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One of Beau's lawyers sent a letter to Donald Trump about a week and a half ago regarding a possible deposition of Trump or a possible appearance as a witness during Beau's court-martial. Dear Mr. Trump, I request to interview you as soon as possible, etc.
Trump's been doing this bit about Beau on the campaign trail. I've watched video of it. It's about how crappy the trade was, how Beau's a traitor, how these Taliban terrorists are back in the fight, about how in the old days we shot people like Beau on the battlefield. Then he sometimes does this stupid rat-a-tat thing with his fingers. None of what Trump says about Beau is true, not in the way Trump implies. But the audience always gives a big meaty roar when he does it. In the old days, deserters were shot.
Ever since I've been reporting this story, when I've asked people, people on all sides of this thing, what bothers them the most about Beau's case, they'll say, I wish it hadn't gotten so political. Sucks that it got so political. And usually I just nod like, eh, politics. This trade for Beau is just one more thing for Democrats and Republicans to yell at each other about. But then when I really looked at it, I was like, wait a minute. Was it inevitable that it got this combative?
Because maybe it could have gone another way. From This American Life and WBEZ Chicago, it's Serial. One story told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig. The day of the trade, President Obama makes this big announcement. He's flanked by Bob and Jannie Bergdahl. He hugs them, kisses them. And even though the president never called Beau a hero, the heft of announcing it at the White House, in the Rose Garden, the pomp of it in front of all those cameras —
it felt like the president was communicating something heroic, a triumph. Which, if you're someone who's served in the military, maybe someone who went looking for Beau, say, that message was bad enough.
But then, the very next day, National Security Advisor Susan Rice went on TV. She was on one of the Sunday news shows, and the host, George Stephanopoulos, asked her about Beau. Finally, on this point, Sergeant Bergwald, there are a lot of questions about how he originally was captured and whether or not he had deserted, had left his post. Is that going to be investigated? And if it's found that he did indeed leave his post, will he be disciplined or has already paid the price?
Certainly, anybody who's been held in those conditions in captivity for five years has paid an extraordinary price. But that is really not the point. The point is that he's back. He's going to be safely reunited with his family. He served the United States with honor and distinction. And that, yow, honor and distinction.
To a lot of military people, it was like the administration had reached out of their televisions and given them the finger right in their living rooms. And then it became this like, "Oh, he's a hero who served with honor and distinction," and blah, blah, blah. It really made me angry. I talked about how I served honor and distinction. That hit pretty hard. I was irate. It's just like, "Whoa, wait a minute." Some government officials were saying that the circumstances of Sergeant Bergdahl's capture weren't clear.
And the soldiers were like, oh, the circumstances are clear. He walked away. Oh, that feels so shitty to be told, well, we don't really know the truth. That's Mark McCrory, who's in Bo's battalion. It took us, you know, screaming into the internet to be heard.
Some of the guys from Beau's former unit got in touch with each other immediately. Someone started a "He's Not a Hero" Facebook group. People started tweeting. One of them was Cody Full, who'd been in Beau's platoon. Cody had actually roomed with Beau back in training in Alaska. He didn't want to talk to me on the record for this story. But his tweets got the attention of a media guy named Brad Chase and of a guy named Rick Grinnell, a public relations strategist who's worked for some big-name Republicans. Chase and Grinnell work together.
And they said to Cody, do you want to go on TV, get a wider audience for what you want to say? Joining me first tonight, former Army specialists Cody Full and Gerald Sutton. First stop was Fox News. Cody, let me start with you. Do you believe that Beau Bergdahl deserted? Yes, I do believe he deserted without a doubt in my mind. The other guy on TV with Cody that day was Gerald Sutton. He was also in Beau's platoon. He was friends with Beau.
He told me Cody had contacted him and said, we got to do something. Will you help me? Years before, Gerald said he had tried to tell people what had gone down, that Beau had walked away. He wrote something on the internet. A few others had too. But he said nobody seemed to pay much attention back then, and he worried the same thing would happen now. I didn't think anyone would actually take us seriously. And I guess the reason why we had so many people behind us is that if one of us just came out and said it, then...
people would just be like, oh, you're just a disgruntled person. So maybe if the entire platoon came out and said what we had to say on our end, that maybe it would be taken seriously for once. We are joined now by six members of Bo Bergdahl's platoon. Guys, thank you all so much for being here. So the group got bigger. A few days later, Fox again, this time a panel of platoon mates.
Soldiers made other TV appearances, CNN, ABC, MSNBC. We're hearing a lot about him from his fellow platoon members who served with him. Would you like to see a dishonorable discharge for him? Yes, yes. He needs to be held 100% accountable for what he did. Soldiers who served with him in Afghanistan have challenged his account. The fact of the matter is, is he deserted us.
That's Gerald Sutton again.
Gerald didn't want to go on any more shows. He knew his limits. And he wanted to stick to the facts. No opinion, no speculation. The problem was that maybe Gerald was, like Beau, a fact-based dude. But he was just no match for the juggernaut that was now up and rolling.
Fox News especially was all over it. In fact, just before they had that panel of six guys from 2nd Platoon on, they'd aired an exclusive report. Breaking tonight, we are learning exclusive and dramatic new details about Sergeant Beau Bergdahl's time in captivity, including reports that he became a Muslim and at one point declared himself a warrior for Islam.
The story was based on, frankly, bullshit intel from a discredited source. But now it was out there, and it was repeated and repeated. Next, the politics of it all. That became the story. The Obama administration was using Beau's trade for political purposes. No, the right was using this for political purposes, using these former platoon mates for political purposes. After all, Rick Grenell, the media guy helping them, he was a big Republican strategist.
And again, for guys like Gerald, none of that was the point. They weren't trying to attack the president. They weren't even trying to attack Beau. Even Cody Full, who's spoken early and often on the topic of Beau, he testified at a congressional hearing saying he wanted to make sure Beau was held accountable for what he did. But even he resisted Obama baiting by a Republican congressman. If you could say anything to President Obama regarding this trade, what would you say?
I'm not going to answer that. Fair enough. Mr. Waltz, you're forewarned. Same questions. At that same hearing, Mike Waltz also testified. He told the committee he was there before them in part because of the Rose Garden.
Mike's a lieutenant colonel in the Army Reserves, a former Green Beret. He'd been commander of Army Special Forces that he said went on lots of missions looking for Beau. Before that, he worked in the Bush White House as a special advisor to Dick Cheney on South Asian counterterrorism. When I read Mike's testimony and Cody's, I was like, all this is because of a five-minute ceremony in the Rose Garden? Just because of how it looked? I asked Mike about that, and he kind of schooled me. Are you saying, like,
Like, none of us would even be talking about this if basically, you know, the president hadn't done that Rose Garden thing and— Hadn't tried to politicize it? I'll answer—I'll be more truthful. Well, yeah. I mean, is this all about the optics, in other words? Or is this like—you know what I mean? Are you just saying, like, I wouldn't even be—I wouldn't have gotten my, like, feathers ruffled about this if—
There had been a picture. I don't think – I don't want to speak for anyone else. I don't believe that I would have been as vocal about –
That was just an incredibly tone-deaf move on the part of the White House. I think it shows how disconnected they are from both the Pentagon and I think – and just truly lack in understanding of the military culture. And when you have the national security advisor in a civil military system where the – who the military has to listen to, essentially knife-handing on national television, sending the signal that this man was honorable –
You know, I was afraid that it would all be, you know, forgotten and that this was going to be politically swept under the carpet. To Mike and to a lot of people watching and listening to the president that day, it wasn't just what he said. We're glad Beau is back. We're committed to ending this war. We support reconciliation. We're committed to closing Gitmo. It's not just that he said all of that. It's what the president didn't say.
That's what was glaring. No recognition or even mention of, we understand there were some irregularities or some question about his disappearance. And I want to assure all veterans, all former POWs and everyone involved with the search that we will objectively and fairly get to the bottom of what happened. You know, I felt that justice was not going to even be attempted to be served.
I've asked many people lo these many months in other parts of government, what was the White House thinking? Why'd they do it? And everyone I've asked, they're like, I don't know what happened over there that day, but I'm sure they regret it now. Well, they do regret it.
Because this Rose Garden event that kicked up so much anger and resentment, evidently it was put together kind of spur of the moment. One of those things where you're like, I know, let's have a party. It'll be great. Except big, fat mistake. None of it, the president's speech, the podium, the Rose Garden, none of it was the original plan for how to announce this trade. The original plan was a much quieter affair.
No one would talk to me on tape about this, but off tape, I talked to several people who worked in the White House at the time. They all told very similar stories about what happened that day. So this is their version. Here goes.
Beau's rescue operation was touch and go for several days. Remember the C-17 sitting and sitting at Guantanamo? It was high wire, the whole thing. And it all went smoothly in the end. But leading up to it, you don't know if the special operations guys, if their helicopter's going to crash or if they're going to get into a firefight. You don't know if Beau's going to get hurt or killed during the rescue. And it had to be stone secret the whole time. The Qataris had made it clear, if even a word of this gets out beforehand, the deal is off.
And people in the White House thought this might be the last real chance to get Beau back. It was stressful. For much of the week before the trade, inside the White House and the national security offices, they'd been working around the clock. If I see the scene in a movie, what does it look like? Mostly, I was sleeping under my desk for four days up until the recovery. Are you kidding?
That's Jeff Eggers. He was a special assistant to the president for national security affairs. He's also a retired Navy SEAL. He deployed to Iraq. He'd worked in Afghanistan. He'd been helping coordinate Beau's recovery with the DOD and the State Department. Because it started to gain momentum that week, and it was... Are you being euphemistic? You were sleeping under your desk, or you were actually sleeping under your desk? No, I was actually sleeping under my desk. Well, actually, it was next to my desk. For four days? Yes.
I think. That was also the week that the president made some significant announcements about troop decisions in Afghanistan. So it was actually a big week. Was the timing of that just coincidental, those two things? Purely coincidental.
President Obama had already done a more solemn Rose Garden event that week. May 27, 2014, he announced a big drawdown of troops by the end of the year and a plan to get out of Afghanistan fully by the end of 2016. Quote, Americans have learned it is harder to end wars than it is to begin them, he said. And now, a few days later, May 31, they'd just gotten word the operation to rescue Beau had worked. He was alive. He was safe.
The national security folks and the White House press folks knew it was going to be lumpy, this news, that trading five Taliban was going to be controversial, that the circumstances of Beau's capture were going to be a topic. They knew. The people I talked to in the White House weren't strangers to military culture. Some of the people who worked on this exchange had been in the military, such as Jeff Eggers, or had worked closely with the military, had worked in war zones, etc.
They thought it was important that the president own the decision to make this trade and that he explain the policy behind it. So the original plan for how to announce it: Release a written statement from the president. The Pentagon would also release a written statement at the same time. Done.
Well, Bob and Jannie Bergdahl happened to be in town. They'd come to D.C. for some meetings that had been scheduled long before with the administration. No one told them this was about to take place. Their visit to D.C. was not planned to coincide with Beau's return. They were in a park playing with some friends' little children when they got the call. And it seemed to make sense. They're in town already. Instead of just a phone call, the president will see them in person.
And now here's where I'd argue there was a blind spot about how all this would look and that no one in the White House seemed to catch it. Some of the people on staff had been working on this for years. First, the talks with the Taliban, then the operation to get Beau. They'd met with Beau's parents before some of them. And so what people told me is that for them, it's not that they were oblivious. It's just that that day, that moment, they felt so happy.
They'd been on tenterhooks for days, weeks even, and now this horrible saga had come to an end. No one had gotten hurt. And you've got both parents right there. You can see their faces. They're crying. It's affecting. Meanwhile, there are some very good reporters in Washington and at Guantanamo, as I've mentioned. And a few of them had known this was going to go down, but had held off reporting it.
And so now the White House press people thought, well, we need to placate them, to please them. Because if we have the Bergdahls here with the president and we don't let some photographers catch that scene, give them what's called camera spray, they're going to be pissed. So maybe let's arrange at least for that. Maybe a shot of the president walking and talking with the Bergdahls, for instance. And then, well, it was such a sunny day. It was such good news for once. Why not just do the whole thing in the Rose Garden?
So in the space of a few hours, it went from a simple statement to a rose garden ceremony. And the idea of Beau's parents talking at all from the podium, much less Bob speaking some words in Pashto and Arabic, those utterly impromptu.
As for the Susan Rice thing, Ambassador Rice politely declined to talk to me for this story. But the White House people I talked to told me they cringed when she said it. They said talking to the press is not her forte. She got a little defensive. And this cliche tumbled out, honor and distinction.
A few days later, Rice explained herself, saying she just meant that volunteering to serve his country in a time of war was an honorable thing to do. But by then, honor and distinction was already caught in amber. There wasn't going to be any shaking it loose. You're pretty isolated when you work in the West Wing. That's what one person who used to work there told me. You're pretty cut off from the normal workaday world. And it's easy to forget how iconic it all is. The columns, the podium with the presidential seal —
They told me there wasn't a concerted effort to make Bobergdahl into a hero, to whitewash what happened in Afghanistan. They say they know it looks that way, but there really wasn't a grand political calculus. They say they were just tired and abuzz with relief, and they thought, "Everyone will feel this joy, right?" They got carried away. In hindsight, one former staffer told me, "We should have thought about it more, that there were other audiences who were watching, people who'd suffered." Quote, "The Rose Garden put a target on our back.
The thing is, and this is me talking, I think it also put a target on Beau's back. Just walk with me now, along this path from the White House, up the street a ways to Capitol Hill. I swear we won't stay there too long. But this is the next place where the politics of this trade hardened and intensified. And I get it. It's Congress. They're in a constant state of readiness to hate anything President Obama comes up with. But this time...
First off, no one from the White House or DOD or the State Department, no one told Congress this trade was about to go down. So members heard about it on the news, basically, like everyone else. By law, the administration was supposed to notify Congress 30 days before any detainee was transferred out of Guantanamo. This time, they didn't. And that was on purpose. The White House didn't want members to get mad and to try to stop the deal from taking place by leaking it to the press, for instance.
Why did they think Congress would get mad? Well, because the administration already knew that Congress thought it stunk, this deal. Back in 2012, when the trade was still linked to peace talks with the Taliban, and it really seemed like it might go forward, the White House had arranged some classified briefings in special rooms on Capitol Hill, where this stuff happens, apparently. And members had made themselves pretty clear at the time. Their reactions to a proposed trade of five Taliban guys ranged from skeptical to horrified.
For instance, then-Senator Saxby Chambliss, a Republican from Georgia, had a briefing of the Senate Intelligence Committee on January of 2012, almost two and a half years before it actually took place, talking about trading these Taliban guys for Beau. I want to state publicly, as strongly as I can, that we should not transfer these detainees from Guantanamo. So the administration worried, understandably, that if they brought it up again, it'd get crushed. And they might not be able to get Beau back at all.
The decision was made. Don't say anything. So by 2014, a lot of people in Congress assumed the deal was dead, which was a reasonable thing to think, because that's more or less what they'd been told over the years.
You can see in State Department memos, in January and February of 2014, even as the administration was working to revive the deal, officials called around to certain offices on Capitol Hill to update certain members of Congress about the Bergdahl situation. And the calls ended with, quote, we told them we would keep them updated and continue to consult before taking any action, unquote. But they didn't consult Congress because here Congress was hearing it on the news. All of that was a surprise, right?
Just how blatantly obvious. Yeah, how blatant and intentional misleading Congress was as part of this. That's Mac Thornberry, Texas Republican. At the time of the trade, he was a member of the House Armed Services Committee, known as HASC. Now he's the chairman. HASC oversees the Department of Defense. And HASC staffers on the Republican side told me that that relationship with DOD has traditionally been pretty solid. It's cooperative, straightforward.
Now they realized DOD had been the lead on hammering out this final Bergdahl deal and had told them nothing. For instance, just three and a half months before the trade happened, the Washington Post published a story, quoting unnamed sources. It talked about the five Taliban going to Doha. It was pretty detailed. And so some Hask staff, they say they asked the DOD about it. Hey, is there anything to this? And they say they were told, nope.
It's possible, probable, actually, that the person they called wasn't lying. They just weren't in the know. Meanwhile, emails are zinging among all these other government officials who are in the know. Quote,
Tony Blinken at the White House sent one around about his dismay and disgust over the leak, since it could derail the deal. Quote, simply put, whoever is responsible should look him or herself in the mirror and ask, by what right did I jeopardize the life of a fellow American? Here's Thornberry again. We had specific questions, you know, are these press reports right? They denied it. And looking back, now we know that in...
Some instances, they were too cute by half by saying, "Well, we're not in negotiations today," when the guy was about to get on a plane and go to the Mideast to have negotiations tomorrow.
What he's talking about is a congressional hearing in late April, just a month before the trade. A State Department official was asked about efforts to recover Beau, and he gives this kind of cryptic update. He says that agencies across the government were striving in the most, quote, energetic and creative ways we can devise, unquote, to secure Beau's release.
Unfortunately, the Taliban broke off direct contact with us in January of 2012. We would very much like to return to direct contact with them. And if we do, at the top of our agenda will be Sergeant Bergdahl. It is certainly not the case, as was reported, that somehow the Taliban and the Haqqani Network are seeking to release him and that interagency squabbles within the United States government are preventing or delaying that.
That same guy was in Doha by the next day for a meeting about the Bergdahl trade. So yeah, the administration wasn't exactly forthcoming with Congress. On the other hand, it was an open hearing, and he's talking about a deal so fragile still. He doesn't know if it's going to fall apart like the others before it.
Regardless, once Hask's staffers on the Republican side went back and traced exactly what they were and weren't told, once they investigated the whole trade, issued a strongly worded report about it, that report then entered the political fray. Democrats called it an expression of shrill demagoguery, accused the Republicans of using the trade to push their national security agenda. Republicans accused Democrats of exactly the same thing.
I talked to some Hask staffers, again, on the Republican side, about this whole thing. And they sounded to me surprisingly, genuinely upset by what had happened to their once-collegial relationship with DOD. If that's going to be the relationship going forward, then there is nothing. What can we rely upon that they are telling us about any given issue? Like, you just feel like you don't trust those guys anymore. Yes.
Is this a biggie? Like, is this the biggie that you've seen where you're just like, I cannot believe how this went down? Or is this just like, oh, my God, there's like, this happens like three times a year on different things? We view this as unprecedented.
This staffer said, we're not just foot stomping here that you guys didn't tell us. It's actually a profound concern about national security risk and the risk to our, in particular, not exclusively, but in particular, our forces deployed overseas and in Afghanistan. And so it's, we're worried about,
She's talking about the Taliban Five. They felt like the president and the DOD had done an end run around the approval process for Gitmo transfers. And so, you know, who are these five Taliban guys anyway? How can we trust you that they're safe to release, that they won't rejoin the battle? Who signed off on this? This part of the fight over Beau's trade, I just want to talk about it for a minute because it mirrors a deeper, bare-knuckled fight over Guantanamo.
The president wants to close Guantanamo. Most Republicans in Congress, even though President Bush wanted to close it too, they've opposed the idea since Obama took office. And one of the arguments they make is that some of the prisoners we've released from Gitmo have rejoined the fight. And that's true. Most haven't, but some have. So it's a fair question, right? What about these five Taliban guys? Were they safe to release from Guantanamo?
There's probably nobody, including the military, who knows the ins and outs of Gitmo better than Carol Rosenberg from the Miami Herald. I've actually asked military people questions about Guantanamo, and they've referred me to Carol Rosenberg.
Carol explained that these five guys were what's known down there as forever prisoners. They hadn't been cleared for release, and they hadn't been and wouldn't be charged with crimes. But they also weren't going through the administration's new review process, an interagency board meant to assess each detainee who was still down there and figure out whether they could be cleared for transfer or should still be held. By all accounts, this review process is a much more rigorous and more rational look at the intelligence than has been done in the past.
But again, these five guys weren't on the list for review. Here's Carol. Three of these guys got there on the first day. You would have thought that they'd get the first reviews, but they didn't. And I'm watching through the years. Why aren't they reviewing these guys? Why aren't they reviewing these guys? I mean, I started asking questions really early. Why aren't these guys? Because my instinct was, my thought was, we know that they're trying to trade. Wouldn't you think they're trying to push them through the board to get them in position?
And then, they're not. They're not. And I'm like, I wonder if they think that intelligence people won't clear them. Right. Got it? Right. If you have it on paper... Then it would look even worse for the president, right? Yeah. Imagine if they'd been rejected for release by the board and the U.S. had traded them anyway. Since there wasn't a review, we don't have, in any public way at least, a recent intelligent assessment on these five guys. ♪
However, I talked to someone who should know. That guy Nathan, not his real name. You heard him back in episode five. He's the guy who was close to the recovery effort for Beau and worked with Beau's parents. Nathan is not a lefty. He's former military, and he was an intel analyst at Gitmo. His specialty was Afghanistan-Pakistan. He did two stints at Guantanamo for a total of three years, ending in 2013.
So he knew all about these Taliban guys. His office at Gitmo was a stone's throw from where they were being held. Nathan readily admits that he's biased, insofar as he wanted Beau to come home, and he was working toward that very goal. But he was not happy about this trade. He doesn't hate it like a lot of his peers in the analyst world. He just wishes it hadn't come to that. But the only option left for the president was this Gitmo option. There wasn't the political will to do anything else.
But he also thinks these five guys, they're okay to release. They're being watched closely in Qatar. They're high profile, so they can't hide. Everyone knows who they are and what they look like. Nathan says there's just not much they'd be able to pull off, even if they wanted to. Their value to the Taliban in Afghanistan, he said, is pretty much limited to a rallying cry.
Yeah, I was very familiar with them. And honestly, I didn't feel that it was that big of a danger to release them. You didn't? No. Even the sort of guys, Nori and Fossil, who were the kind of biggest fish, it seems like?
Yeah, yeah, definitely. They're not going to be that. They're not going to be trouble. Like if they're ending up being trouble, it's because, you know, we let them be trouble because we drop the ball on, you know, keeping an eye on them. Do you feel like you guys had cleared or I know it's not your job to clear someone for release, but had recommended release?
or had seen people released who were on par with these guys? Sure, sure, yeah. And, you know, we've released guys that we probably shouldn't have. We didn't even know who they were. But, yeah, definitely. We definitely released some not-so-good guys that were pretty close to these, in level with these guys. Right, so it's like you didn't see the names and just, like, freak out, like, I can't, what? Yeah.
There's only like one or two people at Gitmo that would freak me out if we... Like KSM, if he were on the list, that might be weird. That's going to be a problem. Yeah. That's definitely going to be a problem. Oh, really? But you're being serious. Like there are really only a few who just are... Okay. You know, and frankly, we got to do something with Gitmo. Them leaving Gitmo, they would have left anyway. It's, you know, at least we made use of them. Yeah. So...
So the hot reaction to this trade, Nathan says he understands it.
But he also says it's not exactly based on the facts. The anger over releasing those guys comes down to a lot of the same reasons why people are, you know, still mad at Beau for walking out the base. Like, it's a very personal thing. Like, you don't, you know, they feel very strongly about what these guys have done and, you know, what kind of people they are. And you don't negotiate. You don't make trades, you know. So they're wrapped up in a larger moral question.
So Obama released these five guys. Congress didn't like it. And to be clear, Congress doesn't get a vote on individual Gitmo transfers like this. They're just supposed to be notified. Right after the trade, the White House explained that the Secretary of Defense had followed all the requirements for the detainee transfers, that the 30-day notice could have endangered Beau's life, and that they believed the president had the constitutional authority to make this decision.
But it was agreed all around, Republicans and Democrats. The administration had pulled a fast one by not giving the 30-day notice. And the Government Accountability Office, which is nonpartisan, found that the DOD broke the law by doing the transfer the way it did. Which, that happens sometimes. President Obama's definitely not the first to claim executive power in order to make a move like this.
But when a president does that, a rankled Congress tends to push back with whatever power it has. In this case, one way to do that, Gitmo legislation.
So here's a fairly tangible effect of the trade for Beau. There's this massive annual defense bill that's put together by the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. And tucked inside it for the past five years is language specifying what the Secretary of Defense has to do before he can sign off on any foreign transfers of Gitmo detainees. After the Bergdahl trade, Republicans decided to change that language to make it harder to transfer anyone.
Adam Smith, a Democrat from Washington state, was one of four lawmakers trying to come to final agreement on that bill last year. I talked to him over the summer, when he was still in the thick of arguing with Republicans over the harsher transfer language. Smith has been a big proponent of shutting down Gitmo. He and I were both on the phone when I asked him about it, both of us traveling in cars, actually, so the tape isn't great. How much is the Bergdahl trade for the Taliban, those five Taliban guys,
Is that a shadow over what you guys are doing right now? And how big a shadow? It's a pretty darn big shadow. Absent that, I don't think we would be having the discussion of further foreign transfer restrictions. Really? Wow. Yeah. Well, we'd be having the discussion, but I'd be winning it.
And yeah, Republican Mac Thornberry, who was also one of the four lawmakers negotiating that bill, said it's true. The Bergdahl thing was corrosive. They were not going to budge on that stricter standard for letting people out of Gitmo. Oh, there's no question. I mean, it was a direct result of the Bergdahl trade and the not telling Congress the truth.
Another result, less tangible maybe, was that outrage and suspicion over the trade spilled over onto Beau himself. June 11th, 2014, the House Armed Services Committee held a packed hearing on the Bergdahl trade. At the start of this hearing, I'm pleased to welcome members of the public who have such an interest in these proceedings. The chairman opened by saying, we are not going to talk about Bergdahl personally. Let me be clear up front on the focus of today's hearing.
It is not my intention to dive into the circumstances of the disappearance of Sergeant... Then, of course, it came up. Testifying before the committee was Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel. He had to answer all the who-knew-what-when questions that were pissing Congress off. Representative Jeff Miller, a Republican, took a turn at the mic. Did you or did you not notify Congress within the 30-day time frame, yes or no?
No. Okay. No, sir. Yes or no? All right, no. Does the administration intend to violate the notice required? And then Miller started asking questions about Bo. Why weren't we hearing from him? Why was he still at an American military hospital in Germany? And what we are doing is we are allowing the doctors to make the decision. Wait a minute. Wait a minute.
Why hasn't he been returned to the United States? We have seriously wounded soldiers that are returned to the United States almost immediately after they are stabilized. How long did Jessica Lynch wait before she was returned to the United States? You're trying to tell me that he's being held at Landstuhl, Germany because of his medical condition? Congressman, I hope you're not implying anything other than that.
I'm just asking the question, Mr. Secretary. I'm going to give an answer, too, and I don't like the implication of the question. Answer it. Answer it. The implication, I think, was that maybe something fishy was going on with Beau, something embarrassing to the Army, that maybe this Bergdahl fellow, an American soldier whom we had just brought home at enormous cost, had walked off to join the Taliban, and now they were hiding him away in Germany, and he was
Hagel fended all of this off. This isn't just about a physical situation, Congressman. This guy was held for almost five years in God knows what kind of conditions. We do know some of the conditions from our intelligence community, not from, by the way, Bergdahl. This is not just about can he get on his feet and walk and get to a plane. So you're telling me he cannot be questioned because of his condition? I'm telling you is that the medical professionals who rely on their judgment for his health
So what was going on in Germany? At an army hospital in Landstuhl, Beau was undergoing this really pretty profound transition. The official word for it is reintegration. At first, as you can imagine, every single thing is weird for him. He can't talk, really. He's blinking and squinting. For five years, he'd had only a few things. A bowl, a blanket, a water bottle.
He says his mind had adapted to the simplicity of that. And now all of a sudden there are all these people, he's got to interact with them. There's all this stuff around, furniture he's not used to. For instance, one of the first things that happens is they bring him into this room and there are chairs and a sofa. And they tell him, wherever you want to sit down is fine. You know, I heard the word fit. So basically I just sat because that's what I was used to doing.
And so all these commanders, they follow suit. Yeah.
For the SEER community, that's the military's survival, evasion, resistance, and escape training. For them, this moment, getting back a POW who'd been held for that long, alone, and survived, it was huge. It hadn't happened since Vietnam.
The military had been practicing for Beau's return for months, for years, really. They'd cleared out two entire wings of Landstuhl Forum. In one wing would be Beau and a few SEER folks. In the other wing, all the intel, the administrative people, the commanders, computers,
Beau is interacting with just a small team, but everyone involved was so overexcited, I guess. All these commanders and psychs who are supposed to take over when Beau gets to San Antonio, they all showed up in Germany. And then they just hang out, sit around in the hospital wing with nothing to do. Apparently, one psychologist from Europe arrived on his own dime, offering his services. They sent the poor guy away.
One person who was on the Germany team told me that all these people, it was like they wanted to behold Beau, to meet him, like they wanted to touch the stone. I've spoken to several people who were involved with Beau's reintegration and debriefing, and they told me it was all planned down to the smallest detail, how to walk Beau from the plane to the bus that would take him to the hospital. ♪
How to speak to him. They'd explain exactly how the day was going to go. Food will come at 10. There's a strategic debriefing at 1. Is that okay? If it's not okay, we don't have to do it. You want your food at 11? That's okay too. And they asked him, are you comfortable sleeping in the bed?
Bo couldn't really talk yet, but he had to let them know, mm-mm, he was not comfortable sleeping on the bed. His body was in pain, especially the spots that had been in contact with the floor for so long. But somehow he couldn't deal with the softness of the bed either. Plus, the hospital bed was out in the open, open on all sides in the room.
Somebody could very easily get to me, so it was just like this very uneasy feeling. So what I had to do was I had to move over by the bathroom where there was like a little hallway. And to sleep on the first night, I slept in the bathroom because there's a door. I slept in the bathroom and I shut the door so I could... There's also a distance between the front door to the room and the bathroom, so I knew that allowed me to hear footsteps coming from...
Beau didn't end up being a model soldier, but he'd been, by all accounts, a model POW, and now a model returnee, cooperative, eager to be helpful, to the SEER team, to the intel debriefers. He participated in debriefs for weeks.
His progress was being watched very, very closely by lots of people, especially at the Pentagon. Every day, all the questions, all the follow-up questions the intel people were asking him, they had to clear them, all the way up through the Joint Chiefs and then all the way back down again. The team is updating all these muckety-mucks from SOCOM, CENTCOM, JPRA, by video every day. And the muckety-mucks are asking, is Beau telling the truth? Does he have Stockholm syndrome? Is he really trying to help us?
All reasonable questions. But again, it seemed as if the people dealing with Beau in a daily way had such a different, such a softer view of him than the higher-ups did. At one point, for instance, someone gave him a compass. Beau had always kept a compass before. One person told me that when the Army chief of staff found out, he went, quote, fucking ballistic. Why would you give a deserter a compass? They had to take it away.
About a week and a half after Beau came to Germany, at the same time that members of Congress made it clear publicly in that hearing with Chuck Hagel that they're also watching this process very closely. — Wait a minute. Why hasn't he been returned to the United States? — Word comes down at Landstuhl, they got to speed it up, move it along to San Antonio. The army wanted him back, wanted more command and control over their soldier, this still unknown entity who was an ocean away.
This was communicated rather forcefully to the reintegration experts in Landstuhl. We were like, "Wait a second." That's Michael Valdivinos. He's a former Air Force SEER psychologist. He was in charge of the psych team for part of Beau's reintegration. You know, it really started feeling like it wasn't about the reintegration per se anymore. You know, it wasn't about his overall well-being. It was much more— it started becoming really political and administrative. It just felt, like, wrong, you know?
We would have liked to have maybe had him stay a little bit longer, but there were other competing interests. Someone else who was there in Germany told me they started seeing these charts about Beau with categories for medical, psych, and intel. And the charts had colors: red, yellow, or green. Green meant cleared. They got the picture. They had to show progress.
They were supposed to set specific goals for Beau, such as, "Is Bergdahl able to deal with negative media attention?" And every day at 4:00, they'd need to brief the commanders to report whether they were meeting their targets. Every day, more and more green boxes turned up on the charts. Of course, part of bringing Beau back to the modern world was letting him know, gently, that he'd become popular.
Valdivinos has been in contact with Beau recently. They've talked about this. He didn't know that he was on TV. He didn't know that he was the subject of national interest. He didn't know that his parents had met the president. God, it must be so weird to know not only, like, does the whole country know about you, but then, yeah, like, it's not...
They aren't having parades. Yeah, no, he, it was really hard. It was really hard because there was so much of it coming so fast and it was all bad. Like telling somebody that and just, you know, how do you prepare somebody that's gone through something like he did and then by the way, let him know, hey dude, you're home. You can relax now. But as soon as you walk out that door, get ready because there's a shit storm, you know, and it's not going away anytime soon.
Back to that congressional hearing with Chuck Hagel, one last time. Representative Jim Langevin, a Democrat. He agreed that questions about Sergeant Bergdahl's conduct should be addressed with due process at the appropriate time.
But he asked Hegel, could you at least answer this one thing? But could you settle one conflicting report, at least, in terms of regarding the number of the loss of soldiers who may have been involved in searches for Sergeant Bergdahl? Hegel started by noting that any soldier who dies is a terrible loss to their family and to their country.
And then he got down to business. He knew this was coming. I've personally gone back and asked that question inside the Pentagon, in the Army, in all of our reports. I have seen no evidence that directly links any American combat death to the rescue or finding or search of Sergeant Bergdahl.
Hagel said it once, then right away he said it again. I've asked the question. We've all asked the question. I have seen no evidence, no facts presented to me when I asked that question. Hagel had to know that question was the consequential heart of Bo's story. Did anyone die looking for him? And I have to think Hagel also knew that his answer would not settle this question, not by a long shot.
Soldiers were talking about it. Commanders like Mike Waltz were talking about it, were testifying about it, that people did die looking for Bergdahl. That's part of what was so galling to them about the Rose Garden in the first place. Why weren't those families being recognized by the president?
I asked Mike Waltz about it. Why is the Army saying the opposite, then, of what you're saying? Why are they saying nobody died in the search? I'm not sure who did the investigation, and I haven't seen from you or any other journalist a real dig into how the Army came to that conclusion. What did they look at? What was the basis of that statement? I don't know. I can only speak to my own experience.
Okay, then. Let's find a journalist. Oh, wait. We're journalists. We put one of our staff, Whitney Dangerfield, on this question. Has there been an official investigation into whether people died looking for Beau? Is there a record of people who got injuries looking for Beau? She started with Army Public Affairs, and they told her to ask FORSCOM, U.S. Army Forces Command. A guy there pointed her to the investigation by Army Major General Kenneth Dahl.
But General Dahl, he didn't look into this question of whether people died or got hurt in the search. That wasn't his mission. At a hearing on Beau's case in September, Beau's attorney asked Dahl about it. And Dahl said he'd heard a lot of discussion about it in his own interviews and just in the press, allegations one way or another. But he didn't pursue it. He said he was told, quote, unquote.
Okay, interesting. So Whitney, our Whitney, went to Central Command, CENTCOM. And CENTCOM wrote back to her, quote, So Army to FORCECOM to CENTCOM, which sent her back to the Army, also known as Square One.
Unless we're missing something, the U.S. military hasn't done an official investigation into whether any soldiers died because they were looking for Beau. Here's the other thing General Dahl said about this question when he was on the stand back in September. He said, quote, I had asked the appointing authority, you know, should I investigate this? Because really, this is something that, at the end of the day, is going to have to be answered. I mean, if I was a parent, I would want to know. Everybody should want to know.
We really ought to close that out, unquote. Yeah, I agree. Next time on Serial. Serial is produced by Julie Snyder, Dana Chivas, and me in partnership with Mark Boll, Megan Ellison, Hugo Lindgren, Jessica Weisberg, Page One, and Annapurna Pictures. Ira Glass is our editorial advisor. Whitney Dangerfield is our digital editor. Research by Kevin Garnett. And additional research this week by Benjamin Phelan.
Fact-checking by Michelle Harris. Copy editing by Anahita Lani. Emily Connan is our line producer. Our music is composed by Nick Thorburn, Fritz Meyers, and Mark Phillips. The show is mixed by Kate Walensky. Kristen Taylor is our community editor. Other serial staff, Seth Lind, Elise Bergersen, and Kimberly Henderson. Special thanks this week to Carol Giacomo, Jeff Melman, and Rachel Hammerman.
Our website is SerialPodcast.org, where this week you can watch the Rose Garden video and you can look through some of the emails government officials were sending to each other in the months before Beau's recovery. Again, that's SerialPodcast.org. Stay tuned for a preview of our next episode. But first...
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Serial is a production of This American Life and WBEZ Chicago. Coming up on the next episode of Serial. It's certain, there is no doubt in my mind, that U.S. soldiers died looking for Bo Bergdahl. And this guy says, I want to let you know we're fixing to break this story. People are going to get hurt. People are going to get killed. And I just see the first truck just explode. But what was the mission?