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Previously on Serial. Like, how can I get into Afghanistan? Or how can I get into Pakistan? I'm going to get my bag, I have my passport. Our greater bureaucracy is telling the families to just shut up and wait. Address the Pakistani armed forces. I think I can get that done for you, but he really likes Johnny Walker Black Label. In order to exchange you, the Taliban is waiting for all the prisoners in all the prisons, all the Muslims around the world to be released.
From This American Life in WBEZ Chicago, it's Serial, one story told week by week. I'm Sarah Koenig. May 31st, 2014, the day Beau gets picked up by a special operations team in Afghanistan. He's quickly pulled onto a helicopter. Leaving the ground like that, with space suddenly all around him, after five years of being locked in rooms, he said it was like crossing an abyss.
When they landed at a nearby base, Beau wanted to communicate with these guys who'd rescued him, but he couldn't talk yet. He hadn't spoken sentences, much less had a conversation in so long. He says he could think of the words, but he couldn't make them come out of his head. What I ended up doing was asking for something to write on, and the first thing I asked them was if there are special forces. And then when they told me there are special forces, I immediately went into giving them intel and names,
And then they got me onto the plane. After a few minutes, you know, they threw some clothes on me. They threw the hat and the shirt and pants and threw me on the plane with the rest of the team. And they got me to background. And that was the last I saw of them.
I did mention that I wanted to say thank you and the people around me at the time, they said, "Okay, we'll pass that on, but we gotta get going because we gotta get you on the plane. We gotta get you some food and you and all that." And I didn't want to bother those guys because I could understand they had a lot of other things to do.
At that moment, a military transport plane was standing by at Guantanamo Bay, waiting to take five Taliban guys to Qatar. Five years' worth of machinations — high hopes and false starts and politicking and secret meetings — had gone into getting Beau onto that helicopter and the five Taliban prisoners onto a C-17.
The response to this trade back home in the U.S. varied, but probably the loudest response was, "I can't believe we just did that. We negotiated with terrorists to release some terrorists to get back a deserter?" And it seems people also had questions in Afghanistan. Wait, what was all of this about? Did they really just give up five liters of the Taliban for one American soldier? That's Haider Akbar.
He grew up in the U.S., but he's Afghan. He now lives in Kabul. His father was governor of Kunar province. Haider is a friend of This American Life. He's done some stories for us. Haider was in Afghanistan when the trade happened, and he remembers the talk, the disbelief. This guy was definitely not—is he a general? I remember these conversations. Is this guy a general? No, he's just a soldier.
Really? They're going to let go of five leaders? There must be something greater at play here. And there was supposed to be something much greater at play here. Something as big and grand as a plan to end the war. So what happened? How did this become the solution to getting Beau home?
In 2009, the Yerbo was captured. The war in Afghanistan was going very badly for U.S. troops. And a struggle was going on inside the Obama administration about what to do about it. The idea the president settled on was fully resourced counterinsurgency. Peace talks, meaning talking directly to the Taliban about ending the war, that was not part of the plan. Not yet.
The person who argued the most forcefully for that to change, who said we should start talking to the Taliban now, was a diplomat named Richard Holbrooke. Holbrooke had just been appointed SRAP, Special Representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan. Basically, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton had hired him to help end the war.
Holbrooke was this legendary negotiator, a huge tenacious talent, and also a huge personality. In her memoir about being Secretary of State, Clinton tells a story about how relentless he was, how he once followed her into a ladies' room in Pakistan so he could finish making his point. Holbrooke rubbed some people in the administration the wrong way, including Obama himself. But Holbrooke didn't stop lobbying for a political solution to the war.
That's Kati Marton, a journalist and writer. She was also married to Richard Holbrook, who died in 2010.
He did not think that you could just muscle your way to a solution. And, you know, General Petraeus felt that doubling down on the Taliban was the way to go. Richard would have 10-second conversations with Petraeus. And the gist of that was, no, this is not the time for diplomacy. And he deeply...
Kati says it wasn't a personal slight to Holbrooke. He didn't care about that. It was the principle. He thought the military had too much sway, that it was dominating political strategy in these wars.
Vali Nasser also worked for Holbrooke in the SRAP office as a special advisor. He's a Middle East scholar. Vali Nasser says, in Holbrooke's view, the whole military versus diplomacy debate was out of whack. In other words, it was General Petraeus who should be Holbrooke's wingman. Or handmaiden?
The military is a handmaiden to diplomacy, and that balance has been lost during the Bush years. And I think he believed that that was fundamentally wrong and would get America into greater trouble. So Holbrooke's view was that you use the military to get the Taliban to the table, but the goal is to get them to sign a document, an agreement.
Meanwhile, Holbrooke is being sidelined this whole time. People in the administration are trying to get him fired, in fact, though Hillary Clinton protected him. To make matters worse, Holbrooke had a crummy relationship with Hamid Karzai. Karzai thought Holbrooke had undermined him in the Afghan presidential elections the summer of 2009. And Karzai wasn't entirely wrong about that. So all around, Holbrooke isn't so popular. And neither is the notion of the U.S. sitting down with the enemy, the Taliban.
But it seems the enemy was interested in talking to us. Diplomats in Germany had been meeting with a 30-something Afghan guy who was close to Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader. His name was Tayyab Agha. Back in Washington, they didn't say his name out loud, though. They used a code name, A-Rod. Holbrooke was a baseball fan. Yes, A-Rod was a very familiar name around my house.
A meeting with A-Rod would be risky. You don't know if the guy's for real, whether you're being played. Neither side knows, in fact. But Holbrooke wanted to try it. He took it to Hillary Clinton, who was skeptical, but gave the go-ahead for a first face-to-face meeting between the Taliban and the United States government. It was to be just outside Munich, right after Thanksgiving 2010. And it was to be secret. The Taliban insisted it be secret, or else they'd walk. Pakistan didn't know. The British didn't know. Few people in the U.S. government knew.
few people in the Taliban knew. They met in a small village in a safe house run by German intelligence, although Tayabagha had worn Western suits in his earlier meetings with the Germans. At this meeting, he wore traditional Afghan clothes, a white tunic. Tayabagha opened by reading a formal propagandistic statement he knew the Americans wouldn't like. The Americans don't have a set agenda. They're mostly there to listen. But while they weren't talking terms, the U.S. did have some non-negotiables.
We wanted the Taliban to stop fighting, break with al-Qaeda, and support the Afghan constitution, including rights in there for women and girls. That was especially important to Hillary Clinton. The big goal was to get the Taliban to start talking to the Karzai government. The idea, as the State Department put it, was to get Afghans talking to other Afghans about the future of Afghanistan, so we could get out of the room.
The Taliban wanted a few things, too. They wanted the U.S. to distinguish between them and al-Qaeda, take their names off a U.N. sanctions list of terrorists. They wanted a political office outside of Pakistan. They wanted it in Doha, Qatar. And they wanted their prisoners back. And that's where Beau comes in. By that time, the Haqqanis had been holding him for almost a year and a half. And now, at this meeting, his fate becomes tied to the fate of the peace process in Afghanistan.
If the U.S. hands over some Taliban prisoners, they'll hand over the American soldier. Beau would be part of what are called confidence-building measures that would pave the way for substantive peace talks. The Americans weren't allowed to call it a prisoner exchange, by the way. They had to call it a mutual release.
So Beau is part of the discussion, but he's not the point of these talks. He's not the crux of anything. That's pretty clear when I've asked diplomats and State Department officials about it. Beau was like a line item, an important line item, but a line item nonetheless.
I've heard and read a number of different accounts now about what the Taliban initially asked for in exchange for Beau. One source told me it was always five particular guys at Gitmo the Taliban wanted. Another source who was at the meeting told me that at first it was a simpler demand: four Taliban prisoners held at Bagram in Afghanistan. Tayyabagha turned us down for an interview, so I haven't been able to definitively pin this down.
In any case, when the Munich meeting was over, the Americans, a contingent from the White House State Department, they fly home, report back to their bosses. Thumbs up. It's on. Holbrooke drives out to the airport to meet his guy. He's so eager to hear how it went. And then, just a couple of weeks later, Holbrooke dies. He was at work when his aorta ruptured. He was rushed to the hospital for surgery, but on December 13, 2010, he died.
Just to pause here for a minute, a bunch of people I talked to for this story were sad about Holbrooke's death, not just for him, but for Afghanistan. They had this feeling that maybe if Holbrooke hadn't died when he did, the talks with the Taliban could have worked out differently, that we wouldn't still be in this mess of a war. Here's Vali Nasser. Holbrooke was the only, I think, statesman at that time in the United States who was willing to take the risk of owning reconciliation.
He wasn't afraid of it. Wasn't afraid of it. He advocated what was a very, very unpopular and risky position. And I don't think anybody else was willing to do it after that. Nobody stood up and said, I'm now Mr. Reconciliation. I'm now the champion of this thing. And the irony of it was that, you know, he was being so much effort was being put on marginalizing him.
That, you know, when he actually died, we realized, you know, how much was he actually carrying and how important he was.
Right after Holbrooke dies, that's when political reconciliation with the Taliban officially becomes U.S. strategy. In February of 2011, Hillary Clinton gives a speech, in honor of Holbrooke, actually, in which, for the first time, an American official speaks out loud, in public, about talking peace with the Taliban. Still, many people in the government aren't happy about it. Now, I know that reconciling with an adversary that can be as brutal as the Taliban sounds distasteful.
even unimaginable. And diplomacy would be a lot easier if we only had to talk to our friends. But that is not how one makes peace.
Here was the original vision after Munich. Over the next six months, everyone would agree to terms on the confidence-building measures. The office would happen, the trade, including Bo, would happen. And then the goal was, by December 2011, at an international conference planned in Bonn, Germany, Karzai would be there, and the talks, Afghan to Afghan, would be underway. Such an orderly vision.
Instead, what happens is fitful is the best word I can think of. Years of fits and starts. For people in the diplomacy business, the ping-ponging trajectory of these talks is probably familiar. But to me, as I was trying to figure out what happened with Beau and his connection to these meetings with the Taliban, I just had no idea it would look like this. And I'm not going to take you through every step because we'd be here all week. But I just want to point out some of the moments of like, if only...
because they really bring home how fraught and fragile diplomacy can be. So, after Munich, there's this brief moment of hopefulness, let's say. Hamid Karzai had created a high peace council in anticipation of impending peace talks. The U.S. had a couple more meetings with Tayib Agha. And then, stagnation. Nothing is signed. Nothing is moving. Washington is wary. It's dithering.
Michael Steiner was the SRAP for Germany at the time. He'd helped set up the U.S.-Taliban talks in the first place. And he says after Munich, it was like the motor of the whole process sputtered.
We lost time, enormous, precious time afterwards. With every lost month, the perspectives to get this situation healed becomes more difficult, you know? It took so damned long. Tayyabagha needed to show progress to his bosses. The Taliban were getting antsy.
In addition, for Tayabagha, it's no easy thing for him to get to these meetings in secret. He worried, understandably, that his life might be in danger if it became public he was talking to the U.S. Factions inside the Taliban didn't want peace talks. And no one had consulted Pakistan about any of this, and Pakistan had long wanted to be a player in any peace talks. Karzai was perpetually worried that the U.S. and Pakistan were up to something behind his back. It all had to stay quiet.
In 2011, Ambassador Mark Grossman replaced Holbrooke as SRAP. Well, it was supposed to be secret. It would have been better if it had been quiet. But as I know you know from doing your research, people just kind of talked and talked and talked. They did. We suffered a lot of leaks from Washington and also from Kabul. And why? Well, because, you know, it wasn't the most popular thing in the world to be doing.
The result? In May of 2011, the Washington Post and Der Spiegel in Germany both reported that the talks were happening, and for the first time, they named Tayyab Agha. The Taliban walked away from the talks. Clinton rushed to Islamabad to smooth things over with Pakistan. Another State Department official flew to Doha to ask the Qataris to please, please ask the Taliban to come back, which a few months later, they did.
But according to Michael Steiner, the leaks meant the Taliban now had to dig in on their demands to reassure their own people they weren't selling out to the Americans. The price for the continuation of the process got higher because the demands become higher. And if we would have acted earlier, much less would have been to be paid.
Steiner didn't specify, but I believe he's talking about the Gitmo detainees that the Taliban now fixed on that demand. And that made things harder because getting prisoners out of Gitmo, any prisoners, just ask President Obama, that's not easy. There are laws about it. You have to tell Congress. You have to get the Secretary of Defense to sign off on it. Someone in the SRAP office at the time told me when they discuss it at meetings, the Defense Department just really, really, really opposed transferring anybody out of Guantanamo.
Big picture, Mark Grossman's goals were the same as Holbrooke's, to create a stable Afghanistan inside a stable region. And he had a plan, a series of international conferences and meetings to get other countries to commit money and support to help not only end the war in Afghanistan, but sustain a peace. He explained all of this to Tayabaga when they finally met. And what were, what did he want? Like what became clear to you was like why he was there?
They wanted their prisoners out of Guantanamo. Grossman says at one point they did try to offer Tayabagha prisoners from Bagram, but that was a no-go. And he told the reporter David Rhoad that they tried to offer up four different Taliban guys from Gitmo, lesser figures who'd already been cleared for transfer, but that was also rejected. The Taliban wanted these five guys. At this point in the middle of 2011, there were 17 Afghans in Guantanamo, all of them accused of being tied to the Taliban or to terrorist groups.
So why was Tayeb Agha asking for these five back in exchange for Beau? If you look at especially two of the biggies on the list, guys named Mullah Fazal and Nouriel Anouri, what happened with them is actually a really interesting window into what was going on with the war right in the beginning in 2001.
Because, and this was a surprise to me, at that time, late 2001, some Taliban commanders surrendered. So there was this opportunity, some people argue that we blew it, that it was a big missed opportunity, to get the Taliban to stop fighting. That we could have swooped in when they were weakest, contained them, made peace. In other words, all the things we'd still be struggling to do a decade and a half later.
I talked to Carlotta Gall about these guys, Fazal and Nouri. Carlotta's a reporter for The New York Times, and she arrived in Afghanistan just a couple of weeks after the U.S. started bombing. The Taliban regime was unraveling, and in the north, where Carlotta was, hundreds of Taliban and al-Qaeda fighters had just been trapped in the city of Kunduz. She wrote a newspaper story about what happened next, but it never got published. So much else was going on then in Afghanistan. In retrospect, though, what she saw was a singular moment in the war —
I talked to Carlotta over Skype. She was in our office in Tunis. She's a North Africa correspondent now, so the sound isn't great. But she told me the story of what she saw.
She says she was up north at this big mud fort where General Dostum also was. Dostum was this infamous commander who was fighting the Taliban, and the U.S. was supporting him. So Dostum's there at this fort. And he received a delegation of Taliban who wanted to surrender. And it was amazing. A bunch of us reporters were waiting there all day, and suddenly these sort of—
this convoy of pickups arrived in sweeping into this mud walled fort late at night in the dark. And they were, you know, it was full of, they were all Taliban. They were, you know, manning these big guns on the back of their pickups and they swept in. They were pretty scary, but actually they were coming to talk and to surrender to Dostum. And Mullah Fazal was their leader.
So Mullah Fazl was there, and Nouri El-Enouri was with him. And these were two of the guys that a good decade later, the Taliban would ask us to release in exchange for Beau. Carlotta says Nouri El-Enouri had a reputation as someone you could reason with. He was a quieter guy than Fazl, a provincial governor. But Fazl, Carlotta said he was one of the most feared men in the land. He was this hideous...
operational commander who had a string of massacres to his name and people up there in the north were terrified of these guys. Oh, really? And he, you know, yeah, I mean, people had been telling me all week because I'd been there a week or so and people were saying this is the man who would...
shove his fingers up people's nostrils and to push their head back and then slit their throat. He was really, I mean, I would say he was accused of many war crimes. And he was known to have committed massacres of a lot of the northern tribes as the Taliban sought to suppress the north. And here he is, Mullah Fazal and Nouri and others, and they're surrendering.
They head into this meeting with Dostum. There are Americans in the room, too. CIA, probably. Carlotta's waiting outside. And it took hours, and eventually they called us in at midnight, the press. And Moller Fassel was there. He's a very short, grumpy-looking guy.
Dostoyevsky made him basically say on camera that, you know, the fight's over and he didn't actually, I think, say the word surrender, but he basically said we will give up our weapons and end the fighting. So it was an incredible moment to see and not many of us were up there and not much of it got in the papers at that time, but
It was the only public surrender of the Taliban forces. Carlotta says in the days that followed, Faisal delivered.
Hundreds of his fighters, Taliban and also foreign fighters and Pakistanis, came streaming in and handed over their weapons. Apparently, the understanding was that Faisal's fighters would be allowed safe passage back to where they came from. But it didn't happen. Instead, many of them got killed at a now infamous prison uprising, which lasted for days. Hundreds more got packed up in container trucks and asphyxiated. It's a whole other grisly chain of events.
As for Fazel and Nuri, Dostum kept them under house arrest for a while at his own rather fancy guest house. But eventually he gave them up to the Americans. What we learned later was they were taken to one of the warships in the Gulf, I think, as quite a few prisoners were at that time. And then they later ended up in Guantanamo.
They were, in fact, in that group of first arrivals at Guantanamo on January 11, 2002. You've seen the pictures from that day. Men on their knees, orange jumpsuits, barbed wire. As for the other guys on Tayabaga's list, they all seem to have been in contact with, if not cooperating with, either the U.S. or the Karzai government when they were arrested and sent to Guantanamo.
One was the Taliban's deputy intelligence chief, who was at a meeting with CIA agents when he was grabbed and rolled up in a carpet and carried away like that in broad daylight. Another was the former Taliban interior minister, who'd been in contact with Karzai about a job. And one was meeting an American at the airport when he got arrested. So those are the five. Actually, there was one other guy the Taliban wanted back, but he died at Guantanamo. He had a heart attack after exercising on an elliptical in early 2011.
If the Taliban could get these guys out of Gitmo, it would be symbolic in a bunch of ways. First off, it's a hugely morale-boosting message to their own fighters. Look at the lengths we'll go to get our prisoners out. More than that, it's a huge public relations victory. The United States, at the highest levels, would be recognizing them, the Taliban, as a legitimate organization, not treating them as a ragtag band of terrorists.
And finally, to them, it's a victory for their understanding of justice in this war, since most of these guys say they weren't exactly fighting with Americans when they were captured in the first place.
Mullah Fazal himself explains this line of thinking in his military tribunal at Guantanamo. He tells the tribunal about the meeting with Dostum, the reporters. Quote, there were cameramen and journalists there. He, meaning Dostum, he says there's 25-year war between person to person, village by village, city by city, province by province, and tribe against tribe.
If you think this is crime, then every single person in Afghanistan should be in prison or bring them here. I never, ever fought against the new government. I never fought against America, and I didn't do anything wrong against them. Then why am I an enemy combatant? Unquote. It does seem true that Fasl was a brutal fighter, a powerful commander, and possibly a war criminal. But you can argue the same is true of General Dostum. Dostum has also been accused of war crimes.
He's now first vice president of Afghanistan, our ally. And one last thing on this. In 2001, Hamid Karzai had come to an agreement with Taliban commanders in the south. The Taliban would hand over control of four provinces peacefully, and in return they'd get amnesty. But the U.S. said, nope, you can't do that. Wouldn't let it happen.
Instead, we proclaimed via Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld that because the Taliban harbored Osama bin Laden, we would be treating them the same way we treated international terrorists. We do not give amnesty to terrorists. We do not negotiate with terrorists. We hunt them down. The talks with the Taliban suffered so many setbacks over the years, it's hard to even contain them all in my head. So many factors were in play in so many different countries.
Some of the setbacks were pointed and intentional. The leaks, for instance. Some setbacks were immutable, a simple case of bad timing. And some setbacks were so human, just old-fashioned screw-ups.
The most obvious assault on the talks came in September of 2011. A guy came to the door of former Afghan President, Bernhardin Rabbani. Rabbani was heading Afghanistan's High Peace Council. This guy said he had a message from the Taliban and blew up Rabbani's house. Rabbani was killed, as were four others from the council. Rabbani's assistant, Massoum Stanekzai, was badly injured. No one took responsibility for the attack, but many people suspected Pakistan was behind it.
Mark Grossman says losing the help of those guys, and especially having Stanekzai out of commission for so many months, it was terrible. When you talk about Afghans talking to other Afghans about the future of Afghanistan, they were the Afghans. Yeah. They would have been doing this work. And whoever did this, it was a very strategic move.
The Rabbani assassination happened a couple months before the big international meeting in Bonn, set for December 2011. The one that a year earlier had been something of a finish line. Now it felt like they were back to square one. And then, a year and a half later, a screw-up, with some very bad results.
Mid-2013, Beau had been in captivity for four years by then. After various arm-twistings in Washington and in Kabul and in Doha, it looks as if they really might be able to crank up the talks again. Things have shifted some. Instead of the prisoner exchange first, they're going to do an office. The Taliban wanted an office in Doha as a home base for political talks.
It would show they were legitimate political actors. The office had become issue number one for them. And Karzai was naturally cautious about this. There's a new SRAP by now, Ambassador James Dobbins. He's working with Karzai and with Qatar, who's the intermediary.
"Cautious" is probably an understatement for Karzai on this thing. He doesn't trust us. He doesn't trust our stated objectives in Afghanistan are for real. He's worried we're trying to cut him out of the talks, make a side deal with Pakistan, maybe. He obviously doesn't trust Pakistan. He thinks maybe this whole office deal is a Pakistani-orchestrated plot to get recognition for the Taliban. He's worried Qatar is essentially letting the Taliban set up a shadow government with this Doha office.
So it's shaky, to say the least, Karzai's cooperation here. The United States is trying to make sure everyone abides by the ground rules, including the detail that the Taliban cannot throw around the words "Islamic Emirate" in connection with this office. Very important. They have to call it something like: The political office of the Taliban movement, not as a representation of the Islamic Emirate, which was what they called their government.
So they shouldn't present themselves in effect as an alternative government of Afghanistan. So everyone's agreeing to the sort of ground rules. At this point, the assumption was that in June, the office would open and we would begin discussions and the detainee exchange would be most likely the first order of business. Meaning the exchange for Beau would be the first order of business.
So, June 18th, the office opens. It's this new, pretty elaborate, multi-story building with a wall around it. There's an opening ceremony. Back in the U.S., the time difference means it's something like 3 or 4 in the morning in Washington. Jeff Eggers, who is an Afghanistan and Pakistan director for the National Security Council, he and his staff had been up all night waiting for the opening on TV.
The first indication that there was a problem was the flag. The flag of the Islamic Emirate. They also had a sign outside the building that said Islamic Emirate. John Kerry was Secretary of State by then. Within minutes, he calls the Emir of Qatar. Remember, we're not communicating directly with the Taliban at this point. It's all through the Qataris.
So Kerry presumably impresses on the emir, it's not supposed to say Islamic emirate. The one word you can't have on that flag, on that building, is emirate. We're upset. It's not what we agreed. And it's going to make Karzai flip his lid. It's exactly what he feared. Barney Rubin worked in the SRAP office then. He's an expert on Afghanistan and Pakistan. He'd been hired by Holbrooke. He was in the air when this happened, flying to Doha from Dubai. So I got off the plane.
And I see on my BlackBerry, oh my God, what's happening? So I went directly to the embassy. The flag is lowered out of sight pretty fast. But the offending sign is still on the outside of the building. It's there all day. On day two, it's still up.
Barney decides to go there to try to find someone to take down the sign. The embassy is short on cars. He gets a ride in some guy's private car. They arrive at the Taliban office building. They're surrounded by armed Qatari security. It's a whole thing for a while until they can figure out who Barney is and what he wants. But he is not leaving until someone shows up with some tools, basically. He didn't leave until it was down. Oh, really? You stayed there? Yes. And watched them take it down? Yes. Okay.
And then I took a photograph of the wall without the sign, and we emailed it to the U.S. Embassy in Kabul, and they showed it to President Karzai.
But by that time, it was too late. Here's Jeff Eggers. — That all it took was, you know, the optics of that one flag being thrown in there to really derail, at that point, years of effort. — Dobbins and Secretary Kerry fly to Doha to find out if there's any way to salvage the situation and to find out why it happened. What Dobbins learned is that it seemed to be a genuine misunderstanding.
The Taliban thought it was fine for them to call themselves whatever they wanted. The Qataris said that in discussions that had occurred in 2012 or 11, the U.S. had said, we don't care what you call yourselves. You just have to understand we won't call you that. Now, I don't believe any U.S. official said that, but the Qataris believed it. And as I say, I think it was, the Taliban weren't trying to
demonstrate bad faith. They genuinely believed that what they were doing would be unexceptionable and were, I think, surprised by the reaction. It all could have been avoided is the thing. Dahman says the arrangement had a whiff of amateurishness. It wasn't even being handled formally by the Qatari foreign ministry. They had this kind of B team on it.
Barney Rubin says the office agreement kept changing to accommodate everyone's concerns, but that there was never a final document everyone signed off on, line by line. Anyway, now the Taliban had lost face. They felt that once they had been, in effect, humiliated by having to take down their flag and their sign, that they couldn't go forward with the talks. So peace talks grind to a halt. Beau would stay in captivity for another year.
— That's Sami Yousafzai, the Afghan reporter. Sami interviewed someone high up in the Taliban for us. We agreed not to say who it is. This guy told Sami that after four years, four and a half years of holding Bo, they were getting fatigued.
Even for the Qatar office, I believe this was getting too much long. They made a contact in 2010 or 2012, and then it was 2013, still nothing was coming as a result. You know, the Americans were just quite slow in responding, and they told them that we have to bring everything in the knowledge of President Obama, and it's not like an easy case, so you understand. So that's why there was like communication was getting longer and longer.
In 2013, the year before Beau was released, the Taliban had a lot going on. We wouldn't know it for a couple of years, but Mullah Omar, the Taliban leader, had actually died in spring of 2013. Mullah Sangin, who was in charge of keeping Beau for most of his time as a prisoner, was killed in a drone strike in September of 2013. Sami says he imagines the Pakistanis were also pushing the Taliban to settle this prisoner deal because they were getting pressure from the Americans about it.
So there were all those reasons. And... Fourth one, I would say the Pakistani army operation. The Pakistani army was gearing up to launch attacks in Waziristan against the Pakistani Taliban. And so people there were on notice, including the Haqqanis who were holding bow. You might want to get out of there before you get killed. But obviously, you know, the Haqqani people was told that we are going to do our operation.
So the area will be totally abandoned for all kind of militants, except they're fighting. So Akhani moved—some of them moved to Afghanistan. And they know in Afghanistan they couldn't hide him because the Americans have access to anywhere they want. Yeah. Yeah. Early in 2014, the Taliban finally let the Americans know they're ready to make a deal, but not on a peace plan. Instead, they tell us, "If you just want to swap for your prisoner, we're ready."
Beau is now cut loose from the broader talks about reconciliation. He's free-floating. And it's up to us whether to grab him. Ultimately, the White House would have to make the call. Jeff Eggers was working at the White House as a special assistant to the president for national security affairs. Jeff says they took stock of the situation. And at around the same time, there was, you know, some sense that
We were only going to lose opportunities to recover Bergdahl the more the resources, the Western and coalition resources in Afghanistan declined. In other words, we're about to start withdrawing our troops, transitioning out of there. So this isn't going to get any easier to get him back. The United States had asked for a proof-of-life video of Beau, and in January it arrived. I haven't seen it, but I've talked to a few people who have, and they said Beau looked to be in bad shape.
His movements were strange. His speech was incoherent. People told me it was alarming. Eggers says the White House wasn't weighing any other options, for better or for worse. And they worried Beau wasn't going to last in captivity. And the U.S. was getting out of Afghanistan. It was the combination of those factors that gave rise to the idea that you could salvage
Those two line items. The two line items being we get Beau back, they get the five Guantanamo prisoners back. Those two line items in the original confidence-building plan for catalyzing the political process as a standalone pair. But once you hit 2014, there is no broader agreement. It's just...
It's just the trade, right? Well, I wouldn't put it that way. I would say that the broader agreement was sitting up on a shelf gathering dust. Something was better than nothing. And maybe, maybe one day someone would take down the rest of the big, beautiful agreement to make peace and dust it off. And there'd be two fewer line items to argue about.
During those last months before Beau was released, Beau says the Taliban started to treat him better. They fed him better, more regularly. He got this little treadmill thing so he could gain some strength. He'd already gotten a toothbrush, which he said he'd asked for during a videotaping. But now they gave him some science books he'd also asked for. He said they gave him college-level physics and chemistry books. U.S. officials, including Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel, start making trips back and forth to Qatar to iron out the deal.
We're not negotiating with Tayyabag anymore or anyone else from the Taliban about it directly. These aren't talks. It's a transaction. And the Qataris are the brokers. We drew up an agreement with the Qataris about how they'd monitor the five Taliban, who were supposed to stay in Qatar for a year.
There's this video I've watched a few times on YouTube. It's from May 26, 2014, Memorial Day. Chuck Hagel is visiting Arlington National Cemetery. Thank you, sir. Hi, guys. A Vietnam War veteran, an activist for POW and MIA cases, confronts Hagel about Beau. We're getting out of Afghanistan. We need to get him home. We know he's alive. He says, please, sir, you've got to bring him home. Hagel stands there patiently, awkwardly, in the sun, hearing the guy out. Everybody
He can't say anything except... We're doing everything we possibly can, and we are. The next day, word comes back from the DOD legal counsel, the guy Hagel had traveled to Qatar with. He says, we have a deal, meaning the Taliban holding Bo are good to go. Everything about this transfer was top secret. If it got out, they worried it could fall apart, somebody could get killed. On May 29th, a delegation of five people from Qatar comes to Guantanamo to escort the Taliban guys back to Doha.
The Qataris talk to each of the Taliban guys, and then they wait. The deal was that the U.S. wouldn't release them until Bowe was in U.S. custody. But the Taliban holding Bowe are taking much longer than anybody anticipated. Eight hours later, they realize this is not happening. They have to house the Qataris in a nearby naval hotel. The Taliban guys, they put in a kind of holding cell near the airport. This was not supposed to happen.
Carol Rosenberg, a reporter from the Miami Herald, had been looking out for this Taliban trade for years, actually. Carol's been covering Guantanamo since the day it opened. She'd watched three of these Taliban guys arrive there on day one. Carol was down at Guantanamo at the end of May, and she said she noticed these big planes, two C-17s, across the water from where she was. She can just make them out. Squinting across the bay, seeing, you know, the airframes of...
C-17s on the airstrip. I'm like, why doesn't it leave? Right, right, right. They don't park them here. Another day goes by. The planes are still sitting there. Now it's May 30th. Carol's asking people at the base, what is going on with these planes? They're saying stuff like, C-17s? What C-17s? I don't see any C-17s, which to me confirms it's probably the Bergdahl trade.
Finally, the morning of Saturday, May 31st, the U.S. gets word, Bo is safe. The plane leaves for Doha. On it are the Qataris, the Taliban prisoners, and U.S. security personnel. According to a congressional investigation, when they were planning the transfer, a Defense Department official said he thought the U.S. security would be a good idea because they were concerned about, quote, one of the knuckleheads trying something, unquote.
Jim Dobbins said to me about the trade, it wasn't a disaster and it wasn't a brilliant achievement. It was a successful and necessary operation, but it wasn't going to end the war, which of course is disappointing and also makes this deal hard to assess. You can easily say, wow, the Taliban really got a lot of bang for their buck on this one. If you look back at the things they wanted at that first Munich meeting in 2010, well, check, check, check.
They got some of their names off the UN sanctions list. Their office isn't official, but there is that building in Doha. And they got their prisoners back, from Gitmo, no less. And all they gave up was Beau, the guy they planned to give up all along, the guy they were tired of holding. All in all, a tidy victory. On the other hand, we had to get Beau back somehow. Nothing else had worked. And there was no way the United States government was going to let an American soldier die in captivity.
And other countries trade all the time. Israel, say, they'll trade prisoners even for the remains of one of their soldiers. And there are now five fewer prisoners at Guantanamo. President Obama would like to close Guantanamo.
When I was talking to Carol Rosenberg, one of the things she pointed out was that these five Taliban guys hadn't had intel value for a long time. Osama bin Laden was already dead. And also, as prisoners, they didn't do any of the things you sometimes hear about from Gitmo officials. They weren't hunger striking or gathering up their bodily fluids in cups and flinging it at the guards. With the exception of one, they didn't even challenge their detention in federal court, as so many other detainees have. These guys did none of that.
They sat there in communal confinement, following the directions, praying when there was prayer time, eating when it was food time, sitting there sort of, you know, I don't want to say like Buddha, but, you know, sitting there following the rules and not being a problem. They were what they would call down here highly compliant. And to me, that says like,
That's like a POW, right? They're there thinking, I'm a prisoner of this war, and when the politics change or the war ends, I'm going to get out of here. Good afternoon, everybody. This morning, I called Bob and Jannie Bergdahl and told them that after nearly five years in captivity, their son, Beau, is coming home.
The day of the trade, right after lunch, Obama appeared in the Rose Garden, along with Beau's parents. He thanked the service members who recovered Beau. He noted that the United States is committed to winding down this war and to closing Gitmo. And he gave a shout-out to the erstwhile peace talks. Going forward, the United States will continue to support an Afghan-led process of reconciliation, which could help secure a hard-earned peace within a sovereign and unified Afghanistan.
Bob and Jannie Bergdahl had been reassured many times over the years by many people, some very high up people in the military and at the Pentagon, that if Beau came home, he wouldn't face serious charges. The time with the Taliban would be punishment enough. That they probably didn't need to consult a military lawyer. So the Bergdahls thought that day in the Rose Garden that it was over. Mission accomplished. Not quite. Next time on Serial.
Serials 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, producing help this week from Jonathan Menjivar. Whitney Jangerfield is our digital editor, research by Kevin Garnett, fact-checking by Michelle Harris, copy editing by Anahita Lani.
Emily Condon is our line producer. Our music is composed by Nick Thorburn, Fritz Meyers, and Mark Phillips. The show is mixed by Kate Balinski. Kristen Taylor is our community editor. Other serial staff, Seth Lind, Elise Bergersen, and Kimberly Henderson. Special thanks this week to David Holbrook and HBO, Christopher Chivas, Bruce Mason, reporter Christina Lamb of the Sunday Times, David Rode, Ari Shapiro, and Biz Iqbal.
We learned about Carlotta Gall's story from her book, The Wrong Enemy, America in Afghanistan. And the tape of Chuck Hagel at Arlington comes from Patrick J. Hughes. Check out his website, patrickjhughes.org. And our website, serialpodcast.org, where this week we have a timeline of the Afghanistan peace process, showing where Beau's story fits in. That's serialpodcast.org. Stay tuned for a preview of our next episode. But first...
Hey, serial listeners, go deeper into one detainee's story in Letters from Guantanamo on Audible. Mansour Addaifi was 18 when he was kidnapped by Afghan militia and sold to the CIA. As one of the first prisoners at Guantanamo, he endured unbearable
unimaginable torture. Starting as an act of rebellion, he wrote to the Pope, President Bush, MLK, and others. For the first time, hear these letters that celebrate the strength of human spirit and that ultimately bring catharsis to Mansoor. Letters from Guantanamo is free with membership at audible.com slash Guantanamo. Serial is a production of This American Life and WBEZ Chicago. What President Obama did was, it took a lot of
A lot of intestinal fortitude to make that decision. Were you about to say balls and you didn't want to say it? Yes. Coming up on the next episode of Serial. He served the United States with honor and distinction. And then, holy shit, it's in your face. Colonel Biker called me and he said, Sondra, we need to have a talk about this. And I said, okay. I haven't seen from you or any other journalist a real dig into how the Army came to that conclusion.