In 2009, the United States had been at war in Afghanistan for eight years—it has now been 17—when Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl, a young infantry soldier, and Major General Mike Flynn shook things up in their own ways. Both had recently arrived in Afghanistan and knew the war was going badly. Bergdahl's decision to walk off his base in late June caused a chain reaction that affected all U.S. forces, reaching all the way to Flynn, the senior military-intelligence officer in Afghanistan, who made his own bold gamble to find him.
It was a sunny Tuesday morning in Kabul as Major General Michael T. Flynn arrived for a meeting in one of his two new offices at ISAF Headquarters. In his previous job, as director of intelligence for the Joint Staff at the Pentagon, Flynn sat through endless meetings and briefings, which he learned to hate, and it didn’t seem like Kabul would be any better. Staff officers presented classified PowerPoints—briefing slide after briefing slide—that all seemed to say the same thing: the war was going badly, the structures and strategies in place to fight it weren’t working, and the Taliban were growing stronger and launching more deadly and sophisticated attacks from their sanctuary across the border in Pakistan, where U.S. troops could not venture. Nothing came from these meetings—if good ideas did emerge, they were stymied by an unending bureaucracy. “I spend 80 percent of my day, easily, fighting our own system,” Flynn would tell Rolling Stone writer Michael Hastings in 2010.
Flynn was just two weeks into his new dual-hatted job—as both the senior U.S. military-intelligence officer in Afghanistan and as the director of intelligence for NATO’s ISAF coalition—and he was just now developing a clear picture of the war’s dysfunction, which he discussed in late-night chats and on early-morning runs with his boss, General Stan McChrystal. In March 2009, President Obama had tapped McChrystal to replace the previous commander, General David McKiernan, the first four-star general in the field relieved of duty since Harry Truman fired MacArthur during the Korean War. Obama had given McChrystal total discretion to assemble his command staff, and McChrystal had known and trusted Flynn for years, since they were paratroopers in the 82nd Airborne. They’d grown even closer over their shared deployments to Iraq, where McChrystal commanded the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) black-ops units that included Delta Force and SEAL Team 6, and Flynn served as his senior-intelligence officer. In Iraq, Flynn deepened the wild-card reputation he’d had since Operation Urgent Fury, the 1983 invasion of Grenada, when he’d flow his signals intelligence platoon into the fight without authorization. After the four-day operation was over, Flynn escaped punishment because he, by chance, was sitting in eavesdropping positions on the coast and spotted two soldiers flailing in the Caribbean Sea. Flynn, who’d been a lifeguard and passionate cold-water surfer growing up in Rhode Island, jumped into the water and dragged the men back to the beach. Flynn’s colonel admonished the young lieutenant for disobeying orders and sneaking into Grenada, but thanked him for saving the soldiers. Flynn was a good officer with the makings of an excellent leader—the kind of officer who deserved to be protected, even from himself.
Over the course of his career, Flynn kept getting promoted into better and better assignments because sometimes his brand of crazy was the only way to get things done. He was lauded for putting together the team that developed rapid-fire targeting and intelligence-gathering methods for the special operations strategy that allegedly decimated al-Qaeda in Iraq during the 2006–2007 surge. There was some merit to the argument: JSOC kills included Abu Musab al‑Zarqawi, the founder of Iraq’s preeminent terror franchise, A.Q.I. (al-Qaeda in Iraq). Yet these oft-repeated claims that McChrystal, Flynn, and JSOC were incredibly successful in their secret war against A.Q.I. were rarely scrutinized. Instead, politicians on both sides of the aisle repeated their praise ad nauseam as they sought any good news from a bad war that could dazzle and distract their constituents from the coffins coming into Dover Air Force Base in Delaware. The role that McChrystal and Flynn played in pacifying Iraq was further exaggerated by a breathless national-security press seduced by the mystique of special operations. Al-Qaeda in Iraq was never destroyed and would eventually rebrand itself as ISIS. By the time he arrived in Afghanistan, in 2009, McChrystal had a reputation as a snake-eater, a killer, a tough guy who could sell the gentler aspects of the Army in Afghanistan’s new old way of war: counterinsurgency.
McChrystal knew how to sell the war, but that didn’t mean he could win it. Now, as the director of intelligence for ISAF, Flynn would oversee NATO and the United States’ information operations and intelligence gathering in both the acknowledged battlefield (Afghanistan) and the unofficial war in Pakistan, where only the C.I.A. was authorized to capture and kill.
As wanting as the Pentagon was for reliable intelligence in Afghanistan, the situation in the Federally Administrated Tribal Areas (FATA) was worse. Nearly eight years after Osama bin Laden disappeared into the mountains of Tora Bora, Flynn inherited what looked to him like a dysfunctional intelligence apparatus. It was the same C.I.A. that had lost a U‑2 spy plane in 1960, missed the Pakistani underground nuclear tests in 1998, and failed to stop Islamabad from using nuclear scientist A. Q. Khan as a cutout for proliferating weapons-grade plutonium and nuclear technology to aspirational regimes in North Korea, Iran, and Libya. Pakistan was a mess. Flynn believed it was predominantly C.I.A.’s fault, and that he and the Pentagon could fix it. If he could show up his C.I.A. rivals, all the better.
Flynn’s meeting on the morning of June 30 had been called to address these exact concerns. A retired Army colonel named Michael Furlong, now a civilian in a position funded by the C.I.A.’s military counterpart, the Defense Intelligence Agency (D.I.A.), was in from San Antonio, Texas, pitching unconventional solutions in Afghanistan. Furlong had ideas that would fill the tactical intelligence gaps that bedeviled the troops on the ground. Tactical intelligence—the type that saved soldiers’ lives on the battlefield, rather than the type that informed politicians of the price of barley in Bahrain—was why McChrystal’s predecessor had signed Furlong on in the first place. After an American outpost in Wanat was nearly overrun in July 2008, General McKiernan had demanded new approaches. Furlong had plenty of ideas, including information operations, kill/capture campaigns, and deception operations. Furlong was just getting started with his pitch when Flynn’s executive officer, Colonel Andrea Thompson, came to the door with the morning’s news: a soldier was missing. It was one of the Alaska paratroopers assigned to work with the Afghan security forces in the Eastern Provinces, a 23-year-old who vanished overnight from a small observation post in Paktika, leaving his weapon behind.
Their meeting had been scheduled that morning to address the sorry state of U.S. intelligence. Now that they had a fresh crisis, Flynn and Furlong formed an unlikely yin-yang duo. Flynn, who was intense, thin, and wiry-verging-on-gaunt, woke up every morning at 0430 for five-mile runs around the ISAF compound with McChrystal. Furlong was built like a former NCAA lineman gone to seed and was perpetually patting at a pack of Marlboros in the chest pocket of his rumpled shirtsleeves. Where Flynn was all confidence and edge—like a “rat on acid,” as one of his own staffers put it—Furlong had the desperate staccato delivery of a used-car salesman. McKiernan, who had brought him onto the I.S.A.F. team the summer before, called him, with no disrespect intended, “the fat sweaty guy.”
With a mind that sparked in rapid-fire bursts, Flynn had little patience with colleagues who couldn’t keep up with his bang-zoom thought processes. In Furlong, he found a man tuned to the same wavelength, and one of the best bureaucratic knife fighters the Pentagon had produced in years. In the 1980s, when Furlong was an OPFOR (opposing force) officer with the 11th Cavalry (“Ride with the Blackhorse!”) at the National Training Center, he won so many mock battles in the Mojave Desert that the Army named part of Fort Irwin after him. Furlong Ridge was one of the terrain features that Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl had studied in California, a procession of linked hills that Furlong used to conceal his men as they moved into place for a counterattack. It also didn’t hurt that Furlong, Flynn, and McChrystal had known each other as young lieutenants at Fort Bragg. McChrystal’s brother even bought a house in North Carolina from Furlong. This was before Furlong moved into a series of strange jobs he wasn’t supposed to talk about.
For Furlong, rank didn’t really matter, because he had something better: he knew secrets and he knew the sources of those secrets. His power came from the information he knew, the information he had access to, and the sources of that information. In the intelligence community, access depended on three things: security clearances, needs to know, and higher ranking officials approving undercover proposals. Furlong’s power was ascendant. He’d come back into the federal government as a GS‑15—the civilian equivalent of a colonel—after trying his hand at government contracting by running an American-backed Iraqi media company into the ground post-invasion. He did it in style, though, tooling around Baghdad in a civilian Hummer he imported from Maryland, the same showy model that Arnold Schwarzenegger drove to the ski slopes in Sun Valley.
After Colonel Thompson delivered the news, Flynn looked at Furlong. “What can you do for me?” Flynn asked, the implied question lingering in the air: What can you do for me, Mike, that the others can’t, that the C.I.A. won’t? He wanted an answer by 9:00 p.m.
“I was going to be there for the rest of the summer to build the strategy, and then this happens, my first meeting,” Furlong said. He worked his phone and pored over his classified spreadsheets all afternoon. A missing U.S. soldier could have catastrophic consequences. At best, it would be a public-relations nightmare that could embarrass the Army. At worst, this DUSTWUN (duty status–whereabouts unknown) could have political fallout that reached all the way to the White House—a captured hostage soldier could be a devastating domestic distraction and cripple McChrystal’s efforts to turn the news of this war around. They needed to contain the story, find the soldier, and get back to the mission at hand.
One of Furlong’s first phone calls was to a retired C.I.A. officer, Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, who was now running a private intelligence company, the Eclipse Group, from his home in San Diego, California. Clarridge was a living legend, aging but still in the game, receiving raw intelligence reports poolside from agents in the field and from his extensive network of contacts in foreign governments via encrypted email, which he read, collated, and sent off to his clients in the U.S. government and private industry. Furlong told Flynn he was bringing Clarridge on board. There was just one problem: when Clarridge was head of the C.I.A.’s Latin America Division, he was a key player in the Iran‑Contra affair. He was investigated by Special Counsel Lawrence Walsh and indicted on seven counts for lying in his sworn testimony about his role helping Oliver North arrange a covert shipment of Hawk missiles to Iran in 1985 in a scheme designed to free American hostages in Iran and Lebanon. Clarridge was indicted, but never convicted; President George H. W. Bush pardoned him in 1992 before his case went to trial.
Flynn had no objections to Furlong’s plan to recruit and pay the old spymaster for help. “I’ll do this on good faith right now,” Clarridge told Furlong, but reminded him that he had his needs too. “I’ll get my guys working on it, and you see what you can do on the contract.” Tracking Bergdahl became the priority on the pool deck of the once-in-never-out spy legend in San Diego, but that legend needed concessions. Furlong scoured his spreadsheets for the black budget money he needed. He diverted $200,000 from another contract and was ready to get Clarridge, a retired, indicted, and pardoned ex‑C.I.A. officer, back in the game. Furlong recalled how easy it was; he would eventually collect $24 million and change for Eclipse and his other private intelligence operations, deliberately keeping it under the threshold of $25 million that would trigger congressional oversight. Pentagon lawyers could parse whether this was technically legal. They had a soldier to find and a way to do it. It was legal enough for Furlong.
Bergdahl saw the motorcycles turn off the main road. His first thought was, “There’s nothing I can do.” If he had a gun, if he had taken Cross’s 9mm, maybe there would have been a chance to escape. But he hadn’t, and there wasn’t. There were five motorcycles and six guys in their early twenties with AK‑47s and one with a longer rifle. They blindfolded Bergdahl, tied his hands behind his back, put him on the back of one of the bikes and drove him to a two-story home where they emptied his pockets and refastened his wrists with heavier, tighter straps. They drove him to a village, where it sounded to Bergdahl like the whole town had turned out to see their quarry. The villagers laughed and shouted. Children threw rocks at him. Then they were moving again and his captors made what sounded like excited radio calls looking for someone who could speak English. Finally, they found someone, and met an educated, English-speaking man by the ruins of a mud-built compound.
“How are you?” the man asked incongruously. Through the cracks in his blindfold, Bergdahl saw that the man wore glasses. “I am fine,” Bergdahl replied.
The man with glasses looked at Bergdahl’s hands and told the gunmen to loosen the straps. Bowe felt the blood flow back into his hands, which the men then wrapped in a metal chain and fixed with padlocks. The gunmen produced the wallet they’d taken from his pockets earlier and handed it to the man in glasses. He examined it, saw the Army ID card, and told them what they already knew: they had hit the jackpot. Their hostage was an American soldier.
Next came another townsite, where the elders gushed over the young captors to such a degree that Bergdahl suspected it was their home village. Here, they threw a blanket over his head and left him kneeling on the dirt outside, while the men presumably discussed the opportunities and dangers their precious cargo represented. As Bergdahl knelt in the dirt and children gathered and again threw rocks, he worked his eyebrows and cheeks to budge his blindfold. He bent his face to his knees, nudging the fabric until he could see that the village was surrounded by steep hills. Maybe he could make it.
He stood and ran, and cleared about 50 feet before a gang of men tackled him mid-sprint and began beating him. One struck him with the butt of a rifle with such force the weapon broke, wooden stock shearing from the metal receiver of the AK‑47. Now knowing he would run, Bergdahl’s captors took precautions. They locked him in a small room where he was watched over by an old man with a gray beard. From there they drove him to a tent, where they used a cell phone to record a 10-second video: Bergdahl, cross-legged, hands bound behind him, leaning over. It was their first proof-of-life video, saved on a SIM card, which soon after was delivered via courier to Major General Edward M. Reeder Jr. in Kabul, along with a message seeking a ransom and the release of prisoners in return for the American hostage. At dusk, the gunmen stashed Bergdahl in the bed of a pickup truck under layers of blankets. “If you move, I am going to kill you,” a man said to him in broken English. “But don’t worry. We take you to another place.”
The American Operations Officer, Major Ron Wilson, sat cross-legged and barefoot on woven rugs at the Tribal Liaison Office in Kabul when he felt his flip phone vibrate in his pocket. He was there for the day’s jirga, a traditional assembly where leaders gather to discuss the issues facing their tribes and make decisions by consensus and according to the codes of Pashtunwali. Wilson wore his usual work clothes for Afghanistan—jeans, a long-sleeved shirt, and a ball cap—and the tribal elders sat in a wide circle around him, wrinkled men in black turbans with flowing dark beards, and for the oldest men, white beards dyed with henna. Back home Wilson was clean-shaven. Here he grew his beard to show respect—not as long or full as the elders’ beards, but a small gesture to the people whose trust was the currency of his work.
The jirga was held in the big room on the building’s second floor. Tribal leaders arrived in little yellow taxis. The larger the gathering, the farther they traveled. Some had been driving for days. After they arrived, they performed wudu—ablutions of their feet, faces, and hands—they prayed, and then they talked. They talked about the new school being built, the well being dug, the goat that was killed by the American bomb, the government collaborator who was killed by the Taliban. Talking was why they were there, along with the tea and the food, a generous spread of dried fruits, nuts, and sweets to fuel the hours. Wilson was there to listen.
Wilson stood up and walked out of the main jirga, past the pile of plastic sandals the Afghans left by the entrance, and stepped into the hallway to take the call. “Hey, we got a lost puppy,” his boss at ISAF headquarters said on the other end.
He listened to the news and peered down to the courtyard where the younger men helped with chores while their elders met upstairs. The competing smells of burnt goat fat and hashish mixed in the air. A 23-year-old Army private lost near the Pakistani border was bad news. Receiving the call at the jirga, surrounded by tribal leaders from the districts where kidnapping was a thriving business—that was just good timing.
Wilson walked back into the room and got to work. He raised the subject of kidnapping for profit with the elders. Was it a problem they were familiar with? Wilson didn’t mention the missing soldier; he didn’t need to. The gathered elders had an unparalleled institutional memory. If they didn’t know the answer to Wilson’s questions, they would help him find someone who did. A Kuchi elder from the east told his story about how three of his own men were recently taken hostage as a moneymaking venture for a local criminal gang. When the captors killed one of them, the elder paid $20,000 apiece to save the other two. Wilson posed a hypothetical: “If an American was kidnapped in Paktika, what would happen to him?”
Wilson was joined at the jirga by Robert Young Pelton, a Canadian writer who had co-founded an information subscription service called Af Pax Insider with former CNN executive Eason Jordan. They were looking to recreate the success they had found in Baghdad with IraqSlogger, an online compendium of “Insights, Scoops, and Blunders” written by a squad of local reporters and sources they had recruited around the country during the war. In Afghanistan, the demand for good, raw, well‑sourced information was even higher. Af Pax launched to an insatiable audience. “We had subscribers from every venue: media, State Department, NGOs,” Pelton said. According to one U.S. officer who worked in classified information operations under JSOC command in the summer of 2009, Pelton’s outfit was the best source at the time for fresh, clean, unprocessed intelligence.
The tribal leaders explained the kidnapping business model in their home provinces. They named specific individuals and villages that formed the nodes of an illicit underground ratline network that used taxicabs and safe houses to stage and move weapons, drugs, and valuable human cargo. The kidnappers would make frequent stops, never driving more than an hour or two, and they would make a predictable sequence of calls as they sought payment to process the hostage up the Taliban’s regional chain of command.
“Where would they take him?” Wilson asked. There was no ambiguity. Every scenario led to the same destination: Bergdahl would be delivered to the Haqqanis in Pakistan.
It was as predictable as it was discouraging. Once Bergdahl crossed the border into the FATA, there would be no straightforward way to bring him back. Wilson and Pelton knew they didn’t have much time. They thanked the elders, left the jirga, and started making calls to Pelton’s network, regardless of affiliation or background. They called Taliban lawyers, friendly mullahs, and officers in the notoriously corrupt Afghan Border Police. The more people Wilson called, the more he learned. He was told which models of deception the Taliban would use to mask Bergdahl’s movement, how they would spread invented stories designed to embarrass the Americans, and how it would end: “a ransom, a prisoner trade, or a high-profile execution video.”
This was how human intelligence worked. Rather than avoid men with questionable associations, he pursued them, seduced them, and flipped them to support the American mission using the four principal motivators that case officers kept in mind when handling their espionage agents. MICE was the mnemonic, drilled into C.I.A., D.I.A., and JSOC human-intelligence officers throughout their training at the C.I.A.’s yearlong spy course at Camp Peary, Virginia: Money. Ideology. Coercion. Ego. Decipher which of these motivated an agent, use it to your advantage, and he would do what you wanted. Spies did not deal with the world’s nice people. They were tasked with protecting America from those that would do her harm. In America’s post-9/11 Global War on Terror, “We don’t negotiate with terrorists” is an oft-repeated government mantra. It’s also an idea that Wilson characterized as a political nicety, divorced from the reality in Afghanistan. Wilson cites an Afghan saying—“There are no bloodless hands”—as a truism that applied to his work. “We talked to guys who were clearly Taliban. They would tell you. They believe in the mission and the goals of the Taliban.”
By the end of the first day of the DUSTWUN, Wilson had a multi-sourced and corroborated forecast for the Army’s missing soldier. “We knew how they were going to move him, where they were going to move him. We figured it would be 48 hours at the most before he was across the border.”
From AMERICAN CIPHER: Bowe Bergdahl and the U.S. Tragedy in Afghanistan by Matt Farwell and Michael Ames. Copyright © 2019 by Matt Farwell and Michael Ames. Published by arrangement with Penguin Press, a member of Penguin Random House LLC.
CORRECTION: This post has been updated to accurately reference Operation Urgent Fury.
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