Excerpt from The Adventurist by Robert Young Pelton

Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia – The helicopter ascended: white, clean and gleaming. I was filthy; burnt, brown, mud-dirty and disheveled, from exploring bat shit filled caves in the interior of Borneo, shooting rapids and sliding through dark forest floors. This was the quickest way to get where I wanted to go. A place where no one had been. Once on board and aloft, the complexities of the jungle intermingled into a rich, green blanket. The heavy heat became an icy coolness as the Bell 206 gained altitude.

From above the miles and miles of jungle carpet, the ground was unbroken, except by a few large rivers that had cut the dirt right down to the sandstone. Here, there was diversity, but also a monotony of endless green: a carpet of color every few miles from a flowering tree, subtle shades of green, blending from dark brownish green to light green and even yellowish green. If the helicopter went down in this canopy, we would never be found.

Off in the distance we saw the crisp shape of a continent rising above an ocean of mist. The sharp outline of the steep cliffs cut an exact shoreline in this cloud as if it were an island.

The only ground access in is a full day hike from the nearest timber camp on the Tawau Keningau timber road. The downside to this method is a very steep and dangerous cliff ascent late in the day or early the next morning.

My plan is to drop the gear at a crudely cleared helipad first, then have the pilot drop us off wherever he can find a hole. First I wanted to see just what I was up against.

I motioned the pilot to take us higher to get a better idea of the shape of this vast island within an island. The Maliau basin looks like an elephant track in hard dirt that has been washed by rain. The basin also could be described as a crown shape that rises in the north to a tiara-like configuration and slopes down on each side to where rivers have cut a series of jagged canyons through which they spill like wax from a candle. The Maliau is an important drainage basin that creates the Sungai Maliau, which tumbles down to create the Maliau Falls, then drains into the Kuamut, which links up with the Kinabatangan.

The area is so vast that we flew long and hard before we found the chain of rapids and waterfalls spilling out of the basin seen by so few people. The drainage of the entire 25 kilometer-wide basin made a most impressive showing. As the pilot dived and maneuvered between the steep cliffs, the ground turned from a smooth carpet to individual giants. What had looked like strewn pebbles were house-sized boulders. What had looked like rapids, were 20-30 foot waterfalls that cascaded into basin after basin. An extraordinary sight.

The pilot tapped his gauge, alerting us to his low fuel. We broke out of our aerial reverie and began to search for the helipad. Crude helipads had been hacked out of the dense jungle to let the research and survey teams in. But no one had penetrated the remote interior. Until now.

The helicopter touched down lightly in a clearing, not really putting any weight on the undergrowth. I leaped out and immediately sank up to our chests in moss. Shocked by the lack of solid footing,  the firm peat forest floor was an illusion. Their were three to four feet of moss and leaf litter before the trees rooted in the thin hard bedrock.

Labored like horses in deep snow we moved the gear away from the rotor wash. As the chopper lifted back into the bright sunlight, we had a chance to record our first impressions of the Maliau Basin.

It was cool near the rim. The altitude and humidity created an agreeable atmosphere. There was moss everywhere. The curious lack of soil and depth of the moss was typical of a peat forest. The trees were not the typical lowland dipterocarps. Here, there were conifers. Big conifers.

It was a discomforting feeling to descend from the clear, piercing blue sky into the dark grasps of the jungle. The trees towered above us. The contours of the basin, which had seemed gentle and caressing, were now wickedly steep and forbidding. Instead of seeing clearly in 360 degrees, we were now confined to staring at patches of sky through 60-100 foot trees.

Our weight restrictions and the distance we needed to fly to get to the Maliau dictated that we make two trips. Our solution was to send Jon back with the pilot to help find the helipad.

We flew into helipad four and set up camp at the base of the hill, lugging our gear and crashing through the dense brush like drunk elephants.

We were just five minutes down the trail and suddenly Tony asked us to stop. It appeared he had already made a discovery. He pointed to a thimble-sized plant that closely resembled a cross between an alien spaceship and a Victorian light standard. He collected the second finding ever of a small saprophytic plant; Thysmia aescananthus. The tiny plant is nestled under the roots of a tree and would have been easily crushed. Tony mentioned in a casual manner that the first time this plant was found was in exactly this same spot on an earlier expedition. The uniqueness and fragility of this area began to sink in.

Tony explained that we were in unique coniferous forest dominated by huge Agathus (related to the New Zealand cowrie pines), dacridiums and podocarpus trees, mixed with oaks and casserinas as it mixes with the lower hill dipterocarp forest.

This was truly pristine forest. There was no evidence of fire. There have been no natural calamities. There are no people to disturb the forest and there is no wind. Nothing to disturb the test tube-like conditions for creating new species. The only major trauma is the life cycle of the giant trees as they grow, die, and then crash into the forest, unheard and unseen, creating a gaping hole in the canopy for their offspring to fill.

In 1947, a pilot flying from the west coast of British North Borneo to Tawau experienced a rude shock when he narrowly avoided colliding with a wall of steep cliffs emerging from the misty jungle. This minor incident is the first recorded mention of the Maliau Basin. The “Lost World” was recorded in the Borneo Bulletin—and then quietly slipped back into obscurity.

The nearest Dusun villagers lived only four days away, but their belief that a fierce dragon inhabited Lake Limunsut at the base of the cliffs didn’t encourage exploration. Muruts along Sungai Sapulut were known to have reached the lower basin, calling it the “Mountain of Stairs” in reference to the many waterfalls and limestone ledges.

The first Western attempt to enter the “Lost World” was in 1976 during a forest service expedition to Lake Limunsut. They tried in vain to scale the escarpment but were forced to turn back just forty feet from the upper edge

Four years later, the Sabah Museum mounted an expedition to penetrate this remote area. The expedition ran out of supplies, was felled by malaria, and had to give up before they could conquer the escarpment.

In 1982, they managed a brief reconnaissance by helicopter, landing on a gravel bar near the falls.This preliminary mission was designed to lay the groundwork for a more intensive expedition a year later. They were greeted by animals that had never seen man before: a docile 22 foot, 400 pound python, mildly curious bearded pigs and a kijang, deer. In all, this brief foray into the wilderness posed more questions than it answered.

Finally, in April-May of 1988, a 43 man expedition spent three weeks in the Maliau unlocking its secrets. What they found was impressive. The 390 square kilometer basin covers an area of 25 kilometers across and is protected by an encircling escarpment that climbs up to 1500 meters. The highest point is Gunung Lotung, estimated to be 1900 meters high, but it has yet to be properly surveyed.

This expedition identified 47 species of mammals, including rhino, proboscis monkey and clouded leopard; 175 species of birds, including the Bulwer’s Pheasant (once thought extinct in Sabah); and 450 species of plants, many of them rare species.Their scientific finds and increased understanding of this absolutely untouched region led them to declare it a conservation area. But, along with the numerous rare plants and unusual ecosystems, the expedition also discovered significant coal seams.

There had also been a more adventurous and less scientific foray into the Maliau. Jon Rees walked in from Sapulut with three other Americans, a New Zealander and a Brit. They had heard there was a place no one had ever been, so they hiked through solid jungle from Sapulut for three days, plunged down into the Maliau River, walked along the ridge trail for five days, spent time in the central area and then devised a curious way to exit the basin. They had carried in canisters of two chemicals, used in boat building to create a buoyant foam. They also carried in two presewn plastic socks sewn in the shape of a Hobie cat.

The group tried to create hulls by hanging the socks in a tree, mixing the chemicals and pouring the chemical mixture into the socks. However, instead of a light, crisp vessel, they got two soggy bananas. The foam did not expand to its full volume, due either to altitude, heat, humidity or to all three. Nonetheless, they made a platform with roughly hewn crossbars and an old tennis net, tied sticks to the sawed-off blades of paddles, and proceeded to float down the Kuamut for 10 days to get out.

Their total time in the country was 27 days longer than any other outsider before them. During their foray they came across all the major mammals of Borneo except the rhino, and discovered “Jalan Babi,” a curious highway used by pigs to enter the Maliau. The profusion of coniferous and oak trees attracts the pigs in impressive numbers every year. The interior and the edge was still a tantalizing goal for scientific discovery.

Because of the area’s inaccessibility, various expeditions had passed the Maliau Basin by, or skirted its perimeter. The Maliau also had a curious history of being discovered and then undiscovered. My team would consist of Coskun who would cover our trip for European and Turkish magazines, Jon Rees a British born expeditor who lived in Sabah and Tony Lamb, a botanist whose fascination and experience with the Maliau Basin made him the perfect choice for our expedition. Tony was in charge of the Tenom Research Center, now retired, and his special interest is in the identification, propagation, and domestication of tropical fruits. He also has a vast knowledge of local insects, birds and mammals. His knowledge of the orchids and plants is encyclopedic. Only accurate identification of the multitude of trees prompts him to defer to a tree expert.

Tony was born in Ceylon, (now Sri Lanka) and grew up on a tea plantation during the British colonial period. Being educated in England and spending many years in Malaysia, another former British colony, may explain his genteel and pleasant nature.

The idea was to penetrate the upper basin and then head into parts unknown. We began our trek to the rim and then down along the edge to our rendezvous at a pre agreed base camp. For navigation we had a compass and a crude map.

The size of the Maliau is overwhelming. Like most wilderness areas, there is a mixture of monotony and surprise: smooth skinned gum trees, disrobed and red in the normally green jungle; streams that run with tea-colored water; pitcher plants that festoon trees like Christmas decorations. As we increased in altitude the trees became stunted, the moss became thicker and the forest wetter.

We could tell when we were close to the rim because we hit a green wall of moss. There is a distinct rim forest that lives in the constant wash of the mist and fog that pours over the rim. The trees are twisted and gnarled with their roots raised as if to keep their feet dry. The moss is constantly wet. Walking through the almost impenetrable maze of roots and branches drenches you as they squish their burden of water. It is chilly. It is also silent. There does not appear to be any life along the rim.

Another surprise was that the spectacular view we thought would greet us, did not exist. The dense growth at the rim blocked any chance to get a clear view of the surrounding jungle. We were floating in a “sea of mist” that stretched as far as the eye could see. “Sea” is an appropriate description because the mist bobs and ebbs like an ocean. It hits the cliffs, curls up and then floats above the trees, spraying a fine cool mist over the trees and moss.

I pushed out to get a view over the ledge and had a gut wrenching revelation. When the mist cleared for a few seconds, I saw below me over a thousand feet of sheer cliff. More correctly, “behind” me was over a thousand feet of sheer cliff. I had learned another intriguing fact about the rim forest. The roots of the trees grew far out over the cliffs. Covered with moss and detritus and being continually moist, the roots support more plants and trees, encouraging the process to repeat itself. I should have learned my lesson when we leaped off the helicopter into a mossy trap. Wiser, I gently returned to the safety of the cliff five feet behind me.

Tony and I, realizing that the day was getting late and that we had a long hike ahead of us, made haste along the rim. From the air, the rim looks like a smooth, clean edge sloping softly to a basin. Toiling ant like on the ground, it is a wonderland of ravines, cliffs, gullies and inaccessible smaller cliffs. In some places, water too impatient to flow into the central basin, has sliced through the edge of the precipice, creating a magical series of waterfalls and ledges ending in one last leap of escarpment. The water never hits the ground, dissipating into mist and drops of moisture.

We made our way through alleys of 20 feet high, five feet wide and 60 feet long slabs of sandstone. We clambered up the root-bound cliffs and slid down the other side. We passed the remains of a camp. This was the first evidence of man after the helipad—further evidence of the search for coal. In the coming days we would come upon holes dug to measure the depth of soft black coal. They had picked a most impressive spot: water had carved a notch in the cliff face providing a picture window view of the top of the mist sea.

Soon the path flattened out. Instead of the steep climbing and tumbling, we were dodging, ducking and twisting around the chaotic moss forest. I couldn’t help but think of British Columbia or the Olympic National Park in Washington. It was cool, green and refreshing when we were moving at a clip. We took a short breather. As soon as we stopped, the chill attacked.

We pressed on. Tony vaguely remembered there is a quicker route further down the rim. I chose to travel along the rim in my quest for a photograph that would capture the congested wet moss forest and the ocean of fog that gave us tantalizing peeks, but never the full picture.

The game path was now marked with survey sticks and occasionally flagging tape. We had been walking for a full day without food or water. Luckily, we were traveling light and the cool wet rim had made water abundantly unnecessary.

Tony’s muttering, normally an ongoing description of plant life and other information, turned to concern. He didn’t remember that ridge. We should be higher up. It was getting rather late.

Our crude maps showed we were still quite a long way from the helipad and eventual base camp where our gear was stored. Looking back, I could see the profile of the cliff that matched the map. The problem was, I was looking up at the ridge and it was behind me.

We continued. We were losing altitude at an alarming rate. It was getting darker. Now Tony and I were sure something was wrong. The map showed a smaller plateau below the cliff edge. We had been mindlessly following a game trail that we assumed would follow the ridge. Instead, we had found a way out of the basin and down the cliff.

We discussed our situation. We could turn back, but we didn’t know exactly where we went off the ridge and down onto this lower plateau. Since the path winds and curves tree by tree there would be no sure way of knowing where the path diverged, if it diverged at all. Plus, it was getting dark. Being lost in unexplored jungle at night with sheer cliffs was not a welcome feeling.

We decided to go forward because it would take us closer to our rendezvous. We would then cut in towards the cliff face as we got to the end of this minor plateau. There might be a way up, similar to the way we were fooled into coming down.

We continued losing height until we were in the depths of a black swamp. Trees blocked the light as our feet were sucked into the dark ooze. We were tired. It was late and the swamp was a depressing place to spend the night. Noxious gases were released as we struggled to pull our feet free. A blue oily film floated on the surface of the mosquito infested slime.

We decided that the swamp was the last place we wanted to spend our first evening in the Maliau. We could see the cliffs looming above us. We made a bold decision. We would push up the cliffs since the path we were taking went deeper and deeper into the lowland jungle.

Tony was tired. He had been helicoptered in from his comfortable desk job and he was now sitting in a dark swamp, about to cliff climb with a stranger, at night, in one of the most remote jungles in the world.

I was concerned about him. He had twenty years on me, but he was the one who suggested that we haul ourselves up the cliff. All he asked was that we have a good rest before we attempted the ascent. I gave him what little water I had, knowing it would be the last of our water for some time.

The sun had set, but there was still a dull light that illuminated our climb. The first section up was through tight brush and razor-sharp rattan. It was demanding, but doable.

We hit the first ledge. Using cracks in the rock, we pulled ourselves up. We hit our second ledge. Once again there were enough crevices to gain a purchase. Then we hit the wall—sheer cliff that ended in a green cornice of tangled, moss-covered roots. Momentarily set back, we explored the base of the cliff for a way up. We were drenched by the constant fall of water from the moss forest high above us. We had followed a narrow game trail along the base. We could spend the night here in the overhang below the face, but the sight of our quest, after working so hard, drove us on.

We had no ropes, no climbing gear, so it would be tough going. Office building size chunks of cliff had fallen off and blocked our way on the side. Occasionally there was a collapsed section but they ended up in sheer overhangs. Finally, we found what we were looking for: a section of the cliff that had fallen away leaving a crack that enabled us to get tantalizingly close to the green overhang—more importantly, a large tree root that gave us something that would allow us to hike up the clean, cliff face.

I climbed up to see if it was possible. I pointed out to Tony that once we were over, we could not come back down. We could find another cliff face just as high, if not higher, beyond this climb. Tony told me to go first. We could barely see in the dusk. We were soaked with sweat, hungry and thirsty after our climb. We didn’t know if we had the energy to make this climb.

I began to climb. I fell back, a handful of moss and dirt clutched in each hand. I burrowed my hands to find something solid. I began to climb slowly and nervously. A slight tug or pressure could bring down tons of rock and trees on top of me.

As I gained in height, the chance of going back down seemed dimmer and dimmer, making each upward move that much more desperate. My muscles were shaking with exertion as I reached the cornice. What looked like a green ledge was now a four foot overhang covered in slippery moss and elastic roots. For awhile I was baffled. I could not get a grip on anything to move myself back and then over. I could not go down, sideways or up. My muscles were turning weak and my mouth was dry. I locked my legs around the dangling roots and jammed my hand into the deep moss. Still nothing to hold onto. If there was nothing to hold onto, maybe I could use that to my advantage. Desperately, I began to burrow through the roots and moss with my bare hands. I almost laughed with the sight I must have presented as I broke through the dirt and moss to finally find a tangle of solid roots above. My strength was drained as I wedged my arm in like a stick and threw my leg up to avoid falling back to the rocks below.

Catching my breath, I found myself in the cloud forest of the rim. I crawled the remaining fifty feet under roots and over moss to discover that we were back on the rim.

Covered in dirt and my clothes dripping, I weakly made my way to the ridge. I yelled to Tony we had made it. I searched for a creeper or vine to help Tony up.

I tore off a creeper and dangled it down for Tony to tie his pack to. Tony said, “Don’t worry. I’ll come up with my pack.” He began to climb using the vine for support. When he reached the green wall that I had to burrow through, he used the vine to crawl over. As he tried to lift his leg up for the final push, he paused, looked at me and then fell back down. It all happened in slow motion. I almost laughed as Tony calmly looked at me as he slowly shrank in size and fell to the rocks below. When he hit, back first, I don’t think he even blinked. No screams, yells, or grunts. He just lay there calmly, eyes wide open. I assumed he was dead. I felt detached. A combination of the dim light and fatigue.

From down below I could hear Tony say quietly said, “I think I hurt myself.” Surprised he was alive, I asked if he needed assistance.

“No, just let me lie here awhile.”

He had fallen a sickening distance. Later we discovered what had saved his life. He had fallen in the crevice of two large moss covered rocks. In the crevice, the moss was almost three feet thick. Twelve inches either way, he would have had only two inches of moss to cushion the impact.

He rested for quite a while. This time, I hauled his pack up and then used the vine to take him all the way up. It was dark now. We shivered with cold as the temperature dropped and the sweat from our exertion chilled us. It looked like rain.

I found a hollow tree large enough to hold two people in moderate comfort. Lining it with fern fronds, it made a passable bivouac for the night. Tony’s pack held a cornucopia of treasures: a tin of sardines, one can of orange juice, newspaper, plastic bags—and eureka!—a pack of matches.

After planting Tony in his fern bower, I set about building a fire to dry our clothes and to provide some heat. It was not easy to create fire with wood that has been continuously wet.

After a few false starts and with the last of the dry newspaper, the fire reluctantly smoked to life. It is almost perverse to say we spent quite an enjoyable evening with a roaring fire on the edge of the cliff inside a fern-lined hollow tree. It is hard to describe the pleasures of relative existence. I say “relative” because we might have had to spend the night in the swamp. We might have had no matches, no food, and Tony could be dead.

The rain came down in polite periods, allowing us to dry out in front of the fire. Each onset was heralded by gentle showers before the deluge.

Tony became consumed by thirst, so I set off to find water, using the large plastic bags Tony brought to collect plant samples. At night the confused tangle of trees turned into a nightmare of dead ends, pits, and the ever present cliff face.

I tried walking down to where the water eventually gathers in small streams before joining the rivers that flow everywhere in the Maliau Basin. In the blackness I realized that by going down and then coming back up, it would be impossible to know if I should go left or right to return to our camp, despite the light from the roaring fire, which disappeared within 20 feet. I yelled to see if sound travels. The thick moss absorbed all sound. I wisely decided to follow the edge.

I walked for about a mile in the dark along the rim in search of water and almost fell into an open pit. Open is not a good description because it was full of brown water. I kneeled down and drink my fill from the gritty stagnant water. I kindly did not tell Tony where I found the water.

The morning dawned cold and wet. The fire was still smoldering. The sun skittered across the top of the mist, creating a strange sunrise. I climbed out on an overhanging limb to take a picture. The trees grew out and over still blocking a clear view of the golden ocean below. I still couldn’t capture the sense of being on the edge of a lost world. I was barred in by the jungle.

FURTHER READING

Read RYPs jungle tips here.

The post Into The Lost World of Borneo appeared first on Dangerous Magazine.

It would be hard to imagine a less likely candidate that Donald Trump for President of the United States.  To many Trump was a relic of the 80’s, an aging, uneven dilettante, a serial womanizer, a repeat bankrupt, a narcissistic Manhattan B lister, a media bull shitter and obnoxious loudmouth.

To others he was a successful real estate tycoon a deft business genius turned flamboyant reality TV star. To those who loved his TV series The Apprentice he was an American icon, a golden haired symbol of hard won success and outspoken support of America and Americans. To law enforcement Trump had lawyered up and papered over misdeeds that ranged from mob connections, affairs, money laundering, and to the media elites who worked for the broadsheets. He used mob savvy lawyers like Roy Cohn and later a softer, equally crooked version called Michael Cohen to do his dirty deniable clean-up work. Trump was a long time Manhattan publicity whore, a man who even posed as “John Barron” or “John Miller” as his own PR person to compliment himself and now possibly suffering from some geriatric ailment that prevented him from forming a compete sentence.  There was no way a tainted throw-back like Trump would ever win an election, let alone pay for one. Unless you were running against Hillary Clinton.

Initially, the conservative right backed an outsider, a plain speaker, a tough talking patriot who would focus his efforts on restoring the esteem of the much maligned middle aged white conservative male and someone who didn’t care what the elite media or the entitled left thought. That man was Ted Cruz.

When Ted Cruz lost steam after losing in the Indiana primary on May 3, 2016 to Donald Trump, the extreme right and the center right gravitated to the reality show star. The man with wasta and a rapidly growing following was now Trump. Trump, with a little help and a lot of money, could be the perfect wrecking ball to swing in the sclerotic insider world of DC and smash down the  politically correct left. This appeal was also bolstered by a general sense of dread that the elderly Hillary Clinton, much abused wife of Bill Clinton, former Senator who moved to New York and frequent flier mile secretary of state had been carefully placed into political positions to assuage her naked hungry for power. The Democrats had elected a man from mixed parentage, why not the first woman?

Despite what the left considered an ideal candidate, Clinton appeared to just patiently await her coronation. She did not connect with voters. Aloof, entitled and not in touch. It was not an ideal election and the poor choices sparked fierce debate. A knock down slugfest creating a perfect place for someone to light a fire. Something the world of social media was happy to do.

Trump had no money to win and Clinton was drowning in it. Elections run on advertising and image. Raising funds requires making bargains with the devil and using every tactic available. What was needed was something that would push the ball over the line. Cinton had weak points. Trust, arrogance, inability to tell the truth, a dodgy family foundation, deleted emails…there must be something in those deleted emails….if they could be found. Clinton’s camp found finding fault with Trump laughably easy All they had to do was Google the thousands of outrageous statements, deplorable acts and thousands of silly statements.

Surprisingly, this mudslinging only emboldened Trump. His followers didn’t trust the media. He would simply tweet if he had something to say and the media would go nuts chasing Trump’s insulting tweets until he tweeted again.All of this perfectly in line with Steve Bannon’s desire to destroy the cozy old school relationship between government and the media. Bannon’s history as a investor in Hollywood, turned propaganda film maker turned blogger made him an outsider and Trump inflamed the old school media with his lack of respect.

Tweeting vs Sunday print editorials is perfect OODA loop stuff. The O.O.D.A. Loop, which stands for Observe, Orient, Decide and Act was Col John Boyd’s way of explaining to fighter pilots in the 50’s how combatants go through the process of reacting to stimulus Boyd’s idea was that if you move faster than your opponent you will always maintain the initiative. Even if what you are doing does not make sense. It is more important to confuse and wrong foot the enemy until you strike. So Donald Trump and his strategic advisor Steve Bannon worked the short game while a group of supporters worked the long game. If Clinton wanted coverage on Sunday news shows and magazine profiles, Bannon was happy to roll ini the viral mud of social media. It was all about controversy the electricity that drives popular discussion and top of mind awareness.  He needed fuel to stoke this fire just as he had built up Brietbart on bashing Clinton and Obama.

The press still has not regained their balance. Demanding, facts, in depth interviews, real concepts Bannon and Trump just fired off more tweets more Facebook ads and laughed all the way to the bank. Trump’s media maven Brad Pasquale spent 80% of their ad budget on Facebook and created another perfect way to alienate the main stream media. A business that relied heavily on campaign ads to swell their coffers.  It also created a petri dish for Russian trolls and fake news as the monetization of clicks drove thousands of enterprising people to capitalize on Trump’s stickiness and viral qualities. The election was so viral that Romanian kids could create hyperbolic political ads and fake news sites and then use monetization sites like Adsense to make up to $10,000 a day. Trolls not pundits rose to the top of the food chain.

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Controversy needs dirt. There were plenty of willing miners that searched for dirt that would be used to feed the trolls.

The Clinton Dirt posse were a strange cabal of characters straight out central casting. They range from Chicago investment banker Peter W. Smith, then an aging and now dead scandal monger, Iowa activist Sam Clovis an obese radio host, Charles C. Johnson  a short pudgy red headed ginger muckracker, former folk singer and Reagan era speechwriter Dana Rohrabacher, ex-Blackwater neo-mercenary Erik Prince, Knight of Malta and former Inspector General Joseph Schmitz, Rohrbacher employee and Prince supporter Paul Behrends, Victoria Toensing (muckraking media savvy lawyer for Clovis and Prince)  and even Prince’s best buddy and role model Olly North of Iran Contra fame popped up in media reports. Other than Johnson and Prince (who also worked together against Weiner) It was the 80’s all over again. And this election suddenly seemed to be all about dirt and dirty tricks.

This group of aging political super villains (to the Democrats at least) appeared to act in concert or in support of candidate Trump’s National Security Team under General Mike Flynn. Flynn was not a politician, he was a war fighter, so the people he picked seemed heavy on enthusiasm and short on diplomacy. The extreme took front and center, with neocons. alt-rights and just plain scary featured prominently. An Iran Contra level of paranoia, slippery dealing and skullduggery took hold. Conversations, speeches and memos with terms like “deep state”, “fake news”, “political warfare”, “information campaigns” and “islamofascism” peppered conversations. There was an enemy out there, but the comingling of enemies that included Antifa, Muslim Brotherhood, Clinton supporters, Marxists, ISIS and the media made for a heady brew.

When Trump assembled his “brightest minds” foreign policy team the media had to hit Google to figure out who they were. It didn’t help that the reality show candidate said he formed his world view by watching television on the weekends.  His starting line-up was Joseph E. Schmitz, Gen. Keith Kellogg, Carter Page, George Papadopoulos and Walid Phares and would be chaired by Jeff Sessions.  Jeff Sessions had to recuse himself from the later investigation into Russian interference because he actually met with Russians as did most if not all of the rest except for pro-Israel, Lebanese-born Christian Walid Phares who was a virulent critic of Islam and Kellogg who had briefly run the Iraq CPA and had worked for intelligence contractors after becoming an expert on network centric warfare

Almost immediately various elements of the Russian government began reaching out to this crew to offer “Clinton Dirt”. It is important to remember that at a certain point the right assumed that Clinton had deleted both embarrassing and sensitive emails and assumed that many of these were Classified or above.  The most high profile “Clinton Dirt” was the June 2016 meeting between Trump campaign staff and Russians. But the search began much earlier.

Some of the team surreptitiously travelled to Europe to make contact. The spring summer and fall of 2016 were full of multiple random meetings with multiple random Russians and Trump proxies. That intensity of randomness about one topic and within that short window would make the whole affair not random at all. This was in addition to the formal contacts the Trump team had with the Russian ambassador in the U.S.

Trump was no stranger to Russia or Russians in his business dealings. His checkered business past swung from grandiose to bankrupt to cash flush. His decision to shift from building and owning to licensing meant he had to be a brand. The idea of a TV show that featured him as wealthy and successful self-made man was perfect. In 2004 The Apprentice was born, produced by TV’s most successful reality show producer, former nanny and Venice T-shirt hawker Mark Burnett. It also meant the classic TV watching demographic began to meet the man from Queens as a tough, no nonsense purveyor of the poor man’s view of American Dream. Trump insists he made over 200 million dollars over the 14 seasons he was on the show and was able to successfully license his name on properties from hotels to golf courses. More importantly Trumphad managed to gild his tarnished brand with thin 12 carat TV reality star gold. .

Trump had plenty of Russian customers, friends and was working on a hotel in Moscow  (among other locations) before his run for office but he would constantly downplay his business and personal interests in Russia to the media during the campaign. Did Russia really figure into Trump’s thinking during the election?

The one area where Russia was important in the campaign was the general sense was that Trump wanted to move Russia away from Iran in their war against extremists in Syria and move our support towards Israel and the Gulf dictators in the UAE and Saudi Arabia. Trump was going to not only embrace Assad but work with Russia to push back Iran. The reverse of what Obama tried to do in overthrowing Assad using covert “moderate” rebels trained by the CIA. Trump’s idea of working with the Russians was dangerous, it had elements of Stalin working with Roosevelt in World War Two against a common enemy only to watch most of Eastern Europe vanish into the Soviet empire. President Obama, seeing decades of endless warfare had moved away from the anti Iran/pro Israel Neocon vision of a new Order in the Middle East.

The other incentive to include Russia was a multi-billion-dollar plan from ACU Strategic Partners to bring nuclear power to the Gulf States with Russian nuclear reactors. A project Flynn had helped push before joining the Trump machine. A plan that would haver required lifting sanctions from the Russian state owned nuclear energy company Rosatom and VTB bank.  Instead of waiting for after the election to not interfere with the current President’s policies, Trump’s people jumped right into the middle of foreign policy discussions on multiple and confusing fronts. Searching both for damaging information against opponent Clinton and discussions on their foreign policy plans to drop sanctions and partner with Russia.

George Papadopoulos was approached by Maltese professor Joseph Mifsud. Excited he contacted Sam Clovis about his March 24, 2016 meeting with “Putin’s niece” Sam Clovis’ lawyer is Victoria Toensing, Erik Prince’s lawyer. By August of 2016, Clovis was encouraging Papadopoulos to set up a meeting. Manafort disagreed, insisting that a low level person should travel to Russia to meet and discuss dropping sanctions.

The clown circus continued. Russians appeared to pop up from every nook and cranny offering Clinton Dirt but delivering nothing. When samples were found, they were forgeries. There was even attempts to counter the idea that the Russians were hacking. In August of 2016, that Florida political operative Aarons Nevinsalso reached out to Guccifer, as did Roger Stone. Stone first tried to say that Guccifer 2.0 was not a Russian hacker.

In the summer of 2016, Joseph Schmitz was the former Inspector General for the DoD, turned Blackwatermeltdown-era lawyer had been accused of slow rolling investigations against George W. Bush officials, pitching wonky arms dealsto rebels in Syria. He approached the FBIand other government agencies to verify an offer to hand over the missing Clinton emails from the Dark Web. The offer came via an American contractor he code named “Patriot”. Schmitz took the material to at least two federal agencies and two congressional committees he realized he had been duped.

Carter Page went to Hungary towards the end of the summer and later told the House Intelligence Committee he “did a lot of sightseeing and went to a jazz club. Not much to report.” He did note that “there might have been a Russian in there” Page would later plead guilty to lying to the FBI. The FBI had been granted a FISA surveillance warrant in October of 2016.

Why would so many Trump campaign members be lying about meeting with Russians?

Donald Trump Jr, got an email from Rob Goldstone on June 3 2016 saying that “The Crown prosecutor of Russia met with his father Aras this morning and in their meeting offered to provide the Trump campaign with some official documents and information that would incriminate Hillary and her dealings with Russia and would be very useful to your father.”

Trump Jr. would later fly to Paris the day before election day to give a $50,000 speech at a think tank. He lunched with  At the Hotel Ritz Paris with Syrian Peace activist Randa Kassis a women who supports Russian intervention in the war, and her French husband, Fabien Baussart. A man with Russian ties who is said to have nominatedRussian President Vladimir Putin for the Nobel Peace Prize. She summarized her October meeting on Facebook: “I succeeded to pass [to] Trump, through the talks with his son the idea of how we can cooperate together to reach the agreement between Russia and the United States on Syria”

In addition to the globetrotting there were a host of supporters and insiders who made suspicious trips. Suspicious only because the Trump team kept insisting these meetings weren’t happening. In November of 2017.  Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak would say that it would take him 20 minutes to list all the Trump people he met with or spoken to on the phone. His recollection did include lengthy meetings with Jeff Sessions and with Mike Flynn on sanctions.

What had turned into an attempt to shape or perhaps reverse Obama’s foreign policy in the Middle East found Trump being played by Russian intelligence. To the media, during the campaign, all of this is just churn, no smoking gun, just multiple examples of Trump’s campaign people acting out John Le Carre novels but getting nothing in return, only finding more and more tentacles reaching out from Moscow hoping to get sanctions lifted to free up Putin’s money.

As October 2016 and the election loomed it was clear there was no Clinton Dirt to be had, and Hillary had as she said wiped her servers clean, “like with a cloth”.  With Clinton climbing in the polls, Trump needed that October Surprise, even if there wasn’t any dirt on Clinton.

Perhaps some enterprising supporter could invent some?

+++

Peter W. Smith (who died at 81 in May of 2017) bankrolled muckrakers going back giving $25,000 to support the State Troopers who ratted out Bill Clinton and hired then Breitbart reporter Chuck Johnson to find Hillary Clintons missing emails. According to Johnson, he had first met in 2013 when they worked on opposition research on President Obama. It’s not quite clear why a second term President would be of much interest. But Johnson worked with Andrew Auernheimer aka “the Weev”, a convicted hacker living in the Ukraine to help him out. Smith had put 50,000 of his own money and a donor had provided 100,000 in additional funds.

Just after July 22, 2016 When WikiLeaks began publishing the DNC emails, Smith contacted Matt Tait a senior cybersecurity fellow at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law at the University of Texas at Austin. Tait was covering Clinton’s email woes and as an expert on hacking,

Smith assumed that Tait could help him with to the “Clinton Dirt”. Smith conveyed the impression that he was a Trump campaign insider and told Tait that someone from the “Deep Web” had offered his team erased emails and could Tait verify that they were real? Tait had little interest in Smith and wrote up a blog pieceto memorialize the conversation.

On July 27, Donald Trump tweets, “I hope you’re able to find the 30,000 emails that are missing. I think you will probably be rewarded mightily by our press.”  The July 13, 2018  DoJ indictmentinsist that on the same day, Russian hackers then tried to gain entry into Hillary Clinton’s personal servers. The 20,000 DNC emails released on July 22, 2016 by Wikipedia three days before the Democratic National Convention. Despite the cartoonof an angry Clinton in front of a computer with bombs and money (remember she primarily used a Blackberry) this was still not the “Clinton Dirt” Trump was seeking.

Later on, Tait remembers is being sent an invitation to join Trump associated opposition effort dated September 7, 2016 and labeled, “A Demonstrative Pedagogical Summary to be Developed and Released Prior to November 8, 2016”. KLS Research. the company authoring the report was owned by Smith and registered in Delaware. For nitpickers, a pedagogical summary is not actual evidence but facilitates the presentation of evidence. The assumption was that Clinton had done something illegal but complicated and that crowdsourcing hackers and data would put together a convincing case before the election. The goal was to hire hackers to find anyone or someone who had Clinton Dirt on the dark web.

Again, there was no actual evidence the purpose of the document was to recruit hackers to find and analyze the Clinton Dirt. Tait remarked at the need of the dirty tricksters to create a corporation designed to avoid campaign reporting linked to his recollection that Flynn had asked for go between to receive Clinton emails from the Russians. Tait was also upset that his name had been included and he had no interest in participating. Tait was intrigued enough to start poking holes in the theory of Russians being the source of the DNC hack.

What did happen was an ever expanding analysis of the Guccifer 2.0 documents by the digirati that concluded that Guccifer 2.0 spoke very bad Romanian, had artificially put time codes in documents and tripped up when he made a change to a Word .doc on West Coast time under the name “Ernesto Che’. And that there was no clear evidence of Russian or Western authorship.  The slipup Tait had spotted was someone on the West Coast of the U.S. had added an invisible space in Word’s “Track Changes” features to “brand” the document. A peculiar idiosyncrasy that none other than Matt Tait first noticed.

On January 16 2017 the late Smith wrote an interesting blog before his death and laid you the whole hacking affair blaming Obama’s spin doctors on bringing in Russia as the culprit.

1. (Clinton’s email) operated on a virtually unprotected server. Its contents were openly available to nation-states and to individuals. WikiLeaks said it was in possession of the 33,000 or so missing Clinton emails and has sat on them for nine months without releasing them.
2. Guccifer (Marcel Lehel Lazar), an individual self-trained in cybersecurity, successfully hacked into 100 private email accounts of prominent U.S. and world government officials with ease. His unchallenged legal testimony indicated no Russian involvement.
3. John Podesta, chairman of the Clinton campaign, had his commercial email account hackedwhen he fell for a bogus password-change request. His emails were released through WikiLeaks, with no evidence of Russian involvement.
4. While Guccifer 2.0 is an individual who claims to have modeled his work after the original Guccifer, his DNC server leaksresulted in the resignation of the discredited head of the DNC. The material was readily available from the DNC site, which had protection deficiencies which were unattended to for 18 months. WikiLeaks said that the copies delivered to them came from a leak from a disgruntled DNC staffer, not a hack.
5. DCLeaks appears to involve individuals in the Washington, D.C. area who are interested in disseminating political information. Included in these emails were those belonging to the author, which were on a weakly-protected state GOP server. It is difficult to see that such mundane content would be of interest to Russia.

- Peter W. Smith

To make matters more obvious a bizarre PR campaign was mounted in Washington D.C. to show a fictional/documentary film to convince the media and lawmakers Bill Browder does the best job of laying this out in his testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee :

“Rinat Akhmetshin, a former Soviet intelligence officer naturalised as an American citizen, was hired to lead the Magnitsky repeal effort. Mr. Akhmetshin has been involved in a number of similar campaigns where he’s been accused of various unethical and potentially illegal actions like computer hacking.

Veselnitskaya also instructed U.S. law firm Baker Hostetler and their Washington, D.C.-based partner Marc Cymrot to lobby members of Congress to support an amendment taking Sergei Magnitsky’s name off the Global Magnitsky Act. Mr. Cymrot was in contact with Paul Behrends, a congressional staffer on the House Foreign Affairs Committee at the time, as part of the anti-Magnitsky lobbying campaign.

Veselnitskaya, through Baker Hostetler, hired Glenn Simpson of the firm Fusion GPS to conduct a smear campaign against me and Sergei Magnitsky in advance of congressional hearings on the Global Magnitsky Act. He contacted a number of major newspapers and other publications to spread false information that Sergei Magnitsky was not murdered, was not a whistle-blower, and was instead a criminal. They also spread false information that my presentations to lawmakers around the world were untrue.

As part of Veselnitskaya’s lobbying, a former Wall Street Journal reporter, Chris Cooper of the Potomac Group, was hired to organize the Washington, D.C.-based premiere of a fake documentary about Sergei Magnitsky and myself. This was one the best examples of Putin’s propaganda.

They hired Howard Schweitzer of Cozzen O’Connor Public Strategies and former Congressman Ronald Dellums to lobby members of Congress on Capitol Hill to repeal the Magnitsky Act and to remove Sergei’s name from the Global Magnitsky bill.

On June 13, 2016, they funded a major event at the Newseum to show their fake documentary, inviting representatives of Congress and the State Department to attend.

While they were conducting these operations in Washington, D.C., at no time did they indicate that they were acting on behalf of Russian government interests, nor did they file disclosures under the Foreign Agent Registration Act.”

Browder makes the case that the sanctions imposed by the Obama administration were deeply hiring Putin and his inner circle but why the oblique approach? And why didn’t they just do something on the Clinton Dirt they had been so eagerly offering…but never producing?

Rinat Akmetshin, and this unusual cast of characters including Paul Behrends, Erik Prince, Natalia Veselnitskaya  would appear at Dana Rohrabacher’s Liberty Ball at the Library of Congress. The 680 photos of the participants have been since taken down but snagged by a number of people on social media

Rinat Akhmetshin & and Natalya Veselnitskaya at Dana Rohrabacher’s Liberty Ball at the Library of Congress, Friday, January 20th, 2017

Next Part Three

The post The Hack Part Seven appeared first on Dangerous Magazine.

continued from Part Five

 When the truth is found
To be lies
And all the joy
Within you dies

- Jefferson Airplane

The political discussion up to the 2016 election was populated by earnest debate, partisan passion and well thought out decisions but also poisoned by false information, fear mongering, insults, deceivers, deceit and distrust. What should have been an informed electorate making clear decisions on candidates was infected with every manner of deception. Partly due to Trump’s embracing of chaos and division as an election strategy against Clinton’s, cool distant, carefully coached and manufactured approach.

Social media and the media took the bait and there were so many hot buttons and arguments that in retrospect it is difficult to understand how America was fooled so easy. To date there has been granular evidence of Russians hacking into the DNC, but that is only a silver of what attempts were made by various parties. What we have learned is that deceit was built into almost every facet of the election. Something that has nothing to do with technology but rather the fallibility of the human brain. Who played who, who lied, who cheated, did American get conned? As we have painfully learned, the answer appears that it was easier to deceive that to use the truth.

Where was the Clinton Dirt? Why were so many Russians offering dirt but coming up empty handed. What did they want? Why did they have nothing? The seeds of the Mueller investigation were planted when a young,  eager George Papadopoulos was propositioned by a Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese professor who promised dirt. When they met on April 26, there was nothing, just more promises of further meetings to keep him interested. It was May 10, 2016 when Papadopoulos bragged about the Russians having Clinton Dirt to an Australian diplomat at a posh bar in London.

The FBI counterintelligence unit opened an investigation after someone tipped off the FBI about an American named Papadopoulos running his mouth to Australian high commissioner Alexander Downer at the Kensington Wine Bars in Notting Hill, London on May 2016.   The Russians had dirt on Clinton, hacked emails, and they were going to use it to influence the election, was the version told to the FBI.  This clearly was linked to Clinton’s sloppy and perhaps criminal, handling of her emails but it didn’t seem that way to the FBI, they were going to open an investigation into Trump, not Clinton.

This begins the key event that will flip an investigation of Hillary Clinton for sloppy or perhaps deceitful email handling into one of Donald Trump colluding with the Russian government to steal the election away from Clinton.

The FBI opened the “Crossfire Hurricane” investigation on July 31, 2016 just a few days after Director James Comey very publicly closed the investigation of Hillary Clinton for using a private email account on July 5.

The Papadopoulos meeting with Downer was not a simple affair. Depending on who you believe, Papadopoulos reached out to a friend named Christian Cantor at the Israeli Embassy official in London. Cantor introduced Papadopoulos to Downer’s lawyer, Erika Thompson. Thompson then set up the meeting at the wine bar.

Downer said he said up the meeting and that after getting a “tip” that the Russians were going to use Clinton Dirt during the election, Downer said he went to the U.S. Embassy in London to report it.  The FBI said the tip came from two FBI agents flown to London on August 2, 2016 to interview Downer, “within hours of opening an investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia” according to the New York Times.

A third version is very different, six days before the boozy wine bar meeting, Papadopoulos was interviewed by the Times. Papadopoulos said that David Cameron should apologize for his negative comments about candidate Trump. It was Thompson, the lawyer who worked in the Australian embassy that reached out to Papadopoulos two days after the Times interview ran.  According to this version, Downer met with the Trump foreign policy aide and told him to leave Cameron alone. All of these could be the same story told Roshomon style with each person having a different recollection of events.

The FBI would question Papadopoulos and he would omit the multiple meetings with Mifsud beginning on March 14, to set up Russian meetings, but it was not until April 26, a hotel in London that Mifsud would tell Papadopoulos that he had Clinton Dirt. As the FBI recounts Papadopoulos quoting Mifsud saying. “They [the Russians] have dirt on her”; “the Russians had emails of Clinton”; “they have thousands of emails.”

Ohr, was a high ranking member of the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces but kept in touch with Steele long after the FBI had dropped him as a source. Ohr knew gangsters and Trump as a former casino owner, bankrupt and New York construction magnate ticked all the boxes.

The 35 page Steele Dossier is not written in any particular intel style, nor does it have any legal provenance or show the hallmarks of academic research like cites, footnotes or sources It is mostly unsupported anecdotes or second hand conversations all designed to build suspicion that Trump and his then campaign manager Manafort were being controlled by Vladimir Putin. The tools were supposedly a compromising “golden shower” video and perhaps documents, or financial leverage. It has all the hallmarks of a “Black Letter” an unsubstantiated collection of accusations that would send the media on a thousand journeys to find “Trump Dirt’.

Christopher Steele had leaked information to the media and was fired on November 1, 2016 but continued to provide information and chat with Associate Deputy Attorney General Bruce Ohr, who had reported to Deputy Attorney General Sally Yates. 

On July 1, 2016 Steele emailed Ohr, “There is something separate I wanted to discuss with you informally and separately. It concerns our favourite business tycoon!” On July 5, Steele would meet with the FBI in Rome to discuss possible Russian attempts to influence the American election.  That could be Trump but it could also Oleg Deripaska, a Russian oligarch who had been refused a visa and worked very closely with Paul Manafort, Trump’s campaign manager, a campaign manager who owed ten million dollars to Deripaska. according to litigation.

Deripaska’s lawyers filed suit in the Cayman Islands in 2014 saying that he invested  $19 million with Manafort that year to create a TV station called Black Sea Cable.

Conversely, for the last decade, Manafort figured prominently in defeating U.S. interests in Crimea, supporting a Viktor F. Yanukovych a Ukrainian gangster turned politician and furthering Putin’s regional interests.

President Trump would later ask Manafort to resign after AP revealed that Manafort was lobbying for the pro-Russian Ukrainian government.

Ohr, his wife Nellie and Steele would meet on July 30, 2016, at the Mayflower Hotel, in Washington D.C. Steele sent a thankyou note after the meeting, “Great to see you and Nellie this morning Bruce, let’s keep in touch on the substantive issues/s. Glenn is happy to speak to you on this if it would help.”

On July 31, the FBI would open “Crossfire Hurricane”

Guccifer 2.0

The Russians had begun to spearfish DNC officials on March 10 of 2016. On Wednesday, June 15,  Guccifer 2.0 appeared with an email to the Smoking Gun with DNC emails. “Hi,this is Guccifer 2.0 and this is me who hacked Democratic National Committee.”

The DNC knew they had been hacked. But none of this material contained Clinton’s missing emails, any dirt nor did it include the Steele file. But the DNC now knew that they had been hacked. Again a fine but important distinction. Mifsud was offering Papadopoulos the missing 30,000 emails supposedly hacked by the Russians not the DNC hack. Papadopoulos first met Mifsud in Italy on March 14,telling him he was going to be on Trump’s team, They met again

The agent who opened the investigation into Russian collusion to influence the election was Peter Strozk. Someone who vehemently to Congress that his hatred of Trump evidenced in texts to his mistress, another FBI employee would influence his decision to influence the election.

The FBI was under pressure the second Trump took office, he felt that the law enforcement agency was not only partisan but working against him. The Steele Dossier was  probably the most embarrassing document and Steele had not only been working with FusionGPS but also for the FBI as an informant. Trump began to blame “Deep State” and insist he was being bugged, spied on and set up. The left wing media constantly referenced the Steele Dossier and the right wing pushed “Clinton Dirt” neither of these were absolute or even close to being factual. The election had been hacked by the U.S. media’s obsession with “Dirt” from each side.

Back to the Hack

“You have about 18 seconds to catch the hack”, one of the SybrTek tech experts explains, “then you might have another hacker slide in behind him and exploit that hack, or sometimes you can jump ahead of the hack. You can make it look like someone else did the hacking” Ray explains as he tries to shape the rapid, chaotic world of hacking. He and others make it clear that hacking has no religion, it’s often done just to see if the hacker can get in. Most have no idea what they will find once they are inside a server or computer. Hackers work both as security experts and as “red team” hackers. An associate of mine made a living by hacking into nuclear subs and sensitive bases for the NSA. It was easy considering how old, large and slow government acquisition for IT products is. You hire a thief to catch a thief.

In a stunning example, the U.S. government banned the anti hacking software program provided by the Moscow-based, Kaspersky Security Network because it posed a threat to the U.S. government computers…only to discover that the Kaspersky coding was built deep into thousands of U.S. government programs and had the ability to access any computer that had their software installed, examine and in some cases transfer files to any where they want. Kaspersky estimates that there are 315,000 new malicious programs created every day and there is no evidence of any malicious acts by the Russian national. It was a head smacking moment on just how vulnerable government computers are. And still are.

Even the CIA is often confused about how to identify hackers with even legendary Carl Bernstein taking the media to task for being pawns of the CIA and then supporting the CIA findings in the latest CNN story by promoting the “golden shower” dossier. To make things more obscure James Clapper head of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence which manages the 17 U.S. intelligence agencies did not initially endorse or deny the CIA allegations against Russia because “they can’t prove intent”.  Eventually only four of them weighed in on a Russian hack.

The threat is not just to computers, During her time as Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton continued to use unsecured Blackberry’s during her visits to foreign countries, all coordinated well in advance. As a Blackberry user. There are devices like a false Wi FI base station or femtocel that can fit in a pocket using the same tools the phone companies use to refigure Blackberry firmware.

Malware and hacking software is freely available. Anything that can be run by software can by hacked by software including the software that U.S. government agencies use to prevent hacking.   A group calling themselves Shadow Broker is offering a collection of NSA hacking tools for the equivalent of $1.8 million in bitcoin. The CIA found themselves “hacked” by an insider who dumped their tools on WikiLeaks. Cozy Bear and Fancy Bear with their password reset scams, almost seems like an archaic way to hack these days.

“There was a guy at Black Hat outside of the hall selling CD’s with that Cozy Bear and that other Russian malware out of a duffel bag for $50 a copy last year” remembers Ray from SybrTek.

Hacking is both a business and a social force.  Whether it is the social media that fueled Arab Spring of locking down computers for bit coin ransom. There an now plenty of “data analytics” companies like the defunct Cambridge Analytica who transferred their skills used from military election and psyops projects in Iraq, Somalia, Nigeria and other regions to the U.S. elections.

A member of SybrTek who has been inside the transition team and has a background in military influence operations explains the tool used to help Donald Trump get elected, “Trump’s son in law hired Cambridge Associates to help in the campaign, Jim explains, “They were battling an unseen robotic enemy that would automatically retweet negative responses to a Trump tweet.

“It’s called Message Flooding. Social media platforms that run machine software bot-generated traffic. It makes you appear like you have a million followers and can be generated automatically. You push preloaded message. One tweet can be retweeted 5000 times 6 times an hour. The secret is to not do it too much so you don’t get caught by other bots that look for spamming.”

“There is also a group of cyber mercenaries and hactivists that screwed around both the Trump and the Clinton campaign that would trigger automated responses. Around 38% of Trump’s retweets and responses were machine spoofed. There is a $40,000 piece of software you can buy in Russia that does this well. This system is designed to fool the analytics crowd.” Analytics is how you measure the effectiveness, audience and other factors of an online campaign.

Jim estimates that 80% of the fake retweets from the machine responses were negative to fool the analytics. “Trump averaged about 14,000 retweets. There’s a lot of people that don’t like him so this software simply used an algorithm to find those negative sentiments and retweet them.” Twitter has only recently wiped out 70 million bot accounts.  Pew Research estimated that two thirds of all accounts linked to major organizations or companies are fake. They estimate that between 41 and 44% of accounts linked to political sites are bots. Not as damning as the 90% rate for adult content sites but just under half the political discussion on Twitter was artificial.

It took two years for Facebook to shut down 538 million fake sites, a quarter of their  base of 2 billion user.  Not all these sites are political but the concept of contentious, outrageous, inflammatory and polarized content feeds the advertising machine.

Did Trump win because of these bot armies? Did Hillary lose because of these automated public opinion shapers? Were they from Russia? “No Clinton had the same problem.” Says Bill,  “There is a definite science on how to influence people’s thinking. It’s called influence operations in the military.” Realizing that this may sound too Orwellian, he walks it back “The great thing about this is that anything that can be designed can be reverse engineered. We can screen that traffic and block it. In reality these tools come from the marketing world not the military”.

President Obama was the first to really use social media. DC-based Bluelabs was founded by data scientists Elan Kriegel and Chris Wegrzyn worked for Obama measuring shaping and timing messages to match big data research.  They are now a successful analytics and technology company that promise to get politicians elected. Trump also used social media to great success. It is the future of targeted advertising.

The SybrTek points out that, in their opinion, Clinton’s tactics were flawed and archaic. Bill points out, “Clinton used one algorithm from the mid to late 80’s named Ada to focus visits and ads. Although Ada could absorb and analyze 400,000 simulations a day the data entered from traditional phone polls were flawed.” Ironically Ada was named after the daughter of Lord Byron,  Ada Lovelace, an early 19^th century female mathematician and a close associate of Charles  Babbage inventor of the first computer or “counting machine”. “She (Clintons campaign) relied on traditional polling and advertising but the majority of people are moving to smart phones as their primary news media” he says, “Obama used social media in the 2012 elections back when Twitter first started using Bluelabs were the pioneer in social media and big data science.  Trump was also able to do sentiment analysis using geo data to find clusters. People think differently in New York than Texas”

+ + +

Designed to teach fighter pilots, the OODA Loop is now a tactic used in politics and business.

This new internet blitzkrieg on voters and to a certain degree Trump’s style of governing, is understandable in a pre-social media concept known as the OODA loop created in 1997 by the late United States Air Force Colonel John Boyd to describe a decision cycle of “observe, orient decide and act”. “40 Second” Boyd (so named because he bragged no one could ever evade him for 40 seconds in aerial maneuvers) used his successful aerial dog fighting theory to handle complex ever changing scenarios that occur in larger aspects of warfare. Boyd laid out the idea that the goal is to react faster than your enemy forcing him to react and then speeding up your reaction time until the enemy fails. The need to insert ambiguity and unpredictability also prevents the enemy from reshaping his tactics or strategy in any meaningful fashion. This combination of constantly shifting, reacting and repetition is designed to put the opponent on the defensive and rapidly degrading their capabilities to respond or predict.   His theory is still very popular in both military and business strategy planning.

Although a wide range of academics have tried to create a precise taxonomy of influence strategies they range from military targeting of communications networks and entire nations to playful game like scenarios. and you an entire toolbox of deception to steer the population.

The Russians with their small size and large army, along with aggressive isolated posture but expansionist acts.  The Russians have eagerly embraced information warfare. In 2013, the Valery Gerasimov, Russian Chief of the General Staff of the Armed Forces and Deputy Defense Minister was said to lay out what he called the “Gerasimov Doctrine” in an speech, later referenced by NYU resident Russia expert, Professor Mark Galeotti in his blog.

Gerasimov is supposed to have outlined non military means of achieving political and strategic goals with the “combination of political, economic, information, technological, and ecological campaigns.” One of his examples was the Arab Spring and the use of social media to plunge nations into chaos. A form of Guerrilla Geopolitics that can preserver trade and social links but create devastating social impact without linking to the cause. The confusing and opaque Russian forays into the Crimea and Ukraine are examples of this. An older version was Russian creating a false insurgency or coup and then that invented political Russian proxy inviting Russian troops in to rescue them. There is one minor wrinkle to this story, the professor who wrote the story about the doctrine in 2014, Mark Galeotti later apologized for inventing The Gerasimov Theory in a March 2018, Foreign Policy article. It turns out the Russian General was interpreting what he though caused the Arab Spring but the media and pundits picked up Galeotti’s term as precisely what the Russians were doing in Ukraine and Crimea. A brilliant example of psychological operations in which fiction becomes fact and then fiction again.

A brutally simple chart of information warfare options, ranging from physical destruction to psyops.

Is Trump a genius of social media? Does he practice psychological operations on Americans?  Is he harnessing complex OODA loop thinking that constantly wrong foots his opponents yet emboldens his supporters? Could his tweets be precisely written by algorithms and then sent by bots to hit the right eyeballs at the right time? No, but buried in the mumbo jumbo science of information operations are the natural instincts of sociopathy. Doing things to manipulate people instead of plainly explaining goals and tasks to garner support.

Sociopathy, is defined as “a personality disorder characterized by persistent antisocial behavior, impaired empathy and remorse, and bold, disinhibited, and egotistical traits”

On the road, Trump would see 6000 people standing outside a stadium for hours and he felt that he got the pulse of what people were thinking and that is why he crushes.” John, a Psyops specialist from SybrTek, when what the logic Trump is using when he turns to Twitter to send out negative comments, the answer is quite analog. “People were so tired of ten minute long Obama answers that mean nothing” Even when he (Trump) does a big whopper, they laugh and move on”

Is Trump a genius of the dark arts or a sociopath?

John laughs, “Trump doesn’t give a shit.  The man is a billionaire for a reason.  I am not saying he is a genius, in some areas he is shallow, but he understands human nature. But (if he has a problem) he can find the right people at the right price.”

And that may be the ultimate psyop. The ability to confuse and baffle your enemies as to your intentions and activities. A leader of a country who will choose any tactic that suits him and from any source that is willing to provide that expertise.

Was that Russia?

+ + +

The traditional media is losing credibility as the public doesn’t know who to believe anymore. A recent Edelman poll showed that the trust of the U.S. government had dropped lower than at any time in their 18 –year-long Trust Barometer report and that the media was the least trusted institution. Now seven in ten American’s worry about fake news and almost 60% polled say it’s harder to tell if the media is telling the truth.

John the man who messes with minds fromSybertek, insists the media is played and wants to be played.

“At first people didn’t take the casino owner turned reality show star seriously. There was a lot of public opposition. When Trump appeared at rallies, people would violently protest. Many were genuine, but some weren’t. The public didn’t’ see the ads that appeared on Craigslist offering $15 an hour to protest Trump. It was a tactic seen in the riots in Ferguson. John insists, “All you need is few people to show up for the media and an iPhone to post it on social media. Counter hacking put wrong information in the ads, phone numbers were programmed to be multi-dialed and the protest organizers were flooded with fake emails.”

The end result is a loss of faith in both media and politicians. And more dangerously a lack of interest in what the government is actually doing or what is real.  Sentiment tracking is part of government control and it doesn’t really matter if what you like is real or imagined. But it is how governments and politicians work.

So with the loss of trust in traditional media, populations turn to social media for their news. They are essentially the news sources and form their own networks. These users can like or dislike, support or argue, comment and amplify anger and outrage . This is called sentiment tracking another word for opinion polling. The life blood of politics.

Ray explains, “Sentiment is based on a particular event. There are algorithms that can be used (to measure sentiment). Knowing the cultural differences across a large area or small area you can tell what people are thinking. You can actually see people on mobile devices, you can see the density in a specific area by using word choices. We (SybrTek) have algorithms that can predict the rise of that sentiment.”

Sentiment Tracking during the 2016 election.

Sentiment trackers use the innovation curve used in marketing to find early adopters. The curve starts off slow and then picks up speed until it reaches peak adoption and then drops. The key is to find that sharp rise and exploit it hard. Sentiment is more accurate, faster, cheaper,  broader based and perhaps sneakier than traditional polling. Traditional polling is someone asking a question of a sample and tabulating the answers. Politicians like consumer brands, use this science to develop campaign platforms, slogans, and even pick words in their speeches.  That sentiment can be skewed by robots, retweets and false actors, as laid previously. There are ways to determine and eliminate robots. The bottom line is that Trump’s people were tracking positive growth and sentiment using social media tools while Clinton’s polls and many media polls were missing key or disenfranchised voters in what they thought were Blue States.

Polls as of July

The ultimate irony in all this is that Trump managed to lose the popular vote but win the presidency despite having no political experience and having probably one of the most corrosive and combative campaigns in modern history.  Some confirm that Trump enjoyed the free publicity. Around $2 billion of free media coverage according to some estimates

“I don’t’ think Trump wanted to win, or rather maybe he didn’t care if he won” says James who has been part of the campaign insiders, “but sentiment analysis on October 28 started to show “positive” growing. The analysis of Hillary showed negative growing but positive was stable. That’s when Trump started winning.”

Was Clinton’s stalling and Trump’s upward move caused by Vladimir Putin and his Russian hackers? Well after vociferously criticizing his intelligence agencies and the reports, President Elect Donald Trump finally admitted that it might be Russia. But could it have been Deep State, or the liberal opposition….or even a cute young girl in Romania?

The post The Hack Part Six: The War On You appeared first on Dangerous Magazine.

A photo submitted by Sydney Leathers to the Dirty to prove she had been sexting with Anthony Weiner and then matched up to her social media account by Buzzfeed

“My name is Sydney. I’m a 22 year old college student from a small town looking to move to Chicago with one of my friends. I’ll be in Chicago from Thursday the 9th, until Monday afternoon and would love to meet someone special.

I’m Seeking: Sugar Daddy

I expect: Open – Amount Negotiable

I’m looking for a discrete mutually beneficial relationship, Each person gets what they desire. How irresistible is that?”

– August 8 2012, personal solicitation placed by Sydney Leathers on the “SeekingArrangement” website. Profile Number 11332091

Lonely and on the Internet

By mid 2012, a 22-year old Leathers was selling sexual and internet based companionship services for money on sites where young women hook up with older men for money and “gifts”.

Hillary Clinton had weathered numerous sexual affairs and scandals caused by her roving husband. Not surprisingly she kept a tight grip on personal information and data. We know that Hillary Clinton knew how to handle her data and with the Benghazi controversy there was a sudden interest in the idea that she had deleted thousands of potentially incriminating emails. When she announced her run for President on April 12, 2015. There was a sense of inevitability even though she was not a popular choice. If Obama could be the first African American President, then she would be the first female president.

She would rely heavily on her inner circle of friends chief among them her top aide Huma Abedin, wife of Anthony Weiner who handled much of Clinton’s correspondence. She kept a home computer to keep backups from Clinton’s Blackberry. And it appeared shared that home laptop with her husband. A lonely and gregarious man who seemed to spend a lot of time on the internet with strangers. It was no secret that Weiner used his devices to communicate with other women but it is very important to understand how some people deliberately took advantage of that knowledge.

In April of 2011, one month before Anthony Weiner became famous as a sexter a young woman sent him a message of Facebook. According to Sydney Leathers It took until July of 2012 for him to respond with a “Poke”

By mid 2012, a 22-year old Leathers was selling sexual and internet based companionship services for money on sites where young women hook up with older men for money and “gifts”. According to TMZ who discovered Leathers’ ad in 2013, she had been doing this for three years which would sync up with sending a communication to a fairly high profile politician in New York.

A “Sugar Baby” looking for an older man or Sugar Daddy to send her money. What they got in return was up to the donor and what services were provided were up to the provider.

Leathers insisted that she never provided sex for money but provided companionship… just phone or video sex and/or photos of a sexual or non sexual nature. That wasn’t entirely true, she would later talk about meeting many of these men for sex and complain about being paid for her clients performing oral sex on her and how boring it was. Shortly after she was outed by TMZ, she provided “10 Secrets For Seducing a Politician” on how to seduce men on the internet. On July 21, 2013 she had sent screen shots to “the Dirty” to prove she was sexting with Anthony Wiener. On July 23, 2013 Buzzfeed and others revealed that she was the 23 year old woman sexting to Anthony Wiener. By August of 2013, she was doing porn for Vivid. There was little doubt about the goals and aspirations of Sydney Leathers who was billed as a “writer”

Anthony Wiener

In April of 2013,  Anthony Wiener announced he was running for mayor of New York. Weiner began as an aide to Democrate Chuck Shumer in 1985 until 1991. He spent six years on the New York City Council from 1992 until 1998. He took Schumer’s job by a narrow 258 votes in September of 1998. In 2005 he took a shot at Mayor of New York and lost.  He was most famous as the defender of 9/11 victims in a fiery August 2010 speech shortly after marrying Huma Abedin in July. Weiner was the mouthy Democrat populist from from New York. Abedin was then deputy chief of staff to Hillary Clinton in the State Department. Abedin had grown up in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia. “He was smart, he was passionate” she told Vogue. They were a throughly modern couple.

Huma Abedin was born in Kalamazoo Michigan in 1976, but her Pakistan-born father and India-born mother moved to Saudi Arabia to teach. Abedin came to the U.S. at 18 years old to study at George Washington University. She began working for First Lady Hillary Clinton’s Chief of Staff in the East Wing of the White in 1996. Another West Wing intern Hillary’s husband at the time was Monica Lewinsky. Huma Abedin wanted to be Christiane Amanpour and work as a journalist but she has never had another job except taking care of Hillary Clinton and her various institutions.

Abedin met Weiner on Martha’s Vineyard in 2001. He asked her out on a date. Abedin wasn’t impressed. After they began to cross paths more and more they became an item. They married in 2010. She did not know that  Anthony Weiner had a problem. He liked to chat with strangers on the internet when he was alone. Young women ideally.

Kompromat is a Russian word for comprising information. Ideally of a politician who has much to lose if the information is released. The idea is to blackmail the victim or if they have no use, end their careers. Weiner was a rising star in the Democratic party in a key part of the country. His position at the inner circle of the Clinton dynasty meant he was a threat. Bill Clinton had taken the back seat and it was clear the party was pushing his wife as a potential candidate. There was little chance the Republicans would unseat the incumbent Barak Obama and Hillary bowed out early, like in 2009, early.  If the right wing could do enough damage to the left’s inner circle. Maybe, just maybe they could make headway. Hillary Clinton, had failed in 2008, but had been handed the high profile position of Secretary of State. She had used the position to bolster her lack of experience in international politics as she and Huma Abedin traveled the world. Clinton was definitely a threat if she ran in 2016. Things looked fine.

Remember that back in May of 2011 a young Obama organizer named Sydney Elaine Leathers posted on Anthony Weiner’s Facebook page. She said she admired him and said she was “shocked and intrigued” when he “poked” her back on July 12, 2012 when she 20 as “sidneyelainexo”. For the next two years, they used a number of platforms to exchange sexual discussions, have phone sex (as often as five times a day)  and send each other nude photos on platforms that included Facebook, Formspring, Yahoo (as Carlos Danger). Leathers told “the Dirty” that by November 2012 her online relationship with Weiner relationship began to fizzle out… but she kept everything. She was surprised when Wiener texted her on April 10, 2013, to look at a massive New York Times mea culpa profile on his comeback six months before running for Mayor.

By July of 2013 she had leaked photos to the Dirty and Buzzfeed and others quickly figured out that she was the 23 year old woman who had been sexting with Anthony Wiener. Even if the scandal was a year old.

Stephanie Clifford

May 19, 2011 is also when a heavy chested porn actress named Stephanie Clifford aka “Stormy Daniels” took a polygraph test at Western Security Consultants in Las Vegas.  Clifford claimed truthfully (according to the test) that she met then married reality star Donald Trump’s at a July 16, 2006 golf tournament in Lake Tahoe  and they carried on an affair until January 17, 2007.  Her agent, Gina Rodriquez. had set up an interview with Bauer publications tabloid reporter Jordi Lippe-McGraw about a sexual encounter with reality show start Donald Trump. Gina Rodriquez a former porn actress had set up the interview for $15K with a 20% cut for herself. The former husband of Rodriquez (2006 – 2008 )was porn actor Greg Deuschle aka “Randy Spears” remembers being called and threatened by lawyer Michael Cohen. Ron Slay’s polygraph indicated that Clifford’s statements about the affair were truthful.

Ron Slay the owner of Western Security Consultants was said Daniels took the lie detector test for Bauer Publishing,  Life & Style magazine. But they never ran the story. In January Bauer’s In Touch Weekly published  “Stormy Daniels’ Explosive Full Interview on Donald Trump Affair: “I Can Describe His Junk Perfectly.”. Later Slay said he sold the videotape of the polygraph Daniel’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti for $25,000

Michael Cohen would pay Daniels $130,000 in October 2016 to sign a non disclosure, a month before the election. What is evident was that Trump had many skeletons in his closet and his strategy was to attack even if it meant inventing or exaggerating dirt on his opponent. The affair would reappear in 2018 as a scandal even though the original  InTouch interview was seven years old.

 Sidney Leathers

On November 7, 2012, the day Obama was reelected as Presidtan,  the election former congressman Anthony Weiner went on twitter and tweeted for the first time in a year and a half. Almost instantly Donald Trump tweeted;

Pervert alert. @RepWeiner is back on twitter. All girls under the age of 18, block him immediately.”

Trump was no stranger to sleaze. Leathers was not the shy political groupie Weiner thought she was. According to texts exchanged between work mate Lou Colagiovanni and the 23 year old over a four months between April 12, 2013  and just one month before the news broke, she confided to a friend that not only was she charging “sugar daddy” a $1000 for sex.  According to texts published by the Daily Mail, Leathers comes off as quite experienced and comfortable chatting with older men online and in person and charging some money for sexual favors. What is notable is that on April, 12, 2013, Leathers told Colagiovanni that somebody had found out about her online relationship with Weiner and was threatening to blackmail her. Was this a hack?  Weiner was running for Mayor and her initial concern about being exposed suddenly became a concerted effort to expose him.

Leathers reached out to Hooman Karamian aka Nic Ritchie, the owner of a Scottsdale, AZ based scandal blog called “The Dirty”.the editor of one of her favorite scandal sites, “The Dirty”. A site used to expose bad behaviors of ex’s and current lovers, ideally with embarrassing photos, usually for money. She didn’t expect the answer:  Pics or it didn’t happen.

On June 27, 2013 23-year old Leathers contacted Ritchie again, she said  she had incriminating photos of Weiner. A man who insisted he had changed his ways after his 2011 sexting disaster. Weiner’s high profile run for mayor featured appearances with his wife Huma Abedin who made statements like ““Anthony has spent every day since [the scandal] trying to be the best dad and husband he can be”. Ritchie wasn’t that interested until she sent in pics. Leathers was angry and finally sent proof.on the 23^rd.

Ritchie set Leathers up with his agent Gina Rodriquez at GR Media. Rodriquez had specialized in fringe porn and D-listers like Octomom, Mama June Nadya Suleman and Lindsay Lohan’s father, Michael. who then pitched her to Inside Edition who paid her for an exclusive interview on July 25, 2013. Her hack was all about the money, branding herself a social activist she went after Weiner in the media as he had preyed on her.

Although “the Dirty” heavily blurred the photos, geeks at Buzzfeed quickly found the original photos on the internet. By July 31 she was outed.

On July 31, 2013, Chuck C. Johnson busy exposing every aspect of the 2011 event to sync with the mayoral race in New York while writing for The Daily Caller.

Weiner had been potentially catfished as early as 2011 when false personas named “Betty” and “Veronica”. Sydney Leathers was just one of ten women “Carlos Danger” liked to chat with. In reality, and according to his own confessions, Anthony carried on hundreds of conversations with women. All of them.

Meagan Broussard

Breitbart had been accused of going after Weiner ever since he scored a scoop by publishing Wiener’s May 27, 2011 screen shot of his erect penis while wearing tightey whiteys on his BigGovernment site. A place where Charles Johnson began contributing to Breitbart in February 8, 2010 while attending college at private liberal arts Claremont Mckenna. He began targeting Weiner on June 2 of 2011 starting off his piece about the hacking of Weiner’s email account.

But there were two women. Breitbart was terrified that if Weiner were to go to forensics experts or the FBI he could cast doubt on the veracity of the pics. But Breitbart had been tossed another lifeline and after spending the weekend desperately trying to contact her, he hit pay dirt. He then built a rapid fire PR assault with Broussard using ABC news as the keystone appearance to give him credibility. Most of the media did not distinguish between  the hacked photo that was reset to post as public and the genuine photos provided by Broussard.

Meagan immediately began making the media circuit including ABC News paying to “license” her photos.

Andrew Breitbart

Breitbart even went on Hannity to say how he felt he was under attack by left wing bloggers “when these ideas get out in there in the media, you have to fight back or they become the truth, even if they are not truthful”  He is discussing four photos taken from Weiner’s photo files without actually explaining the provenance of how he got them.

He rattled off the list of photos he had “the underwear, the wedding ring, kitty cats at home, the shirts off in the next one the other one is naked shot. The one he won’t release is considered “pornographic” . These are the PatriotUSA76 supplied photos. Images supplied by @goatsred not the female in question.

In a bizarre use of logic, Breitbart tells Hannity, “I am not enjoying the salacious aspect” Breitbart says, “had I not shown those photos, he would continued down a campaign of smearing me”

“I know how politics work, I know how the politics of personal destruction works. Don’t go after Meagan.. don’t go after the other girls.”

How did Breitbart get the image that launched his career?  As he tells it in his book Righteous Indignation: Excuse Me While I Save the World (Grand Central Publishing, 2012,  it was a Saturday and….

“As the sun began to set at the start of a weekend meant to delineate spring from summer, (Memorial Day Weekend) I asked my wife if she’d like me to open up a bottle of white wine. No sooner had I opened the bottle of Chardonnay and poured two glasses, standing at our kitchen island, then I began multitasking, refreshing my Twitter stream on my iPad. It was at that moment that the best-laid vacation plans of mice and men ended, and my recommitment to the story began four days ahead of schedule.

Huh, I thought, what’s this?

Someone, using the Twitter handle PatriotUSA76, had re-tweeted an alleged tweet of sitting congressman Anthony Weiner (D-NY). The message included a link to an image, which I immediately clicked.

 Gennette Nicole Cordova

That woman was a 21 year old student from Bellingham Washington Gennette Nicole Cordova. Cordova lays out a very different scenario in her May 29, 2011 statement to the Daily News.  She says she checked in to her Twitter account on a Friday eventing and found obscene photos with her name linked to them. They were not from Anthony Weiner, they were from a group that harassed her. “Since I had dealt with this person and his cohorts before I assumed that the tweet and the picture were their latest attempts at defaming the Congressman and harassing his supporters.” She blocked them, turned her page “private” and assumed the prank was over. It wasn’t. she came under unrelenting attack for the next 36 hours as she was attacked, insulted, her personal information spread around and accused of being Weiner’s mistress.  In other words she was set up. In her summing up of the event, “There have never been any inappropriate exchanges between Anthony Weiner and myself, including the tweet/picture in question, which had apparently been deleted before it reached me. I cannot answer the questions that I do not have the answers to.”

Her underage friends had also been targeted. Something that slo slips between the reporting cracks.Not by Weiner but by individuals looking to get a pornographic photo from Weiner’s ImageShack account onto followers phones and computers.  Something Breitbart never mentioned then or in his book. In a stunning lapse of clear reporting, the young women had never seen the photographs sent to Breitbart.  Her comments about the photo after she was told about it were used to act as confirmation that she had received it. She had been hacked.

Meagan Broussard

What saved Breitbart’s ass was Meagan Broussard.

That woman turned out to be Meagan Broussard, a 26-year old single mother from Texas. She clicked “Like” on his Facebook page on April 20, 2011 and said he looked “hottt” in a YouTube video. He replied back on Facebook Chat. For a month they swapped photos on Facebook and Weiner sent his photos via anthonyweiner@aol.com and RockOh77@yahoo.com until May 18, when she got an erect penis shot with the last communication on May 27, at 4:21pm East coast time.  It is worth noting that all AOL user accounts had been breached in August of 2006 by a publication of search terms that had been mirrored and distributed. In an attempt to provide data to scientists, AOL provided data from their 650,000 AOL users with the names removed, but ample information for hackers to recreate user’s identities.

Let’s continue with Breitbart’s recollection

“Nine days beforehand, we had received an e-mail tip from a gentleman in Texas who claimed to have compromising photographs and communications between a single mother in Texas and Congressman Weiner.  In any event, the source spoke to (Joel B.) Pollak once but never followed up with him. In truth, we probably would have forgotten about it had PatriotUSA76 not re-tweeted Weiner’s original tweet that Friday night.

This puts a very different spin on the innocent way Breitbart came to come into the possession of Anthony Weiner’s personal photos. Even his ace in teh hole was not from the actual woman involved but by a go between who was desperately trying to salvage the   skanky provenance of the first photos provided form USAPatriot76

But Weiner very nearly got away with it. Without further evidence except his own self-destructive interviews, the story could not move forward. For the next few days, the media began asking about PatriotUSA76 and the sources of the original story. Even though Weiner was clearly in implosion mode, the mystery of what really happened on Friday night, May 27,  was still a hot topic in the blogosphere, and even in my own camp. While Lee Stranahan, Patterico (Patrick Frey), and LibertyChick (Mandy Nagy) tried to figure out who PatriotUSA76 was, I was more focused on a much bigger fish: Megan Broussard, the woman in Texas whose friend tipped us eight days before the congressman’s now-infamous tweet.

When I first spoke with Megan Broussard’s friend on Saturday, May 28,

Saturday May 28, was the exact same morning as when Breitbart received the emails from USAPatriot76. What exactly are the odds of two agents having compromising pics of Weiner on the exact save Memorial Day Weekend?

To get some insight on how fast the spin doctors work, on 11:49 am PDT that same Saturday, May 28 the Daily Kos was already sandbagging in preparation for a propaganda fight. The Ministry of Truth posted a headline “Brietbart to use SEX SMEAR on Rep Anthony Weiner UPDATEX2: Easily Debunked FRAUD EPIC FAIL”Breitbart was called a”serial liar and corporate hack” and were accused of ” another Shirley Sherrod”  and “ACORN” type con. Breitbart had been accused of editing Rural Development head, Sherrod’s speech to appear racist and had also created fictional characters to apply for government housing assistance as pimp and prostitute. They offered digital forensics as proof that Breitbart had doctored the screed shot of Weiner’s underwear.

Dan Wolfe

Let’s create a secondary narrative to Breitbart’s convenient re-ordering of events. PatriotUSA76 was a right wing of Dan Wolfe. Wolfe had been tweeting as far back as May 12, 2011  that a “top5 RightWing blogger has sexscandal pics” of Weiner.

Remember that name Dan Wolfe and more importantly his partner, 39-year old New Jersey resident, Mike Stack. It was actually Stack that started the ball rolling on May 5 when he tweeted as @goatsred  that a big time congressman was about to be involved in a sex scandal. He attributed that information to a person named Dan Wolfe. Wolfe…according to the Smoking Gun, told Stack that he had heard the rumor from a source who worked for a well-known conservative web site.”

Now we have come full circle. The Weiner pics originated with “a conservative web site” not sold or leaked to it.

“Wolfe” as PatriotUSA76 began to tweet “via@goatsred” on May 5, that the Congressman was Anthony Weiner and did it again on May 12.  This is a full fifteen days before the May 27 tweet sent from Weiner of the grey underwear/erection photo sent to a 21-year-old college student in Washington state. We are to believe that that tweet was spotted on Friday by PatriotUSA76 aka Wolfe aka Mike aka @goardsred and then on the next day brought to the attention of BigGovernment editor Andrew Breitbart while he was sipping Chardonnay at his LA home getting ready to decamp to the desert for the long weekend.

Despite sending Breitbart a tweet at  4:16 AM (Eastern, 7:16AM Pacific) he refused to speak to Breitbart. He did email (not tweet) 6 jpgs of screen shots from a photo hosting site called yfrog. Remember these are what he calls “screen caps” which are from the phone of the person getting the photos and communications, but the other photos are from Weiner’s password protected yfrog site. Using a security hole, a hacker can reset the privacy settings on the ImageShack photo storage site to automatically post photos from yfrog. A vulnerability that affected 50 million monthly users, was pointed out on June 1

Wolfe’s reluctance to actually speak with Breitbart surfaced only hours after he had emailed the conservative blogger a series of screen captures that he “took live” . Wolfe’s e-mail to Breitbart was sent at  and included six .jpg images. His e-mail to Breitbart concluded, “We have more.” It is worth remember that hacking is against the law.

The yfrog emails accounts were automatically generated Yfrog’s automatically generated using words of the same length and the did not require a confirmation using another email address, ideal for a brute force attack in which software can try millions of words until they hit pay dirt.   Stranger was Brietbarts attempt to contact and confirm the photos before his 2pm publication deadline:

Come out, come out wherever you are ‘Dan Wolfe’ @patriotUSA76! Stop hiding behind anonymity! Own up to your role & motivation.

 

Is there a real ‘Dan Wolfe’ @PatriotUSA76 or has someone for months elaborately pretended to be? #Weinergate gets more confusing!

 

Lookin’ for some clarifying data from @patriotusa76. Call me. I’m listed. Article coming by 2pm EDT @BigGovt

The fear was that perhaps Breitbart was being set up by Democrats just as he set up Democrats.

On Monday May 30, at 12:25 pm   “Dan Wolfe”suddenly appeared by email to lay out a laundry list of personal problems and why he didn’t want to talk on the phone.

Breitbart Ascendent

A June 6, 2011 at a bizarre press conference intended to allow Weiner to make a statement, was hacked by Andrew Breitbart who learned of the event and walked over.

While answering questions and defending himself, Breitbart went live. The media was not that interested in the war of left vs right on the internet. Catfishing, spoofing, ghosting, spearphising, doxing, outing, sock puppeting, swarming, shaming or even the strategy of bloggers linking together to flood the search engines to game google searches was not really on their radar. The rise of the right wing blogosphere was viewed with some suspicion. Brieibart knew just how crazy the extreme left was.

Then there was the radical left. A group of people who saw what was being doing to Weiner by the right wing and would go as far as to threaten and then SWAT,  right wing bloggers and instigators like Mike Stack, who they blamed for setting up and taking down Weiner. Blogger Patterico, a deputy prosecutor in Los Angeles was treated by email, then by phone and then SWATed on July 1, 2011. He blamed a cabal of left wingers Ron Brynaert, Neal Rauhauser, and Brett Kimberlin for his harassment.

When Weiner weiner showd up 15 minutes later he confessed to sending a photo “last Friday night”to a supporter in Seattle but in his very public mea culpa, he said  “once I had realized I had posted it to Twitter, I panicked and took it down and said that I had been hacked”. He insisted he would not resign. Weiner was not innocent, he also admitted to inappropriate online conversations with 6 women over the last three years but he had been tricked. He just couldn’t put his finger on how.

AT 4:46 Weiner says something that will bite him, his wife and Hillary Clinton in the ass years later  “My Blackberry is not a government Blackberry, my home computer is usually where I did these things.”

Weiner resigned from congress after the Breitbart publication on June 16 of that year.

Weiner had been told a week earlier that his Twitter account had been hacked. Additionally the metadata does not match other photos pulled from the YFrog site used by Weiner. Weiner was conducting risqué chats with women, and Weiner did not pursue law enforcement actions that might have vindicated him but someone was clearly messing with Clinton associate Anthony Weiner while Weiner was messing around.   This in the business is known as the “Honey Trap” using sex or the promise of sex to lure targets into trouble or providing information. In this case Weiner provided the access to Hillary Clinton’s emails kept on his laptop and used by his wife.

Weiner’s obscene Tweets had been initially captured and nailed by Breitbart in May 27, 2011. Weiner insisted the photos which did not show his face, were faked and that he was the victim of a hoax. Later he admitted it was his photo but that the picture of his screen shot was faked. None of Weiner’s 45,000 followers managed to save a screen shot.

That hack was about politics.

Betty and Veronica

June 3 2011, right after Weiner’ press conference, there are attempts to scam Wiener and Breitbart with  “Betty and Veronica”. A scam in which the young girls turned out to be real but never followed or communicated with Wiener. Coincidently these were also west coast residents. The New York Times dug into the complex story.   The short version is that the mother of two underage girls provided a fake California driver’s license, blamed Andrew Brietbart and editor Dana Loesch

A group of “conservatives” called #were found to be catfishing Weiner, pretending to be underage women. They created two false identities on Twitter to gather information against him. One Twitter user labeled @starchild111 pretended to be a 16-year-old girl named “Nikki Reid” was created in September of 2011, and invited Weiner to be her prom date. Another false account was created under the name Marianela Alicea and she pretending to be a classmate at Hollywood High School. A third person claiming to be the mother of Nikki Reid provided a fake driver’s license and bad address to a media blog to convince journalists that she was real.

“During the latter two Skype sessions, on February 18 and 23, 2016, and in a Snapchat communication on March 9, the defendant used graphic and obscene language to ask the Minor Victim to display her naked body and touch herself, which she did.”  Wiener also used an app called Confide.

In 2011, a young Chik Fil-et employee told Chuck C. Johnson a story.  “BroGrammer” Pax Dickinson was Johnson’s business partner in WeSearchr created in February 8, 2016 to monetize tips on news. “WeSearchr is an online information marketplace that crowdsources funds for desired information bounties” Their first customer appeared to Peter Theil with $50,000 bounty for information on Gawker’s Nick Denton and 10,000 for Gawker Plagiarism.

Sydney Leathers Redux

In January of 2015, Weiner started texting another woman. A well-built 40-year-old on the west coast. He barely saw his wife as she juggled book appearances, Clinton’s speeches, Clinton Foundation messes,  the upcoming campaign run President in May and her own PR to make her one of the jetset.

On April 16, 2015 Charles C. Johnson launched a fundraiser called Clinton Secret Oppo Project to take down Hillary Clinton. Johnson proclaimed that “for the past three years my team and I have been researching Hillary Clinton and we have a lead on a game-changing story.” The month before the FBI had met with Clinton and warned her about the vulnerability of her server and URL.

On August 3, 2015 at 8:50am Donald Trump tweets “It came out that Huma Abedin knows all about Hillary’s private illegal emails. Huma’s PR husband, Anthony Weiner, will tell the world.

Guccifer 2.0

A year later on March 10, 2016  the first attempts to phish the DNC begin by what was labeled as a Russian backed operation called Guccifer 2.0. It started small and most were long shuttered accounts from Clinton’s campaign in 2008. The next day they managed to get access to new emails and they were in.   Between the 22nd and the 25th of March Huma Abedin’s computer and other senior communications team members were targeted.

It wasn’t just Democrats, Forensics show that hackers were targeting hundreds of Gmail email addresses in 19 countries. Not only were they hacking but they took the unusual step of dumping the information into the public realm. Something penny pinching hackers don’t do without getting paid.

On April 12, 2016 an attempt to set up a secure host from Romanian company, THCServers.com cost $37 in bitcoin. After the payment didn’t go through for ElectionLeaks.com, a week the customer fixed it and chose DCLeaks as the URL. The search for Clinton Dirt took on strange twist. Russians and middlemen kept popping up in front of Trump people insisting they had the “Dirt”.

It was April 26th that Joseph Mifsud, a Maltese Director of the University of Stirling’s London Academy of Diplomacy told George Papadopoulos in London that he had “Clinton Dirt”. Papadopoulos had joined the Trump campaign as a foreign policy advisor in March and was looking to follow up on the campaign managers platform of better relationships with Russia. He first meets Mifsud in Italy on March 14, and they attempt to set up a trip to Russia. Ten days later they meet in London with a women introduced as “Putin’s niece” They meet again for breakfast on the 26th in London. the general back and forth is focused on setting up a trip for Trump to meet Putin.

In late May of 2016, Roger Stone met with a Russian named“Henry Greenberg” in Florida after Greenberg offered Clinton Dirt in exchange for two million dollars. Greenberg was actually Henry Oknyansky, a long time FBI informant. Oknyansky denied he was working for the FBI and counter to Stone’s version, he said he brought along “Alexei” described as a Ukrainian and former Clinton Foundation staffer and that it was Alexei who asked for the money.  The Clinton Foundation denies they had any such person working for them.

On Tuesday, June 14, the DNC announced their email system had been hacked. The next day Guccifer 2.0 send a sample of documents to the legal doc site The Smoking Gun with the Boris Badenov sounding note ““This is Guccifer 2.0 and this is me who hacked Democratic National Committee.” The hackers would add the word CONFIDENTIAL to some emails.

By July the FBI got wind that an American was helping Russian intelligenceinfluence the election. That person was George Papadopoulos and he was on the Trump foreign policy team. He would lieabout the professor and the niece in his January 27, 2017 interview to the FBI. He also forgets that he documented his meetings on Facebook which he does not shut down until after his second interview with the FBI on February 16, 2017. In keeping with the concept of an October surprise, the Obama administration did not release their findings until October 7,

A haphazard leak of AP estimated 150,000 documents from Guccifer 2.0 blog, the DCLeaks site and finally on July 22, WikiLeaks.

On June 9, 2016 a meeting in the Trump Tower Russia meeting was set between Russian lawyer Natalia Veselnitskaya, Rinat Akhmetshin  and Donald Trump Jr., Paul Manafort and Jared Kushner. Veselnitskaya was supposed to be in the U.S. on a legal case regarding sanctions but got the meeting by promising “Clinton Dirt”. She didn’t bring up emails at the meetings but discussed dropping sanctions. Natalia Veselnitskaya had been in DC working  with Paul Behrends and Dana Rohrabacher to promote an anti Magnitsky film. Something that had apparently been set up when Behrends and Rohrabacher were in Russia. More on that later.

Rohrabacher and Behrend

There is an assumption in the media that Mifsud and Veselnitskaya are trying to sell or barter “Clinton Dirt” meaning the hacks from Podesta and the DNC. They began to be downloaded on the 19th of that same month but there is no evidence that they are the same. It is clear that Russian wanted Obama imposed sanctions lifted and were eager to help Trump. This enthusiasm also spun on another axle, the idea that Russia could be convinced to move away from Assad ally in Syria and let the US and Israel war against Iran.

On August 14, 2016, Stone contacts Guccifer 2.0 via his website; ““Please ask Assange for any State or HRC e-mail from August 10 to August 30. particularly on August 20, 2011″ Stone bragged that he was in contact with Assange and in private messages toadied up to hacker Wikileaks. Nothing.

Who were these damn Russians and why the hell did they keep offering Clinton Dirt?

It began with Erik Prince’s former employer and close friend former California politician and Reagan speechwriter Dana Rohrbacher. Prince had interned for Dana in the 90’s and had hired Rohrabachers aide Paul Behrends.

Two months before the Trump Tower meeting, Dana Rohrabacher and long-time Erik Prince employee/friend/lobbyist Paul Behrends went on a trip to Moscow between August 4 and August 8^th2016.  There they met with Vladimir Yakunin, a member of Putin’s inner circle and one of the Russians sanctioned after the invasion of Crimea. Victor Grin, an aide to Russian prosecutor general Yuri Chaika and others that were described as FSB agents by the US State Department and Embassy security. The Russians handed Rohrabacher a folder marked “Confidential” with evidence against Magnitsky. Their goal was to get sanctions lifted in the US. They also met with Natalia Veselnitskaya…in April 2016according to Veselnitskaya, five months before Rohrabacher and Behrends’ official trip in August and more than a year before the Trump meeting in June.

Veselnitskaya told a Russian television interviewer, “So, the first meeting was in the spring of 2016 here in Moscow with the head of the Subcommittee of the International Committee of the House of Representatives of the US Congress with Dana Rohrabacher. And with the members of his team who accompanied him. So, we talked with him, I explained to him what, in fact, happened, in our opinion, taking into account the evidence that we have. And I asked only one thing – that if it is, interesting for your committee, we are ready to come to you, give evidence, present all the evidence, and that’s it. We would just like to initiate an investigation procedure in the Congress of these circumstances. At the same time, Dana Rohrabacher was given a film by Andrei Nekrasov.”

That anti sanctions film would be the center point of Rohrabacher and Behrends mid-June 2016 DC Russian sanctions bustingdog and pony. Veselnitskaya , the original star of the Russian grand tour at first insisted she was related to promoting the reinstatement for adoption of Russian babies stopped after the sanctions but in fact was the lawyer for the FSB….Russia’s Federal Security Service when she operated as Kamerton Consulting, from 2005 to 2013.

One of the other people the dynamic duo met in Russia in 2016 was Russian spy Maria Butina. Butina was a Russian gun advocate who was caught using the NRA (now run by Olly North) as conduit for secret Russian government communications and perhaps for Russian funding of Trump election activity.  Rohrabacher and Behrends were also photographed in Berlin with anti Magnitsky filmmaker and a host of Russians involved in what the FBI describes as collusion and the same crowd along with Erik Prince and his family all are photographed attended Rohrabacher’s inaugural ball at the libray in DC.

After the media caught wind of this Russian boondoggling. Paul Behrends was fired and Rohrabacher moved him out of the lime light into a staff position.

But there was another target in the cross hairs. In December of 2016 Erik Prince was seen waiting to meet Trump carrying his famous large shiny briefcase at the Trump Tower bar it is one of at least two times he has met Trump and his team.

I had met Johnson at Erik Prince’s home in August of 2011 along with Oliver North, Victoria Toensing and Paul Behrends. They were all concerned about how they could affect the upcoming election. Prince with his then unpublished book. Johnson was just out of school and considered but a bright, but troublesome student. He went to work at Breitbart and would circle the Democrats like a shark. Dirty tricks were his game and it appeared he had no shame in pitching ideas to whoever listened. He told people that his main stock in trade was oppo research and even called it Charles C. Johnson Research.It was at that meeting that I was asked to help fix Prince’s manuscript. It was bad. Badly plagiarized lift from Joby Warrick of the Washington Post, basic google level backgrounders and clumsily injected slanders of those that Prince felt had done him wrong. I hired a fact checker to fix the mess and when I began writing in earnest, Prince refused to change a number of knowingly false entries. I moved on but Prince sued me to hide the original contents of that book. Contents that would contradict a federal weapons case that directly implicated Prince. A case which was only resolved after Prince and his lawyer David Boies had two CIA agents write letters seven years after the fact.

““The campaign had no contact with Russian officials,” said Hope Hicks said in November. But she was lying. The Moscow Project, estimates over 82 contacts between just Trump campaign staff and Russian designated entities despite numerous vociferous denial from Trump’ camp.

Much has been said about the media’s coverage of Trump and Russia, while virtually none has bothered to discuss Hillary Clinton and Russia. Vladimir Putin hated Hillary Clinton. Clinton took it upon herself as Secretary of State to actually point out the horrible human rights violations, crooked system and rigged elections in Russia that returned Putin to power for the third time. In 2011 Clinton was accused by Putin of causing unrest in Russia and stating the parliamentary elections were rigged and called for a full investigation. Russian media and even the Golos election watchdog site found themselves under attack from hackers. Not surprisingly a series of attacks on Clinton’s email servers began, a coincidence but in hindsight not a very difficult one to figure out. Beginning in 2011, Hillary Clinton was one of Putin’s least favorite people.  Even going as far as saying that her adventuringinLibya was akin to a Christian Crusade. Clinton’s written opinionon Putin as she moved on in 2013 was simple “Snub him”.

+ + +

At 8:50am on August 3, 2015 then Presidential contender Donald Trump sent a tweet.

“It came out that Huma Abedin knows all about Hillary’s private illegal emails. Huma’s PR husband, Anthony Weiner will tell the world.”

On August 31, Trump tweets again.

“Huma Abedin, the top aide to Hillary Clinton and the wife of perv sleazebag Anthony Wiener, was a major security risk as a collector of info”

This hack is different from the DNC hack, the attack on Abedin’s computer appeared to be a catfish attack in which a hacker adopted the personas of Betty and Veronica to plant underage photos of themselves on Abedin’s laptop via Wiener’s shared usage of it. Rather than go into the complicated process of engineered stings, the black op conspired to put illegal child pornography on Abedin’s laptop, use the NYPD (which investigated underage sex crimes) to seize the laptop because of those photos and then accidentally discover Clinton’s missing emails on the same laptop hard drive. Now if that is though through the New York prosecutors’ investigation into allegations that Weiner had sexted with an underage girl should have nothing to do with classified emails or political games in the case of pedophilia.

On October 28, 2016 the New York Times carried the storyof Comey’s letter announcing his decision to reopen the investigation into Hillary’s emails Abedin/Wiener emails after 650,000 emails were found.

NYPD

On September 22, 2016 Preet Bahara in the New York U.S. Attorney’s office issued subpoenas for Anthony Wiener’s electronic devices.

Bahara and NYPD detectives and the Manhattan District Attorney’s office also confirmed to the New York Post that they were investigating Weiner.  The core of the announcement was “The NYPD’s Special Victims Unit is investigating the matter after a 15-year-old high-school student released a trove of sick texts and photos she allegedly received from the disgraced politician.”

Go to Part Five. The War on You

Back to Part Four of The Hack

The post The Hack Part Five: Catfish and Honey appeared first on Dangerous Magazine.

by Robert Young Pelton

In a humid, 88-degree summer swelter, Erik Prince pulls up on his Cannondale mountain bike drenched in sweat but unwinded. Dressed in a cheap white polo shirt, the 41-year-old ex–Navy SEAL, ex–CIA assassination point man, and avid adventure racer has just pedaled over to meet me from his self-described redneck mansion, a low-key brick affair a few miles away in North Virginia horse country, where he has been raising his seven school-age children. The next day, Prince will board a flight from Dulles International Airport, heading off to begin a new life in Abu Dhabi, the capital of the United Arab Emirates — a nation, some have been quick to note, that lacks an extradition policy with the United States.

Today he needs to pack, and he wants to be with his kids, but he also needs to talk. He has some things he needs to get off his chest, some things he wants everyone to know. He greets me politely, takes a seat, and proceeds to remove the batteries from his cell phone — “It’s too easy to eavesdrop these days,” he says. Then he checks his Breitling watch and shoots me the impatient look his business associates know only too well: Let’s get on with it.

In phone calls leading up to our meeting, Prince was angry — furious, even — that he and Blackwater, the company he built from a ramshackle shooting range into a $1.5 billion one-stop shop for war-zone services to the Pentagon, U.S. State Department, and the CIA, continue to endure what he views as a ceaseless and politically motivated “proctological exam.” The company will go on (it recently won a fresh $100 million contract from the CIA), but Prince, seething with betrayal, has had enough: “I’m done. It’s all sold or shut down. I’m getting out of the government contracting business.”

Since the clumsy February 2009 rebranding effort in which Blackwater was renamed Xe (pronounced “zee”), both current and former executives, Prince says, get deposed regularly by investigators from at least six federal agencies, including Congress, the Pentagon, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, and even the Department of Agriculture. They’re looking for dirt to support what Prince dismisses as “baseless” accusations that run the gamut from negligence, racial discrimination, prostitution, wrongful death, murder, and the smuggling of weapons into Iraq in dog-food containers. One witness, Howard Lowry, who traveled to Iraq frequently between 2003 and 2009, testified on September 10 that Blackwater contractors had him procure steroids and other drugs for them, and that he was invited to weekly all-night parties in Baghdad’s al-Hamra hotel.

“One of the suites would be absolutely packed with gentlemen running around with either no clothes on, no shirt on,” he said in a court document that was leaked to the media almost instantly. “It was like a frat party gone wild. There was cocaine all on the tables. There were blocks of hash, and you could smell it in the air.” Lowry gave his testimony as part of a 2008 lawsuit brought by two former Blackwater employees, who allege that Blackwater sent the bill for hookers and strippers to Uncle Sam and that Prince benefited from this fraud. Prince says there’s no merit to the charges: “When we found knucklehead behavior, we fired them.”

Though Prince stepped down as CEO of Xe on March 2, 2009, the IRS, he claims, is auditing his personal income taxes, all while press reports and blogs call him a “war profiteer,” “right-wing crusader,” and “mercenary” (a term he despises), and imply that he is fleeing the country to escape justice.

But if he is on the run, his evasion skills need help. Xe/Blackwater recently agreed to pay the Feds a $42 million fine for a series of niggling violations; when we meet, Prince is one week away from a seven-hour deposition (with an attorney who followed him to Abu Dhabi) for a lawsuit financed by the New York–based Center for Constitutional Rights. It’s a matter of public record that he’s sold off or closed many of the 30-plus companies that he created to handle discreet contracts from the government between 2004 and 2009. Meanwhile, he still fumes that he was outed as a covert CIA operative in August 2009, a leak he blames on his Democratic enemies in Congress and newly appointed CIA director Leon Panetta’s incompetence.

“Look at the stink they raised when a low-level agent like Valerie Plame was revealed,” he says. “What happened to me was worse,” he adds, going on to call the leak criminal. His cover blown, he tells me he has nothing left to hide.

If there is a short version to where it all went wrong, Prince’s curt response sums it up: “Nisour happened.” On September 16, 2007, Blackwater guards were sent to clear the way for a U.S. State Department convoy and ended up opening fire on a busy traffic circle, killing 17 Iraqis. Because of a special order established in 2004 that exempted Blackwater contractors from Iraqi law, the five Blackwater employees who shot up the square were indicted in the U.S. for voluntary manslaughter; Prince, looking like Ollie North’s boyish nephew, appeared before Congress soon after the bloodbath to explain the expanding and deadly role of private contractors in Iraq. (On December 31, 2009, a U.S. district judge dismissed all the manslaughter charges because the case against the Blackwater guards had been improperly built on testimony given in exchange for immunity.) Many of the victims of Nisour Square and their families accepted State Department–approved payouts for their silence, but Prince says a suit may be refiled in North Carolina. “It won’t go anywhere,” he adds.

At the time of Nisour, Prince and Blackwater had already been engaged in a legal battle for nearly three years with the families of four men who were brutally murdered in Fallujah in 2004 while in Blackwater’s employ. The attorneys for the families undertook a negative PR campaign against Blackwater. Because he is wealthy and held sole propriety of the company, Prince himself made an ideal target for their smears.

Although Prince says he’s saddened by the deaths of the 33 Blackwater men killed on the job (he teared up about it at a private going-away reception the previous day), he chalks up the loss of life not to his or Blackwater’s hubris, but simply to war, and men doing dangerous work in dangerous places. At every turn, he points out, Blackwater followed the orders of its client — U.S. government officials — who, he says, often put his men in harm’s way. His one regret? “I wish we had never worked for the Department of State. They’re not worth it.”

Prince is not a chatty fella, and as he downs a second bottle of spring water, I have to ask him the same question multiple times to get him to answer — like starting a car with a dead battery. You can tell by his manner and the length of his replies what he wants to talk about (his dad) and what he doesn’t (the sensational accusations against him that speculate on his plans).

While he allows that taking up residence in Abu Dhabi will “make it harder for the jackals to get my money,” he tells me that his move to the Persian Gulf isn’t about avoiding the courts, but rather about being home for dinner with his kids. No, he’s serious: His real motive for leaving the country, he assures me, is that he can get to Abu Dhabi quickly from his undisclosed new work in “the energy field” — a future that has his detractors wondering what’s scarier: Erik Prince running security for the State Department and spying for the CIA or Erik Prince freelancing in the Middle East.

If Prince seems like a man in a perpetual hurry, it’s because he is. For one thing, the men in the Prince family have a genetic predisposition to early death from heart disease. Prince’s grandfather Peter died of a heart attack at age 36, his uncle at 60, and his own father nearly died of one when Erik was three. “My dad was scared, but focused,” he recalls. “He was a tugboat that pulled a lot of boats behind him.”

Born in 1969 to Edgar and Elsa Prince, Erik was their only son (he has three sisters) and grew up in Holland, Michigan, a conservative Dutch-immigrant enclave that could be the setting for a Norman Rockwell painting. Like many in business and politics, Prince wears his family’s hard climb to success like a badge of honor. Edgar started his own company in 1965, and during Erik’s early childhood, the family of six lived in a heavily mortgaged house about a third the size of his mother’s current estate on Michigan’s Lake Macatawa.

At the time of Edgar’s near-fatal heart attack, he and his business partners had just developed their breakthrough product: a lighted sun visor with a mirror, first introduced in the 1973 Cadillac. More innovations followed, including a built-in garage-door opener, digital compass, and thermometer, which made Edgar Prince rich. What impressed Detroit the most was that Prince Industries invested its own money in R&D and often successfully predicted the little things that made the difference to the car-buying public.

Prince soaked up his dad’s business philosophy around the dinner table. He also absorbed his father’s focus on family. “My dad insisted on being home for all of my sporting events,” he says. “He even kept a fleet of aircraft so his sales guys could be home from meetings in time for dinner.”

From an early age, Erik liked to push his luck. As early as 12, he tested himself by sailing alone on Lake Michigan, and he ran a trap line in the cold Michigan winters. As a teen he was a cold-water diver for the sheriff’s department (to find drowned snowmobilers) and a volunteer firefighter while attending Hillsdale College, a privately funded libertarian school in southern Michigan.

As he built his fortune, Prince’s father became a prime mover in the Christian evangelical movement, his mother overseeing donations to James Dobson’s Focus on the Family and other conservative political action groups. The relationships his father developed through his philanthropy not only informed Erik’s worldview but also became important to his business prospects later. In 1990 Edgar secured Erik a low-level internship in the White House, but Prince soon quit for a much more exciting opportunity to intern for California Congressman Dana Rohrabacher, Reagan’s former speechwriter and an ex–freedom fighter against the Soviets in Afghanistan.

Rohrabacher recalls that Prince, a “bright, driven young man,” volunteered to search for a mass grave in Nicaragua to expose Marxist-turned-president Daniel Ortega as a killer. “I went down there with this other guy from Dana’s office,” Prince says. “It was the first time I had to shake a surveillance tail, from the Sandinistas.” He was 21, eight days shy of his first wedding, and thrilling to his first taste of international intrigue. “We found a mass grave: bones sticking out of the ground, hands tied with wire at the wrists.”
More adventure awaited him. Prince’s initial goal was to become a Navy carrier pilot, but in the era of Tailhook, he was turned off by the frat-house antics at the naval academy. Switching to the Navy SEALs, he found his calling. But first he had to pass Basic Underwater Demolition School — one of the toughest selections in the military.

“The cool thing about the SEAL teams is that the only difference between enlisted men and officers is that the officer has a white stripe on his helmet,” Prince says. He found in the SEALs both an outlet for his intensity and a credo for his entrepreneurial drive. “The sea is the most difficult environment to operate in — on land you have a few hours to sort out your problem, but if you have problems in the water, you’re not going to live unless you sort them out in seconds.”

In 1993 Prince joined SEAL Team 8, based out of Norfolk, Virginia. “I figured I would be a SEAL for the next 10 to 12 years. There wasn’t much going on then. The invasion of Haiti was a non-event. It was mostly training, training, and more training. Had I stayed longer, I would have seen action, but things changed at home.”

On March 2, 1995, Edgar Prince collapsed from another heart attack and died. Later that same year, Prince’s wife, pregnant with their second child, received a cancer diagnosis. Prince finished out his fifth year as a SEAL but returned to civilian life sooner than he’d planned. “You roll with the punches,” he says stoically.
For the next eight years, his wife struggled with cancer, until she passed away in 2003. He refuses to elaborate but allows that “the saddest moment of my life was her funeral.” He was 34.

When the Prince Group sold in 1996, one year after Edgar’s death, it garnered $1.35 billion. Though split between several of his dad’s business partners, numerous employee stockholders, his mother, three siblings, and him, the windfall still set Prince up for life. “My SEAL friend suggested that maybe I should invest the money, kick back, and live off the interest,” Prince says, in a rare moment of reflection. “In hindsight that wasn’t such bad advice.” Instead, he created the ultimate boys club in a North Carolina swamp.

Prince’s original plan, created with help from veteran Navy SEAL Al Clark, was to build the dream training facility — a place all his buddies from Norfolk could use. “We needed 3,000 acres to make it safe,” Prince recalls. After searching for a location for six months, he ended up paying $900,000 for 3,100 acres (or about $300 an acre) in Moyock, North Carolina. The swampy, tannin-stained “black water” and the bears on the property inspired both the name and the famous bear-paw logo. By the time the Blackwater Lodge and Training Center officially opened on May 15, 1998, the footprint had doubled in size, to 6,000 acres, and Prince was into it for $6.5 million. Over the next few years, he would invite a number of influential members of the military, FBI, local law enforcement, and even the CIA to visit and play “Blackwater.”

At first, locals didn’t pay the range or Prince much notice. “To the degree that [Prince] was thought of, it was as this patriotic guy who had built this Hail Mary facility to help the SEALs, and who probably hoped to break even,” recalls Jay Price, staff writer for Raleigh’s The News & Observer, who tracked Blackwater’s rise to prominence. “The big contracts weren’t on the horizon, not even a glimmer, and I don’t think anyone in their right mind was thinking of him as a greedy military-industrial profiteer.… Maybe as a kid from money who was looking around to see what his role in life would be.” Prince could have spent the next few decades in eternal adolescence, impressing and entertaining his shooting friends at the “Lodge” and staying out of the limelight, but 9/11 would change that.

Before 2001 the term contractors referred to retired agency and special operations vets who knew each other by reputation or service. The small pool of retired “Tier One” operators, usually middle-aged men with smeared tattoos and worn SF or SEAL rings, were discreetly hired and signed up for overseas gigs with few questions asked and little to no public divulgence.

Shortly after 9/11, Cofer Black, the former CIA head of Counter Terrorism, put out the word to hire more than a hundred “shooters” for Afghanistan. The CIA would “sheep dip” (reassign under false cover) active operators and activate “green badgers” (cleared agency contractors) for the CIA Special Activities Division. Once the agency moved from using small mobile paramilitary operations in Afghanistan to larger, fixed installations, it quickly realized that it needed a more robust type of protection: The tiny old boy’s network was soon tapped out. That’s when the CIA turned to Prince and his clubhouse.

In the spring of 2002, Buzzy Krongard, the number three at the agency, presented Prince with Blackwater’s first “mission”: Could Prince provide 20 men with top-secret clearances and have them on a plane to Kabul within a few days? Their job in Afghanistan would be to protect the CIA headquarters and one remote OGA base, in Shkin, supporting the hunt for Bin Laden. Friends were called, and Prince quickly had his team. A six-month, $5.4 million contract was rushed through as “sole source, urgent and compelling need.” What’s more, Prince assigned himself to be part of the group so he could make sure his customer was being well served.

Once in Afghanistan, Prince couldn’t wait to get back to the States: He realized right away that he could make millions more providing security teams than he could running a shooting range. His new “private military company” would be to the Pentagon as FedEx was to the Postal Service. And his sales pitch to CIA bureaucrats was about as sophisticated as his $17 haircut. “We did it cheaper and better,” he boasts. Blackwater was paying each man $550 a day and billing the agency $1,500 all in. It was hard for Prince to lose money.

Then came Iraq. By spring of 2003, an old-fashioned land war had given way to a robust State Department and CIA political mission. Hundreds of young U.S. diplomats and case officers, many of them straight out of college, were posted to Iraq to shape a new nation. The Bush administration initially expected the same jubilant response from liberated Iraqis that they had seen in Afghanistan, but they would be proved wrong. Newly assigned viceroy Paul Bremer, tasked by President Bush with creating a transitional government (the Coalition Provisional Authority), needed a dramatically different form of protection, and so did all the
diplomats. Normally, the government is responsible for its own security, but it simply didn’t have the staff for such a high-risk personal-protection detail overseas. From the government’s point of view, contracting for this protection also outsourced the political risk in the event of a screwup or fatality. The contractor, not the client, would take the heat — and the bullets.

In the fall of 2003, Blackwater was awarded the $27.7 million “Bremer Detail,” a Department of Defense contract that essentially created a Frankenstein brigade of highly visible hired guns. Blackwater provided the security to the Iraq Survey Group (the ISG was the CIA group looking for proof of weapons of mass destruction), allowing the ISG to travel anywhere in the country with the guarantee of safety.

By the time I first visited Blackwater, in July 2004, to lead a course on how to think like a terrorist for a bunch of special-forces types who were about to be deployed to Afghanistan, the Lodge was well on its way to becoming a networking center for U.S. and foreign special operations and anyone else hoping to be recruited for security work in Iraq and Afghanistan. The place reeked of Prince’s weakness for Boy’s Own derring-do — from the hunting lodge/summer camp/club house–type decor to the main office, which featured trophy animals and gun-enthusiast magazines.

Outside on the many shooting ranges, brass glittered in the gravel; the popping of bullets was ever present, as were the sounds of screeching tires and explosions from the driving track. Fifty-caliber rounds fired from the sniper range echoed off the portable buildings with a metallic shriek. Well-muscled men in tan T-shirts and crushed ball caps methodically cleaned their M4s and pistols outside the chow hall. Inside, a long line of plaques and mementos from police and special operations groups decorated the entry to the offices. Off in the distance were aircraft fuselages, Navy ship towers, and a village built from Conex containers. Longtime Blackwater president Gary Jackson even had a desk made out of armored steel. Jackson and Prince were proud of the tactics they had developed to operate in Iraq — Prince still is.

“We were using low-profile, armored indigenous vehicles with teams of two and four,” Prince says, explaining that he chose the “low profile” look to protect the ISG. That look consisted of operators wearing local dress moving in beat-up yet armored taxis, with weapons held below the windows. “You can’t shoot at what you can’t see,” he says. Blackwater was suddenly guarding arguably the most hated man in the most violent country on Earth — and Prince rose to the challenge. “Not one State Department employee was killed while we were protecting them,” he says.

While Prince’s success may have been partly the result of his aggressive approach, it made some of his own executives nervous. “Erik decided to become a lightning rod and then [attach it] to his ass,” says Mike Rush, another ex–Navy SEAL and former Blackwater vice-president, of Prince’s business manner. “Erik would walk up and down the corridors of Langley and the Pentagon telling everyone how fucked up they were and how they should run the war,” he continues. “That’s nice…but we had to do business with those people.”

Prince’s “sell first, figure it out later” style injected massive stress into his rapidly expanding venture. Everyone remembers him as impatient. Prince’s own stance on those early days: “You hire people, they don’t work out, you move on.” In the scramble to keep contracts manned, Blackwater trained, hired, and rotated thousands of men. The men generally had little time for their bureaucratic State Department counterparts, and the natural tension between them became fertile ground for payback when the media and lawyers came looking for sources with a score to settle with Prince. But between 2003 and 2007, Prince had his own agenda and didn’t focus on petty squabbles.

In 2002, a few short months after 9/11, the CIA had turned him down for a job when he applied to be part of its Clandestine Services, specifically the Special Activities Division of the agency. The CIA, he says, told him he didn’t have enough “hard skills.” So, two years later, in December 2004, he hired the CIA — bringing in Cofer Black following 28 years of service with the agency. Prince installed the former CIA exec as Blackwater’s “chief breacher” — the man who blows in doors on a SEAL team.

As Blackwater grew, so did Prince’s ambitions. Indulging his lifelong love of aviation, he began assembling a small air force of smaller cargo planes, helicopters, and even large transports (including a Boeing 767) for either a Dulles-to-Baghdad run or the rendition of terror suspects, depending on whom you believe.
He also hatched a plan to vertically integrate all these assets to form a self-sufficient army of 1,740 men — an “army in a box” complete with air support, medical and construction outfits, and high-tech weapons that could deploy instead of, say, a United Nations peacekeeping brigade. Registered in Barbados under the name Greystone, this new company was designed to hire foreign employees and operate outside U.S. legal restrictions. “It is more difficult than ever for your country to successfully protect its interests against diverse and complicated threats in today’s grey world,” Greystone’s brochure stated. Prince even pitched then Secretary of State Colin Powell a version of this: a battalion-size humanitarian force that could provide “relief with teeth” in the Darfur region of Sudan. To Powell and his advisors, Prince’s gunned-up proposal was as politically acceptable as calling a nuclear strike on an orphanage.

Meanwhile, as if Prince didn’t have enough going on, the CIA finally accepted him for its NOC program. As a “non-official cover operative,” he was given a polygraph and an operational code name, and only his handler knew his true identity from his “201” personnel file. Prince volunteered to find terrorist targets for “capture or kill.” Twice he was able to come through, but authorities in Washington never gave the green light.
Blackwater was supposed to be the grease in the wheels of regime change in Iraq, but there was soon serious friction. Numerous troubling events that had been buried in action reports came to light: Blackwater was suffering from its success and spreading itself too thin.

In the violent fall of 2004, I spent an unrestricted month covering Blackwater teams running the charred route between the Green Zone and Baghdad International Airport. The daily 15-minute thrill ride often included close calls, angry Iraqis, sniper attacks, car bombs — enough near-death experiences to last a lifetime. I was able to see the service that our government was buying, and while I also took taxis and private cars without incident, I found Blackwater’s teams aggressive but professional.

But when I returned to Baghdad in 2006, at least one contractor complained that Blackwater had become a “flat-out sloppy fucking operation,” and the men I knew apologized to me for the “roid-rager” who told me to “get the fuck out of here” when he heard I was media.

The press soon brought Blackwater’s most egregious acts to the attention of the public: dead Iraqis, a crashed plane, crushed vehicles, a drunken shooting of a vice-president’s security man, media guards gunned down, and much more. On the CIA side, “big-boy rules” were in effect. These rules are a tacit code among covert operatives that states that there are no rules until you break one — by, say, appearing before Congress on every television on Earth. Prince’s mission to find terrorists fizzled and then died under the new administration. Finally, with Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in power (as a senator, she had introduced legislation to put the kibosh on private contractors), Blackwater ran out of oxygen. So Prince, ever the SEAL, quickly assessed, adjusted, and moved on.

America won’t get an apology from Prince, because in his view, he did what he had to do and, crucially, what his government asked him to do. Yes, Blackwater has paid off victims of its violence, but only under the direct advice of its client, the U.S. State Department. When Prince had to get equipment in-country to keep his clients and his people safe, he did. When his staff racked up 300 counts of violations while following client orders, he simply ate the fine. It’s like another popular slogan SEALs use during training: Pain is just weakness leaving the body. Now Prince is leaving the pain and taking himself out of range.

Financially, Prince may yet come out ahead. His quick estimates are that his failed self-
financed ventures, like armored trucks and airships, burned about $100 million. Toss in another $50 to $60 million in legal fees (last year alone he spent $24 million) and another $42 million in government fines, and then subtract the net-after-tax income from the billion and a half in estimated government contract revenue: How much did he make? “The rule of thumb is that you plan for 15 percent and are happy if you make 10,” he explains. “I have enough to live comfortably. I’m a multimillionaire, but with way less now. I am almost embarrassed I didn’t make more money.”

Prince won’t provide details on his future other than that he won’t be accepting government customers. “The media tends to screw up my plans,” he says. Still, it’s no secret Blackwater’s up for grabs. As of press time, a letter of intent had been drafted regarding its imminent sale. Reconciled but not pleased with this outcome, he pauses for a moment, searching awkwardly for a way to sum up his payback. He thinks he has it: “Atlas Shrugged.” He means Ayn Rand’s novel in which defiant engineer John Galt protests stifling bureaucracy by convincing other leaders to bring society and government to the brink of collapse. It’s clear that Prince identifies with Galt. It’s also clear that he will not abandon his dreams.

Sitting inside Prince’s toy-cluttered Suburban hours before his flight to Abu Dhabi, I press him once more to define himself against the caricature many have of him — somewhere closer to evil than Iron Man’s Tony Stark. At first he is reluctant, even embarrassed by the question. Then he tells me, “I try to live by the Parable of the Talents” — Matthew’s story in the Bible about the chastising of a timid servant who buries his master’s money out of fear, and the praising of an industrious servant who increases his master’s money tenfold. But he shifts again; Talents isn’t exactly right.

“I don’t plan to meet my maker tanned, fit, and rested,” Prince says, at last. “I intend to be tired, battered, and bruised.”

—

The Golden Age for Contractors & Mercenaries

Blackwater/Xe may have been dropped from the State Department’s Worldwide Personal Protective Services contract, but Xe founder Erik Prince’s vision for his industry is being realized on a scale that even he could not have imagined — with firms such as DynCorp International and Triple Canopy (both now located in Virginia) racing to fill the contracts denied Xe. How big are we talking? Despite being an outspoken critic of private contractors during her 2008 campaign for president, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will soon preside over a private army in Iraq that dwarfs that of the Bush era. Here is a look at the current Obama administration’s security plans for Iraq.

7,000 HIRED GUNS

On August 2, 2010, President Obama announced: “Our commitment in Iraq is changing from a military effort led by our troops to a civilian effort led by our diplomats.” To keep those diplomats safe, however, the State Department plans on doubling — to roughly 7,000 — the number of private security guards and low-paid foreign mercenaries assigned to U.S. personnel and locations.

WORLD’s LARGEST EMBASSY
Approximately the size of Vatican City and costing $592 million, the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad is among the largest and most expensive in the world, even though it was built with cheap, imported labor. A bunkerlike complex of 21 buildings, it spreads over 104 acres and houses 835 employees. Private guards maintain the complex and other facilities in Basra, Erbil, Hillah, Kirkuk, and Tallil.

2,500 ARMORED SUVs and 50 MRAPS
To enable our diplomats and nation-builders to move safely around Iraq, the U.S. Embassy has ordered up a fleet of between 2,500 and 3,200 armored sport utility vehicles at a cost of approximately $150,000 each and has asked the departing U.S. military forces to leave it 50 MRAPs — 28,000- to 42,000-pound trucks built to withstand massive roadside IED explosions.

PRIVATE AIR FORCE
Twenty-five Black Hawk helicopters and a small number of fixed-wing aircraft and air-support crews will also be used to transport embassy staff between locations. Blackwater pioneered the concept of using “Little Birds” with two snipers to protect SUV convoys (and as rescue or escape vehicles). DynCorp International will replace Blackwater in providing this air support.

This article was originally published on Tuesday, November 30, 2010 in Men’s Journal. 

The post Erik Prince – An American Commando In Exile appeared first on Dangerous Magazine.

This article on ODA 595, General Dostum, John Walker Lindh and the battle at Qali-i-Jangi was originally published in the March 2002 edition of National Geographic Adventure

THE LEGEND OF HEAVY AND THE BOYS  By Robert Young Pelton

The Regulators flew in from Uzbekistan at night on a blacked-out Chinook helicopter. They landed near a mud-walled compound in the remote Darra-e Suf valley in northern Afghanistan. As they began unloading their gear, they were met by Afghans in turbans, their faces wrapped. “It was like that scene in Close Encounters where the aliens meet humans for the first time,” one soldier says later. “Or maybe that scene in Star Wars: These sand people started jabbering in a language we had never heard.” The Americans shouldered their hundred-pound rucksacks while the Afghans hefted the rest of the equipment. The gear seemed to float from the landing site under a procession of brown blankets and turbans.

The next morning, about 60 Afghan cavalry came thundering into the compound. Ten minutes later, another 40 riders galloped up. General Abdul Rashid Dostum had arrived.

“Our mission was simple,” another soldier says. “Support Dostum. They told us, ‘If Dostum wants to go to Kabul, you are going with him. If he wants to take over the whole country, do it. If he goes off the deep end and starts whacking people, advise higher up and maybe pull out.’ This was the most incredibly open mission we have ever done.”

Before heading in-country, the soldiers had been briefed only vaguely about Dostum. They’d heard rumors that he was 80 years old, that he didn’t have use of his right arm. And they’d been told that he was the most powerful anti-Taliban leader in northern Afghanistan. “I thought the guy was this ruthless warlord,” one soldier says. “I assumed he was fricking mean, hard. You know: You better not show any weakness. Then he rides up on horseback with one pant leg untucked, looking like Bluto.”

Dostum dismounted and shook everyone’s hand, then sat on a mound covered with carpets. He talked for half an hour. Dostum’s strategy was now their strategy: to ride roughshod over Taliban positions up the Darra-e Suf Valley, roll north over the Tingi Pass in the Alborz Range, then sweep north across the plains and liberate Mazar-e Sharif, Afghanistan’s second largest city. When the council broke up, Dostum stood and motioned toward the horses. America’s finest were about to fight their first war on horseback in more than a hundred years.

The rocket howls over the roof of General Dostum’s house in Khoda Barq at about 10 p.m. It’s November 26, my second day in Afghanistan, and already I’m in the middle of a hellacious firefight. Although nighttime gunfire is normal in Afghanistan, there is an urgency to the sound of the deep explosions that come from the 19th-century fortress of Qala Jangi, just over a mile east from Khoda Barq, a Soviet-era apartment complex west of Mazar. The heavy shooting, the worried soldiers, the rapid radio chatter—all signal that something ugly is going on over there.

Airstrikes, AC130’s and Hazara guards had killed all but 86 al Qaeda and Taliban fighters
© Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

Meanwhile, I’m hunkered down, waiting for Dostum. I’ve arranged through intermediaries to spend a month with the general, but for the past week, he has been a hundred miles east, trying to subdue Taliban forces that control the city of Kunduz. General Abdul Rashid Dostum is a man who has rarely been interviewed but has often been typecast as a brutal warlord—usually because of his reputation for winning. He is a kingmaker who works the ethnic minority to choose who will rule and who will fail. A man who is said by some journalists to define violence and treachery. (In his book “Taliban”, author Ahmed Rashid reports a tale he heard that Dostum once ordered his men to drag a thief behind a tank until all that was left was a bloody pulp of gore. Rashid later admitted that not only did he not witness it but it the event was fictional.  Beyond that, all I know is that Dostum, born a poor peasant, grew up to be a brilliant commander, a general, and a warlord—one of the many regional leaders across Afghanistan whose power derives both from ethnic loyalties and from military strength. That he is known to be a deft alliance maker—and breaker. And that he became the first Afghan commander to take over a major city when he entered Mazar-e Sharif on November 10. It’s an irresistible story, made all the more so by a convincing rumor I’ve been hearing since my arrival: that Dostum triumphed with a little help from his friends—specifically, the Green Berets.

As I wait for Dostum to return, though, the constant chatter of machine guns and the badoom badoom of cannons from an American gunship bombarding the fort—Dostum’s military headquarters—suggest that I might be a bit premature in offering any congratulations on winning the war. I soon learn that yesterday some 400 foreign Taliban prisoners overpowered their guards, broke into arsenals, and took over part of the fortress. Right next to where I am staying. I had first tried to meet the General in May of 1997. At the same moment he was trying to flee Mazar from the Taliban assault. I had jumped a train in Tajikistan, snuck into Uzbekistan and remained holed up in a dusty border town. My attempts to convince the Afghans took place in a building in which men with dark beards sat in from of Tony Montana style palm tree sunset wall paper murals. Finally after two weeks they admitted they could not smuggle me across. This time I had less worries with just a few hours waiting for Uzbek guards to look the other way while we hustled our kit over the blockade Friendship Bridge at night.

At 3:30 a.m., I go to bed. Three hours later, I am awakened by a massive explosion a few yards from the house—another near miss by a rocket fired from inside the fort. The sound of canon fire continues without a break but at a slower pace. In the morning Villagers come out in the crisp, golden light of morning, shivering and tired. Some huddle together to watch the gray pillars of smoke from the bombing runs. Others begin the work of the day without even paying attention to the nearby fighting.

In the afternoon, when I visit the 1985 fort called “Qala i Jangi” or Fort of the Soldiers,  bullets sing over my head. Up on the parapets, Dostum’s troops stream toward a gap in the ramparts created yesterday by an errant American 2000 lb bomb. Soldiers run up to the bite in the wall, shoot into the fort, and then scurry back down. I watch a fighter go up to the top, then crumple into a black pile of rags. Astoundingly, after two days of bombardment, the prisoners still control the fort.

ODA 595 Prepares to retrieve the body of Mike Spann from Qala-i-Jangi ©Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

Late in the afternoon, a convoy of mud-spattered off-road vehicles pulls up, and a dozen dusty Americans in tan chocolate chip camo climb out. They have Beretta pistols strapped to their thighs like gunslingers and short M-4 rifles slung across their chests. They’re polite but wary about having their pictures taken as they set up their night-vision scopes. After a final check of their gear, they head into the fortress. Later, I find out that they’ve come hoping to retrieve the body of Central Intelligence Agency officer Johnny Micheal Spann, who was killed by Taliban prisoners—the first American combat casualty in Afghanistan.

Dostum arrives that night, ducking to avoid banging his head as he strides through the guest-house door. He takes my hand in a meaty grip and apologizes for being dirty and tired; he has just driven eight hours on a shattered road from Kunduz. He has two weeks of beard, beetling eyebrows, and a graying brush cut. When Dostum frowns, his features gather into a dark, Stalin-like scowl—his usual expression for formal portraits. But when he smiles, he looks like a naughty 12-year-old.

He sits and makes small talk, then excuses himself to take a shower. When he returns, the dark weariness has lifted. Over chai (tea), he announces good news. He has ended the bloody battle for Kunduz by negotiating with Mullah Faizal and Mullah Nuri, the two most senior Taliban leaders in the north. It seems that the “brutal warlord” has engineered the biggest peaceful surrender in recent Afghan history—more than 5,000 Afghan Taliban fighters and foreign volunteers laid down their arms. He waves the accomplishment aside with a shy smile even as he promises to introduce me to his new trophies—the mullahs. It turns out they’re staying next door, guests in Dostum’s house.

Mullah Faizel, commander of the Taliban Army in the North. © Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

Dostum proves to be significantly more expansive in conversation than his scant press clippings would suggest, and he’s happy to fill me in on his background. Over the next few weeks I privately coin for him a nickname based on the media’s fear and his in person good humor: I call him Heavy D, after the 1980s rapper.  “Dostum” is actually a nickname that means “my friend” was born Abdul Rashid in 1954 in the desolate village of Khvajeh Do Kuh, about 90 miles west of Mazar. Headstrong and known to get into fights,  was adept at the game of buzkashi, in which horsemen attempt to toss the headless carcass of a calf into a circle. Dating at least to the days of Genghis Khan, the violent game is not so much about scoring as it is about using every dirty trick possible—beating, whipping, kicking—to prevent the opposing team from scoring. Buzkashi is the way Afghan boys learn to ride—and it’s the way Afghan politics is played: There are few rules and the toughest, meanest, and most brutal player takes the prize.

After the seventh grade, Dostum left school to help his father on the family farm. At 16, he started working as a laborer in the government-owned gas refinery in nearby Sheberghan, where he dabbled in union politics.

The people of Dostum’s village were so impressed with his leadership that they recruited 600 men for him to command. It was about this time that Abdul Rashid became “Dostum.” In Uzbek, dost means “friend”; dostum means “my friend.” It was a nickname that the young soldier was given for his habitual way of addressing people. When a local singer wrote a song about “Dostum,” the name stuck. He was quick to defend the weak and if negotiations failed he had no shortage of armed men that would stand beside him.

When a Marxist government came to power in a bloody coup in 1978, the new regime’s radical reforms ignited a guerrilla war with the mujahidin who based themselves in the country’s remote mountain ranges.

The young commando Abdul Rashid, quickly rose through the ranks.

Dostum enlisted in the Afghan military—one of the few ways for poor men to escape lives of labor and hardship in rural Afghanistan. He rose through the ranks quickly becoming a paratrooper in 1973, an armored unit in 1978 and Battalion 734 KhAD by 1983. Dostum’s real success was in negotiating enemy commanders to lay down their arms and to join him. He was authorized to transform his Jowyzjani militia into the 53rd Infantry Division in 1988 and ultimately under the Soviet backed regime of Najibullah, he became commander of the 7th Army Corps in charge of all of Northern Afghanistan. Again he began integrating mujahideen into the political military ranks among them his number two against the Taliban Lal Kamadan. At the end of the Soviet period Dostum had 45,000 troops with about half of them as village reserves. If one was to look for the roots of Dostum’s “warlord” reputation it began when he was the direct and most successful enemy of the CIA-backed insurgency of fundamentalist warlords based out of Pakistan. The idea that that Dostum would actually save the day for an embattled America is an irony that has not fully played out.

In the bewildering matrix of Afghan politics, Dostum has frequently—and nimbly—switched allegiances. In the 1980s, as a young army officer in the Soviet-backed government, he fought against the mujahidin. When the regime fell in 1992, three years after the Soviets departed, Dostum fought alongside the mujahidin and helped the Northern Alliance’s legendary Ahmad Shah Massoud battle the fundamentalist Pashtun forces of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar and gain control of the capital. The shelling, raping, pillaging, looting, and house-to-house fighting that then befell Kabul stained the name of every mujahidin commander, including Dostum’s, and fueled his reputation for brutality. Today the government of President Ghani has welcomed the fighters of Hekmatyar from exile in Pakistan and is looking to bring the Taliban into the government. All the while ostracizing the now First Vice President Dostum who is currently in exile in Ankara plotting his next move.

But back in 2001, “Warlord” Dostum who was head of the Jumbesh political party had simpler but identical goals: Align with the U.S. to return from exile in Turkey and bring the Taliban into the new government.  show Dostum the chapter in Rashid’s book that includes the account of the gruesome execution of the thief. Dostum chuckles and denies the allegation. He freely admits that in two decades of war, abuses have been committed by the troops of every commander. “What else do you expect my enemies to say?” he asks. “That I am kind and gentle? I will let what you see be the truth.”

In 1996, when the Taliban rolled into Kabul, Dostum was forced to retreat to his stronghold in Mazar as the mullahs instituted their version of a pure Islamic state. “At first I thought, Why not let them rule?” he says. “Power is not given to anyone forever. If the Taliban can rule successfully, let them.” A year later, betrayed by his second in command, who had defected to the Taliban, Dostum fled to Turkey. The U.S. refused to work with Dostum until former UN envoy Charlie Santos pointed out to the CIA that the only functioning fighting group besides the Panjshiris of Massoud were Dostum’s Uzbeks. Based on history and dossiers full of Pakistani provided intelligence, the Agency wanted nothing to do with Dostum. Santos pointed out that with Massoud dead, and no Pashtun resistance, Dostum was America’s only hope.

The Uzbeks and Hazara took to the mountains to escape the mechanized columns of the Taliban

Those among Dostum’s men who had remained in Afghanistan now became guerrilla fighters, moving on horseback holed up in the mountains under the command of his former number two La. Staying off the roads and in the wilds, they could swoop down and attack the Taliban but could not hold the ground. Dostum’s lieutenants would call him in Turkey and tell him how difficult life had become. They had to kill their horses for food. They didn’t have enough cloth for shrouds, so they had to bury dead comrades in burqas. “People demanded that I do something,” says Dostum. “Commanders, clergymen, women—they would all tell me very bitter stories. I was full of emotions. My friends were struggling against the Taliban, and I was sitting there.”

Dostum says that to help him get back into the fray, the former president of Afghanistan, Burhanuddin Rabbani, sliced off about $40,000 from the CIA funds. The CIA had begun to work with Massoud’s people in October of 1999 hoping to pay him to kill Osama bin Laden.  The Turks, long staunch enemies of Islamic extremism, contributed a small sum as well, and, on April 22, 2001, General Dostum and 30 men were ferried into northern Afghanistan on Massoud’s aging Soviet helicopters. “That,” says Dostum, “was when the war against terror began.”

Living in caves and raiding Taliban positions, Dostum’s men slowly began to harass the well-entrenched Taliban along the Darra-e Suf. They moved and attacked mostly at night, riding small, wiry Afghan horses that are well suited to steep slopes and long desert walks. “The money was hardly enough for feeding my horses,” Dostum says. “They had tanks, air force, and artillery. We fought with nothing but hope.”

Then came September 11. Despite actively fighting the Taliban, it was not until Santos introduced Dostum to JSOC that the United States might want to give him some help. Even the CIA was reticent to land paramilitaries and officers to set up the conditions for an Special Forces ODA to be inserted. At the last minute the Agency was told by the SF ground commander that his men were going in with or without the Agency. A small group of CIA that included Mike Spann, flew in to the Darra-e Suf the day before ODA 595 would land.

Now three weeks later the war was supposed to be over. The Taliban had surrendered at Qali i Jangi to CIA officer JR and Dostum and surrenders were under way in Kunduz. The B-Team had already set up shop at the Turkish School in Mazar and was getting ready for the push to Tora Bora. Until a group of 480 al Qaeda and talibs showed up at the gates of Mazar. Dostum and the Green Berets drove by them as they headed for Kunduz.

General Abul Rashid “Dostum”
© Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

The morning after Heavy D’s return from Kunduz, he greets me with a deep, booming “Howareyou?” Today, he tells me, he is eager for me to meet his trophy mullahs.

Next door, in Dostum’s pink house, Mullah Faizal and Mullah Nuri sit on pillows in a small room. These are two of the Taliban who chased Dostum out of Mazar in May 1997, but still he treats them more like honored guests than prisoners of war. Faizal has his prosthetic leg off. He is a thick man with a pug nose, bad skin, tiny teeth, and a cruel stare. Nuri has the black look of a Pashtun who has endured a lifetime of war. Wrapped in blankets, members of the mullahs’ entourage fix me with soulless stares. Nuri is chatty, although he often looks to the silent Faizal before answering my questions. During the Taliban’s reign, thousands of Hazara Shias were murdered in northern Afghanistan; the mullahs are unrepentant. “We fought for an idea,” says Nuri. “We did all that we could. Now we hope that America will not be cruel to the Afghan people.”

That afternoon, Dostum and I set off for the fort, where the uprising has been all but quelled. He brings the mullahs along, to show them the havoc incited by their foreign volunteers. Perhaps they’ll convince any surviving prisoners to surrender.

After four days of bombardment, the interior of the fort is a scene of utter devastation. Blackened, twisted vehicles are perforated with thousands of jagged holes. The crumpled bodies of prisoners, frozen in agony, are scattered everywhere. Most of the fallen look as if they were killed instantly. Some are in pieces; others have been flattened by tank treads. More than 400 prisoners are said to have died;

I count only about 50 bodies in the courtyard. The estimated 30 Alliance soldiers who died have already been taken away by their friends. When an American team finally recovered Spann’s body, they discovered it had been booby-trapped with a live grenade (which they removed without incident).

It is also rumored that there are many dead and at least two live prisoners holed up in the subterranean bomb shelter. The entrance to the bunker was pierced by cannon shots and is blackened from explosions. Dostum’s men have been throwing down grenades and pouring in gasoline and lighting it, but the foreign Taliban refuse to come up. Dostum implores the mullahs to call down to the bunker and tell the remaining men to surrender. Mullah Faizal and Mullah Nuri refuse: They claim they don’t know these people.

There are 86 al Qaeda fighter in the basement, including John Walker Lindh. Mullah Nuri insists he doesn’t know them and they refuse to come up.
© Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

The trapped Taliban volunteers, it seems, remain hungry for martyrdom. A day later—Thursday, five days since the uprising broke out—they are still firing sporadically at soldiers removing bodies from the courtyard of the fortress. At least two Red Cross workers who descend into the bunker are shot and wounded.

Later that week, Dostum casually mentions that 3,000 other foreign fighters from the surrender at Kunduz are in a Soviet-era prison in the city of Sheberghan, 80 miles west. Anticipating more fireworks, I head there with him and move into another of his residences, a huge, high-walled compound that includes a mosque and, improbably, an unfinished health-club complex.

By the time the team had arrived in Qali-i-Jangi they were gaunt, sick but eager to keep up the fight. Over 5000 Taliban remained hidden in surrounding villages. © Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

Some American soldiers are billeted upstairs in the guest houses; men in camo pants run up and down the stairs. Their rooms are filled with green Army cots, dirty brown packs, and green flight bags. Rifles, night-vision gear, and boots are strewn everywhere. I head downstairs and discover a group of soldiers bantering cheerfully, mostly in southern accents. They’ve just finished installing a satellite TV. When the television begins to blare, the men stare at the screen. “We haven’t seen a TV or news in two months,” one soldier says apologetically. Transfixed, they watch the Christmas tree being lit in Rockefeller Center.

These are the soldiers I saw back at Qala Jangi preparing to go in and retrieve the body of the dead CIA agent, Mike Spann. “Don’t I know you?” one of them says. “Aren’t you the guy who goes to all those dangerous places?”

It feels more than a bit odd to be recognized for my books and TV show—as someone who specializes in traveling to the world’s hot spots—while poking around a war in Afghanistan. It feels even more odd when I discover that these are Green Berets—soldiers who truly specialize in the world’s hot spots. But I never travel without a few “Mr. DP” hats, so I dig them out of my bag and pass them around.

Over the ensuing days, I take every opportunity to spend time in these makeshift barracks, particularly once I discover that this is the very unit of Green Berets that I’d been hearing rumors about—this is Dostum’s covert support team. At night we sit around talking over stainless steel cups of coffee. Some details of their mission they can’t discuss. Some are provided by Dostum and others. But the story gradually emerges.

There are twelve Green Berets here and two Air Force forward air controllers. Green Berets work in secrecy, so only their first names can be used: There’s Andy, the slow-talking weapons expert who is never without his grenade launcher; back home, he keeps the guns in his collections loaded “so they are ready when I am.” Both he and Paul, a quiet, bespectacled warrant officer, have been in the unit 11 years. Then there’s Steve, a well-mannered southern medic; Pete, the burly chaw spitter; Mark, their blond, midwestern captain; and so on. It’s like a casting call for The Dirty Dozen. Their motto is “To Free the Oppressed”—something they have done so far in this war with no civilian casualties, no blowback, and no regrets.

In between conflict there was time to celebrate. A typical meal at Dostum’s guesthouse.
© Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

These soldiers, I soon realize, come from much the same background as Dostum’s: sons of miners, farmers, and factory workers; some are men whose only way out of poverty is the military. They range in age from mid-20s to early 40’s. They are men with wives, children, mortgages, bills. Men who are the Army’s elite, who are college educated and fluent in several languages, yet who are paid little more than a manager at McDonald’s. They spend every day training for war, teaching other armies about war, and waiting for the call to fight in the next war.

They are direct military descendants of the Devil’s Brigade, a joint Canadian-American unit that fought in Italy during the Second World War. That group was disbanded and then re-formed in the early 1950s as Special Forces, which John F. Kennedy later nicknamed the Green Berets. The men I’m staying with have dubbed their unit the Regulators, after the 19th-century cowboys who were hired by cattle barons to guard their herds from rustlers. The Regulators have served in the gulf war, Somalia, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and in other places they can’t talk about. Their home base is Fort Campbell, Kentucky, but they spend only a few months of the year there. The rest of the time they travel.

On the morning of September 11, the team was returning to base after an all-night training exercise. “The post was in an uproar,” says Paul. No one knew just when or where the team would be sent. They cleaned and stowed their gear and awaited the order. And waited. There was talk that the team might be split up—rumors of differences with a commanding officer who didn’t appreciate the traditional independence of the Green Berets. They were all quitting demanding to be sent to other units rather than put up with new commander ideas on what soldiering was. But 9/11 changed all that. Toward the end of September, the word came down: “Pack your shit.”

Fifteen days later, the team boarded a C-5 Galaxy with a secret flight plan. The Regulators’ final destination turned out to be Uzbekistan, where they spent a week building a tent city and waiting for a mission. “We were at the right place at the right time,” says Steve. “Fifty tents later, they told us to pack our shit again.”

First arrival on the Observation Post. Now the tiny group of Americans need to show General Dostum what they can do.

“We had two days to plan,” another Regulator says. “The CIA gave us a briefing.” Although the Regulators were among the first, other small teams of U.S. forces would soon be airlifted in for similar missions, a response to Dostum’s request for American assistance to be sent to other Northern Alliance commanders. In an effort to trim Dostum’s control the CIA would insist that rival commander Ustad Atta Mohammed get his own Green Beret escort several weeks later as he raced Dostum to claim Mazar. Surprisingly Dostum agreed. Once they hit the ground, the Regulators would be writing their own game plan. “Our commanders said they didn’t know what to expect, but at least they were honest enough to admit it,” the Green Beret continues. “They said, ‘You guys will be on the ground; you figure it out.’ ”

Within half an hour of meeting Dostum at the mud-walled compound in the Darra-e Suf, the Regulators swung into action. Some stayed behind to handle logistics and supplies. The rest mounted up and rode north. “It was pretty painful,” Paul says. “They use simple wooden saddles covered with a piece of carpet, and short stirrups that put our knees up by our heads. The first words I wanted to learn in Dari were, ‘How do you make him stop?”

Their most important immediate order of business was to establish themselves in Dostum’s eyes. “The first thing we wanted to do was to say to Dostum, ‘The Americans are here,’ ” Paul explains, “and to make it a fearsome prospect to mess with us.” The Americans set up their gear at Dostum’s command post—which overlooked Taliban positions about six miles away—and immediately began the process of calling in close air support, or CAS. “You see the village; you see the bunkers,” says a second Steve, one of the two Air Force men attached to the team to help coordinate air strikes. “You call in an airplane; you say, ‘Can you see that place? There are tanks. You see this grid? Drop a bomb on that grid.’ Pretty straightforward stuff.”

It took a few hours for bombers to arrive from their carriers. At first, the planes wouldn’t fly below 15,000 feet—the brass was worried about surface-to-air missiles—so targeting was sketchy. But coordination soon improved, and the improbable allies fell into a rhythm: The Americans would bomb; Dostum’s men would attack.

A crude videotape made by one of Dostum’s men shows a battle in the rolling hills of the Darra-e Suf, where the yellow grass contrasts with the deep blue sky. The Americans, up on the ridge, are using GPS units to finalize coordinates. Down below, small Afghan horses are nipping the dry grass on the safe side of the hill, their riders chatting while awaiting the order to charge. The horses cast long shadows in the late afternoon. The only sign that something is about to happen is a white contrail high in the sky. The radio crackles with call signs and traffic broadcast between bombardiers and the American soldiers. First, a soft gray cloud of smoke rises in a lazy ring. Then the concussion: ka-RUMPH!

The tape now shows Dostum, leaning against a mud wall, watching through large binoculars. The dirty gray mushroom cloud slowly bends in the wind. Dostum stays in contact with the Americans by radio, working to help focus the bombing: a man with a seventh-grade education directing the fire of the world’s most powerful military.

Ka-RUMPH! More hits: Tall, fat smoke plumes cast moving shadows on the grass. The riders mount their horses, check their weapons, and begin the one-kilometer sprint to the Taliban front lines. There’s the erratic chatter of AK-47s and the deep dut dut dut dut of Taliban machine guns. Then the radios are jammed with Dostum’s men shouting and celebrating. The Taliban are running.

The videotape cuts to the next morning. Dostum’s men are touring the battle scene. The twisted rag doll bodies of dead Taliban fighters lie heads back, fingers clutched, legs sprawled as if they fell running. Dostum’s men kick the corpses into the trenches and cover them with the tan dirt, not bothering to count the dead.

The Regulators were joined by at least three CIA officers kitted in full combat gear, including a 32-year-old ex-Marine named Mike Spann. “We were surprised at how good they were,” says Captain Mark. “What we are doing now has not occurred since Vietnam. Up until now the CIA has been hog-tied. Now the CIA and spec ops have been let loose.”

Dostum’s men were a loose alliance that grew with every victory against the Taliban

Each night, Dostum would sit down with the Americans and lay out the battle plan for the next day. “He would say he is going to attack at about 2 p.m.,” says Air Force Steve. “So we would put in for priority for the planes.” The team’s primary weapons were not pistols or rifles; they were the most fearsome tools in the American arsenal: F-18s, F-16s, F-14s, and B-52s. They chose not bullets or grenades but ordnance that ranged from Maverick missiles to laser-guided bombs.

In contrast to the Americans’ high-tech warfare, some of Dostum’s tactics would have seemed familiar to the British troops who tried and failed to pacify this region in the 19th century. Before the arrival of the Americans, Dostum fought mostly at night. “He couldn’t expose his small force to Taliban missile strikes,” explains Captain Mark, “so they would hit and retreat. He never sacrificed his men. He would take a village by getting the mounted guys up close. When it looked like they would break the back of the position, he would ride through as fast as he could and keep the Taliban on the run.”

With their knowledge of military history, the Regulators appreciated the ironies of this strange war: “The Taliban had gone from the ‘muj’ style of fighting—in the mountains, on horseback—to working in mechanized columns,” says Will, another member of 595. That heavy reliance on tanks and trucks meant the Taliban wound up fighting a defensive, Russian-style war. “Then, here is Dostum,” says Will, “a guy trained in tanks who’s using tactics developed in Genghis Khan’s time.”

The Regulators’ job was to invent a new form of warfare: coordinating lightly armed horseback attacks with massive applications of American air power—all without hitting civilians or friendly forces. “In an air attack,” says Air Force Steve, “you do one of two things. You can bomb it until there is no resistance, or you bomb and, as soon as the bomb goes off, you charge. By the time they come up and look, you are on them.” The latter approach was well suited to Dostum’s style of attack. “A cavalry charge is an amazing thing,” Will says. “At a full gallop, it’s a smooth ride. The Afghans shoot from horseback, but there is no aiming in this country. It’s more like, ‘I am coming to get you—whether I hit you is another story.’ It’s Old World combat at its finest.

“There’s one time I’ll never forget,” he says. “The Taliban had dug-in, trench-line bunkers shooting machine guns, heavy ma-chine guns, and RPGs [rocket-propelled grenades]. We had an entire 250-man cavalry ready to charge.” The Regulators wanted Dostum’s right-hand man, Commander Lal, to hold off while they got their aircraft in position, but Lal had already given the order. In seconds, 250 men on horseback were thundering toward the Taliban position a mere 1,500 meters away.

“We only had the time it takes 250 horses to travel 1,500 meters, so I told the pilot to step on it,” Will says. “I looked at Lahl and said, ‘Bombs away.’ We had 30 seconds till impact; meanwhile, the Afghan horde is screaming down this ridgeline. It was right at dark. You could see machine gun fire from both positions. You could see horses falling.” An outcrop obscured views of the last 250 meters to the target. The lead horsemen disappeared behind the rocks, and the Regulators all held their breath, praying the bombs would reach the bunkers before the cavalry did. “Three or four bombs hit right in the middle of the enemy position,” says Will. “Almost immediately after the bombs exploded, the horses swept across the objective—the enemy was so shell-shocked. I could see the horses blasting out the other side. It was the finest sight I ever saw. The men were thrilled; they were so happy. It wasn’t done perfectly, but it will never be forgotten.”

Over 3200 prisoners were kept in Sheberghan © Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

Around eight o’clock on Saturday night, while I’m talking with the Green Berets, one of Dostum’s men comes into the house and asks us to follow him outside. Beyond the high steel gates is a confusion of trucks, headlights, and guns, and the sound of men moaning in pain. Lined up against a wall is the most pathetic display of humanity I have ever seen: the survivors of the bunker at Qala Jangi fortress. Dostum’s men had finally flooded them out by sluicing frigid water into the subterranean room. Instead of the expected handful of holdouts, no fewer than 86 foreign Taliban emerged after a week in the agonizing dark and cold—starved, deaf, hypothermic, wounded, and exhausted. Their captors brought them here en route to the Sheberghan prison.

They send off steam in the cold night, their brown skin white with dust. Some hide their faces, others convulse and shiver. I talk to an Iraqi, as well as to Pakistanis and Saudis—all of whom speak English. On another truck are the seriously wounded. Some cry out in pain, some are weeping, and others lie still, their faces frozen in deathly grimaces.

They put the prisoners back on the truck. A few minutes later, one of Dostum’s men runs up breathlessly, saying there is an American in the hospital. I grab my cameras and ask Bill, a pensive Green Beret medic, to come with me.

The soldiers stay well away from the al Qaeda prisoners as I interview them. They have been blowing themselves up with grenades. © Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

The scene at the hospital is ugly. The warm smell of gangrene and human waste hits me as I open the door to the triage room. Shattered, bearded men lie everywhere on stretchers, covered by thin blue sheets. The doctors huddle around a steel-drum stove, smiling and talking, oblivious to the pain and suffering around them. In the back, a doctor leans over a man with a smoke-blackened face, wild black hair, and an unkempt beard. He lies staring at the ceiling. The doctor yells in halting English, “What your name?” He jabs at the half-conscious man’s face. “Open your eyes! What your name? Where you from?” The man finally answers. “John,” he says. “Washington, D.C.”

The man is terribly thin and severely hypothermic. At first he is hostile, like a kitten baring its claws. He won’t tell me who to contact, or provide any information that would get him out of the crudely equipped hospital. I convince the staff to move him to an upstairs bed, where Bill inserts an IV of Hespan into the man’s dehydrated body to increase blood circulation. As Bill checks for wounds, he talks to the young man briefly in Arabic. I tell the prisoner where he is and who he’s talking to. Bill finds a shrapnel wound in the emaciated man’s right upper thigh and wounds from grenade shrapnel in his back; he also finds that part of the second toe on his left foot has been shot away.

John Walker Lindh was the second Irish American jihadi  I had met who was trained in Bin Laden’s camps. He refused to talk to his parents and he was taken back to our guesthouse for his protection. © Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

As the Hespan drips into his veins, I fire up the video camera, and the man begins to tell his story. His name, he says, is John Walker. He studied Arabic in Yemen and then enrolled in a madrasah, or religious school, in northern Pakistan. He says it was an area sympathetic to the Taliban and that his heart went out to them.

Six months ago, he traveled to Kabul with some Pakistanis to join the Taliban. Since he can’t speak Urdu, he was assigned to the Arab-speaking branch of Ansar (“the helpers”), a faction that Walker claims is sponsored by Osama bin Laden—whom Walker says he saw many times in the training camps and on the front lines.

He ended up in the Takhar Province, in the northeastern part of the country. Then the war began. After the American bombing campaign decimated their forces, Walker and members of his unit fled on foot nearly a hundred miles west to Kunduz—all for nothing, as it turned out. Mullah Faizal and Mullah Nuri soon surrendered Kunduz to Dostum, and Walker was imprisoned with the other foreign volunteers in the bunker at Qala Jangi.

When I look at the terrible conditions and the predicament that Walker is in, I have to ask him if this is what he expected.

“Definitely.”

Was his goal to become martyred?

“It is the goal of every Muslim.”

Then the morphine begins to kick in. I suggest to Bill that we remove Walker from the hospital, where he might be killed by other patients, many of whom were fighting against him at the fortress. We transfer him to Dostum’s house, and the next day he’s spirited away at the same time that his story is being broadcast around the world.

When the videotape of my interview with Walker hits the airwaves back in the U.S., the country focuses its white-hot anger on him, and some of that anger spills over onto me. In the conservative press I am criticized for being too gentle in my questioning of an obvious traitor, on the left for cold-bloodedly tricking a helpless boy into incriminating himself.

The team was ordered to exile to meet Donald Rumsfeld and be interviewed by Robin Moore. What happened next was the first of many distortions and fictional retelling of their story. This is the back jacket of The Hunt for Bin Laden ghostwritten by the late Jack Idema and published as non fiction by Random House editor Bob Loomis. The book was quietly taken out of print.

If you drive west from Mazar, past Qala Jangi, past Khoda Barq, past the ancient, crumbling city of Balkh, and head south toward a ridge of snow-dusted mountains called the Alborz Range, you will see a gap—the Tingi Pass. This is where the Taliban made their last stand. The Green Berets call it the Gap of Doom.

Two of the Green Berets I’ve been chatting with—Andy and Paul, the pair with the longest tenure in the company—have decided that I need to see this place for myself, or maybe simply that they need to go see it again one last time. We jump in a Toyota off-road vehicle and set off. Soon we’re winding past an ancient brick bridge that crosses a roaring gorge; on the west side are large caves that shepherds have scooped out of the soft rock over the centuries.

As we drive, Paul tells me that, back in the U.S., even the Regulators are subject to a military culture of rules and red tape. Planning a one-day live-ammo training exercise can require six months of paperwork. “If there is no enemy, then bureaucracy is the enemy,” he says. But on the ground in Afghanistan, they’re on their own. The greatest restrictions they face have been placed on them by Dostum himself. “Dostum was very concerned about us getting too close to the battlefield,” Captain Mark had told me back at the barracks. “In the last two semi-wars we have been in, every time American soldiers get killed we pull out. That is one of the premises Osama bin Laden operates under.” Dostum wasn’t about to let an American casualty put a premature end to his battle plan.

Their closest call came toward the end of the campaign, before they’d reached the Tingi Pass; I’d gotten an account of it last night from Mike, a big, bearded, soft-spoken soldier. The conflict began with several hundred Taliban troops moving into positions on an adjacent hill. Outmanned, the Green Berets decided to move out on horseback. They had gone only about 600 meters when they started taking fire. “I figured I could whip my horse and run across an open area,” Mike said. “I whip my horse, it takes three steps, and stops. The rounds are zinging over my head. Somehow I make it across the open area. I get off the horse and say, ‘Screw this; I’m walking.’

“We set up in a bomb crater and used it as our bunker. We were receiving more fire. It was somewhere between harassing and accurate—enough to keep our heads down. We called in a couple of bomb strikes. We could see a bunch of Taliban come out of another bunker complex off to the south and disappear behind a hill. It took about an hour to get the aircraft. All the while, we could see troops moving and disappearing. I’m looking through the optics while rounds are zinging all around us.” At this point in the tale, Mike nodded toward Paul, who was sitting next to him on the couch at Dostum’s guest house. “Paul here is busy shooting at guys. What we didn’t realize was that the Taliban who we saw coming out of the bunker had gone into the low ground and were sprinting up the hills at us in a flanking maneuver.

“Our Afghans are running out of ammo. Their subcommander has told us at least six times over the radio to get out of there. You have to understand: Dostum had told them, ‘If an American gets hurt . . . you die.’ We were focused on calling in an air strike to take out this truck that had rumbled into view, and now RPG rounds are flying over our heads. We’re not about to stand up and watch what’s going on. The pilot asked us, ‘What’s the effect [of the bomb attack on the truck]?’ We yell over the radio, ‘We don’t know! We’re not lifting our heads up!’

“When we turn around and notice what’s going on, we see our Afghans have split.”

The team decided to call in a B-52 strike practically on their own position—a drastic move considering the planes were flying above 15,000 feet. The enemy was 700 meters out and moving quickly. “Matt yelled, ‘Duck your head and get down!’ And that pilot dropped a shitload of bombs,” Mike said. “You felt the air leave. After the bombs hit, I peeked over the side of the bunker; our horses were gone. We grabbed our stuff and ran.”

The team knew that their story would be stolen, rewritten and misused as Rumsfeld and others seized the moment. © Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

Paul, Andy, and I drive past villages of round, domed huts, past a checkpoint manned by Dostum’s men, and up along the winding road to the Tingi Pass. Three years of drought have broken: A cold rain pours down in gray sheets. We pass the twisted, stripped wrecks of trucks and Toyotas. Afghans in a blue truck are scavenging for parts. The two Green Berets are solemn; they insist on driving through the gap so they can tell their story from the right perspective.

We wind through the tight pass alongside a swollen mountain river, go over the pass, then head a kilometer down the south side of the divide and stop at a freshly mudded house. We get out of the jeep and stand in the rain and slick mud. Paul picks up the story, raindrops dotting his gold-rimmed, government-issue glasses.

“We kept moving north on horseback, but at that point, no one could tell where the front line was anymore. Once we hit Keshendeh-ye Bala, we picked up a road and followed it north in a truck Dostum’s men had captured from the Taliban. At eight that night, we pulled in to Shulgareh, which is the biggest town in the valley. We were ready to throw down the mattress and settle in for the night when one of the security guards came up with a radio and said that Dostum needed someone to go up to the front to call in aircraft. We jumped in the back of a truck and drove up to Dostum’s HQ here in this house.”

In the courtyard, a soft-eyed cow tries to eat spilled oats just beyond its reach. A hundred yards away, villagers stand against a long compound. They huddle in brown blankets, trying to avoid the soaking rain. Paul points to a misty, triangular peak that forms one side of the gap. It served as Paul’s command post.

“When we climbed up to the top of that hill, we could see the Taliban on the other side, regrouping for the final attempt to stop us. They were setting up fixed positions—bunkers with Y-shaped fighting trenches—on the northern side of the gap. It works against tanks, but it’s plain stupid in this terrain. We had unrestricted movement into the gap, which gave us the high ground.”

Andy chimes in. “Whoever gets the high ground first wins the wars here.” From their perch on the east side of the gorge, the Green Berets could shoot directly into the trenches of the Taliban.

“Once the plane got there, it circled about six times,” Paul says. “Every time the plane would circle, the Taliban would run behind their bunker. After four times or so, they didn’t get bombed, so they just stayed there.

I targeted a spot right next to this guy’s head. I was sick of this guy running back and forth getting ammo. Then the bombs are dropped, and I look through the scope and see body parts flying everywhere. We moved our targeting up along the ridgeline to the second bunker. Same thing: We identity it and boom! No more Taliban. I target the third bunker. They just can’t figure it out. The bomb lands and hits and bam! After that hit, all of them took off on foot to Mazar. And that ended the resistance.” As the three of us climb back into our vehicle, I glance at the battlefield. All I see is grass growing beside abandoned trenches. Only Paul and Andy are able to appreciate what happened here.

Early in the afternoon on November 10, Dostum reached Mazar. His men rounded up vehicles that the Taliban had left behind, and Heavy D entered the city as a conquering hero, standing through the sunroof of a Toyota Land Cruiser. The crowds quickly grew; people threw money in the air for good luck. Dostum’s first stop was the blue mosque at the tomb of Hazrat Ali, the revered son-in-law of the Prophet. Men wept as the imam prayed and thanked Dostum for deliverance.

A local mullah sings a prayer of deliverance and thanks to Dostum. © Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

The joy was short-lived. It turned out that 900 Pakistani Taliban had been left behind in a madrasah in the center of a compound about the size of a city block, and they were ready to fight to the death. Dostum and his commanders wanted to negotiate, but the foreign Taliban shot and killed their peace envoys, which left Al-liance leaders with little choice. “We had hardened fighters holed up in the middle of an urban area who wanted to die,” says Will. “And we were going to oblige them.”

The team set up on the roof of a building about 400 meters from the madrasah and called in a strike. When the two aircraft were on location, the Green Berets radioed Alliance commanders to evacuate civilians from the area. The pilots, however, could not lock in on the laser-sighting device that the team was using to identify the target. The madrasah was surrounded for about a mile on each side by identical buildings, which made it difficult for the pilots to pick out the school. “Finally, the pilot says he has the target in sight. I asked him to describe it, just to be sure,” says Will. “He described the building we were sitting on to a T.” Finally, Air Force Steve guided the pilot to the correct building, and he dropped the ordnance: direct hit.

The team cleared him for immediate re-attack, but the pilot radioed back that he had “hung a bomb”—a bomb had not released. When the pilot radioed that he needed to return to base, the other pilot swung into action. On the next pass, three more bombs went through the hole in the roof made by the first bomb, killing most of the holdouts inside.

Under intense pressure, the Regulators had called in a perfect surgical strike—a bomb drop in a crowded urban area without a single civilian casualty. “This is the first close-air-support strike in years in an urban area,” says Air Force Steve. “It was old-fashioned professionalism. The whole team jelled.”

The steel gate to the guest house opens, and Dostum strolls out, hands in pockets, and is ushered into a black Audi Quattro with tinted windows. Dozens of dark-eyed men in turbans scramble into battered Toyota pickup trucks and assorted four-wheel-drive vehicles. Armored personnel carriers jerk to life in clouds of black diesel exhaust. It’s three weeks after the madrasah bombing, and word has come down that 3,000 Taliban are still occupying the city and environs of Balkh, Alexander the Great’s old walled capital, a few miles west of Mazar. Dostum has decided to clean up the region’s last remaining pocket of Taliban himself.

I ride in the warlord’s communications truck, a white Land Cruiser. The Regulators rush to catch up in two mud-covered cars. We roll past weathered villages unchanged in two millennia. Abandoned Soviet-era tanks are scattered about the flat countryside like dinosaur skeletons.

Not everything goes to plan during a raid on a village
© Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

This part of Afghanistan is ancient, arid, windblown—and is the real cradle of its history and wealth. This is where Alexander ruled, where Zoroaster was born, where Buddhists came on pilgrimages, a center of art, poetry, and study where lions were hunted and where Genghis Khan came to conquer. Now, in a scene that has been repeated over and over for the past 2,000 years, a warlord is arriving.

In a village on the outskirts of Balkh, the convoy rumbles to a halt near an ancient castle that is now a rounded mound of tan mud. The truck-mounted ZU antiaircraft guns are cranked down to eye level. Twenty Urgan missiles point toward the village. Dostum’s men load RPGs and check their ammo drums. About 200 men have taken up positions around the village, eyeing ragged locals, who stare back from a careful distance. It feels like a scene out of a bad Mexican movie.

After a cinematic pause to allow the implications of his arrival to sink in, Dostum phones the village leadership from the Audi: Send out your weapons and any fighters or we’re going in. The deadline is noon.

The general climbs out of the tiny black car and tucks his hands into his belt. He rolls in a John Wayne walk to Commander Lal, who’s in charge of the standoff. The two Afghan leaders study a map with Captain Mark, just in case air strikes are needed. When noon comes and goes, I expect the order to fire. I am surprised, then, to see Dostum wrap his blue turban around his head and chin and stride into the village . . . to talk.

Ironically, it was this sort of diplomatic triumph—the surrender at Kunduz just before my arrival—and not a battle that gave the Regulators their most bitter experience of the war. “We thought Kunduz was [going to be] a full-scale attack,” says Captain Mark. “When we got there, we were sitting on our asses.” It was while they watched the drawn-out surrender that Mike Spann was attacked at Qala Jangi and the uprising began. “This was a guy we considered part of our unit,” says Mark. “If we had been there, Mike’s death would not have happened.”

When they got word of the incident, the unit desperately wanted to get back to the prison. “The info I had was that he was MIA,” Mark says. “We thought he was wounded. The old creed is that we never leave a guy behind.” The Regulators wanted to find the prisoners who had killed Spann and attacked a second CIA man who was questioning the Taliban. “We begged,” Mark says, “but we were told to stay away.” (In the end, the Regulators wouldn’t get clearance to enter Qala Jangi until the uprising was over.)

Commander Abdul Karim Fakir, who was in charge of the fortress while Dostum was in Kunduz, had worked with the Green Berets since they landed in Afghanistan. “I saw this look in Fakir’s eyes,” says Mark, “like, Why didn’t you help?”

Dostum, triumphant on a return to the simple village of his brith. © Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

Dostum has not been home in five years to the village of Khvajeh Do Kuh. His father is old. Two weeks after Dostum descended on Balkh, things have calmed down, so the warlord climbs into the front passenger seat of a Nissan, and we head across a sandstorm-blasted desert. This time there is no convoy; just a son paying his respects to his father. As we drive through a drought-ravaged wasteland, he points out battlefields and the sites of ambushes and skirmishes. Dostum tells me that he has fought on every inch of Afghan soil and can recite the names of his men who have died, describe each battle in detail, and tell you what he has learned from every encounter. He says it sadly.

A few yards before the turnoff to Khvajeh Do Kuh, he gestures to a place where 180 of his men died fighting the Taliban. All I see is brown dirt and men on donkeys leading camels along the road. Nothing of the war, death, exile, and victory that have shaped the man sitting in the front seat. There is an emotional landscape here I cannot see.

As we approach the village, the men and boys are lined up in a perfect row a hundred yards long, waiting to greet Dostum. The general gets out of the car and goes down the line, trying to embrace and talk to each person, but it is getting dark. The crowd of men follows Dostum into his father’s compound.

In a tiny, sparse room are his father, Dostum’s former teacher, and a village elder. The old men are frail, with deeply lined faces. The teacher giggles, his white beard shaking with joy. Dostum’s father talks to his son as though he were a child, telling him that he and the teacher have been praying for his success. They reach out to shake his hand, to embrace him. The men in the room try to act formally, but as Dostum starts to leave, some begin to cry. An old man yells, “God bless you. We are alive thanks to you.” As Dostum stands on the porch, looking at the place of his birth, he chokes up.

He takes me to the hilltop above the village. It’s a high, lonely place. When war first came to Afghanistan, two decades ago, he built his first stronghold here to guard the village. Dostum points to the fresh dirt of new graves in the cemetery. “The men who first defended this post with me are all dead now. The new graves belong to those who were fighting terrorists.” He is silhouetted against the slate-blue sky, the long tails of his silver turban whipping in the wind.

For a brief moment, the general stands triumphant, the conquering hero, the bring-er of peace, the warlord who has ended war in the north—and, therefore, perhaps eliminated his own reason for being. As he leans into the Afghan wind, the light falls, and a moment in history fades.

The first monument to CIA officer Mike Spann, the first casualty in the war on terror was erected by General Dostum. Here Spann interviews Lindh but Lindh remains silent. Moments later Mike would be murdered by prisoners.

Dostum must now change his focus from fighting to rebuilding his country. (Within a week, he will be named deputy minister of defense for the new interim government of Afghanistan.) Now, on most mornings, Dostum emerges from his house, squinting into a crowd of turbaned men waiting for an audience. They sit patiently for hours, clutching tiny pieces of paper, seeking his aid. Dostum’s meetings do not end until well after midnight.

Not long before I’m to leave, Dostum asks for help with a letter of condolence to the widow of Mike Spann. The task inspires him to try to express his feelings about the past two months. He confesses that he had worried at first how the Americans would handle Afghan warfare: “It was cold; the food was bad. The bread we ate was half-mixed with dirt. I wondered if they could adapt to these circumstances. I have been to America and know the quality of life they enjoy. To my surprise, these men felt at home.”

And more than that: The Afghan warlord and his tiny band of American soldiers had clearly formed a bond that only men who have been through combat can understand. “I now have a friend named Mark,” Dostum says, referring to the Green Beret captain. “I feel he is my brother. He is so sincere; whenever I see him, I feel joy.” He pauses for a moment, lost in reflection. “I asked for a few Americans,” he says finally. “They brought with them the courage of a whole army.”

Down the road at the Regulators’ make-shift barracks, a call comes over the Motorola: “Pack your shit.” The men quickly gather their gear, as they have so many times before. Within hours, they are gone.

Afterword.

SFC Bill Bennett RIP
© Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

The team was under orders not to talk to journalists. Since I was a guest of General Dostum it was a little difficult for the men to avoid me. After a while we soon got along. There were some deep unresolved internal conflicts because of the death of Mike Spann and why they over their protests had been sent to Kunduz. After our time in country, I became friends with the men and defended them when they were accused of war crimes by the media. A bizarre story called “The Convoy of Death” surfaced and painted Dostum and the team in a negative light. After days of killing as many Taliban as they could they were accused of murdering prisoners in shipping containers. Newsweek, The New York Times and other outlets insisted that eyewitness had seen American soldiers laughing and shooting into containers. Prisoners were so hot that they had to lick the sweat off each other one man said. An NGO insisted that thousands of corpses were dumped at a graveyard called Dasht-i-Leili outside of Shiberghan but refused to actual exhume them.  It didn’t seem to matter that there was no actual evidence. An odd case of a lack of evidence being brought forward as the evidence. This scandal would tarnish General Dostum’s very real accomplishment of being America’s most aggressive and stalwart ally against the Taliban and al Qaeda.

The mystery of missing prisoners was never matched up to the careful medical records kept of each al Qaeda and Taliban detainee kept by doctors and local NGO’s. ©Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

The problem is that the the Convoy of Death story is false. I was at the prison in Sheberghan when they unloaded the trucks and watched the Red Cross medics count the dead and note the wounded. The wholesale conversion of talibs to the government side during the Kunduz surrender had created confusion in how many Taliban existed in the North. Was it ten thousand, five thousand,  The actual number was around 3,500 who surrendered, another 460 al Qaeda showed up at the gates of Mazar and around 250 – 300 died of their wounds, disease or suffocation during transport in the frigid weather. I know because I counted the dead bodies. The only mystery was the lack of interest in the NGO, governments and media in investigating the facts.

Although I spoke out on behalf of the team the media, didn’t publish my eyewitness photos and testimony because it would go against a narrative that a Pashtun backed by a European-backed central government must rule Kabul, not a coalition of regional leaders.We did not want the Taliban voting themselves back into power, yet we restrained the grass roots power of the ethnic minorities. Sidelined, and in exile in Turkey, In 2009, Dostum was begged by President Karzai to come back from exile to reelect him and again in 2014 Dostum engineered the victory of President Ghani….only to go back into exile.  To this day the war continues and Dostum as First Vice President remains a staunch ally of America.

Back in 2002 and 2003 the film and book industry were not interested in books or movies about Afghanistan. Our war had been big footed by Iraq. When SFC Bill Bennett invited me over to join the team SCUD hunting before the war he did not like that war. Later on he had a dark  premonition. “I don’t think I will make it through this one” he wrote me in an email just hours before he was gunned down on a raid in Ramadi. It was September 12, 2003. Bill and the team were wearing  armor decorated with my logo when he died. I was asked to sit on the same row as the team during his funeral. An event and a man I will never forget. There is a need to never forget the sacrifices men make in war. We must honor their truth not the fiction that creates more wars.

In Hollywood I was asked to join meetings during which actors and producers pitched the story, read half a dozen books in which the idea of John Wayne like cavalry charges and Dostum’s ogre like cruelty were fictionalized into cartoons. The men know their story and I wrote it down. Some were angry then, some had been through enough wars to see what was coming.

They are currently enjoying some well earned recognition now that the film 12 Strong has been released but again, the film is not anywhere close to the truth. We will never end wars if we don’t understand how to win them. A story of how 12 Americans and a Afghan warlord won the war on terror, if only for a brief time still remains to be told.

© 2018 Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

ryp@comebackalive.com

The post General Dostum and 12 Strong: THE LEGEND OF HEAVY D AND THE BOYS appeared first on Dangerous Magazine.

by Robert Young Pelton

By late 2013 Bowe Bergdahl had been a prisoner of the Haqqani’s in Pakistan for almost half a decade. According to Bergdahl’s account,  he fought back , he refused to convert, refused to eat cooked food (an insult to Pashtuns) and he refused to bathe. He escaped multiple times ending up in a small cage. Like most of his decisions, he ended up choosing the one that would make it harder on him.

Bergdahl had no idea how to deal with being a hostage in a region where kidnapping was perfected as part of the culture. Just in-country and eager to understand the strange land he quickly began to dislike his commander and in June 2009 he left his small group of 33 soldiers to walk 30 kilometers north to the unit’s headquarters and file an official report on his unit. The naive US soldier was quickly kidnapped and after some clumsy attempts by tribesmen to trade him to the base commander he was hustled over the border to Pakistan.  My previous chapters 1, 2, 3 and 4 were published in Vice to detail this extraordinary event. I chose to ignore Bergdah and let him tell his own story. My focus was learning from the insiders who tried to help, and sometimes hinder,  his torturous path to freedom. Bowe Bergdahl has now told part of his story in a bizarre Hollywood discussion with a producer and again through a detailed video interview with former hostage Sean Langan but his story is only beginning to be told.

The story of Bergdahl and the efforts to free him also are tossed in an ocean of angry condemnation, biased news reports, slanted commentary and stern accusations from five years of speculation on Bowe Bergdahl’s motives and that is then whipped up into a by a storm of personal agendas that sunk any chances of Bergdahl had of ever being understood calmly and fairly.

OVER THE LINE

The negotiations leading to his release on May 31, 2014 had come a long way from the first hours of his kidnap after June 30, 2009.  Or even a few days later when U.S. Army Major Crapo unsuccessfully offered local Taliban leaders boxed MRE’s and some basic supplies in exchange for the missing soldier. The tribal leaders said they had Bergdahl and wanted to deliver him back to U.S. forces. The Major was not eager or able to negotiate that rapidly on behalf of the U.S. military so the locals then promptly sold Bergdahl to the Haqqani Network. The Haqqani’s were members of the Zadran tribe who had moved across the Durand line in a political spat in the 70’s. They grew to become a formidable transnational organization who had made kidnapping a profitable business and political tool. However they had  just lost New York Times’ reporter David Rohde after his escape from Miram Shah. Rohde’s captors had been enticed (or drugged depending on which source telling the story) to allow Rohde and his interpreter to climb over a steep wall and run to safety. That left Siraj Haqqani, the young military leader of the Haqqani’s without his best bargaining chip to free prisoners held in secret prisons in Afghanistan along with having to explain to his ailing father Jallaudin, why they lost a chunk of cash.

Bergdahl’s captors spent five years being shifted him among a series of makeshift prisons in the semiautonomous tribal areas in Pakistan just 30 kilometers across the border from the Observation Post called Mest Malak where then 23 year old soldier from Hailey, Idaho first disappeared. False intel reports provided by the intelligence network originally cobbled together by the “New York Times” to rescue Rohde but soon contracted to the military described a Bergdahl who had converted to islam and carried a gun. Dewey Clarridge the former CIA anti terrorism had transformed the KRE insurance-funded rescue gig into a intel network looking for money from the U.S military in Afghanistan. He managed to get $6 million but when that ran out he fired off numerous and random intel briefs, among them extremely damaging and unvetted stories of Bergdahl’s duplicity. The truth was very different. Bergdahl took pride in his outdoor and survival skills. He tried to escape his captors a number of times. Each time he was caught by locals brought back and punished.

Bergdahl was been beaten with chains, cables, hoses and sticks. For a large part of his captivity he was kept in a welded together 6′ X 8’cage, chained to a bed, hit with sticks, had his food spat in, suffered constant gastric pain and diarrhea and had escaped again and again to be returned and treated even more savagely.

He had appeared in seven videos during that time, including one in which both his physical and mental condition had deteriorated significantly in his captivity since the first video was released that observers thought he was near death. In July 2009. Looking frail and shaky during the May 2011 footage, Bergdahl mumbles a heavy-handed rant about how the Afghan war wastes lives. Then he wanly says, “Let me go. Get me to be released.”

A Pentagon spokesperson responded to the video: “Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl has been gone far too long, and we continue to call for and work toward his safe and immediate release. We cannot discuss all the details of our efforts, but there should be no doubt that on a daily basis—using our military, intelligence, and diplomatic tools—we work to see Sgt. Bergdahl returned home safely.” Bergdahl survived on that hope.

To a large part of America, Bergdahl was a traitor who fled to join the Taliban, to others he was a victim, someone snatched at night and hidden in a cruel place. To some Bergdahl deserved his captivity, to others his safe return as a U.S. soldier was paramount. There would be time for him to explain what happened but a constant flow of stories many of them pure invention would not let him ever live down a reputation the media foisted on him.

In the long running war on terror, Americans felt little pity for Bergdhal. They also had no time or space to think of the Afghans that had been kidnapped and hidden in cruel places. One part of the story was completely missing from the history books but buried in Gitmo records and first hand experiences. For the first time a kidnapped American soldier and kidnapped Afghans who were working with American soldiers would be swapped, creating another bizarre an unexpected firestorm of protest from the American public.

THE PET MULLAHS

Mullah Faisal, former head of the Taliban Army in the North on operations with General Dostum and U.S. Special Forces © Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved.

In late 2001 I had met and stayed with two of the Mullahs who would later be swapped for Bergdahl. They had just surrendered to the Northern Alliance and General Dostum in a quasi formal ceremony held at the 19th century garrison of Qali Jangi near Mazar-i-Sharif. They had offered to convince the remaining taliban to lay down their arms and give up the foreigners hidden among them.

Mullah Faisal, the head of the Taliban military in the north and Mullah Nuri the Governor of the region were both prisoners under house arrest but eager to put the war behind them.

Aided by his own personal U.S. Special Forces team, Operational Detachment Alpha 595, Dostum was eager to finally return peace to the North. His ouster by the Taliban and long exile in Turkey made the victory an emotional event. After the murder of General Achmed Shah Massound by Tunisians posing as journalists just before 9/11, I had the good fortune of being trusted and invited by Dostum to document the war without restriction. I knew from my time with the talion a few years earlier that part of bringing peace in Afghanistan requires forgiving your enemy and move on. The taliban had violated this when they invaded the north and murdered thousands of shia Hazara and other Afghans. Despite this duplicity (and a number of false surrenders that killed some of Dostum’s commanders) he was willing to show that peace with the taliban was possible.

Dostum was eager for me to meet his trophy mullahs, fellow house guests kept adjacent to his compound. Dostum treated the two morose leaders and their entourage more like honored guests than prisoners despite their driving him into exile in Turkey in May of 1997. Back then in a stunning betrayal by one of his commanders. the Taliban swept into Dostum-controlled Mazar I Sharif and began slaughtering thousands of Hazara Shias. When I asked to film and interview the mullahs, they were not happy. The old school Taliban had vandalized all the faces in the paintings in Dostum’s house and smashed all the televisions. They agreed to my interview requests. They sat glaring at me, wrapped against the November cold in brown wool blankets.  Faisal, who had removed his prosthetic leg was a perfect caricature of a talib commander, he had pitted skin, bad teeth, and just glared. Mullah Nuri also had the black serious scowl of an angry Pashtun but was chattier than Faisal. Their message? “That the Taliban movement over and they hoped the Afghans would not be too tough on them.”

To prove that they wanted to put the last 6 years of brutal fighting behind them, the mullahs went with Dostum’s men and the SF team on military missions in their gold Land Cruiser. While I filmed Dostum and his US Special Forces team surround Pashtun pockets to oust stragglers the mullahs would helped seal peace deals. It was clear that the allegiance of the Pashtuns in these pockets created by the same builder of Qali Jangi was based more on survival than beliefs. But for now the pragmatic approach of negotiations with the underlying repercussions of extreme violence worked. The Pet Mullahs (as I called them) were the trump card played to show the local taliban that given a choice between a B 52 strike and living like our new best friends, the mullahs, the decision was easy.

Then one night, despite their eager alliance with the US, on someone’s orders, the Mullahs were roughly awakened, stripped, bound with cargo strapping, sedated anally, blindfolded with cotton behind welder’s goggles and flown by military aircraft to an offshore hospital ship until Gitmo opened up. There were among the first prisoners there and were never charged with any crime. Although in early 2002 this would be perceived as revengeful and just it set the tone for the decade plus long war that was to follow. A rapid number of Afghans who were working with the Agency and the DIA also were roughly hogtied and vanished into the unknown.

The warnings of Mullah Daddulah,  the other one legged hold out mullah,  to the one legged Faisal not trust the Americans and their allies rang true and the Taliban insurgency began.

FAILED RANSOMS AND RESCUES

March 10, 2012. A U.S. Army PR photo shows 1st Platoon, Company A, 1st Battalion, 2nd Infantry Regiment, Task Force Black Hawk, conducting a foot patrol in Yayah Khel, where Bergdahl vanished from years earlier.

During my research I discovered that finding Bowe Bergdahl launched two failed rescue missions, two failed ransom payments, and finally a successful financial negotiation and complete capitulation to the Haqqani’s, his kidnappers’ and the Taliban’s demands. Politically America under President Obama had run out of options to end the war and breakthrough solution that bypassed the Pakistanis was needed.

The Taliban were equally desperate. Unbeknownst to the world their leader Mullah Omar had died in 2013, setting off uncertainty and succession squabbles. The Taliban were able to fool the Germans and the U.S. into negotiations on his behalf even though the one eyed Mullah had been dead for a year after Bergdahl’s release. This resulted in the most lopsided and contentious prisoner exchange in American history. Overshadowing perhaps the Iran-Contra affair in the 80s that traded Israeli-brokered weapons as collateral for the return of US embassy staff kidnapped by Fedayeen revolutionaries in the wake of the Iranian Revolution and overthrow of the Shah.

The contentious release also wrong footed the White House and exposed a history of other negations to free Bergdahl. One in specific that required no ransom and would have released other hostages held by the Haqanis’.

The follow up resulted in an ugly attack on Special Forces war hero Lt Col Jason Amerine who was among the first on the ground after 9/11 and after negotiating a deal to release all hostages held in Pakistan, was ignored and shocked at the incompetence, infighting and bungling of how America searches for their captives. When he finally spoke out to Rep Duncan Hunter and sought whistleblower protection, the FBI maliciously charged him with leaking secrets, stopping his paycheck, retirement and attempted to punish a man who worked tirelessly to get Bergdahl home.

When Bergdahl returned there was wave after wave of controversy as Bergdahl himself stoked the controversy. A failed film deal turned into a podcast, a TV interview tell all that slammed his accusers and the decision to plead guilty without a plea bargain would all shock followers and simply continue his demonization.

THE PAWN

It is now known that the US had made halting attempts to broker a peace deal shortly before Bergdahl was kidnapped in June of 2009. During the Bush administration, the US had opposed any reconciliation with the Taliban, despite Afghan President Hamid Karzai’s support of such a move. The American view was that Talibs should switch sides and pledge allegiance to the new Afghan government, as if it were a binary decision. The multipronged alliances of Afghans seemed invisible to their Western friends, even though American officers had studied their jihad against the Soviets, which was successful in part due to complex, shifting alliances. Instead, American officials had a dismissive, simplistic expression: You can’t buy an Afghan; you can only rent one.

Not long after taking office in January 2009, President Obama reversed the previous administration’s strategy and ordered a two-month policy review. “In a country with extreme poverty that has been at war for decades,” Obama said in March 2009, “there will also be no peace without reconciliation among former enemies.”
Karzai welcomed the change, citing reconciliation as the most significant aspect of a plan that also included military aid and money for development. Pakistan’s president, Asif Ali Zardari, also oversaw the appropriate approvals, perhaps motivated by his country’s cut—$1.5 billion per year in civilian aid for the next five years. The unspoken assumption in all this was that America could buy its way to peace—one elder, one village and one region at a time.

Ambassador Richard Holbrooke, Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan said he only have 90 days to “break the furniture”. His attempt to work back channels to free Bergdahl created a complex deal in which Talib mullahs in Gitmo would be traded for Bergdahl.

To jumpstart the process, Obama deputized veteran diplomat Richard Holbrooke as the special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. In June 2009, just a few weeks prior to Bergdahl’s capture, Holbrooke’s road to peace in Central Asia took him to the tiny kingdom of Qatar.

Ambassador Holbrooke had an audience with Emir Tanim bin Hamad al-Thani, the UK-educated crown prince of Qatar, to discuss, among other things, how the prince could help with Afghanistan and Pakistan. For years Qatar (which has a population of two million, an eighth of whom hold Qatari passports) had volunteered to insert itself into regional disputes as an open-minded deal broker that worked “the full spectrum of ideologies.” While al-Thani would usually send a deputy to handle such matter, he had agreed to meet with Holbrooke to discuss the rift the war had created between the unpopular Afghan government that had been installed vis-à-vis the equally unpopular but ascendant Taliban. The fates of Afghanistan and Pakistan were—and still are—inextricably intertwined, partially because the latter belongs to Club Nuclear. As Holbrooke succinctly put it: “America could tolerate an unstable Afghanistan but not an unstable Pakistan.”

While the Americans were discussing a potential mediator role with Qatar, the Germans were hosting casual meetings with self-described ”former” Taliban officials in Dubai, just 200 miles east of Qatar. Germany might seem like an odd participant in Afghan affairs. The country, however, has historic ties to Kabul and has hosted three conferences to assist post-war Afghanistan. This included the Bonn Conference in December 2001, which brought the relatively unknown Hamid Karzai to power following UN-supervised power-sharing negotiations.
In 2010, an Afghan-German had told Bernd Mützelburg, Germany’s special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, that he could introduce Mützelburg to Syed Tayyab Agha, a wispy-bearded, 35-year-old who appeared to function as the chief of staff for Mullah Omar, the Taliban’s reclusive leader living in exile in Quetta, Pakistan. The Afghan-German individual suggested that Agha could function as the interlocutor between the US and the Taliban.

Agha appeared to have all the basic Taliban bona fides: He wore the black turban of the talib, and a bulky olive-green military greatcoat favored by the organization. Born in 1976 in Kandahar’s Arghendab district, he was a member of the Popolzai tribe, as was Karzai and the deposed Afghan monarch, King Zahir Shah. His father had been one of Mullah Omar’s religious instructors in Kandahar, and his older brother, Lala Malang, had been a well-known jihad commander during the Soviet occupation. Agha spent most of that era as a refugee in Quetta, studying the Quran and foreign languages, including Pashto, Dari, Urdu, and English. Afgha was not a diplomat, a lawyer, or even man of means. His major skill in the retro-rural Taliban organization seemed to be his ability to use a computer.

Beginning in November, 2010, a series of eight meetings hosted in Bavaria, Germany, as well as in the Persian Gulf, took place between the Germans and Agha before Berlin had established enough trust for the US to step in. As a guarantee to their safety, the Talib present at the meetings insisted that a member of the Qatari royal family was present since the US had a habit of luring, and then arresting, members of the Pashtun rebel group on the grounds of supposed negotiations as they had in early 2002 with the Mullahs who were later to be released for Bergdahl.

The prime example of American duplicity was rotting away within Guantánamo Bay: five senior Taliban members languishing in perpetuity at GTMO. Before their prison-camp sentence, all the Mullahs and Afghans slated to be swapped for Bergdahl had all worked with the CIA or US-designated elements in the immediate post-9/11 Afghanistan. Thinking that the US was willing to talk peace Afghan style in which commanders and leaders simply swap sides in exchange for amnesty and nice living salary, the mullahs were surprised when American operatives suddenly captured them and packed them off to Navy ships, eventually dumping them in Gitmo.

In 2010 any meetings with the Taliban had to be secret. Very secret. If rank-and-file, fight-to-the-death Talibs in Afghanistan knew that the Quetta Shura, the Taliban government-in-exile in Pakistan under Mullah Omar, was negotiating with the infidel invaders it would severely undermine the insurgency movement. As for the U.S., peace talks seemed like a very thin olive branch compared to the big stick of the surge. After the 2001 surrender, the double cross and a decade of shifting goals and fortunes, peace talks seemed like a waste of time. The mood in both camps was not conducive to giving anything away. But Bergdahl changed all that when he was offered as a swap for numerous Talib prisoners.
An insider at the peace talks between the Taliban and the US (Led by then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton) recalled to me: “[The Taliban] knew they couldn’t come into the political system by suicide bombing their way to the presidency.” There were two ways they could transition into a legitimate political party, much as Afghanistan’s ethnic militias of the 1990s had done. “They had to renounce terrorism,” the insider said, “and they had to give back our guy.”

Senator Obama makes a pre election trip to Afghanistan. This was a war he said must be fought but after the failure of Petraeus’ “surge”,  of which Bergdahl was a part of, reversed his strategy and began to look for a way out. Suddenly Bergdahl become a bargaining chip to close down Gitmo and bring the Taliban to peace talks.

“Our guy” meaning Bowe Bergdahl. Somehow America’s foreign policy in Afghanistan suddenly shifted from a complex but featureless geopolitical framework to the safe return of a singular hostage who had wandered off his post on some misguided quest.
The first formal meeting to set the stage for peace talks occurred on November 28, 2010. A 19-passenger Falcon jet operated by the German foreign intelligence agency, the Bundesnachrichtendienst (BND), was dispatched to the Persian Gulf to pick up Agha and two associates, rumored to be the former Taliban ambassador to Saudi Arabia, Mualavi Shahabadin Delawar, and the former Taliban health minister, Sher Mohammad Abbas Stanikzai. The BDN flew Team Taliban to Munich, Bavaria, where the Talibs were whisked through customs and immigration, and then driven to Mützelburg’s home in a nearby village for a meeting that lasted more than 11 hours.

The peace talks were a microcosm of the military campaign. The US had sent seasoned diplomats, including Holbrooke’s deputy, Frank Ruggiero, and Defense Intelligence Agency staffer Jeff W. Hayes, a former First Group Special Forces soldier and expert on Afghanistan and Pakistan. It is likely that the Qatari representative was HBJ, the country’s high rolling Prime Minister Hamad bin Jasim al-Thani. Although Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani was the ruler of Qatar he insisted that Hamad owned the country. The ruler of Qatar had been born in a tent but with his scheming Prime Minister had taken over control in a coup and were busy creating a powerhouse either by using al Jazeera or brokering deals. Their support for Hamas, the Egyptian Brotherhood or even supporting the downfall of Qaddafi and their vast cash resources made them important middlemen.

It was important that the Americans not physically meet in the same room as the Taliban so that the U.S government could say with a straight face that they were not negotiating with the Taliban.

Siraj Haqqani posing with Bowe Bergdahl was part of an clumsy but effective PR campaign to keep the pressure on the U.S. to negotiate a deal. Bergdahl was dressed in various outfit and told to recite various speeches to garner media attention.

The Taliban delegation consisted of the badly dressed Agha and two associates.
The idea of well-heeled, educated US diplomats interfacing in a posh European home with the backward Taliban seemed more like the premise of a Monty Python comedy sketch than a global diplomacy. The question during this first set of meetings was did this ragged Taliban trio really have the authority to speak for Mullah Omar and the Quetta Jura? Or was Agha just another country bumpkin looking to wiggle his way in the middle of a lucrative hostage exchange and political boondoggle?

Early results were promising, however, and Holbrooke, who had trouble remembering the Taliban negotiator’s complicated name, soon began calling him “A-Rod,” after the New York Yankees slugger. According to the insider, the talks initially revolved around a general peace deal, but quickly morphed into a more targeted and narrow objective: Swapping the only American POW in Pakistan for some of the Taliban POWs in Cuba. More specifically, Bergdahl for the GTMO Five—Mullah Mohammad Faizal, Mullah Norullah Nuri, Khair Ulla Said Wali Khairkhwa, Abdul Haq Wasiq, and Mohammad Nabi Omari. These senior members of the Taliban had been in Cuba since 2002, and for years their organization had been calling for their release.

The Haqqanis, who kidnapped victims strictly for ransom, had introduced the concept of a classic Afghan prisoner swap. They wanted a long list of Pakistani and Afghan prisoners for captured New York Times journalist David Rohde in November 2008. Rohde’s kidnappers had complicated things when they demanded cash and naively, the release of Taliban prisoners from both GTMO and Bagram. And at some point a female Pakistani nuclear scientist held in the U.S. was added to the list. Clear indication that the Pakistani ISI had some chips on the table. According to the insider who spoke to me on the condition of anonymity, “It was a big disaster for David Rohde’s people, thinking the US would exchange prisoners [for Rohde].” It would be difficult enough trying to raise ransom money secretly; adding a complex prisoner exchange to the deal made the release of Rohde seem virtually impossible. In the end despite efforts to both launch a rescue attempt and pay a million dollars in insurance money, Rohde escaped on June 19, 2009. Less than two weeks later, the Haqqanis landed an even more valuable American hostage: Bowe Bergdahl.

According to the insider, the prisoner-swap deal point “was when the efforts [to start peace talks] became cross-pollinated and contaminated by characters carrying messages.” A large-scale nationwide reconciliation process was being reduced to a Mexican standoff in which each side forgot about the good of the Afghan people and instead focused on its own political self-interests. Mullah Omar needed to assuage his hardline supporters and the friends of the so-called Taliban Five; Obama could not be seen as a weak leader who simply handed over prisoners in the War on Terror and received nothing in exchange. Mullah Omar could not be seen as being two faced. Demanding that Afghans die to oust the infidel, but cutting deals that would allow his inner circle lodged in Karachi Pakistan to escape the hardship of jihad.
On February 15, 2011, the US and the Taliban held another secret meeting in Qatar’s capital of Doha, to move the peace talks and prisoner swap along. Just three days later, at an Asia Society event in New York to honor Holbrooke, who had died unexpectedly in December, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton undermined the negotiations by giving a major speech denouncing the Taliban as “an enemy of the international community.” The left hand was having a hard time knowing what the right hand was doing.

By the spring of 2011, the best deal the Americans could come up was to release what they deemed to be the three least important members of the Taliban Five and wait 60 days to see what impact it had on the U.S media and ultimately voters. If there were no major political repercussions, then Bergdahl would go free and the US would quietly release the other two mullahs. If both sides felt confident in one another, then they would move toward integrating the Taliban into an Afghan political structure. Few Americans knew who was being held in Gitmo let alone where it was. None knew how exactly how many Afghans were being held in Afghanistan and black sites around the world.

To show the Taliban that its offer was in earnest, the US got busy working to remove former Talibs from the United Nations sanctions list. The UN can lock up a group or person’s travel freedoms and money worldwide with a stroke of a pen. It sounds humorous but some of the Talibs could not fly because of the ban. It also not coincidently meant that money could not be sent to certain Taliban. Luckily both parties were able to work out a swap, the US could ship the five Taliban prisoners from GTMO to Qatar without running afoul of UN Resolution 1267, which (in part) banned international travel of Taliban who served in the Afghan government in the late 1990s. By the end of the year, the UN had removed or amended 105 names on the sanctions list.

THE PHANTOM

Then came May 2011, a month filled with violent actions and consequences. On May 2, a US Navy SEAL team assassinated Osama bin Laden in a featureless compound in rural Pakistan, where the al Qaeda founder had been living for five years, only a few blocks from a major military installation. The incursion by US forces into an ally’s sovereign territory plunged potential cooperation with Pakistan on peace negotiations regarding Afghanistan into the deep freeze. Technically the Taliban were Afghan but they, like the Haqqanis, and Bergdahl were based in Pakistan. Theoretically Pakistan was an ally of the U.S and Afghanistan but had long played all sides against the middle.

Two days later, on May 5, the Haqqani Network released its fifth video of Bergdahl. The clip shows the haggard and battered prisoner and a laughing Mullah Sangeen, a commander from the Zadran tribe. Sangeen blindfolds his American captive and leads him away from the camera’s view. The jocular tape was shot prior to the death of bin Laden, who had begun his jihadist career in the early 1980s as a volunteer with the Haqqani Network. The video had little impact in the US but if there was no confusion that Pakistan was harboring Bergdahl’s kidnappers.

Three days later, on May 7, the US and the Taliban held a third meeting on the outskirts of Munich. It was chaired by Michael Steiner, the new German special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, with Qatari Prince Faizel al Thani present as a guarantor of the Talibs’ safety. Given the timeline, the main topic of discussion was most likely not the most recent release of a proof-of-life video of the American soldier, but rather the assassination of the a dour tall Saudi exile, Mullah Omar and the Taliban’s most vocal and visible supporter.

August brought a fourth meeting, this time in Doha and this time the agenda at hand largely reverted back to Bergdahl. Agha presented Ruggiero a personal letter from Mullah Omar addressed to President Obama. In it, Mullah Omar encouraged Obama to speed things up regarding the potential prisoner swap. Soon after this the two sides agreed that the Taliban should proceed with setting up an office in Doha to be staffed by a couple dozen Talibs. Then, of course, the US made this very simple deal very complicated. If freed in exchange for Bergdahl, the men who would come to be known as the Taliban Five would have to stay in Qatar and be monitored around the clock until an overarching peace deal was struck in Afghanistan.

Despite Mullah Omar’s letter and the US’s caveat for the swap, the Americans continued to move at a glacial pace. “By summer 2011, we were in listening mode,” the insider told me. One fundamental stumbling block: The Americans still weren’t convinced beyond a reasonable doubt that Agha spoke for the Quetta Shura let alone Mullah Omar. There was doubt whether the newer rebel group, the Taliban truly had the authority to order the much older and powerful Haqqani Network who had shifted away from their former US Reagan-era support pledged support to Taliban in 1995 . And then there was Pakistan. The Americans asked Agha to provide yet another proof-of-life Bergdahl video. He did. Whatever was on that video, which was classified and never released to the public, helped convince American officials that Agha was a legitimate proxy for the Taliban’s leadership.

But the Taliban were also cautiously biding their time, but for much different reasons. They knew that if their fighters became aware that Mullah Omar was sending out peace feelers, morale and support for their cause would be dramatically undermined. The Talibs (and just about everyone else in the world) were also baffled that it was taking years to make good on the Obama’s 2008 election promise to shut GTMO for good. Despite the President of the United States making multiple public promises to shut the legally gray holding pens, some key US officials were not about to release battlefield detainees without a fight. James Clapper, then the director of national intelligence, and Leon Panetta, director of the CIA, objected to a potential prisoner swap with an insistence that the Taliban prisoners were too dangerous to release. When the insider who spoke me with me suggested to military officials that releasing the GTMO Five would be a step forward in the peace process, his military counterparts not only balked at the suggestion but became aggressive in their response. The insider recalled: “I thought they were going to send me to Guantanamo.”

By August 2011 progress was being blocked stateside then Afghan President, and former Pakistani resident, Hamid Karzai and his government were miffed at being left on the sidelines, out of the action. Their strategy was to leak the details of the talks including dates, locations, and the identity of the Taliban’s envoy. The State Department and the Pentagon were forced to confirm these talks. Not surprisingly, the Taliban pulled out and months of clandestine work went down the toilet. Pakistan had apparently restored the status quo.

Karzai, ever the opportunist, tried to shift the negotiations to his own reconciliation vehicle, the High Peace Council, which he had created in 2010 and packed with doddering elder Soviet-era jihadi turned statesmen. At the time the council’s leader was Burhanuddin Rabbani, a multilingual Tajik cleric who was the president of Afghanistan during the mujahedeen years until the Taliban ousted him in 1996.

THE BOMBS

“Smart Bombs” from above and smart bombs from below. Targeted suicide bombers from Haqqani and the CIA drones became the favored kinetic weapons in the Pakistan tribal areas and Afghanistan.

On September 20, 2011, Rabbani had just returned from a trip to Iran and was receiving visitors at his Kabul home in honor of his 71st birthday. A man named Esmatullah had been staying at his guesthouse, where he had been waiting for the elder Tajik cleric. He talked his way in with the claim that he was an important Talib commander who wanted to talk peace with the council leader. When the two men finally met, Esmatullah bowed low and detonated a bomb in his turban, killing himself, Rabbani, and two other council members.

To ensure that there was enough bad blood to smear everyone involved, the US Special Operations stepped up their pressure on what was called the Haqqani Network. The organization is affiliated with the Afghan Taliban but operates autonomously, mostly in eastern Afghanistan with its main base located in North Waziristan. Maulwi Jallaluddin Haqqani, an ethnic Pashtun from the Zadran tribe in Khost left Afghanistan in the late 70’s after leading an uprising against Daoud and an important cross border organization. With his border ties, was an important CIA-financed freedom fighter during the Soviet occupation, with close ties to the Pakistani spy agency Interservices Intelligence (ISI). After Jallaluddin suffered a stroke in 2005, he tapped his eldest son, Sirajuddin, to take over the organization. Haji Mali Khan, who is Sirajuddin’s uncle, was described as the brains of the operation—paying bills, setting up safe houses, and planning operations like the one that had killed Rabbani. Financing for the organization reputedly originates from Arab donors in the Persian Gulf, the extortion of legitimate businesses, smuggling, protection rackets, and, most prominently, the bread-and-butter of kidnapping and ransom.

A few days after Rabbani’s assassination, a US Special Operations team kidnapped Haji Mali Khan in the Musakhel district of Khost province. Khan was the highest value Haqqani target the US had ever captured. A month later, in November, the US officially labeled him a terrorist. Khan then disappeared into the bowels of the CIA’s secret detainment and interrogation system. He has not been seen or heard from since, and his name does not appear on any US prisoner list. It would appear that the primary goal of capturing Khan was to change the dynamics in negotiations for Bergdahl. If that was the case, the plan failed miserably. Although Khan was captured with great media fanfare, the same media is silent on his current whereabouts.

Certain US officials may have balked at releasing prisoners from GTMO, but they had no qualms about clearing out overcrowded detention centers in Afghanistan. Thousands of detainees captured during the surge and during better intelligence were clogging the system. All of them awaiting charges to be pressed by Afghan prosecutors or simply being held. The conditions in some of these CIA-run facilities with names like the “Salt Pit” were barbaric leading to the deaths of prisoners.  In 2014 a U.S. report detailed stories of freezing naked prisoners, shackled to steel bars, kept in cages and subjected to carefully designed abuse. Bergdahl would have understood the conditions well, as would the Haqqainis whose provided a list of Afghans they wanted released from these prisons.

In March 2012, the US in an attempt to show good faith and the growing authority of the weak Karzai government transferred control of the largest single group of Taliban prisoners to Afghan officials. Instead of prosecuting them, as the U.S. expected after a review by US military lawyers, the Karzai-appointed judges simply let them all go, citing a lack of evidence. The basic drill: As long as the detainees—who were being held without charges—promised to renounce violence, they could go home. The same terms agreed to by the Taliban who surrendered to General Dostum in late 2001. While controversy stormed over what to do with the few hundred captured prisoners in Gitmo, over 3,000 detainees flowed out of similar, US-run facilities like Parwan on the Bagram Airfield, north of Kabul. The number of captured Taliban fighters flowing back out into Afghan society dwarfed the total number of men ever held inside Guantanamo, let alone released.

In 2012, the once hopeful negotiations with the Talibs to release Bergdahl devolved into a Gordian Knot. To show good faith on the U.S. side, the Taliban wanted their prisoners released from Gitmo and to show earnest movement on the Taliban side, the U.S. wanted Bergdahl back. Things may have been confusing in Afghanistan and Pakistan but the real fighting was inside the American government. became increasingly clear that there was dissonance between the State Department and the Department of Defense on the plan to get Bergdahl back. To make things more complicated, the FBI insisted that Bergdahl as a kidnapped American was their rice bowl. While the Americans squabbled and stalled, an opportunity arose to work the dysfunction between the Haqqanis and the Taliban.

THE RANSOM, TAKE ONE

In Afghanistan, shuras, negotiations and self interest were the tools in resolving conflict, hostages and resolution. But in a desperately poor region, cash is the best shortcut. © Robert Young Pelton, all rights reserved

That same year, 2012, an Irish academic named Michael Semple (Michael was contacted for this article and did not respond)  began working on a more straightforward approach. Semple had worked on my AfPax project and had deep cultural roots among the Pashtun (he is a fluent speaker) and unique understanding of the Afghan and Pakistani landscape. Our job was to not only help the U.S. military understand what was happening on the ground but to explain what wasn’t happening and why. The CIA and State Department had deliberately sidelined and “PNG”d some major power players in an effort to let Karzai flow in his cronies. Karzai’s appointees knew they were not welcome and began lining their pockets, creating perfect entrée’s for the Taliban. Eventually AfPax set up secret meetings between Taliban commanders and one Star Generals in Italian restaurants and ostracized warlords to frame major peace deals. Semple was a key part of dealing with the Taliban.

Semple’s idea to free Bergdahl was simple: Pay the Haqqanis a $10 million ransom and cut the Taliban out of the deal. There was only minor wrinkle, the Haqqanis became a terrorist group in September of that year. The Taliban weren’t. Semple is a visiting research professor at the Institute for the Study of Conflict Transformation and Social Justice at Queen’s University Belfast, and a Pashto-speaking expert on the Taliban. Semple’s logic from a source, was that for three years the Americans and the Taliban had talked about the prisoner swap, and nothing had happened. So, he figured, why not deal directly with the Haqqanis?

Semple’s access and insight to help numerous people who were forced to deal with kidnappings in Afghanistan included assisting the wife of David Rohde. The New York Times reporter had been held by the Haqqanis before Bergdahl’s capture and his wife was concerned that his timely return being bungled. Rohde escaped or was rescued, before Semple could put the finishing touches on a ransom deal, but Semple’s approach was very simple: Cash is king. The Irishman has long been accustomed to the fear and the terror that the families of kidnap victims experience, and does not ask for payment for his services. He has never revealed who would provide the funds for his Bergdahl ransom scheme or if there ever was a final plan. Bowe’s father Bob Bergdhal is a retired UPS driver did not have the funds.

Semple’s correct conclusion was the Taliban Five had nothing to do with Bergdahl and that the mullahs would eventually be released from Gitmo. Additionally Semple personally knew four of the five Talibs from his days working for the UN in Afghanistan during the Taliban era, and considered them to be minor players. In his view, leverage their release for Bergdahl’s had unnecessarily complicated matters. And now things were a real mess.
Semple also believed that Mullah Omar had no real authority regarding the negotiations for Bergdahl, and that ultimately dealing with him would lead to a dead end. Actually Mullah Omar was dead.

For example ten days before Omar allegedly died in Pakistan April 3, 2013 an audio message from the Taliban leader ordered his commanders to stop kidnapping for ransom. “We need to understand that all those involved in this heinous crime were bringing bad name to the entire organization of Taliban,” Mullah Omar said in the recording. “We need to identify all those in our ranks. They need to be eliminated.” Mullah Omar had no authority because Mullah Omar was dead or to the more conspiratorial, he had been spirited away as part of a peace deal. According to the Taliban Mullah Omar died on April 23, 2013. Some say in a hospital in Pakistan, others say in Afghanistan. The Taliban insist they kept it a secret for two years, the U.S. government insist they never knew and Pakistan acted surprised. Rarely, if ever has a leader of a two decade long insurgency simply died without successors informing his minions. It was also on than exact same day President Obama was meeting with Hamad bin Khalifa al Thania.

The Haqqani’s became terrorists, making it illegal to transfer money for any reason. Semple dropped his plan to raise ransom money for Bergdahl. But, as we will see, some US officials believe and there is growing evidence that a significant ransom paid by the U.S. government ended up being part of the deal to free Bergdahl.

At the same time there were other U.S. hostages held in Afghanistan. USAID contractor Warren Weinstein was one of them. Weinstein had been kidnapped on August 13 2011 in Lahore Pakistan by eight men who were believed to members of al Qaeda. In 2012 the FBI, which usually takes the lead for all kidnapped hostage Americans “facilitated” a $250,000 ransom payment for the contractor. This is according to a source that worked directly with numerous agencies to free Bergdhal and other hostages. The payment never made it.

THE HIT LIST

On August 16, 2011, the US officially put Mullah Sangeen Zadran, Bergdahl’s minder who is seen joking about him in one of the hostage films,  on the US terrorist list, which was the first piece of a framework intended to violently pressure the Haqqanis and pare down the plan to its simplest elements: Whoever is holding Bergdahl is going to die.

On September 7, 2012 Secretary of State Hillary Clinton applied pressure by very publicly labeling the Haqqani Network a terrorist organization. This also meant it was now illegal for the US to negotiate or pay off Bergdahl’s captors. It also meant that insurance companies and security corporations were not legally allowed to pay ransoms to the network for the release of kidnapped American citizens, thereby blocking any attempt by Bergdahl’s family to raise ransom money for their son. It would also ensure that go-between actors such as Qatar would think twice about providing a ransom on behalf of the US as a secret proxy for the Bergdahls. To make it worse, US agencies typically stonewalled or even threatened US families who thought they could pay a ransom to free their loved ones.

Back in the US, the presidential election was heating up, with political opponents and the media slamming Obama for not following through on his promise to shutter GTMO within one year of taking office in 2008. In October, President Obama appeared on “Comedy Central’s The Daily Show” to complain that Congress was blocking his attempts to clear out GTMO. “There are some things that we haven’t gotten done,” the president told Jon Stewart. “I still want to close Guantanamo, we haven’t been able to get that through congress.” He also (arguably disingenuously) explained that he needed a “legal architecture” before he could send prisoners home. Despite casting blame toward congress, earlier that year Obama had threatened to veto a bill from congress that would have allowed GTMO prisoners to be released. It was abundantly clear that while American families had sons and daughters fighting in Afghanistan, simply freeing Taliban prisoners seemed like a recipe for political disaster on all sides. In reality the US was having a hard time justifying the kidnapping and imprisonment of individuals for over decade without bringing charges against them.

After Obama was reelected in November 2012, the president’s team pushed to restart the peace talks. Obama wanted everyone to know his administration was ready to trade the Taliban Five for Bergdahl, even though the Taliban had consistently refused the American pre-conditions for a settlement: reject terrorism, end support of al Qaeda, and embrace the Afghan constitution. None of this really mattered to Bergdahl, who was now in year three of his captivity.

In late 2012, the Haqqanis moved Bergdahl from North Waziristan to South Waziristan, where the Mehsud tribe took over as his captors. US officials have a nickname for the Mehsuds: the “little t” Taliban, because they have been known to fight both the Pakistanis and the Americans, depending on their current predicament.

In February 2013, Obama proclaimed that the war in Afghanistan was effectively over. “This spring, our forces will move into a support role, while Afghan security forces take the lead,” the president said in his State of the Union address. “Tonight, I can announce that over the next year, another 34,000 American troops will come home from Afghanistan. This drawdown will continue and by the end of next year, our war in Afghanistan will be over.” Would Bergdahl be the last remaining American soldier left in the region?

In June, feeling optimistic that they would return home to some form of power-sharing arrangement in Afghanistan, and with the American need to remove Pakistan from the negotiations,  the Taliban quietly established an official embassy of sorts in Doha. (Obama had privately agreed to the establishment of the safe house, using a Qatar businessman and member of the royal family as a cut-outs.) But, in fact, the setup wasn’t really a secret at all. The yellow-walled compound in the al Muather embassy district is only 300 feet from the US ambassador’s residence and was leaked by numerous media outlets. In addition, the US used one of its aircraft to fly in eight paunchy Taliban “diplomats” from Pakistan to staff their “embassy”. There were now two-dozen Talibs with full residency in Qatar, and when they finished shopping sprees, they returned to house #54, which they joyfully called the “Embassy of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan”. And really all one had to do was look up above the compound, where the white Talib flag the organization had used when ruling Afghanistan two decades earlier.

In a clumsy effort to rebrand the US and Qatari efforts as an Afghan-led effort, Karzai and newly appointed Secretary of State John Kerry, held a joint press conference before flying from Kabul to the new Taliban house in Qatar. Karzai insisted that the peace talks would soon move to Afghanistan. “We know the Taliban want to talk to us,” the Afghan leader smugly said. “They are already talking to the High Peace Council.” He was referring to a group of elders Karzai had created.

Obama supported the momentum of the peace talks, announcing that “Afghans” were talking in Doha in sync with the Afghan elections the following year. The public myth Obama was selling was that “… this was the first step in an Afghan-led peace deal.”
On June 19, the Taliban and Qatari officials held their first public press conference to announce the peace talks. The well-connected Sheikh Faisal bin Qassim al Thani had replaced HBJ as the Qatari go-between. Faisal al Thani’s public story was that he was a self-made man who started an auto-parts business in 1964 that had grown into a global empire of hotels, transportation, medicine, and foodstuffs. It didn’t hurt that he was the emir’s fifth cousin.

A month later, when Karzai returned to Qatar, he suddenly seemed very perturbed to see the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan nameplate on the wall of house #54 below the white Taliban flag. He theatrically demanded that the Taliban shut down their “embassy.” With this outburst, Karzai had effectively, once again, brought any forward momentum created to free Bergdahl and bring peace to the region, to a crashing halt.

On the home front, yet another round of negotiations concerning Bergdahl’s release, which was now inextricably and very publicly linked to the Taliban Five, was also starting to fall apart. Some Yemenis and Saudis who had been released from GTMO had begun to reappear on the battlefields of Afghanistan. This was excellent fodder for Republicans, who pointed out that Obama’s insistence on shuttering Camp X-Ray was another political misstep. The public mood was not forgiving.

The Republican-controlled Congress, which had spent almost half a decade making political hay from Obama’s inability to retrieve Bergdahl, now began to slap restrictions on the release of prisoners from GTMO. A Republican-sponsored addendum to the massive Pentagon budget bill moving slowly through congress required the President to seek congressional approval at least 30 days in advance for any transfer or release of prisoners from Guantanamo Bay. President Obama’s window to close Gitmo was being slammed shut

Congressman Jerry Nadler, D-NY, tried to add some logic and modifications to the restrictions on GTMO transfers: “At the end of the bill… insert the following: None of the funds made available in this Act may be used for the continued detention of any individual who is detained, as of the date of the enactment of this Act, by the United States at United States Naval Station, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and who has been approved for release or transfer to a foreign country.”

Nadler’s logic was sound. If Obama was on a path to peace, what was America going to do with the 166 prisoners in GTMO, 86 of whom who had already been cleared for release? Would they just die in prison? The man who represented the constituency at Ground Zero insisted that detaining people without charge “… is against everything we claim to stand for. In response to this very situation of endlessly detaining people without pressing charges or holding a trial, President Obama asked: ‘Is this who we are?’ I hope today we will answer: No, we are better than that.”
The bill passed in July 2013.

THE DEAL

In 2013 a well known U.S. Army Special Forces Lt Colonel, named Jason Amerine was asked to look into the Bergdahl case. Amerine was famous because he was celebrated Captain of a team that worked with soon to be President, Hamid Karzai in 2001. His SF unit was awarded three Silver Stars, seven Bronze Stars and 11 Purple Hearts. They were also known as the unit that called in a airstrike on themselves. A mistake triggered by an order from a senior U.S. commander who wanted to bomb a cave, but ending up killing three Green Berets and wounding two dozen Afghans. A disaster that Amerine carries with him to this day. Amerine knew Afghanistan and he knew the major players. He was working on a DoD-sponsored deal that would free Bergdahl. He found that the Afghans were eager to resolve the other kidnap negotiations that had stalled as well. The Taliban were eager to do a deal  not just Bergdahl but for Weinstein, Canadian Joshua Boyle, his American wife Caitlan Coleman and their children who had been born while they were hostages. According to Amerine there were two other hostages that were also part of the deal.

Amerine’s deal wasn’t complicated, he just knew that Haji Bashir Noorzai was a major player in the Taliban controlled south and that he was being held in a US jail on drug charges. Noorzai was also the man Mullah Omar put in charge when he fled Kandahar in late 2001. Coincidently the reason Omar had to flee to Pakistan was because of Jason Amerine coordinating coordinated 300 Afghan fighters and airstrikes. It all seemed very complicated unless you knew that the Haqqani’s and the Pakistan government controlled the destiny of all these hostages.

Amerine was also driven by survivors’ guilt. He had lost good men in 2001 and he felt what Bergdahl, Wienstein and the others must be feeling. Amerine led a task force that got to work drilling down on every hostage, their location and the efforts to free them. He was stunned to discover that some U.S. hostages being held in Pakistan had no one looking for them. His first order of business was to try to get coordination from the various U.S. agencies. He failed. Fighting over their “rice bowl” is how it is described. Negotiations stalled, agencies squabbled, Bergdahl and others sat in Pakistan waiting for someone to rescue or ransom them.

When Amerine heard that the Taliban “wanted to get rid of Bergdahl” in the spring of 2014 Amerine made his move. Amerine pushed his deal hard, he wanted not just Bergdahl but all seven hostages held in the region. He played his ace card again: Haji Bashir Noorzai. Surprisingly the Taliban agreed. Amerine did not know that Mullah Omar had been dead for a year and that the movement was in disarray. It was a perfect deal.

It was even better because, Noorzai was not a terrorist, he was considered a drug kingpin and unlike the political prisoners he had no political impact on the U.S. or Afghanistan. Ironically in January 2002 Noorzai, like the Taliban Mullahs in Gitmo, had also agreed to work with the U.S. military. His men began to help the U.S. disarm Taliban units in Afghanistan. Eventually he was so productive, he ended up working for the FBI, DEA, CIA and other US agencies. But one of the agencies wanted more, Noorzai was lured to New York in April 2005 and charged with smuggling $50 million in heroin into the U.S. In 2009 he was sentenced to life in prison. So all Amerine needed was a green light to swap Noorzai for all the hostages.
His simple plan was turned down. Furious, disappointed and aware of screw ups that the agencies wanted to keep secret. Amerine then went to Congressman Duncan Hunter. Hunter was outraged at the interagency bickering.

What wasn’t known was that a ransom had been assembled and was to paid under the guise of the DoD paying for information. Something inherent in ever hostage release due to the kidnappers expenses. The problem was the ransom money vanished, stolen by the man who promised to hand it over. The deal evaporated.

One eyewitnesses who met with  Secretary of State Chuck before went in front of congress on June 11, 2014 to discuss the Bergdahl release explained all this in private.  Republican Duncan Hunter also made the accusation in a letter to Chuck Hagel explaining that his sources knew of a ransom paid by JSOC to release Bergdahl. And more importantly that Chuck Hagel knew of this ransom payment before he testified under oath to Congress. Since the FBI charged Lt Col Jason Amerine with leaking sensitive information its not hard to figure out who was saying what to whom and why. Both President Obama and Secretary of State John Kerry made public statements insisting that the US government does not pay ransoms. The Pentagon simply spun the accusation as money paid for “information” to Bergdahl’s whereabouts.

“No,  it was a ransom” says my source who handled the negotiations.

The FBI had also been involved in an attempt to pay of Warren Weinstein’s kidnappers. This also ended badly, because he brought attention to the disastrous way hostage negotiations were being handled, Amerine believes he was then charged by the FBI with leaking classified material to shut him up.  Bergdahl and the other hostages remained in Pakistan.

KILLING SPREE

Somewhere around the summer of 2013 the CIA began ramping up its assassinations of Haqqani leaders. Someone (some suspected Haji Mali Khan) was providing the Agency with the intelligence it needed to target members of the terrorist group. The CIA, however, had to ensure that Bergdahl didn’t end up as collateral damage during drone attacks on the Haqqanis.
On September 6, 2013, an airstrike killed Bergdahl’s kidnapper and former keeper Mullah Sangeen Zadran, along with three foreign fighters, in Dargo Mandi, a few miles outside of the Pakistani city of Miranshah. A month later another Bergdahl keeper went down when an early morning drone strike killed the Pakistani Taliban commander Haikimullah Mehsud, leader of Tehrik-i-Taliban Pakistan (Movement of Pakistani Taliban), in the Danday Darpakhel area of North Waziristan. Being Bergdahl’s warden was becoming a liability. America was starting to learn (all over again) that the Haqqani’s were a far more dangerous and efficient group than the Taliban.
It began to look like Wyatt Earp’s crew had time-traveled from the past and been let loose in Pakistan. On November 11, 2013, Nasir Haqqani, the brother of Sirajuddin and son of Jallaludin’s Arab wife, was gunned down in the streets of the capital city, Islamabad. Nasir was the financier of the Haqqani Network, serving as the point person for donors in the Persian Gulf. His death, to put it lightly, was a major blow. And then, in the early morning hours of November 21, 2013, four missiles slammed into a madrassa in the Hangu district of Pakistan’s Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province, killing several senior Haqqani and Taliban commanders. At this rate, the CIA would soon run out of targets.
According to the Pakistani government, the above were not hunted down and killed by Wyatt Earp and his men. The Pakistanis said the culprit was “Blackwater”, a term used to describe basically any security contractor working at the behest of the CIA . But Blackwater was working in Pakistan, both protecting CIA officers, loading drones and gathering intelligence on high value targets. On December 22, Pakistan ordered the arrest of every U.S. contractor working for the U.S. This extreme reaction to Nasir Haqqani’s killing temporarily shut down the drone program and consequently exposed Blackwater’s role in arming CIA drones and exterminating targets.
A week earlier, the sixth proof-of-life video of Bergdahl appeared, showing the American POW suffering from a seemingly poor mental and physical state of health. But few seemed to care. Bergdahl had slid down the list of American priorities. Ironically, during next month’s State of the Union speech, President Obama made it clear in case the Taliban wasn’t listening to his 2013 State of the Union Speech: “When I took office, nearly 180,000 Americans were serving in Iraq and Afghanistan. Today, all our troops are out of Iraq. More than 60,000 of our troops have already come home from Afghanistan. With Afghan forces now in the lead for their own security, our troops have moved to a support role. Together with our allies, we will complete our mission there by the end of this year, and America’s longest war will finally be over.”

Obama called for a unified Afghanistan and the pursuit of al Qaeda remnants. And in case the Taliban didn’t get his slow pitch regarding Bergdahl and the swap for the Gitmo Five, the president repeated himself once again: “And with the Afghan war ending, this needs to be the year Congress lifts the remaining restrictions on detainee transfers and we close the prison at Guantanamo Bay—because we counter terrorism not just through intelligence and military action, but by remaining true to our Constitutional ideals, and setting an example for the rest of the world.”

INVASION

In a surprising development that applied even more outside pressure to complete a Bergdahl deal, the Pakistan military announced in February 2014 that it would conduct a ground invasion of North Waziristan. The Pakistanis typically make their intentions on these campaigns widely known well in advance to give Pakistani intelligence-supported groups and foreigners plenty of time to move out. Bergdahl’s captors would most likely take their prisoner with them and disappear to some other desert hellhole. Or kill him in a gruesome fashion on video.

It was clear to all stakeholders that if any deal was to be made for Bergdahl and the five Talibs, it had better be simple and quick. Between drone strikes, targeted assassinations, and desperate retribution for those acts, the Haqqanis and Bergdahl might not be around much longer. Jallaludin Haqqani was reeling from his losses. All of his operational sons except Sirajuddin had been killed, and many other family members were dead or worse—disappeared like Haji Mali Khan.

The US, on the other hand, had just added three more members of the network to the Joint Priority Effects List—also known as America’s hit list: Saidullah Jan, a senior commander and financier; Yahya Haqqani, a senior leader involved with military, financial, and propaganda activities; and Muhammad Omar Zadran, a military commander. And now the ISI and the Pakistan military—the network’s onetime sponsors—would conduct a door-to-door search in the heart of the Haqqani domain in North Waziristan.

The US government had been introduced into peace talks using proxies like the Germans, Pakistanis and the Qataris. All had failed. Then when that didn’t work they had used their military might and contracted assassins, which had also failed. In December of 2013, despite all outside appearances of resigned indifference, the secret video demanded as proof-of-life triggered urgent action—at least among the politicians who still gave a damn about Bowe Bergdahl.

According to Republican Representative Duncan Hunter, who pushed for better coordination between military and diplomatic efforts after Jason Amerine bluntly pointed out that the attempts to return hostages ranged from incompetent to non existent. There was a second Special Mission Unit in a failed rescue attempt of Bergdahl in January or February of 2014, as well as a failed ransom payment for Bergdahl. The multi million-dollar payment was made but the Afghan entrusted with delivering the payment vanished. The US had run out of options. As the insider who was at the peace talks with the Qataris acting as middlemen for the Taliban, bluntly puts it, at that point “they were going to kill him [Bergdahl].”

The deal that freed Bergdahl may have been yet another ransom, this one more successful

What Amerine didn’t know was that there was another deal. The first deal, the long deal to break the deadlock on shutting down Gitmo, the deal that started as peace negotiations between the Taliban and the government of Afghanistan. The deal that would release five old school talibs and give them a safe haven in Qatar. Away from Karachi and the control of Pakistan. A deal that would give the Haqqanis the cash they wanted and the Taliban a way out.

President Barack Obama gave a speech at West Point in May of 2014. “When I first spoke at West Point in 2009, we still had more than 100,000 troops in Iraq.  We were preparing to surge in Afghanistan.  Our counterterrorism efforts were focused on al Qaeda’s core leadership — those who had carried out the 9/11 attacks…Four and a half years later, as you graduate, the landscape has changed.  We have removed our troops from Iraq.  We are winding down our war in Afghanistan.  Al Qaeda’s leadership on the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan has been decimated, and Osama bin Laden is no more.”

Among the young men and women graduated was a foreigner named Victor Hamad. Hamad was the first Qatari citizen to be awarded a bachelor of military studies from West Point. His father and mother were in attendance flew in on their private jet. The Father also happened to be the Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani the ruler of Qatar. After the speech and the celebrations, there was one more bit of business that needed to be done. The ransom for Bergdahl’s release was transferred about the Sheik’s plane under diplomatic protection and whisked back to Qatar. The source for this is rumor is Dewey Clarridge, the man who was intially hired to handle the one million dollar ransom for David Rohde and began the long damnation of Bergdahl as a Taliban sympathizer in his Eclipse intel emails to the military.

HOMEWARD

On June 2, 2014, at 10:30 AM, a Black Hawk touched down at Batai Pass, near Khost. The helicopter was there to recover one man, Bowe Bergdahl, who five years earlier had disappeared from his post at Mest-Makal, about 60 miles southeast. Onboard were American military, paramilitary and civilian members, perhaps the FBI, all dressed in civilian clothes.

Before driving their captive to the pickup point, the lashkar, or small fighting group of Haqqani militia, had shaved Bergdahl’s head, dressed him in clean Pakistani shalwar kameez clothes, and blindfolded him. The lashkar seemed to be enjoying themselves, capturing the event on video and laughingly telling Bergdahl not to come back to Afghanistan: “Go home. Give us back our fighters.” They were giddy. They had clearly won or perhaps they had just confirmed that a ransom had successfully been paid.
Bergdahl’s nickname had been SF, for Special Forces, a reference to his high-energy approach to military life. At the drop off point, before he boarded the Black Hawk, he had asked one of his American rescuers: “SF?” The man nodded.
Bergdahl was broken man. Once aboard the Black Hawk, Bergdahl began sobbing.
When the US Ambassador in Qatar received confirmation that Bergdahl was en route to Bagram Airfield, he alerted US political and military officials. The US, holding up its end of the bargain, flew the Taliban Five from Cuba to Qatar, where they were given a medical examination and new digs for their year of soft lockdown.

As for Qatar’s role in the deal, they insist that for 12 months following the swap that the released Talibs will be prevented from engaging in any activities, contacts, or statements that might be construed as political or terrorist in nature. There is also a travel ban, except for Haj to Mecca. This summer, at the end of one year, the Taliban Five will be free to go home and do as they please.

But what about the equally straightforward American demands for the prisoner swap? Namely that the Taliban must renounce violence and their affiliation with al Qaeda and acknowledge the Afghan constitution, with its inherent rights for women? The Taliban has never publicly stated that it has any intension of meeting these deal points.
By any and all measures, it appeared that the Taliban came out on top of this nebulous deal. They even stole the PR spotlight following Bergdahl’s release. Obama held a press conference in the Rose Garden at the White house, flanked by the Bergdahl’s overwhelmed but cautiously joyous mother and father. The Taliban’s low-res video of them handing over Bergdahl to the hostage recovery team streamed around the globe. The Taliban also drummed up a press release under the name of Mullah Omar: “This huge and vivid triumph requires from all Mujahidin to offer thanks to the Benevolent Creator who accepted the sincere sacrifices of our Mujahid nation and managed the release of these five renowned Mujahidin from the enemy’s clutch.”

And yet, like everything else related to Bergdahl, the outcome was messy. Pakistan, angered that its Taliban client had the temerity to cut them out of the deal and negotiate directly with the Americans via Qatar, began punishing not just the Haqqanis with an invasion of North Waziristan, but also its long-time guests, the Quetta Shura under Mullah Omar.

Two weeks before the hurried prisoner swap there was an important and mostly overlooked event. Since 2009, Tayyeb Afgha, the wispy-bearded Talib negotiator, had refused to leave Qatar and return to Pakistan, presumably out of fear for his personal safety. On May 1, local Pakistani newspapers reported the kidnapping of his two brothers. Security forces in Karachi picked up Younas Afgha, the former Taliban deputy governor of Khost province and the one-time head of the Afghan Red Crescent, the Islamic equivalent of the Red Cross. Tahir Afgha was arrested at his home in Quetta. The ISI was evidently not pleased with the Quetta Shura or its representative.

On June 15, almost two weeks after Bergdahl’s release, Pakistan launched its first major military campaign into North Waziristan, the heart of the Haqqani stronghold. After going house to house in Miranshah and other Haqqani-controlled cities, the Pakistanis proudly displayed photos of captured weapons, chains used to secure prisoners, and other evidence of malfeasance. The images were plastered all over the news. Deep into November, the Pakistanis are still pursuing their offensive, which has displaced 1.5 million people and counting, including 250,000 who have fled across the border into Afghanistan—reversing the usual flow of refugees in the region. The Pakistani military says that it has killed hundreds of insurgents during the campaign, but it is impossible to confirm those claims.

The senior Taliban leadership’s willingness to talk, indirectly or otherwise, with the infidel invaders also angered radical elements of the insurgency. There has been a great shift in the overall Taliban movement. Mullah Omar was a stranger to Osama bin Laden when the radical Saudi first landed in Jalallabad after the Sudanese kicked him out of Khartoum. It was the uneasy marriage between violent wahabist foreign elements of Osama bin Laden and al Qaeda that had plunged the Pashtun nationalist movement of the Taliban into chaos and exile.

After a decade of unrelenting violence, one might think it would seem logical for Mullah Omar to steer the Taliban back to its roots as an Afghan nationalist movement. But, intentionally or not, his death in the spring of 2013 forced the hardliners to kick the hornets nest even harder. Despite being dead for a year, Omar magically made a ghostwritten public statement after Bergdahl’s release, saying the release of the GTMO Five was a “great achievement.” This initially seemed like gloating, but the entire statement also includes verbiage that claims the Taliban intended to focus on national issues, not international terrorism. “I call on all mujahideen in the frontier areas to protect their borders and maintain good relations with neighboring countries on the basis of mutual respect.” Omar’s ghost goes on to say, “Many entities that used to oppose us now have come around to accept the Islamic Emirate as a reality.”

That kind of conciliatory talk infuriated hardline Talibs. Some of them had been fighting since the mid-90’s, driven only by religious fervor and a desire to regain control of their country. This is not a path they were willing to follow, too much blood had been spilled, and it did not align with their core values as freedom fighting jihadists. A young Taliban fighter told reporter Sami Yousafzai, “When I realized the Taliban was really talking face to face with the Americans—the worst enemies of Islam!—my dream of the holy jihad was washed away.”

With heat blasting them from all sides, it’s safe to assume that the gaggle of 40-something, soft-handed religious students are running out of space and time. Commander’s in the field had not seen or heard from the normally reclusive Omar in over a year. They are unable to return to Afghanistan and live there openly, and are now faced with constant harassment in their former safe haven of Pakistan. And the idea that their spiritual leader Mullah Omar was now in peace talks with the Americans was too much to bear.
With all these troubles suddenly facing the Taliban, Qatar looked like an ideal bolt hole for Omar’s aging followers.

THE SPIN

Back in Bowe Bergdahl’s homeland, what was supposed to be a humanitarian coup by freeing America’s hostage turned out to be a political disaster. Right-wing commentators and politicians who had previously hounded Obama for not doing enough to secure the release of Bergdahl now pilloried the president for trading five talibs for one soldier, and a soldier with suspect motives. The lethal reputation of the aging GTMO talibs grew with each Fox News broadcast. Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina described them on-air as the “Taliban Dream Team,” calling for a hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, claiming the prisoners “have American blood on their hands and surely as night follows day they will return to the fight.” Senator John McCain characterized the five former prisoners as “the hardest of the hard-core” and “the highest high-risk people,” who are “possibly responsible for the deaths of thousands.”

The politicians and talking heads apparently do not realize—or more likely wish to publicly acknowledge—that President George W. Bush released 532 prisoners from GTMO, as compared to the 88 that Obama has discharged. More importantly, in all their fulminating about releasing the Taliban Five in exchange for Bergdahl, the politicians and the pundits never mention the 1,700 to 3,000 Talibs flushed from Parwan detention center at Bagram. Since Bergdahl’s release, Afghan officials have released another 650 prisoners, including ten Pakistanis and other nationalities, from more secret sites on the airfield and quietly sent them home.
The parents of soldiers killed in action following Bergdahl’s disappearance from his base five years prior began appearing on news programs, decrying the human cost of freeing a turncoat. Former platoon members piled on, sullying Bergdahl’s reputation and intent. A Republican lobbyist flack at Capitol Media Partners began providing pro bono PR support to members of Bergdahl’s unit. As they made the rounds of talk shows and worked on a book deal, they repeated the unsubstantiated but politically volatile talking point that “people died looking for Bergdahl.” What they forgot about was a lot of other people had died too, for many other reasons related to and expected of America’s longest war, on both sides.

Fox News contributor Richard Grenell parroted those claims on a Fox program that aired on October 10. Full disclosure: I was also an on-camera guest at the San Diego studio called CoverEdge. When I challenged Grenell to back up his contentions, he couldn’t provide the names of soldiers allegedly killed or produce any other evidence for his statements. He later denied ever meeting me even though Fox broadcast both our separate interviews from the same San Diego studio that day.
Of course, there was still more chicanery to follow. On August 21, the General Accounting Office determined that, in freeing Bergdahl, the president had broken the law not once, but twice: He had failed to notify Congress 30 days before the release or transfer of the GTMO Five, and by spending almost a million dollars to transport the five prisoners from Cuba to Qatar and Bergdahl back to the US, Obama had violated the Antideficiency Act, a 120-year-old law designed to curb unauthorized spending. No one has ever been charged or convicted for breaking this law, and it is doubtful Obama will receive any rebuke stronger than the censure vote on September 9, 2014, which admonished him for willfully breaking the law.

When the Senate Armed Services Committee grilled Defense Secretary Hagel for five hours on the controversial swap, the defense secretary said that 17 inmates had been moved out of GTMO in the past 13 months, and “all of these decisions are part of the brutal, imperfect realities we all deal with in war.” Hagel made no mention of a ransom. He insisted the U.S. did not negotiate with the Haqqanis. “We engaged the Qataris, and they engaged the Taliban.  If the Haqqanis were subcontracting with the Taliban, you know the Pakistan Taliban and the Afghan Taliban, there’s a difference there.  So we get back into definitions of who has responsibility for whom.  I just want to make sure that’s clear in the record, and we can go into a lot more detail.”

Pentagon press secretary Rear Adm. John Kirby announced “There was no money exchanged for Bergdahl’s release”

THE TRUTH EMERGES

As summer gave way to the autumn, the political sniping over Bergdahl died down as the media and politicians turned to domestic issues in the run-up to midterm elections. In early October, Brig. Gen. Kenneth Dahl submitted his report on Bergdahl’s disappearance from his post in Afghanistan and subsequent capture by the Taliban. An Army spokesman announced that commanders would conduct an extensive review of this “initial report” to ensure its accuracy. There was no mention of a deadline, except that the review process would be “lengthy”—as in, long enough to extend past the midterm elections.

After his return there was an initial 60 day long investigation conducted by twenty two people led by Major General Kenneth R. Dahl. His investigation determined that not only was Bergdahl telling the truth, that he was an exemplary soldier and that he saw no reason to press any charges. More importantly they were to discover that Bergdahl might not have been perceiving his role in the military correctly thinking that he might have sacrificed himself to save others. A young Private in the army with an exaggerated sense of his role is how other’s describe him. The sworn statement of Berdahl and the officers who interrogated him point out his love for Ayn Rand the idea of John Galt single handedly stopping something to achieve a greater goal.

“What I found was, you know, a Soldier who was: motivated to go and serve in Afghanistan; that was frustrated because he, as a PFC, was not getting to play a much larger role. I think he had outsized impressions of his own capabilities, which again, I think is consistent with what I have heard from people who grew up around him. So that led to a frustration. “Why aren’t I being able to carry, you know, a sidearm in addition to my squad automatic weapon? Why can’t I do combatives? Why aren’t we out there kicking in doors and helping the Taliban [sic] to do more of this?” There were folks doing those kinds of things, but it wasn’t a PFC in a light infantry platoon.

Q. Did you find any evidence that he was disposed to go overto the other side?

A.No.

Q. Or assist the enemy?

A.No.

Q. Did you have occasion to get Sergeant Bergdahl’s explanation for leaving OP Mest?

A.I did.

Q. What was his explanation?

A. His explanation was very clearly detailed in the sworn statement that he did during our interview, but Sergeant Bergdahl perceived that there was a problem with the leadership in his unit. And the leadership of that unit — the problem with that leadership in his unit was so severe, you know, that his platoon was in danger. And he felt that it was his responsibility to do something to intervene you know, before something dangerous or something negative happened to his platoon.

So his motivation was to have an audience with a general officer so that he could explain, you know, his perceptions, you know, to a general officer. He recognized that, as a PFC, he wasn’t going to have many of those opportunities. He was familiar with the open-door policy and some of the opportunities that are there; but he thought that the way to do this was to create a personnel recovery event — a DUSTWUN personnel recovery event, because he understood2 that when a Soldier goes missing, an Airman, Marine — when a service3 member goes missing, then all the bells and whistles go off and we4 really lean in to get that Soldier back. And this is going to go all the way up to the top. And so he wanted to create, you know, that event.”

So many questions remain: Why did the Qataris intervene as middlemen in the negotiations? Why, in the last round of discussions, did the Americans and the Taliban not meet face to face? And, most seriously, did the US directly or indirectly pay a ransom to the Haqqanis?

Or, more precisely: Why would a ransom not be paid? The Haqqanis always demand money for hostages, and the price is usually two to three million. Bergdahl was unique in that he was a U.S. soldier.  In Afghanistan it is customary to pay judges, tribes, or individuals who have acted as jailers for the release of prisoners. To think that the Haqqanis would guard, feed, and move Bergdahl around for five years without compensation, especially considering the significant hardships they had suffered as his captors who took great risks to keep him alive, runs counter to Pashtun culture. This is the truth in their minds, no matter how bizarre it may seem to others that there is a value system in this world that allows for criminals to invoice their victims for expenses incurred during the commission of the crime against them.
As noted in Part 4 of this series, within days of capturing Bergdahl, the Haqqanis were asking for a ransom of $5 million, with no mention of a prisoner exchange in their demands. A year later, in the waiting room of General Abdul Rashid Dostum’s Kabul compound, they offered Bergdahl to me at the bargain-basement rate of $3 million; again, there was no mention of releasing any prisoners. If Rep. Duncan Hunter’s charges are to be believed, at one point a ransom was authorized to ensure Bergdahl’s release and later stolen by a middleman.

The US repeatedly stated to the media and public that it does not pay ransom; that it does not negotiate with terrorists. The reality is that in lieu of these types of exchanges, the American government plays an often clumsy game of proxies with an agenda of largely blind self-interest. The Iran-Contra scandal is the prime example—an illegal arms-for-hostages swap, with Israel as the intermediary between the US and Iran. For the Central American part of the scam, Lt. Col. Oliver North illegally directed some of the proceeds from the transaction to the Contras, who were attempting to overthrow the leftist government of Nicaragua. With the brutal impact of US hostages being killed by ISIS on the heels of what was revealed to be a convoluted—and some may say misguised—effort to retrieve Bergdahl, President Obama announced that the US will review their policy on hostage negotiations. It quickly became clear that the complex and costly efforts that went into freeing Bowe Bergdahl contrasted poorly with an American public who soon after were presented with the images of men clad head-to-toe in black who beheaded American journalist James Foley. Why Bergdahl and not Foley?

Oddly enough, the American conspirators again included the CIA’s Duane “Dewey” Clarridge, who was indicted in 1991 on charges of lying to Congress under oath. President George H.W. Bush pardoned him before his trial could be completed. Three decades later, The New York Times hired Clarridge to help rescue its kidnapped staffer, David Rohde. As noted in Part 2, in the early hours of Bergdahl’s disappearance, the US military hired Clarridge’s group, as well as my group, AfPax, to find out what happened to the missing soldier. Our two groups had already made it clear to the military how the Haqqanis worked the kidnapping racket in Afghanistan; Afpax was able to track Bergdahl in real time and relay his likely whereabouts to US officials.

Beyond what I lay out above, there is additional circumstantial evidence to support the theory that the US ransomed Bergdahl. The appearance of Faizel al Thani late in the negotiations makes sense; the Qatari businessman would be the perfect middleman in a transaction. And the delay required for the US to work out the “logistics” of the deal—primarily, to pick up Bergdahl and then to fly the Taliban Five from Cuba to Qatar—might have been a tactic to stall for time while the ransom money and movements were hastily put together.

The payment of a ransom would also explain Hagel’s odd statements in the final stages of the deal. On one hand he stressed the intense three-day negotiations in Doha between the US and the Taliban via Qatar; on the other, he insisted that there were no face-to-face discussions between the Taliban and the US.

A month after Bergdahl was released, and a month and a half after Sheik Hamad bin Khalifa al-Thani the former ruler of Qatar (he had handed over leadership to his 35 year old son in June of 2013, the older brother of the son who graduated from West Point on May 30th) visited and met with President Obama at West Point to give the U.S. President his personal assurances that the Taliban five would not cause problems, the US sold Qatar $11 billion worth of military gear. A theoretical $10 million that was alleged to have been transferred at West Point ransom would be less than 1 percent of that amount. Not surprisingly Chuck Hagel was in Doha to sign the deal. The Pentagon said that the biggest arms sale of the year would create 54,000 jobs for Americans.

Yet another controversy emerged. The odd delay by the military in deciding whether Bergdahl would be charged with a breach of duty or allowed to be honorably discharged, dragged well past 2014 into 2015. Letter’s showed Bergdahl was unhappy with military life, his 2012 handwritten to his parents while in captivity, was deeply critical of his unit and asked that the military wait until both sides of the story were heard.

Critics of the White House insisted that President Obama was trying to submarine the contentious Bergdahl release. Military justice was painfully slow. In December of 2014, the results of two investigations were sent up to General Mark Milley. General Milley was given the task of reviewing the case and deciding if charges were to filed under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. Under UCMJ, Desertion is the intent to stay away permanently, AWOL, the much lesser charge, is the crime of being away but returning to duty. Bergdahl, by writing numerous personal letters about bad morale, and making statements about leaving his duty to fellow soldiers had shown the willingness to leave but his being kidnapped removed that choice of whether it was briefly or permanently from him. The initial 2009 investigation (called a “15-16”) while he was still a hostage was simply to put the known facts in order. Another 15-16 was conducted after his return in the summer of 2014 and forwarded in December to the more serious Article 32 review, needed to bring charges, has also been completed.

What is known is that Bergdahl insists that he left his base the day before it was scheduled to return to their operating base. He left his weapons and ballistic gear because he had asked the commander if he would get in trouble. He took just enough water and supplies for a short 20 km trip and was accompanied by local Afghans who transported him on a small motorcycle. At some point he was intercepted and kidnapped. It is not known what happened to his Afghan friends. He was AWOL for 24 hours and then under military law became a deserter after that point. Unless of course he never meant to desert or would ave hit Sharana just under the 24 hour limit. Bowe estimated he could make the 20 mile hike before sunrise.

The last American soldier convicted and sentenced to death for desertion was Private Eddie Slovak. Before that the US Civil War was the only previous time soldiers had been charged with desertion. Slovak was no Bergdahl. Slovak had numerous run ins with the military, insisted he would not fight and after voluntarily signing a Confession of Desertion and handing it to his commanding officer was convicted in just two hours. After a failed appeal, Slovik was put in front of a firing squad in France in January of 1945 and executed.

There is also a five- year statute of limitations (U.S. Code § 843 – Article. 43. Statute of Limitations) that does not apply for crimes of Absent Without Leave (AWOL), or Missing Movement in Time of War but may apply if the military thinks Bergdahl is guilty of other offenses. Bergdahl left his post in June 30, 2009 and was conveniently rescued exactly five years later on May 31, 2014. When Bowe returned to a desk job both the statute of limitations and removal of the “intent to permanently desert”, may apply in Bergdahl’s case since he voluntarily returned to the military, was promoted and didn’t show any indication that he originally intended to desert. Bergdahl showed a “Credible intent to return” in his many coerced videos where he begged to come home. Bergdahl may not be tried for political or legal reasons but his journey beyond the Hesco barriers on the night of June 30, 2009 sparked a national debate, polarized opinion on the war in Afghanistan, exposed a lack of cohesive response to hostage rescue and began the long delayed process of emptying out Gitmo as well led to the decimation of the Taliban and Haqqani organizations in Pakistan. As a soldier, Bowe will never be remembered for his exploits, but he will forever be a controversial icon of America’s longest war.

LEFT BEHIND

The hostage and potential ransom payment for Bergdahl quickly overshadowed the other five hostages left behind

In an October 3, 2015 handwritten letter addressed to the media, the 72-year-old Warren Weinstein had said that he had heard nothing from his previous entreaties to President Obama and now he begged the press “to make sure I am not forgotten and just become another statistic”. On April 2, 2015, professor, turned USAID contractor Dr. Warren Weinstein was killed inside the tribal areas of Pakistan by a U.S. drone strike. His kidnappers had released four proof of life videos. American al Qaeda member Ahmed Farouq and 39 year old Italian aid worker and fellow hostage Giovani Porto were killed in a signature strike that allows the CIA to kill based on activity and presence but without actually knowing who is among the targets. He had become another statistic in America’s inability to protect their kidnapped citizens.

Statement of LTC Jason Amerine, USA June 11, 2015:

“Warren Weinstein is dead. Colin Rutherford, Joshua Boyle, Caitlin Coleman and the child she bore in captivity are still hostages in Pakistan. I failed them. I exhausted all efforts and resources available to return them but I failed.
One of the resources I used was to exercise my Constitutional right to speak to members of Congress. You passed the Military Whistleblower Protection Act to ensure such access. Apparently it isn’t working.
After I made protected disclosures to Congress, the Army suspended my clearance, removed me from my job, launched a criminal investigation and deleted my retirement orders with a view to court martial me after I exercised that Constitutional right.
As a soldier I support and defend the Constitution of the United States in order to have a government in which the voices of the people are heard. Yet I have been cautioned by people I admire and respect against testifying before a committee investigating whistleblower retaliation– -for fear of further retaliation.
My team had a difficult mission and I used all legal resources available to accomplish that mission. You, the Congress, were my last resort to recover the hostages.
But now I am a whistleblower, a term that has become radioactive and derogatory. I am before you today because I did my duty and you need to ensure all in uniform can go on doing their duty without fear of reprisal.
Let me be absolutely clear: I have never blamed my situation on the White House and my loyalty is to our Commander in Chief as I support and defend the Constitution. Whatever I say here today is not as a Republican or a Democrat but as a Soldier with no allegiance to any political party.
And what terrible actions brought me before you today?
In early 2013, my office was asked to help get SGT Bergdahl home. We informally audited the recovery effort and determined that the reason the effort failed for four years was because our nation lacks an organization that can synchronize the efforts of all our government agencies to get our hostages home. We also realized that there were civilian hostages in Pakistan that nobody was trying to free so they were added to our mission.
I assessed that both issues were caused by an evolutionary misstep in the government that created stove pipes of our Federal Agencies. The Department of Defense had faced this problem in the 1980’s as the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marines operated independently of oneanother, leading to the Goldwater Nichols Act of 1986. Transformation of the federal bureaucracy on that scale, literally, takes an act of Congress.
To get the hostages home, my team worked three lines of effort: Fix the coordination of the recovery, develop a viable trade and get the Taliban back to the negotiating table. My team was equipped to address the latter two of those tasks but fixing the government’s interagency process was beyond our capability. Our agencies seldom admit failure and this lieutenant colonel’s opinion of their limitations could not even escape the Pentagon.
Recovering SGT Bergdahl was a critical step to carrying out our Commander in Chief’s objective of ending the longest war in American history but the interagency process for hostages had proven incapable of self-repair and could only be fixed with bipartisanship this nation hasn’t seen lately. So I went to a Republican Representative in order to repair a dysfunctional interagency process to support our Democratic President. This was as bipartisan as it gets and it would lead to the Army placing me under criminal investigation.
I talked to Representative Duncan Hunter because he is a member of the House Armed Services Committee. I wanted him to buttress our efforts with two simple messages: the bureaucracy for hostage recovery was broken and because of that five hostages and a prisoner of war had little hope of escaping Pakistan. And it started to work. His dialogue with the Department of Defense led quickly to the appointment of Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Policy Lumpkin as the hostage recovery coordinator for the Pentagon. This step enabled the DOD to act decisively on the Bergdahl trade once the Taliban sought a deal.
But the civilian hostages were forgotten during the negotiations with the Taliban. In that respect, I failed miserably. I continued to work with Rep. Hunter’s office to repair our dysfunctional hostage recovery efforts. He set-up a meeting between my office and the FBI. The meeting appeared to be cordial but the FBI formally complained to the Army that information I was sharing with Rep. Hunter was classified. It was not. After my criminal investigation began, the FBI admitted to Rep. Hunter that they had the utmost respect for our work but they had to put me in my place.
Again: the FBI made serious allegations of misconduct to the Army in order to put me in my place and readily admitted that to a US Congressman.
A terrible irony is that my security clearance was suspended on January 15th, the day after Warren Weinstein was killed, as we now know.
We were the only DOD effort actively trying to free the civilian hostages in Pakistan and the FBI succeeded in ending our efforts the day the dysfunction they sought to protect killed Warren Weinstein.
Am I right? Is the system broken? I believe we all failed the Commander in Chief by not getting critical advice to him. I believe we all failed the Secretary of Defense who likely never knew the extent of the interagency dysfunction that was our recovery effort.
Somewhere along the way the military and Congress switched roles. The military was supposed to uphold the uncompromising values needed to fight and die for a cause. And Congress was supposed to represent the best meaning of the word compromise. But now the military will not uphold this Soldier’s right to speak to Congress while Congress worries about how my narrative will affect the polarized politics of the day.
For nearly five months, I have received no relief from the military and there has been no transparency in their investigation of me. My pay was even stopped briefly after the Army deleted my retirement orders. The Project on Government Oversight has been a godsend and Representatives Hunter and Speier stood up for me while no committee took action until today.
That sends a terrible message to service members: speak to Congress and you may be abandoned. I ask that you ensure that is not the enduring message.
The outpouring of support from fellow service members has been humbling. Worst for me is that the cadets I taught at West Point, now officers rising in the ranks, are reaching out to see if I’m okay. I feared for their safety when they went to war and now they fear for my safety in Washington.
And let us not forget: Warren Weinstein is dead while Colin Rutherford, Josh Boyle, Caitlin Coleman, and her child remain prisoners.

In October of 2017, American Caitlan Coleman, 31, and her Canadian husband, Joshua Boyle, 33 were rescued while being transported by Haqqani members in the trunk of a car. They heard gunshots, and the kidnappers managed to all escape. The Pakistani military took credit for the rescue which came just a few days after high level meetings between Secretary of State Rex Tillerson.  Secretary of Defense, General James Mattis also met with the Pakistanis and had offered the Pakistanis “one more chance”. The timing of the unusual rescue in which there were no Haqqani casualties was not coincidental.

Amerine is understandably bitter about the treatment by his own government against him. “I guess I have survivors guilt” is the best way he sums it up to me.

FAME AND MISFORTUNE

In December of 2015, a popular podcast called “Serial” announced it had a scoop: An in-depth journey into the thoughts and goals of a young man who had deliberately left his post in Afghanistan and wanted to cause a stir. Depending on the day it is estimated that there are up to 50 million listeners to the popular program. Seeking the attention of the media before a court martial is a highly unusual and dangerous move for a man who could face grave charges that could imprison him, again, this time for decades. An even deadlier move for a man who’s mental state was in doubt even before he spent five years in hell.

The foundation of this multi-part broadcast were recorded discussions between Bergdahl and movie writer/producer Mark Boal. In 2015, Mark Boal was on a roll, looking for real life drama that could be turned into blockbuster movies. Films like “In the Valley of Elah”, “The Hurt Locker” and “Zero Dark Thirty” were his calling card and there was no reason to believe that Bergdahl would expect betrayal from a former journalist who openly looked for ideas ripped straight from the headlines. Boal called his company “Page 1″ to give it the journalistic gravitas that he described as “an empowering venture for investigative journalists. During the launch of his company Boal told “Headline Hollywood”, “There are great stories being told everyday by reporters who dig deep and provide not only great reportage, but insights into who we are as societies as nations as people ”. By any amount the Bergdahl story would be perfect fodder for his next big film.  It is not known under what conditions the recordings were made but in legal statements Boal clearly meant to exploit Bowes’s experience for profit or personal gain, adding himself to a long list of people that viewed Bergdahl as a convenient vehicle.

The interview is not a formal or professional interview but rather clipped together discussions in which Bergdahl’s motivations are probed. Typical of any scriptwriter or journalist wanted to get know the motivations and story.  Boal also adds his own interpretation to Bergdahl’s mental state and hones in on a startling, but damning conclusion: That Bergdahl knew in advance this would cause soldiers to look for him.

Voice over and host Sarah Koenig also takes it upon herself to paraphrase, add color and tone to Bergdahl’s motivations, his opinion of the military and even describing the harsh conditions of Mes Kalak as if Bergdahl disliked being in the military. The opposite was true.  Bergdahl enjoyed his remote dangerous post according to British journalist Sean Smith, I met Sean Smith aboard a migrant rescue vessel in the Aegean and he described Bergdahl as a gungho guy who was surrounded by less than enthusiast compatriots. Most of them out of uniform and bitching abut conditions. Smith’s photos show a Bergdahl calmly smoking a pipe. “Bowe was a softly spoken, intelligent and thoughtful guy.” is how Sean described Bergdahl.

Bergdahl was nicknamed “SF” for Special Forces and consistently wanted to go out and challenge the Taliban. But that is not the Bergdahl we hear in Boal’s conversations.  Bergdahl  takes on the tone of a bullshitter trying to impress a movie producer bringing back the focus on the questionable state of Bergdahl’s mental functions after half a decade of torture and confinement. A mental state further affected by a years of very public scorn and accusations.

Essentially Bergdahl tells Boal that he meant to cause a major crisis in the military by triggering a DUSTWUN (duty status—whereabouts unknown) once he disappeared.  But even that term is suspicious if Bergdahl intended to bolt he would be AWOL and then after 24 hours listed as a deserter. Bergdahl clearly has read reports about his status but didn’t seem to learn that the main result off his disappearance was that RC East would energize it’s mission by adding a recovery status to their rules of engagement. On top of that the men of the 501st would be forced to signed non disclosures.  Yes everyone from DIA head Mike Flynn to a nine man team from Bergdahl’s put their focus on finding him. But Bergdaal undermines that story by constantly and consistently saying he was walking and running to the main base at Sharana.

Boal not realizing that Bergdahl had no control over how the military reacted never challenges Bergdahl’s assumption that he would be captured and kidnapped but plunges him into the fire. Bergdahl’s view that he would cause a DUSTWUN also flys in the face of his careful calculation of how long it would take to reach Sharana by dawn, before roll call and the timing of his units move. He also tells Boal that we wanted to gather intelligence on the Taliban, bringing with him a knife and water. It is as if Bergdahl can’t find the right excuse for his actions.

The emails sent out before his incident also paint a picture of a man under stress, a young man kicked out of the Coast Guard and only allowed to join the Army under waiver now desperate to prove himself as a soldier.

Boal found himself ditching the Hollywood side of his Bergdahl tapes and clinging to his journalistic roots while battling a subpoena from the military prosecutor. The court very much wanted to use Bergdah’s words against himself.  Boal lawyeed up and refused to hand over his 25 hours of taped interviews. Bergdahl with the help of the Boal/Serial interview had simply removed any sympathy for Bowe’s predicament.  Boal would negotiate a deal with the court, filing a legal document that took great pains to lay out his many accomplishments and was described as ” First Amendment hero.” by his lawyer.  In the end Boal will eat his legal fees and add only ten minutes of new material to Bergdahl’s broadcasts heard on “Serial”. Again Bergdahl loses a chance to defend himself while others are free to pursue their agenda.  Boal hasn’t decided if he will do a film, book or documentary using the material he gathered from Bergdahl.

The media is not done with Bergdhal. Blumhouse Television co-Presidents, Marci Wiseman and Jeremy Gold are set to create an documentary based on interviews wth soldiers who said they were searching for Bergdahl. A Fall 2018 book from Penguin Press will go deep into the history and depth of Bergdahl’s life, motivations and actions. Will people care enough to spend their hard earned dollars on Bergdahl’s story? The majority of American did not agree with the prisoner swap and even fewer have a positive image of the man.

In 2014, the Reuters/Ipsos poll of 958 Americans found that 44 percent disagreed with trading Taliban prisoners for Bergdahl,  26 percent strongly disagreeing. Twenty-nine percent thought the prisoner swap was the right thing to do and 27 percent said they were not sure. Other polls couched in political rhetoric fell in line but neglected to ask “Should an American POW come home?”

Sean Langan, a British journalist who had been kidnapped in 2008 by the Haqqani’s was able to conduct a video interview with Bergdah in March of 2016. Unlike Boal, Langan knew first hand what life as hostage of the Haqqani’s was like. Bergdahl’s guilty plea lifted the embargo on the interview but again Bergdahl was badly misguided in using the media as way to explain himself. What is clear from the interview is that here is a man who endured continuous physical, emotional and psychological torture.  Bergdahl tells Langan, “Crying doesn’t help. I mean, it hurts so bad you wanna cry, but it’s just so overwhelming you can’t. It’s like a pain that goes so far beyond anything I’ve ever experienced …” He trailed off into silence, then eventually said: “I wanted to scream out. But I couldn’t. The guys on the other side of the door, they don’t just cut people’s throats — they delight in cutting people’s throats. And they don’t use particularly sharp blades. They showed me those videos where they string someone up by their arms and legs and then begin to saw away at their throats. I’d seen those videos myself. My captors made me watch the beheadings on a constant loop for hours on end. “My greatest fear,” I told him, “was having my throat cut in the dark.”

Bergdahl clearly proves to Langan and on the video that he has not put the horror of his experience behind him and that horror may be guiding his self destructive actions. A form of survivor’s guilt that seeks to bring doom and damage to somehow pay penance for rash actions.

There may be an even darker secret that drives Bergdahl’s self destructive acts.  HIs police record as a juvenile allegedly hides a dark secret. Something so secretive he refused to let his lawyer submit it at trial and something he refuses to talk about. That document supposedly had a hand in the decision to remove Bergdahl from the Coast Guard.  Bergdahl may have a serious emotional problem or trauma that has manifested itself in both under and overachieving.  Manifested in Bergdahl the awkward ballet dancer or Bergdahl the brutalized hostage. The facts scraped clean of opinions show a man who wanted to do well and made a series of bad decisions that now shape his life for ever.

The record  also shows a man used by others for unrelated politcial and financial purposes. A man shamed, vilified and abused by not just his captors but large segments of the American population for something he thought was the right thing to do. There is no proof that he was a traitor, or even anti-American. He has been consistent in explaining that he reviled his commander and was willing to put his own life at risk to file a complaint. Whether that was brave, stupid or self destructive is up to the viewer.

Somehow many ignore that Bergdahl is just a young soldier who needed to came home. That much of the controversy had nothing to do with him but yet is indelibly linked to his singular stupid mistake. There was no indication that Bergdahl was not helpful and communicative with the military and his inquisitors since his release. There is no indication that Bergdahl ever cracked or even betrayed his country while in captivity. There is plenty of proof that Bergdahl suffered greatly for his rash act and will have a very difficult life going forward.

After his initial debrief, the lead on the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency team Terrence Russell said that Bergdahl had received some of the worst abuse of any prisoner of the 125 POWs he had debriefed in his career. With tearful interludes, he expressed doubt that Bergdahl was a deserter or traitor. “He had to fight the enemy alone for four years and 11 months,, and described Bergdahl’s treatment in captivity “at the same echelon of the most horrible conditions of the last 60 years,”

PART ONE

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/4w7q3d/finding-bergdahl-081

PART TWO

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8gdd9k/finding-bergdahl-part-2-411

PART THREE

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/dpww3y/finding-bergdahl-part-3-814

PART FOUR

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/8gdeg4/finding-bergdahl-part-4-101

The post Finding Bergdahl – The Final Chapter appeared first on Dangerous Magazine.

The Blackwater NSW 4 is a short-run, commemorative knife designed and manufactured for members of the Naval Special Warfare community. Limited to 500 units in its first production, the NSW 4 was produced exclusively for the personnel who advised its final form.

The NSW 4 is our way of catering to our customers’ specific needs. Nearly a year ago, we asked a handful of NSW personnel what they wanted in a knife. We showed them big knives, short knives, fixed-blade knives and folders. Contrary to what some may think, the SEALs didn’t want a six-inch blade.

They wanted a smaller, all-black, fixed-blade sterile knife that was concealable. They wanted a highly corrosion-resistant blade with two inches of serrations, and they wanted a way to personalize the knife, a way to let everyone else know they were Naval Special Warfare.

It didn’t take long for the SEALs to hammer out a list of modifications to the DPx Gear HEFT 4 Assault, which they pored over and wanted to make their own. They liked the balance, the length, and the look, but they wanted it done their way.

So we made the NSW 4 for them. We made it out of Elmax stainless steel, added our proprietary serrations, and carved space for a customizable medallion in the handle scales.

Elmax steel is considered by many to be one of the finest blade materials available. It’s highly resistant to corrosion and wear, and holds a razor edge for extended periods. Because of its resistance to rust and pitting, Elmax steel is favored among MAROPS personnel. Because of its edge retention, it’s used in operating and emergency rooms across the country.

Powder-metallurgy-based production gives Elmax both its hardness (HRC 59) and edge retention. The NSW 4 is designed to stay sharp, and corrosion free, for a full three-month deployment. When you get home, send us the knife, we’ll grind a factory edge on it, and send it back to you.

The knife is also customizable to any specific unit or branch. For NSW personnel, that can mean name, team number, or unit insignia. The options are infinite. Give us the artwork and we’ll put it on your knife.

The Blackwater NSW 4 was designed by Robert Young Pelton and Thomas Rummici. It is manufactured by LionSTEEL in Maniago, Italy. When ordering a SPECWAR, please have proof of military service available.

This model of the NSW 4 is available only to current and former members of NSW. If you’re interested in purchasing one, please contact us at info@bwbrand.com. If you’re interested in having a DPx Gear HEFT 4 Assault customized, we can handle that as well.

The NSW 4 is covered by the unparalleled Blackwater Protection Policy that guarantees that professionals who register their product will never go a day without a Blackwater knife. With the Protection Policy, your knife is protected against loss, breakage, theft, defect, or any other reason.

The post Blackwater NSW 4 is Operator-Designed Knife appeared first on Dangerous Magazine.