I immediately saw that there was no way of getting out of thatcage.
Previously, oncereal.
This is a metal cage or a wood cage orwhat?
This is like an iron barcage.
Made for whatpurpose? Or keeping me init.
And I knew we'd walked into the tribal areas over themountains, the worst place you can be taken in the Afghanistan-Pakistanregion.
Veryscary. All kind of bad animals and drawn is 24 hour like making buzz buzzbuzz.
You get to getthat. The military perspective from a lot of people's perspective ishonorable,double-born.
The word just like impunity is just jumping into myhead.
I'm going to take a video of you and you need to think about what you're going to say to the PresidentObama.
In this American life in WB-EZChicago, it'scereal.
One story told week byweek.
I'm SarahCanig. In very early July of2009, just a few days after Bo wentmissing, a woman named Kim Harrison went to her local police department inPortland,Oregon.
And I had to go up to the microphone because I don't have a person out infront.
It's a pretty big policedepartment.
I think it's part ofit. So you're like a jail button on the side ofit.
Excuseme, can I talk to somebody I need to report a missingperson?
Yeah, at the time I knew they said they're going to think I'minsane.
Because you're what you're saying to them is I'm reporting a missing person out of MestAfghanistan.
Well, I didn't really want to say that right off the bat because I knew I wouldn't get veryfar.
The person missing wasBo, ofcourse.
A person missing from a place roughly 7,000 milesaway.
Who is thisperson? And Isaid,well, he's so soldier and that what why he can't that he's a militarypersonnel.
Why would he dothis?Well, it'scomplicated.
Socomplicated. Here's whathappened.
Kim is a close friend ofBo's.
They're like family to eachother.
He's friends with herkids.
Bo listed Kim in army forms as a person to notify if something happened tohim.
So on June30th,2009, Army officials came to Kim's house to tell her he wasmissing.
Kim is not a person to sitby.
That is not hernature. That first day shethinks, how can I fixthis?
What can Ido? Who can Icall?
And then shethinks,interpol.
Her friend who happens to be high up atInterpol, the international policeforce.
She calls him and hesays, maybe Interpol canhelp.
They'renon-military,non-political.
They have cooperative agreements with police in more than 180countries, includingPakistan.
They've been helping investigate the Mumbai terror attacks that had happened about seven monthsearlier, which meant they'd been looking into Taliban activity in India andPakistan.
Interpol can actually move around in Pakistan in ways the US militarycannot.
So,Interpol, worth ashot.
To get an investigation underway forBo, Interpol would need to issue something called a yellownotice.
Interpol's version of a missing person report that gets distributed to police departments all over theworld.
To get that goingthough, you need to establish the situation as official police businesssomewhere.
Anywhere,apparently, which is why Kim ends up at the PortlandPD.
She needs them to file a missing person report so that Interpol in turn can generate the yellow notice aboutBo.
And theydo. They make thereport.
Kim sends Interpol photographs ofBo, some stuff with his fingerprints onit, DNAsamples.
The best thing she had for that was a Halloween mask you'dworn.
They all went as Alice in Wonderlandcharacters, and Bo was the Cheshirecat.
So, she sent the Cheshire cat mask toInterpol.
It's all ready togo. The last thing they need before Interpol can issue the yellow notice ispermission.
From the Department ofDefense.
Tosay, can we dothis? They have to get permission because it was a militarypersonnel.
Oh. And they denied permissioninstantly.
Kim has notes she took from thattime.
And inthem, it says the DOD denied the yellow notice 12 hours after it wasrequested.
A certain colonel calls her and tells her the DOD was working in concert with the FBI and theCIA, and that Interpol involvement couldcomplicate,jeopardize, and delay the investigation and thesearch.
AndPS, that itwas,quote, in her best interest to not getinvolved,unquote.
I'm quoting Kim's own noteshere, but the point is she wasannoying, shesays.
They were just like incredulous that I was just causing so much problem forthem.
Imean, that's how they sawit.
I'm likethis,wah,wah,wah, youknow, likesqueaking,nagging, youknow, not behavingfemale.
And so she keepsgoing.Women.
Later that sameday, aSunday, Kim calls the colonelback.
She somehow gets his homenumber.
And he reiterates he does not foresee the yellow notice goingforward.
Kim calls hercongressman, she calls asenator, maybe they can pressure the military to change thedecision.
Nodice. That wasthat. The question Kim is left with to this dayis, what if the DOD had said toInterpol,yes, goahead.
Could it haveworked? Could both possibly gotten homesooner?
When I heard thisstory, the question I was left withwas, what theheck?
Truly,Kim, hoofing it to the Portland PD is not the way this is supposed towork.
So how is this supposed towork?
I talked to a bunch of people who worked on behalf of the military to get Bohome, some on therecord, some onbackground.
And they all talked about how much of a doozy this onewas.
There was just nohandbook.
You had a US prisoner of war that was being held in the friendly nation of Pakistan by the designated terrorist group of the Hakanee on behalf of the lawful combatants of theTaliban.
It's not like there was a cadre of people inside the United States government who had experience on how to untie this particularknot.
Nobody had done thisbefore.
How do you manipulate an entire country to get an enlisted soldierhome?
Youknow, Imean, how do you dothat?
How do you dothat?Well, youdon't.
Ofcourse, it wasn't a military operation that finally got Bohome.
It wasdiplomacy. We negotiated with the Taliban and traded him for five men out ofGitmo.
And that in itself is a fascinatingstory, and we'll get into allthat.
But for thisepisode, I'm going to lay out thetwisty,turny, and often emotional path that came before the president signed off on thattrade.
Because before the most powerful person in the United States took hold of Bo'sfate, he was in the hands of well-meaning peoplemuch, much lower down thechain, or not in that chain atall.
Because that's where the search for Bo lived foryears.
The same day Bo walksaway, the dust one goes intoeffect.
For about a month and ahalf, there's this intense no-holds-barred military and intelligence effort insideAfghanistan.
All this equipment and hundreds of people redirected to search forBo.
The nerve center for all that activity was back in the States inTampa,Florida.
That's where US Central Command isheadquartered, known asSENTCOM.
SENTCOM has a group of people whose whole job is to find missing or capturedpeople.
They're inPR, not publicrelations, but personnelrecovery.
I talked to two people who worked in the PR office at thattime.
They're intelanalysts.
And they might search for anyone who's been reported missing from a conflictzone, not just US militarypersonnel, and not justAmericans.
Could be acontractor, someone working for anNGO, ahiker, foreignnationals,reporters.
I imagine their office as a super high-techworkspace, like the way NASA looks in themovies.
It's not thatsexy. It's definitely notsexy.
That'sAndrea, not her realname, andMichelle, also not her realname.
They told me the office iscubicles,computers,telephones.
Andrea and Michelle did not want to talk specifically about Bosecase, since it's ongoing in militarycourt.
But what they told me applies to hiscase, and to lots of other cases they've workedon.
Also, these women didn't want to use their realnames, because anything bow-related is sosensitive, sohot.
They worry they might sufferrepercussions, justpersonally.
If the publicknew, they tried to bring Bohome.
Anyway, their job didn't stop when the dust one was calledoff.
They keptgoing, until it wasover, five yearslater.
Again, Andrea and Michelle can't talk about the particulars of Bosecase, but they were pretty candid about what made their job especiallytricky.
They said there were a bunch offactors.
First ofall, at thattime, Andrea and the Michelle were kind of it forAfghanistan, in terms of personnelrecovery.
DOD had a good system for recovering downed pilots inAfghanistan, theysaid.
But other thanthat, there was no solid system in place to track people who wentmissing.
Here'sAndrea. They should have had two people or more sitting there in Afghanistan waiting to just support personnel recoveryevents.
Butinstead, everyone in the theater were dual-hatted ortriple-hatted.
They had differentjobs, and so when an eventoccurred, they couldhelp, but they certainly weren'texperts.
And that differedfrom,say, operations inIraq.
Andrea, how do you compare what was in place in Afghanistan versus what was in place inIraq?
For personallydifferent.
So Iraq had a personnel recovery division setup, and they had upwards of 15 people sitting in the same room with the only full-time job of recoveringhostages.
Imean, it was my only wish that we could have had something like that inAfghanistan.
We asked formany, manytimes.
That'sMichelle. I can't even begin to describe the pleading of establishing a cell like that over there that would have helped usimmensely.
Many more people had gone missing from Iraq than fromAfghanistan.
So it made sense that Iraq was much better equipped for theseevents.
Butstill, what that meant is that at a certainpoint, Michelle and Andrearealized, we can't do this job fromTampa.
They started rotating in and out ofAfghanistan, usually for months at atime, so they could manage their cases from theground.
When someone goesmissing, the PR team turns on every intelligence asset theycan.
Those assets might bepeople.
That's called human for humanintelligence, orSIGINT, signalsintelligence, communications you pick up from cell phones or electronicmessages, orGOINT, GO spatialintelligence, such as images of thelandscape.
And theirjob,ideally, is to layer all thisintel, to get the clearest picture they possibly can of where the personis.
Andthen, if you can get thatfar, hand that information off to the people who can actually do something aboutit.
Eithermilitarily, can we send in specialforces, forinstance?
Can we engineer an escape of some kind or a drone strike to set the hostagefree?
Ordiplomatically, can we get our ambassador in whatever country to try to negotiate for ourhostage?
Or a civilianoption? Remember when Bill Clinton went to North Korean2009, got those reporters at a prisonthere?
In Bosecase, all of thatwork, all of those potentialavenues, were stymied by the defining fact of his geographicalsituation.
He was inPakistan. InAfghanistan,DOD, which Andrew and Michelle are partof, DOD owns the battlespace, meaning they havecontrol, they have authority to direct operations and use whatever assets theyneed.
That's why the dust one for Bo could be as far reaching and aggressive as itwas.
But once you no longer own the battlespace, you have to start relying much more on other US government agencies that might be operating inPakistan.
Pretty much any three-letter agency that has a personnel recoveryelement.
NGA,DIA,CIA,FBI,NSA.
It's a CIA that has authority for US operations inPakistan,though.
So you really need theCIA.
Now it becomes amore...
we're doing a lot more asking forhelp.
And it all goes back to thepriorities.
Well, are all the other things that are happening inside of that country less important than this thing that we need rightnow?
Or are youtrumped?Trumped, forinstance, by currentevents.
That oftenhappens. That current events and politics on the ground in whatever country gets in the way of your PRmission.
During Bo'scase, we had some very rough patches in our relations withPakistan.
Take2011. As one former counterterrorism analyst toldus,quote, you couldn't possibly have a busier backdrop than in Pakistan at thattime.
That year started with the Raymond Davisdebacle.
Remember that one wasbizarre.
Davis was a CIA contractor who opened fire on two guys riding a motorbike in the middle of a crowded intersection inLahore.
Several people were dead by the end of it because of huge uproar inPakistan.
He was thrown injail. Then you had the US-led NATO air strikes on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that killed 28 Pakistanisoldiers.
The Hakanis based in Pakistan attacked our embassy in Kabul and NATOheadquarters.
16 peopledied. And that sameyear, the US raid in Abadabad that killed Asama binLaden.
Youknow, you really can't go to the table and start talking about maybe humanitarian releases on the tail endsof, youknow, unilateral operation into a sovereignnation.
It's usually not the best time to ask forhelp.
Bo's friends and family were also agitating on theirown.
And at certainpoints, their unofficial efforts became intertwined with official search business in curiousways, in ways that actually approachsuccess.
Kim, forexample, back toKim.
Kim lived in Idaho when Bo was ateenager.
He spent years hanging around with herfamily.
And they were sort of home-based for Bo for longstretches.
He'd stay withthem, work at the T-shop theyran.
Kim is the odd adult who actually lovesteenagers.
And she lovedBo. She understoodhim, she worried abouthim.
She'd do anything forhim, just as she would for ownkids.
Pretty early on in the search forBo, Kim was shut out by themilitary.
But she keptscheming, kept callingpeople.
She studiedmaps.Like, how can I get in deafAfghanistan?
Or how can I get intoPakistan?
I'm going to get myback, back at mypassport.
Oh, you really felt like I'llgo.
Oh, I'm going togo.Like, I'm going to go overthere.
I'm going to talk toyou,Pakistan,please.
I'm going to work with peaceorganizations.
I'm going to go over there and try and go on thetelevision.
Stupid.Now,Eve, I don't know what I'm thinking at thispoint.
There's got to be something that can bedone.
How far did you get withthe,like, I'm going to go toPakistan, Iguess.
To the point where someone canceled mypassport.
Yes. For my ownsafety, I'm canceling yourpassport.
I can't tellyou. It wasn't a sinister move by the government or anything likethat.
Just someone concerned about hersafety.
Bose parents were also active throughout trying to figure out what they coulddo.
They decided not to speak to me on tape for thisstory.
And asidehere, I read nothing into that decision apart from their best intentions for their own family and for other hostages still incaptivity.
They've been completely gracious to me throughout thisprocess.
And I'm grateful to them forit.
End of aside. Perhaps things like what I'm about to tell you about Kim were happening to Bose parentstoo.
I just don't know forsure.
Anyway, Kim says in November of2009, she didsomething, which I can't talkabout, which sort of paidoff.
In oneway, and that was it got my name and telephone number to someone very obscure inAfghanistan.
And he turned out to be someone that worked with theTaliban.
About six weekslater, Kim is at home in Portland and her cell phonerings.
It's a weirdnumber. She doesn'tanswer.
Ringsagain, there's amessage, but didn't understand a single syllable ofit.
And...Wait, it's a message or a voice mail on my iPhone because I wasn't answering thephone.
And atfirst, the first call he didn't leave amessage, it's a second call he left amessage.
And the third call I pickedup.
I thought it was somethinglike,well, it wasweird, sort of wrongnumber, youknow, directmail, youknow, likefun.
What?What? It's not myphone.
My cellphone, this isweird.
Soanyway, I did pickup, and he's speaking inPashto, it was very obviouslynot.
I was not able to understand it except for hesaid, soblah,blah,blah,blah,blah,blah,blah,blah,blah.
So that's when I wentcrap.
Youknow, this is what is goingon.
And my roommate wasthere, and like thisperson, youknow, I'm making faces out of me as I'm listening toPashto.
Solike, what do Ido? Youknow, so I toldhim, youknow, I saidemail,email, youknow, and he's goingemail,email.
Okay. So he hangsup, I hangup, I goonline, I try to find ways of pronouncing like phonetically letters for myemail.
Like how will Isay,K-I-M,blah,blah,blah, where he'll get theI-S,K-S-K-N-E,N-I-N-M-N-P,right?
But he called back like 10 minuteslater, and I'm trying to give him my email address with anaccent.
We go over it like three or fourtimes, and itworked.
I had no hope that this was going towork.
So I hang up 30 secondslater,bling, I get anemail, and four or 20 it's all inPashto.
It's not a single letter of our letterforms, except forBordal.
The rest is inPashto. So she cuts and pastes the message into one of those online translator sites to decipherit.
And what did itsay?Oh, itcompletely, the translation was likehorrible.
Was it like those sweatshirts that say like youknow, you're not evenhappy.
Like ahappy,happy, celebrate victorynow.
It wouldbe,hello,hello,hello,blah,blah,blah,blah,blah,blah,bridge,tomorrow,Bordal.
That's not what it actuallysaid, just a forinstance.
Kim understood thegist.
This guy had information aboutBo, and he wanted something inreturn.
So I justsaid, Iwill, I cannot helpyou.
I will find someone rightnow.
I will make phonecalls.
I will find someone very simple Englishsoon.
Kim calls afriend. What should Ido?
The friend tellsher, you need theFBI.
She contacts the FBI and eventually the FBI translates themessage.
He was proposing adeal.
And the deal was to share whenhe, he had access to where the locationswhere, where Bo wouldgo.
And where he was at any giventime, he had access tothat.
So hesaid, I can give you information where Bo's going tobe.
So that you guys can go get him in exchange I want out of thecountry.
How manyfamily, how many eight familymembers?
It sounds too good to betrue,right?
Butincredibly, this guy checkedout.
Kim can't say how the guy was connected to Bo's situation or what proof heprovided.
But apparently he checked out to the extent that the FBI began exchanging emails withhim.
They woulddo, so write some copy vaguely tell me what itmeant.
I had to trust them copy and paste it in my email and send it from my email address on mycomputer.
And not a different location because if they're goingto, if he's watching my IP and then he would know with somebodyelse.
So you were basically the FBI at this point is communicating with this guy throughyou.
Throughme, throughyou.
He's making it very clear that I have to get theemails.
If I'm not getting the emails then he's going tostop.
So it forcedme, youknow,well, I was willing to dowhatever.
Yousure? Youknow, this is just theleast.
But he knew he was also communicating with thegovernment.
Yeah, he had toknow. When she got that firstcall, Bo had been a prisoner with the Taliban for about sixmonths.
He was going through the worst winter of his whole fiveyears.
He was thecoldest, thesickest, thehungriest.
Ofcourse, Kim didn't know any ofthat, but she washopeful.
Maybe this could springhim.
The bestscenario.Yeah, they'll give them the location of the flying and swoop him up and take himhome.
Youknow, and we'redone.
Thefancy.Yeah,yeah, it'sover.
We, and that would have beengreat.
And so whathappened? Kim doesn't entirely know because her communication with the FBI was a one wayproposition.
Their mantra to her was need to know for goodreason.
All Kim does know is that for two yearsrunning, she signed releases so that the NSA could monitor herphone, hercomputer, herTV, could follow her if they wanted or hang out in front of herhouse.
And then after that two years wasup,nothing.
So it just kind of fizzled away after awhile.
From myperspective,yeah.
Yeah. I found out whathappened.
The FBI cultivated this source for a while and then passed him along to the Department ofDefense.
And it turned out thisguy, who called Kim on her cell phone one day because of some secret thing she did on her own to get her number to theTaliban.
This turned out to be one of the best leads they ever had in Bosecase.
One person tasked with finding Bo toldme,quote, I thought for sure that was theanswer,unquote.
But they could never quite make ithappen.
The guy wanted to bring his relativesover.
And if you bring nine people to the US under some version of witnessprotection, a government agency is going to have to take care of them for their whole livesmaybe.
And my source toldme, none of the agencies raised theirhand.
Evenso, Visa papers started to be drawn up just incase.
And then the guywithdrew.
He didn't respond when asked for details about his family members for thepaperwork.
Over the years when they'd go back to the drawing board atDOD, trying to think up solutions for findingBo, someone would always write this guy on thelist.
What abouthim? He was willingonce.
He's stillthere, stillactive.
Let's try himagain. But no one pursuedit.
One intel expert toldme, if you have all the tools youneed, you can find someone in less than 30days.
That's not to say you can rescue them in 30days, but you can at least findthem.
In Bo'scase, DOD did not have all the tools theyneeded.
And was never able to say with100% certainty where Bowas.
The US didn't have reliable human intelligence sources on the ground and wasiristan.
The Hakanis have that area locked down so tightly and are so good at propagating misinformation that they either couldn't get intel or couldn't trust what intel they didget.
So to figure out Bo's exactlocation, whichneighborhood, whichcompound, they needed for instancedrones.
And the drones have to be what's calledunblinking.
You can't lookaway. But DOD doesn't have drones operating inPakistan, so you have to ask other agencies to take a look foryou, such as theCIA.
And occasionally theywould.
They might give them a few hours here orthere, but it wasn't nearlyenough.
Because unless say Bo happens to get escorted to the latrine on that day at thattime, you're not going to seehim.
You need to watch and listen solidly for say a week to catch who's going in and out with theirsaying, maybe you follow one of thosepeople.
In otherwords, the drones give you a much better chance of pinpointing hislocation.
And with alocation, you can at least plan a rescueoperation.
One former DOD employee toldme,quote, it was literally two years of asking fordrones.
Andquote, the CIA declined to talk to us for thisstory.
They referred us to theDOD.
But here's what was goingon.
The CIA or the NSA or otheragencies, they have their ownbosses, their ownpriorities.
These priorities aren't general andethereal.
They arespecific. They are writtendown.
They must be approved by thepresident.
For theCIA, their priorities were things like targeting top al-Qaeda and Hakaneemembers.
And while hostage recovery might have been on thelist, on theirradar, it certainly wasn't at thetop.
And Burglow specifically wasn't on anybody'slist.
So it's understandable that the CIA can't just turn over their resources and manpower to a PR mission that isn't theirown.
In someinstances, these other agencies were doing the best they could under thecircumstances.
This tension is shot through all of these hostagecases, not justbows.
Are we doingenough? The answer to that depends in part on where you'resitting.
If you're Andrea andMichelle, this is all you think about allday, is getting your hostageshome.
What else can wedo? They said they had to fightcomplacency,malaise.
Because their priority wasn't everyone'spriority.
Even if onpaper, it was supposed tobe.
Michelle said they'd have to get wilysometimes, just to get the meetings theyneeded.
I needed time with a specific general in hisexec.
And I had been talking back andforth.
And he'slike, I just don't know if I can get thatdone.
And one of our counterparts was really good friends with that exec at thetime.
And she worked with a DIA and kind of put the bug in hisear.
Hey, we have our analyst out there and she needs time with thisgeneral.
And can you make thathappen?
And so she calls me and she'slike, I think I can get that done foryou.
But he really likes Johnny Walker Blacklabel.
If you canfacilitate, maybe putting that on his desk and maybe throw in some beefjerky, I think we can make thathappen.
So Idid. And I got the time Ineeded.
So it's just things likethat.
You're likeunbelievable.
Just to get in front of someone to talk about significant personal recoveryevents.
Youknow, you haveto. And I'm sure I'm sure Andrea has manystories.
It's very similar to what I just toldyou.
They do the most basic things just to remind people thatyes, there are American hostages inSyria,Afghanistan,Pakistan.
They'd put upposters, make those rubberbracelets.
Here'sMichelle. Andrea and I had gone toa.
Oh, I can't remember if it was Veterans Day or POW MIAday, but we she'd made shirts forus.
And we went to thisevent.
And we came back to the building thatday.
We're walking in and a colonel stopped us and he'slike,what?
Who is that on yourshirt?
This is Bernball and he's been missing for Xnumber.
I had no idea about thatreally.
And it'sjust, are you getting educationbulletin?
I can't believe thatstory.
That iscrazy. It'sinsane.
Andit's, youknow, the one that breaks my heart isColeman.
She gave birth andcaptivity.
Why are we not talking aboutthat?
That'sAndrea. Caitlin Coleman and her husband Joshua Boyle disappeared in Afghanistan in2012.
Caitlin was pregnant at thetime.
It justmakes, it makes my hearthurt.
Youknow, and you ask theAmerican, the average American on the street who sheis.
No,no,no. I just want to talk for a second about this very human thing thatoverlays,again, not just Bosecase, but all these hostagecases.
Take ColinRutherford.
He's a youngguy, aCanadian.
He was freed from the Taliban last week after more than fiveyears.
He'd been traveling in Afghanistan when he wentmissing.
And the day he wasreleased, the Canadian press coveredit, not the details of how andwhy, just the fact of hisreturn.
And the online comments immediately were things likethis.
Who goes on vacation toAfghanistan,bonehead?
Orthis? Headline shouldread, idiotrescued.
Who cares about thedetails?
And while I'm tempted to be all sanctimonious andsay, that'sawful, how can people be soawful?
The truthis, I've thought things likethis.
Imean, it'sgreat. They'rehome,but, youknow,also, it's thrown damnfall.
I admitit. And allwager, we've all thought things likethis,right?
It's notunconflicted.
Which makes us no different than a lot of the people charged withfinding,say, Caitlin Coleman or Colin Rutherford or BobErgdon.
The only differenceis, those people are not supposed to think likethat.
Circumstances of capture are not supposed to come intoplay.
Andrew and Michelle told merepeatedly, they really do not care about circumstances ofcapture.
First, you get the personback, and then comeconsequences,judgment,punishment, not the other wayaround.
Because there isn't a hostage situation out there that doesn't involve some aspect ofwrong-clays' wrongtime, some element of humanerror.
The surprise of their jobwas, their colleagues didn't always feel the sameway.
I think the biggest shock for me was thesalesmanship.
I didn't realize that I was going to have to convince them that supporting my mission was something that they shoulddo.
Ijust, I didn't think that that would be anissue, and itwas.
When you're standing before your peers and addressing the meeting in first andforemost, you have to get over the misconceptions of circumstances ofcapture.
And this brings true to a lot ofcases.
You'll hear thecomment,oh, he's just ajournalist.
He shouldn't have been thereanyways.
Why should we helphim?Or,oh, they were justhiking.
Why would they be hikingthere?
They could hike inColorado.
Oh, isn't that the kid that walked offbase?
Yeah, I can't even begin to tell you the amount of times that weheard,well, I should Icare.
He did that tohimself, or she didthis, or it was just some of some believable in certain cases with the level of leadership and the backgrounds of theseindividuals.
He just can't believe that they just saidthat, but in Bosecase, ofcourse, the why should I care attitude wasdoubled, maybe even cubed by the information that he'd walked off on hisown, by the hardship he'd put other soldiersthrough, by the rumors oftreachery.
Lieutenant Colonel Jason Amoryn nowretired, also worked on Bosecase.
Youknow, if you ask people aboutBergdahl, if they were completelyuninformed, itwas,oh, that's thetraitor.
If there were some Latinform, it wouldbe,oh, thatguy,yeah, I heard he was atreacher.
And if they're a little betterinformed, it wouldbe,well, people saythis, but I hear he was atraitor.
Imean, the refrain was almost always that the guy was atraitor, even though there actually wasn't any evidence he was atraitor.
And so that attitude was everywhere up and down the chain ofcommand.
Jason said he was once in a meeting with ageneral, and they had to cut it short because the general got so worked up about the fact that Bo had walkedoff.
The general was emotional aboutit, Jasonsaid.
It's not that people refuse to help or refuse to do theirjobs.
Everyone I talked to who was involved in Bose case said so many people tried so hard on thisone.
It's just that you start to wonder if this attitude is lurking all the way to thetop, then what ideas are not gettingthrough?
What's not even getting proposed because someone low down fear saying somethingunpopular?
Several people told me that for quite awhile, Bose case languished because no one working on it was influential enough to make bigdecisions.
Who areyou? Who areyou?
How can we describe who youare?
I am an intelligenceanalyst.
I have been since1999, I wouldsay.
This is a person I'm going to callNathan, that is not his realname.
He doesn't want to use his real name because although he's no longer in themilitary, he's still working for the militarysometimes.
And what he did in Bose case was so out ofschool, so notdone, that he worries about the consequences for his currentjob.
Nathan did not work directly on Bosecase, notofficially, but he was very close toit, watching from thesidelines, watching all these people not be able to accomplish much ofanything.
There were times along the way where there were variousplans, options to get himfreed, but nobody could make that decision or at least if theycould, they didn't wantto.
Again, we're not talking about why Nathan got so personallyfrustrated, but know that hedid, especially when it came to what officials were saying to Boseparents, Bob and JanieBergdahl.
This whole telling them every day or once a week or once amonth, we're doing everything that wecan.
That's notenough. You need to domore.
You need to be doing what it is youcan't.
The only way to make that happen in Nathan's estimation was to push the topic up higher than the captains and majors who are working on Bosecase.
It needed to go as high as it could go until it reached someone who could afford to expend political capital onBose, meaning ultimately the president himself had to getinvolved.
So Nathan started thinking aboutthis.
How do you catch the president'sattention?
He did what an Intel analystdoes.
Hethought, what assets haven't wetapped?
And it came tohim. TheBergdahls.
He thought if you could get Bose parents to push somebuttons, maybe Bose case could getunstuck.
About a year and a half into thecase, Nathan sent a message to the Bergdahls onFacebook.
He said to them the things that nobody else seemed to want tosay.
Like what were the blunt things you could say that wouldn't get said in abrief?
It'sbad. You know that likelisten,it's.
It's notas. It's difficult and here's why it'sdifficult.
Nobody wanted to they wanted to tip toe aroundthem.
Nathan said contacting them was the scariest thing he'd maybe ever done because he wasn't a high upguy.
It wasn't even his job to look forBose.
And while it wasn'tillegal, he wasn't telling them anything classified contacting them was so unprofessional in the world he comesfrom.
It's. You don't want to get personally involved typically with ananalyst.
You definitely want to keep your personal feelings out ofit.
You started injecting bias inthere.
It starts becoming aproblem.
In mostcases, this was definitely a case though that you needed to bepersonal.
You neededto. There needed to be a face onthis.
The Bergdahls were thesad,scared,fierce, determined parents of aPOW.
Nathan says he made it plain tothem.
You have more power than youknow.
People will take meetings withyou.
People will turn yourcalls.
They're going to at least give you fiveminutes.
And Bob was noslouch. He knew how to use his fiveminutes.
He'd studied the conundrum of his son'scircumstances.
He began to learnPashto, poured over Islamiclaw, read about Pashto in tradition to see if there was some loophole he could find some argument he could make for Boserelease.
He understood the history and the politics of theregion.
And he was already knocking on doors and askingquestions.
Nathan tried to leveragethat.
Why don't you go talk to somebody and joinchiefs.
Are they going to tell youno?
Hewould. And that was yoursuggestion?
Well,eventually.Eventually, you have it had tobe.
The chairman of the Joint Chiefs is the principal military adviser to the Secretary of Defense and to thepresident.
Bo didn't have 25 media companies writing an open letter urging action by the Secretary ofState.
Sometimes happens for foreigncorrespondents.
He didn't have ransom insurance as employees of private companies sometimesdo.
His parents weren't swish DCplayers.
There were people who lived in ruralIdaho.
Bose case wasn't goinganywhere.
They needed someone heavy to think Bo was worth thinkingabout.
And then they needed that person to give it apush.
So that was theplan. Apply pressure in myriadways.
Make it so that people with influence just happen to start hearing about Bo Bergdahl from varioussources.
Get them to perkup. Take aninterest.
And in thatway, inch closer and closer to thepresident.
Nathan began talking to the Bergdahlsregularly.
Maybemonthly, maybeweekly, depending on what was goingon.
He started guidingthem.
You know that person or that group or that commander who says he's doing everything hecan.
Well, he could be doingthis.
And were they then going back to that commander andsaying, what if what if you triedX?
Have you donethat?Yes.
Yes. Isee. There was a manipulation game goingon.
And that's what makes this very difficult to speakabout.
Were you telling them here's what you need toask?
Yeah. Your face looks worried when you saythat.
Yeah, it's why I am quiteworried.
Youare.Why? Because what couldhappen?
It's justmessy. It's justmessy.
A question might be if the United States could pay blood money to get the CIA contractor Raymond Davis out of a Pakistanijail.
Could they maybe do something similar forBo?
Some sort of ransom-ish payment that isn'transom?
I'm making thatup, but that seems like a goodquestion,right?
So did it feel like you were kind of runningthis,um, I don'tknow, scrappy second secret second missionalmost.
Yeah. That's like ashit.
It was like the shadow of the thing that's happening at theoffice.
Yes.Yes. We're runningsupport.
Right. We're runningsupport.
But totally andofficially.
Totally andofficially.
Nathan said itworked. He can't be specific about how itworked.
But he says itworked. Bob's role of decks filled up with people at the Pentagon and also the White House and the StateDepartment.
And Nathan believes the continued pressure created a sense of urgency about those case and got in on the desks of the people they were aimingfor.
There was another part of the strategy too to make noise sometimes publicly in a way they hope to keep bothsafe.
When the UBLraid, youknow, some have been loud and raid happened that through everything up in theair.
Youknow, what's going tohappen?
Is there going to be retaliatory hits on SargentBerk?
All they're going to take them out in thestreet, youknow, and saylike,look,well, you want to dothat, then here'sthis.
Nobody knew what was going tohappen.
I was about the time that Bob put out thatvideo.
I'm the father of captured US soldier Bo RobertBerkdall.
These are mythoughts. I can remain silent nolonger.
Strangely tosome. In May of2011, just a few days after the bin Ladenraid, Bob released a video onYouTube.
He addressed Mullah Sangeen and theHakanis, but his main message was straight to the Pakistanigovernment.
I addressed the Pakistani armedforces.
I personally appeal to General Keani and GeneralPasha.
Our family is counting on your professional integrity and honor to secure the safe return of ourson.
And Pasha was commander of Pakistan's intelligence service orISI.
Keani was the Pakistan Army's chief ofstaff.
That your nation diligently help our son be freed from hiscaptivity.
There's another striking thing about thisvideo.
And thatis, Bob is asking something of Pakistan so directly that American officials wouldnot.
Our soldier isthere. We know they know he'sthere, somewhere in what's called theFata, federally administered tribalareas.
And all thistime, the US is setting aside billions of dollars in aid and military support toPakistan.
According to a recent congressionalreport, between 2002 and2014, we gave them roughly $30 billion dollars alltold.
It's bigmoney. Yet we don't seem to be able tosay,hey,Pakistan, give himback.
Why isthat?Well,again, lots of expertslater.
Now I seewhy. Diplomacy isn't a snapper fingers kind ofbusiness.
It's a longgame. And in the longrun, we'd like to stay on decent terms withPakistan.
For some importantreasons.
Pakistan has nuclearweapons, which we'd really like them to keep a lidon.
We'd also like to keep our air and ground supply lines open inPakistan.
That's how we get stuff to our people inAfghanistan.
Pakistan helped us track down important al-Qaeda leaders and someTaliban.
And we'd like that tocontinue.
Many influential people in our government would also like our drones to keep flying and sometimes killing people inside Pakistan aswell.
And we've got long-term development goalsthere,too.
We'd like to keep helping Pakistanis with education and cleanwater, maybe because we're just nice likethat, but more likely because we want to keep them on ourside.
Because if Pakistan goes the way of say Iran becomes ourenemy, plus those nuclearweapons, that's a scenario we'd very much like toavoid.
So when we might risk our relationship with Pakistan in order to take out Osama binLaden, we're not going to jeopardizeit, not to thatdegree, for one USserviceman.
We're not going to come out publicly and boss Pakistanaround, even if we could dothat, or call their leaders a bunch ofliars.
Ambassador MarkGrossman, who is the State Department Special Representative for Afghanistan andPakistan, told us he did bring bow-up in meetings with high level Pakistani governmentofficials, but he didn't expect them to domuch.
He said expectations arelow, but you do it because it'sright, and you never know what's going tohappen.
And hesaid, if you say to the Burgdalls and to thepublic, we're doing everything wecan, then you better be doing everything youcan.
In2012,2013, a couple of army generals decided to dosomething,separately.
One of the generals realized the PR team at SENTCOM was woefully understaffed and wasn't gettinganywhere.
He assigned an elite unit to thetask, a Delta Forceteam, a bigdeal.
The CIA was roped inmore, whichhelped, but evenso, the PR team never got the intel it hopedfor.
And then anothergeneral, a soon to be fourstar, also gotinvolved.
A general Bob Burgdall also met withincidentally.
Around January of2013, we're briefing General Campbell on our differentprojects.
And at the end of thebrief, General Campbellsaid,hey, this is allgreat.
I want you to know that my top priority is getting Sergeant Burgdallhome, so if there's anything you guys can do to helpout, I'd appreciateit, and that ended themeeting.
That's Jason Amarineagain.
He recently retired from the army after 27years.
Jason is one of the most celebrated soldiers of the Afghanistanwar.
He was there in2001, commanding a special forces team that fought alongside Hamid Karzai in SouthernAfghanistan.
The army even made an action figure out ofhim.
Jason is as close as you could get to putting GI Joe on the Burgdallcase.
His stellar career nearly unraveled last year in connection with his work on hostagerecovery, which maybe you heardabout.
Lastyear, he testified before Congress about among otherthings, the dysfunction in US hostagepolicy.
Back in January of2013, Jason was leading a team of strategists at the Pentagon that was supposed to find solutions to some of the army's biggestproblems.
This group worked for General JohnCampbell, who was in charge of operations and plans for thearmy.
Myproducer, DanaChivas, interviewedJason.
General Campbell just seemed almost haunted by the fact that we hadn't gotten Burgdallhome.
It was just the way he said it tous.
This wasn't just idlebanter.
It wasreally, if there was anything you coulddo, youknow.
It was more emotional than a tactical sort ofdirective.
Yeah,absolutely. With GeneralCampbell, it was aheartfelt, youknow, how do we get himhome?
And that struckme. And after themeeting, I grabbed a couple of myplanners.
And I said tohim, youknow, it seems like something is really fucked uphere.
That was just the feeling that Ihad.
Jason and his team decided to do an audit of Bosecase, who was doing what all thoseyears, why hadn't itworked?
What they found is that the efforts seemed to be moving along twotracks.
So calm was trying to put togetherplans.
So calm is special operationscommand, which runs eliteunits, think Delta Force or NavySEALs.
And then Jason said they could see that the State Department was onit, trying to work withQatar, trying to get the Taliban to the negotiatingtable.
In meetings he'd had with FBI andothers, Jason learned Bose wasn't the only one being held hostage by theHakanis.
There was Caitlin Coleman and Josh Boyle and theirchild.
And there were others alsonearby.
Warren Weinstein was being held by AlQaeda.
He was subsequently killed in a dronestrike.
Knowing about all these others shook Jason prettyhard.
Imean, I was in uniform for 27years, youknow, forme, the notion of not leaving a soldierbehind, you know that you internalizethat.
And forme, it was just always a false assumption that America doesn't leave Americansbehind.
I'd never been put in such a ridiculous position beforeof,wait, there are these Americans that nobody gives a fuckabout.
Nobody is doing anything to get themhome.
Our greater bureaucracy is treating their families horribly while telling the families to just shut up andwait.
Imean, tome, it was bordering on criminal how we were treating our commoncitizens.
Jason's mission had been to try to figure out how to get bowback.
Now he added anothermission.
Why not try for morehostages?
Maybe all thehostages.
So Jason's team comes up with a couple ofalternatives.
He starts shopping around one idea inparticular.
He gets pretty far withit.
But then he can't tell who exactly is incharge.
Imean, you had Sankh Khan that assumed Sok Khan hadit.
You had Sok Khan that assumed the State Department hadit.
And monthslater, after a lot ofmeetings, I'd finally figure out that the State Department assumed that the military hadit.
Wow. So it was this bigloop, was Sankh Khan deferring to SokKhan, Sankh Khan deferring to the StateDepartment.
And the State Department really just deferring toDOD.
But there wasn't anybody there asking the questions to even figure out that it was that big of amess.
Jason took the problem to acongressman, which rather surprisingly led to Jason being investigated by thearmy.
Eventually that was alldropped.
Thecongressman, representative DuncanHunter, a veteran of both the Iraq and Afghanistanwars, proposed legislation to try to fix hostagepolicy.
Other people I've spoken to in government say Jason'sassessment, least in Bosecase, wasn't quiteaccurate.
That the various agencies were more aware of each other's plans than Jason gave them creditfor.
Butstill, everyone I talked to agreed with Jason that our system for dealing with hostages wasn'tgreat.
Cooperation between agencies wasshaggy.
Policies were sometimesinconsistent.
People weren't on the samepage.
That was especially clear after reporter James Foley waskilled, grew similarly and publicly inSyria.
A couple of months after Bo camehome.
In December of2014, President Obama ordered a review of how the US deals with thesecases.
And six months later he announced an update in hostagepolicy, saying that he'd met with thefamilies.
Quote, I acknowledged to them in private what I want to saypublicly.
That it is true that there have been times where ourgovernment, regardless of goodintentions, has let themdown.
I promised them that we can dobetter.
When I first started looking into this question of what did we do to get Boback,frankly, I didn't think it would be all that difficult toanswer, which silly memaybe.
Butstill, at least I thought the answer would belinear.
But a chain of events would revealitself.
One link leading to another attached toanother.
Instead, I found a bunch of people whose stories were all prettydifferent, but whose central theme was thesame.
Frustration. Why aren't we doingmore?
Who's blocking thiseffort?
Why? They described struggling against a tangle of competing interests they couldn't control and sometimes couldn't evensee.
It sounded as if there was a scandal touncover.
And maybe there was dishonesty and even malevolence in somecorners.
But mostly I think it's because the truth is there's alimit.
There have to be limits on how much werisk, how much we giveup, to get one personback.
And for a longtime, Bo loomedsmall.
To putit, ofcourse, he wasn't worthit.
He was tucked in among so many othercrises, a smallfire, smoldering among all these giant fires that also need to be putout.
The time to deal with him is when he becomes somethingelse, somethinguseful, a way to put out a biggerfire.
Bob Burke told me the family was always against a rescueattempt.
He said he studied the Afghanistan Pakistan border in minute detail on Google Earth for two weeks after Bo wentmissing.
Based on where he figured Bowas, he thought a rescue in a place like MiriamShah, even for an elite special operationsunit, wouldn't beviable.
It was just toodangerous.
Quote, we thought it unethical to risk the lives of numerousindividuals, especially when we knew back channel communication was possible or even actuallyhappening.
We believed Bo would agree with thatethic,unquote.
Mark and Bo talked about not exactlythis, but they talked about how much should have been sacrificed to find him in that initial dust oneperiod.
And Bo said in an idealworld, which he gets isn't the one the military livesin, but if he could have directed the initialsearch, he would have made itvoluntary.
And he would have been okay with soldiers who hadn't volunteered because he gets that they didn't understand his truemotives.
If in their mind they'relike,well, this guy isdeserted, I'm not going to go look forhim.
Youknow, youknow, I would belike, allright,fine, understood becauseyeah, they rewrite the resent what happens because from what they're lookingat, they're going all this guy's screwsover.
Why should we then back up likeourselves?
Why should we then sweat and bleed for thisguy?
Ifhe, youknow, screwed usover.
But what if they had known exactly why hewalked?
What specifically Bo wasseeing?
Would it make anydifference?
Next time oncereal. Serial is produced by JulieSnyder, Dana Chivas and me in partnership with MarkBowle, MeganEllison, HugoLingerin, JessicaWeisberg, PageOne, and Anna PernaPictures.
Ira Glass is our editorialadvisor, editing help this week from JoelLovell.
Whitney Dangerfield is our digitaleditor, research by KevinGarnett, fact checking by MichelleHarris, copy editing by AnnaHeelani.
Our music is composed by NickThorburn, FritzMyers, and MarkPhillips.
The show is mixed by KateBalinsky, Kristen Taylor's our communityeditor, other serialstaff, SethLind, EmilyCondon, EliseBergerson, and KimberlyHenderson.
Special thanks this week to VivaHardeg, AriShapiro, TheoPadnos, JessicaGoldstein, JeffEgger's, CaitlinHayden, and DanMarkey.
Our website iscerealpodcast.org.
This week we've posted the video of Bob Bergdahl appealing to the Pakistani government and will put more stuff up there next weektoo, so keepchecking.
Again, thatcerealpodcast.org.
Stay tuned for a preview of our nextepisode, butfirst, cereal is a production of this American life and WB EasyChicago.
Coming up on the next episode ofcereal.
You see guys with helmetson?
Nobody has a helmeton. You see a bunch of guys waiting to get fuckingkilled.
That's what yousee. I remember thinking that I thought that I was going to die thatday.
It's awar. It's what we all signed up todo.
And then we'reout. Out there handingout, youknow, watercolor maps ofAfghanistan.
Wondering how is this going towork?
Youknow, I figured there'd be a little bit more shootinginvolved.
It was a badsituation. Because we all had weird thoughts while we're over there isolated fromanybody.
The things that he starts saying about thearmy.
