra of his son circumstances.

He began to learn pah to pored over islamic law, read about past to intradiscal, to see if there was some loops he could find, some argument he could make for both release. He understood the history and the politics of the region, and he was already knocking on doors and asking questions. Nathan tried to leverage that.

Why don't you go talk to somebody and enjoying chiefs? You know, I am, but but they gna tell, you know, I an so he, he would and he.

and and was your suggestion.

well, eventually, yeah, eventually you have had .

to be the .

chairman of the joint chief. S is the principle military adviser to the secretary of defense and to the president. Both didn't have twenty five media companies writing an open letter urging action by the secretary of state.

Sometimes happens for foreign respondents. He didn't have ransom insurance, as employees of private companies sometimes do. His parents weren't swish D, C.

players. There are people who lived in rural idaho. Both case wasn't going anywhere.

They needed someone heavy to think. Both was worth thinking about. And then they needed that person to give you a push.

So that was the plan.

apply pressure in married ways, make IT so that people with influence just happen to start hearing about bob g. Doll from various sources, get them to perk up, take an interest, and in that way, inch closer and closer to the president. Nathan began talking to the burg doors regularly, maybe monthly, maybe weekly, depending on what was going on. He started guiding them, you know, that person or that group, or that commander who says he's doing everything he can, well, he could be doing this. And were they then going back to the commander and saying, what what if you tried acts?

Have you done that? Yes, yes. I see there was a manipulation game going on. And that's what makes this very .

difficult to speak about. Where you telling them?

Here's what you need to ask.

Yeah here face looks worried when you say that.

Yeah it's but I am .

quite worried because what?

It's just massive. It's just messy.

A question might be if the united states could pay blood money to get the C. I, A contractor, rayman Davis, out of a pakistani jail. Could they maybe do something similar for bow, some sort of ransom ish payment that isn't ransom? I'm making that up, but that seems like a good question, right? So they feel like you are kind of running this no scrappy second secret second mission almost. Yeah that's like a IT was like the shadow of the thing. That's something at the office.

We're running support are running support tally office. I officially.

Nathan said IT worked. He can be specific about how IT worked, but he says IT worked. Bob's roll adec filled up with people at the panic gon and also the White house and the state department. And Nathan believes the continued pressure created a sense of urgency about both case and got in on the desk of the people they were aiming for. There was another part of the strategy, too, to make noise, sometimes publicly, in a way they hope to keep both safe.

When the uh, U. B, already there was some been ladon rate happened that threw everything up in the air. You know what's going to happen is there are onna be retaliatory hits on sargon burger.

All they going to take him out in the street say, like luck, well, you want to do that and here's this. Um nobody knew what was going to happen. And I was about the time that I put out the video.

I am the father of capture U. S. Soldiers, oh, Robert bird, all these are my thoughts. I can remain silent no longer.

StrAngely, in may have two thousand eleven, just a few days after the bin laden RAID bober leased video on youtube, he addressed mola sungei and the hanoi, but his main message was straight to the pakistani government, I dress the pakistani armed forces. I personally appeal to general kiani and general partia. Our family is counting on your professional integrity and honour to secure the safe return of our son.

Partia was commander of pakistan's intelligence service, or iasi. Kaya was the pakistan army's chief of staff. We ask that your nation diligently help our son be freed from his captivity.

There's another striking thing about this video, and that is, pala is asking something of pakistan so directly the american officials would not. Our soldier s is there. We know.

They know he's there somewhere in what's called the fata federally administer tribal areas. And all this time the U. S.

Is setting aside billions of dollars in aid in military support to pakistan. cording. To a recent congressional report.

Between two thousand two and twenty fourteen, we gave him roughly thirty billion dollars, all told, big money. Yet we don't seem to be able to say, hey, pakistan, given back. Why is that? Well, again, lots of experts later.

Now I see why diplomacy isn't a snap your fingers kind of business. It's a long game. And in the long run, we would like to stay on decent terms with pakistan for some important reasons.

Pakistan has nuclear weapons, which we'd really like them to keep a lid on. We'd also look to keep our air and ground supply lines open in pakistan. That's how we get stuff to our people in afghanistan. Pakistan helped to track down important architect ads and some taliban, and we like that to continue. Many influential people in our government would also like our drones to keep flying and sometimes killing people inside pakistan as well.

And we've got long term development because there too, we'd like to keep helping pakistani's with education and clean water, maybe because we're just nice like that, but more likely because we want to keep them on our side because of pakistan goes the way of, say, iran becomes our enemy, plus those nuclear weapons, that's a scenario we'd very much like to avoid. So when we might risk our relationship with pakistan in order to take out osam ban, we are not going to separate ze IT onto that degree for one U. S. Services men, we are not going to come out publicly in boss pakistan around, even if we could do that or call their leaders of uncial liars.

Ambassage mark growth man.

who was the state department special representative for afghanistan and pakistan, told he did bring bow up in meetings with high level pakistani government officials, but he didn't expect them to do much. He said, expectations are low, but you do IT because it's right and you never know what's gonna en. And he said, if you say to the bird dols enter the public, we're doing everything we can.

Then you Better be doing everything you can. In two and twelve, twenty thirteen, a couple of army generals decided to do something separately. One of the generals realized the P R T mat cent com was wilfully understanded and wasn't getting anywhere.

He assigned an elite unit to the task, a delta force team, a big deal. The CIA was roped more, which helped. But even so, the P.

R. Team never got the intel IT hoped for. And then another general, as soon to be four star, also got involved. A general, bob bergdoll, also met with incidently.

around january of twenty thirteen, where brief in general cambell on our different projects. And at the end of the brief, general cambell said, you know, hey, this is all great. I want you to know that my top priority is getting sergeant burgle home. So there is anything you guys can do to help out. I appreciate that ended the meeting.

That's Jason emarine again. He recently retired from the army after twenty seven years. Jason is one of the most celebrated soldiers of the afghanistan war.

He was there in two thousand, one commanding a special forces team that fall alongside hammer car signs, southern afghanistan. The army even made an action figure out of him. Jason is as closer you could get to putting G.

I. Joe on the burger dolcy. His Stellar career nearly unravelled last year in connection with his work on hostage recovery, which may be you heard about last year.

He testified before congress about, among other things, the dis function in U. S. Hostage policy. Back in general.

To and thirteen, Jason was leading a team of strategists at the pentagon that was used to fine solutions to some of the army's biggest problems. This group work for general john cambell, who was in charge of Operations and plans for the army. My producer data chivu s interview, Jason general cambell.

just seemed almost haunted by the fact that that we hadn't gotten burned all home. IT was just the way he said IT to us, this wasn't just idle banter. IT was really, if there was anything you could do.

you know, that was was more emotional than than a tactical sort of directive.

Yeah, absolutely. And IT with general cambell, IT was a heart felt, you know, how do we get him home? And that that struck me and after the meeting in, I grab ed a couple of my planners and yes, I said, do um you know IT seems like something is really fucked up here? I mean that there is just the feeling that I had.

Jason, in his team decided to do an audit of those case, who was doing what all those years? Why had IT worked? What they found is that the effort seemed to be moving along two tracks.

So calm was trying to put together plans. So calm as special Operations command, which runs elite units, think delta force or navy seals. And then Johnson said they could see that the state department was on IT trying to work with cutter, trying to get the taliban to the negotiating table.

In meeting he'd with F, B, I and others, Jason learned bow wasn't the only one being held hostage by the hannes. There was Kelly coleman and josh boil and their child, and there were others also nearby. Warn windstream was being held by alkali a. He was subsequently killed in a drown strike. Knowing about all these others shook Jason pretty hard.

I mean, I was in uniform for twenty seven years. You know, for me, the notion of not leaving a soldier behind, you know, that you internalize that. And for me, that was just always is a false assumption that amErica doesn't leave americans behind.

I'd never been put in such a ridiculous position before of weight. There are these americans that nobody gives a fuck about. Nobody is doing anything to get them home. H, our greater bureaucracy is treating their families horribly while telling the families to just shut up. And way, I mean, to me, IT was bordering on criminal, how we are treating our common citizens.

Jesson's mission had been to try to figure out how to get bow back. Now he added another mission. Why not try for more hostages, maybe all the hostages? So jesson's team comes up with a couple of alternatives. He started shopping around one in particular. He gets pretty far with IT, but then he can't tell who exactly .

is in charge. I mean, you had sank calm that assumed so calm had you had so calm that assume the state department had a and months later, after a lot of minutes, i'd finally figure out that the state department assumed that the military had so IT was this big loop was so come different, and so come so come from the state department and the state department religious differing the dod. But there wasn't anybody there are asking the questions to even figure out that IT was that big of a mass.

Jason took the problem to a congressman, which, rather surprisingly, LED to Jason being investigated by the army. Eventually, that was all dropped. The congressman, representatives duncan hunter, a veteran of both the iraq and afghanistan wars, proposed legislation to try to fix hostage policy.

Other people have spoken to in government, say jesson's assessment, least on bose case wasn't quite accurate that the various agencies were more aware of each other's plans than Jason gave them credit for. But still, everyone I talk to agreed with Jason that our system for dealing with hostages wasn't great. CoOperation between agencies with shaggy policies were sometimes inconsistent.

People were in on the same page that was especially clear after reporter James foley was killed grumbly and publicly in syria a couple of months after both came home. In december of twenty fourteen, president obama ordered a review of how the us. Deals with these cases. And six months later, he announced an update in hostage policy, saying that he'd met with the families, quote I acknowledged to them in private, what I want to say publicly that IT is true, that there have been times where our government, regardless of good intentions, has let them down. I promise them that we can do Better and quit.

When I first started looking into this question of what did we do to get bow back, Frankly, I didn't think I would be all that difficult to answer, which silly me, maybe, but still least I thought the answer would be lenie that a chain of events would reveal itself, one link leading to another, attached to another. Instead, i've found a bunch of people whose stories were all pretty different, but whose central theme was the same frustration, why aren't we doing more? Who's blocking this effort? Why they described struggling against a tangle of competing interests they couldn't control and sometimes can even see.

IT sounded as if there was a scandal to uncover and maybe there was dishonesty and even more levels in some corners. But mostly, I think it's because the truth is there's a limit. There's have to be limits on how much we risk, how much we give up to get one person back.

And for a long time, o loomed small to put up coursey. He wasn't worth IT. He was tucked in among so many other crisis, a small fire, smaller ing among all these giant fires that also need to be put out. The time to deal with him is when he becomes something else, something useful, a way to put out a bigger fire. Bob bergdoll told me the family was always against a rescue attempt.

He said he study the afghanistan pakistan water in my new detail on google earth for two weeks after, by witnessing, based on where he figured bow was, he thought, a rescue in place like mirror shop, even for an elite ite special Operations unit, wouldn't be viable. IT was just too dangerous. Quote, we thought IT unethical to risk the lives of numerous individuals, especially when we knew back channel communication was possible, or even actually happening.

We believed both would agree with that ethic. And quote, mark and bow talked about not exactly this, but they talked about how much should have been sacrificed to find him in that initial dust one period. And both said, in an ideal world, which he gets isn't the one the military lives in, but if he could have directed the initial search, he would have made IT voluntary, and he would have been OK with soldiers who hadn't volunteered because he gets that they didn't understand his true motives.

You know, I would be like our right fine. I just because, yeah, they have every right to set what happens because from what they're looking at, they are gone. All this guy square is over. Why should we ourselves? Why should we sweat lead for this guy if you know screw is over?

But what if they had known exactly why you walked? What specifically bow was seeing? What did you make any difference next time i'm cereal?

Serials produced by Julie smatter dana chivas and me in partnership with mark boal meghan ellison huggin grin just a whisper g page one in anorexic pictures ira glass, our editorial al adviser editing help this week from joe level with any danger field digital editor researched by Kevin garnett fact checking by my hell Harris copy editing by oni our music is composed by nickerson n frits mires and mark phillips.

The show was mixed by kate bullen, ski Christian Taylor or our community editor, other serial staff said land, Emily condon, at least bergson and canberra Anderson. Special thanks this week to viva hardie, r shaper o theo pado, Jessica gold stein, jeff eggs k. Land hadden and denmark, our website serial podcast dot org.

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Do you see guys with help is on?

Nobody has a helmet on.

You see a bunch of of guys waiting to get fucking killed. What you .

thinking? I thought I was going to die. It's award what we all signed up to do.

And they were out out there handing out of water color maps of afghanistan watering. How is this going to work? I figured there would be a little .

bit more shooting involved. There was a bad waiting because we all had weird thoughts. What we're over their isolated from anybody.

the things that he starts saying about the army.

现在 要 走。 Some, some, some Young mind that they come up with an extreme solution.