On the last episode of Serial, which has moved to a biweekly format, host Sarah Koenig painted a portrait of the Haqqanis, who were holding Bowe Bergdahl captive in Pakistan and his treatment – held in an iron cage, tortured with a razor – while in their custody. It was a bleak portrait of a soldier held in deplorable conditions by enemy forces. It was an especially interesting episode in light of the fact that the US army has decided to table discussions on whether Bergdahl is entitled to two military honors, including the PoW Medal and the Purple Heart, which is given to troops who are killed or wounded by an enemy force.  Despite the wretched conditions he was held in, Bergdahl desperately clung to the idea that he would be freed, even as months stretched into years. On this episode of Serial, Koenig explores what was happening in the US to make that happen.  In July 2009, a few weeks after Bergdahl went missing, his longtime friend Kim Harrison decided to take matters into her own hands. She knew someone high up in Interpol, the international police force, and filed a missing person report with them in the hopes that they would get involved. While at first Interpol scoffed at the idea, they realized they actually might be able to help because they had been investigating the Taliban in Pakistan in the wake of the Mumbai bombings.  To get Interpol on the case, though, Harrison needed to file a missing person report in Portland, Oregon – 7,000 miles from where Bergdahl was being held. Since this is undoubtedly one of the less weird things the Portland police have been asked to get involved with, they filed the report, Harrison sent a sample of Bergdahl’s DNA. (a Cheshire Cat mask, specifically) and Interpol started a so-called Yellow Notice for Bergdahl. All that was left was to convince the Department of Defense that it was a good idea. They denied the request, but Harrison wouldn’t accept that answer, and became a “squeaky, nagging, not-behaving female” to help her friend. Still, she could not get the Department of Defense to budge and Interpol could not help in the hunt for Bergdahl.  Koenig spoke for us all when she said, “What the heck?” This cannot be the system for trying to find and free a prisoner of war. Of course it’s not. But Bergdahl’s captivity by the Haqqanis on behalf of the Taliban in the supposedly friendly nation of Pakistan made the situation extremely complicated. In the end, though, it wasn’t a military operation that got Bergdahl released – it was a diplomatic deal that traded five Taliban detainees held in Guantánamo Bay. But before the US president got involved, the hunt for Bergdahl was in the hands of what Koenig describes as “well-meaning people much, much lower down the chain – or not in that chain at all”.  After Bergdahl went missing, the Personnel Recovery (PR) department of the US military’s Central Command Unit were put in charge of the hunt for Bergdahl. Unfortunately, according to Koenig’s two anonymous sources, the military had no real system for tracking missing people in Afghanistan. There were just two people who Koenig gave the names Andrea and Robin, trying to do the work from Tampa, Florida, but they kept at it for five years. Eventually the two women ended up going to Afghanistan to work with their informants and try to find Bergdahl. But, of course, Bergdahl was being held in Pakistan, which complicated the situation due to its supposedly friendly status with the US. Politics on the ground got in the way of the PR department’s efforts. In 2011, those politics included a CIA agent opening fire on Pakistani citizens, US-led airstrikes on the Pakistan-Afghanistan border, the bombing of the US embassy in Kabul by the Haqqanis, and the death of Osama bin Laden. On the tale end of all that, as one of Koenig’s PR sources said, “You really can’t go to the table and start talking about humanitarian releases.”  Meanwhile, Harrison had not given up her hunt for Bergdahl and was scheming on how to go to Pakistan or Afghanistan to find him. Harrison eventually did “something” that she wouldn’t talk about, but it “sort of paid off”. She ended up in communication with someone in Afghanistan who sends her an email in Pashtun, which she sends to the FBI for translation. The man in Afghanistan was proposing a deal to trade safe passage of his eight family members out of the country for Bergdahl. The guy checked out and the FBI started emailing with him. This turned out to be one of the best leads they ever had on Bergdahl’s case, but the man eventually disappeared and the lead vanished.  If the military could figure out where Bergdahl was being held, they could begin to plan a rescue operation, but the Haqqanis had Waziristan locked down making it almost impossible to get reliable on-the-ground informants to help locate the missing soldier. That meant the best option was so-called “unblinking drones”, but the military didn’t have drones operating in Pakistan, but the CIA did. “It was literally two years of asking for drones,” said one Department of Defense source. But hunting for Bergdahl wasn’t the top priority for the CIA – or anyone, really, according to Koenig.  As the years dragged on, the military’s PR team was still hunting for Bergdahl and the two women in charge of the operation had to “get wily” to do their job, including slipping a general a bottle of Johnny Walker Black Label and some beef jerky to get a meeting and printing up T-shirts with Bergdahl’s face on them to foment conversation.  Of course, Bergdahl wasn’t the only American to go missing in Afghanistan. Caitlin Coleman and her husband were taken captive in 2012 and Coleman gave birth in captivity. Colin Rutherford, a Canadian tourist held by the Taliban since 2011, was freed just last week. “It makes my heart hurt,” said Andrea.  For the PR team, they were surprised that they had to convince their military peers to support their mission to bring Bergdahl and the other hostages home. Many in the military seemingly chalked up the capture of a tourist or a hiker or a soldier who deserted his post as simply a bad choice with a bad consequence, which don’t necessarily require military intervention. “I didn’t think that would be an issue,” said Andrea who was surprised to find herself justifying her mission to her peers.  When civilians are taken it’s bad enough, when a soldier walks off base its “doubled or maybe cubed”, said Koenig, clarifying that “it’s not that people refused to help”, Bergdahl’s case simply languished because no one on the team had the power to get anything done.  A former military intelligence analyst, Koenig calls him Nathan, was frustrated by the lack of movement on Bergdahl’s case. To get the case unstuck he recruited Bergdahl’s parents, Bob and Jani, and told them what was really going on in the case, which was not much at all. “There needed to be a face on this,” said Nathan, because no one was going to turn down a meeting with grieving parents. The Bergdahls sprang into action. Bob Bergdahl even released a video asking Pakistani generals to release his son, something the US military and government did not want to do due to the complicated relationship with Pakistan.  In 2012, a general finally realized the PR team was understaffed and brought in a Delta Force team and roped in the CIA. In January 2013, General John Campbell took over Bergdahl’s case and seemed determined to get Bergdahl – and maybe the other American hostages, too – home. His team, including US army captain Jason Amerine, a war hero turned whistleblower, audited the situation and soon found that the system to get back hostages was very dysfunctional and convoluted. In fact, in the wake of this, President Obama revamped the system.  Next episode: Serial will look into Bergdahl’s reasons for walking off his post.  (1) Army tables decision on Bowe Bergdahl’s POW Medal and Purple Heart until after court-martial  (2) Bergdahl’s writings reveal a fragile young man  (3) US family seeks pregnant daughter missing in Afghanistan  (4) Young American mother Caitlin Coleman and her baby are among dwindling number of Taliban-held US hostages  (5) Why is this war hero being investigated?
This episode of the now biweekly podcast examines efforts in the US to find Bowe Bergdahl, involving a determined friend and a cat mask