The Team House - The Truth About Bowe Bergdahl: a conversation with American Cipher author Michael Ames, Ep. 33

Episode Date: March 14, 2020

Private First Class Bowe Bergdahl left his platoon's base in eastern Afghanistan in the early hours of June 30, 2009. Since that day, easy answers to the many questions surrounding his case--why did he leave his post? What kinds of efforts were made to recover him from the Taliban? And why, facing a court martial, did he plead guilty to the serious charges against him?--have proved elusive. Taut in its pacing but sweeping in its scope, American Cipher is the riveting and deeply sourced account of the nearly decade-old Bergdahl quagmire--which, as journalists Matt Farwell and Michael Ames persuasively argue, is as illuminating an episode as we have as we seek the larger truths of how the United States lost its way in Afghanistan. The book tells the parallel stories of a young man's halting coming of age and a nation stalled in an unwinnable war, revealing the fallout that ensued when the two collided: a fumbling recovery effort that suppressed intelligence on Bergdahl's true location and bungled multiple opportunities to bring him back sooner; a homecoming that served to deepen the nation's already-vast political fissure; a trial that cast judgment on not only the defendant, but most everyone involved. The book's beating heart is Bergdahl himself--an idealistic, misguided soldier onto whom a nation projected the political and emotional complications of service. Based on years of exclusive reporting drawing on dozens of sources throughout the military, government, and Bergdahl's family, friends, and fellow soldiers, American Cipher is at once a meticulous investigation of government dysfunction and political posturing, a blistering commentary on America's presence in Afghanistan, and a heartbreaking story of a naïve young man who thought he could fix the world and wound up the tool of forces far beyond his understanding. Support the stream on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/m/TheTeamHouse Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Cl7igKj1RI SubReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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with free support services to help them on their parenting journey. Everyone deserves someone they can turn to for help with parenting. Visit Child and Family Resource Network.org today. Welcome everyone to episode Whatever I can never remember the number of the team house. I'm Jack Murphy. This is our guest, Michael Ames. Michael is a journalist, and he's the author of American. Seifer, which is really a deep dive on Bo Bergdahl, the American soldier who walked off of his base

in Afghanistan and was held captive by the Haqani Network for how many years, Michael? Almost five. Almost five years until he was released. And it's a super controversial event, of course, and your book was pretty controversial as well. Some of your findings and some of the research that you did with your co-author. and we'll talk all about that. But I think people are also wondering where my co-host is Dave. So Dave believes that he has the cold.

He calls me up or he texts me and he's like, Jack, I got a running nose. I think it's just a cold, man. It could be just the cold. It could be just that. Or it could be the boomer remover. We don't know. We just don't know. He hasn't been tested yet.

So. Do you want that from your daughter? No, my daughter's not old enough. No, maybe she is just about old enough. She hasn't hit me. She hits me with other smart-ass comments, but not that. So yeah, David is out tonight. He called in sick, and that's okay. I told him, you know, we can hold things down here and we'll see him again next week. He's doing the right thing. Yeah, probably. You know, my whole thoughts on it is that, you know, it's like chicken pox, like we're all going to get it. So we might as well just get it over with. At least for people my age that are in good health, you know, just get it over with. You know, I know for old people, it really is a concern or people who have compromised immune systems. It's a big deal.

But, I mean, this could be our last live stream before we become, like, Radio Free Brooklyn inside the containment zone. You know, they just have, like, giant steel walls, you know, like fallout with, like, automated gun-centric turrets. There's like a fucking machine gun and then he went down and tries to escape the city. And here we are. We're like in here. I'm just going to be like a pirate flag behind me. You will not silence our voices. Yeah.

Yeah, with the last toilet paper rations. Yeah, yeah. We're selling for $500. Cats and dogs living together. Did you go to the supermarket today? I went yesterday in a local supermarket and there was a line. The hipsters were lined up from the door essentially wrapping all the way around the supermarket.

And as others have noted, it's very interesting. They're purchasing selections, you know? Yeah, yeah. Like, I need that, what's that like, that like fancy yogurt? You know, like, do you need like five, you go to the supermarket in a time of emergency, you get like five cups of that? I mean, nothing against yogurt. We all love yogurt, but I think. Keep your gut healthy.

Yeah, well. It was pandemonium in my little supermarket this afternoon and it hadn't been up until today for whatever reason. But all of a sudden it was like... It hit. It hit. The thing that surprised me the most was the meat, the meat department. Just empty. Really?

Shelf after shelf, empty. People just, I don't know how they're going to do it. You know, it's nice out, maybe they're just going to start grilling. It's grilling season. Could be. Could be. It is getting nicer out. Man, I don't know.

You know, it's, I don't know if we want to go on like a huge dive onto the coronavirus this episode, although people are thinking about it. You know, next week we're actually going to have a woman who was an expert. She worked countering biological weapons for the CIA's counterterrorism center. So Tracy Walder will be on next week. And we'll definitely, this thing will evolve quite a bit over the next seven days, I'm sure. And we'll, I think it'll be timely. It'll be a time of the episode with Tracy.

So we're looking forward to that. In the meantime, I mean, you were mentioned to me, your dad works in what mortuary affairs? He works for an obscure government organization unit of HHS called the Disaster Mortuary Operational Response Team, D.Mort. It's mostly doctors and dentists. He's a dentist who are sent around the country for, as the name applies, to deal with high numbers of dead. So when I announced that on Twitter, it got some people's attention and freaked people out because they were mobilized to deal with the people who were quarantined on the Grand Princess. So I had won the cruise ship off the coast of California. So I got one comment where someone said, you know, are the shit full of dead and they're not telling us?

And no, but not a bad conspiracy theory. What he's actually doing is he is there taking people's temperatures and help managing the people who are still under quarantine. the massive majority of whom are fine, but they're taking their temperatures numerous times a day, I think really frequently, actually. And as soon as someone develops, you know, a fever, they get quarantined. Well, no, they get taken off to a hospital. Okay. This is a quarantine.

About 900 people from the cruise ship. These cruise ships are massive. They hold thousands of people. So 900 of them went to Travis Air Force Base, and my dad is one of the staff now people there who are frequently, you know, have medical backgrounds. and he's doing the swabbing and the swabs haven't arrived yet. So I'm getting live information from him because they're waiting for the tests. The tests haven't arrived.

So there's a BuzzFeed story this afternoon. People on a cruise ship in the quarantine on Travis Air Force base who got off the cruise ship are complaining that they haven't been tested. Well, they're like everyone else. We're running out of test kits. There's just not enough tests. Yeah, across the country. So they're just taking people's temperature.

But the good news that I took away from it is underneath the top of government, there are these obscure organizations that are running things very well. And it sounds very professionally run. And, you know, he's been, he went after Katrina and some of the other Gulf Coast hurricanes to identify bodies of victims. And in this case, it's a very different thing. And he's just been telling me he's very impressed by how professionally it's being run. Yeah, well, it's being run by like doctors and scientists and things like that.

So they're pretty, you know. But they have no control. No matter how professional they are, they have no place. control of the fact that six weeks have gone by there aren't enough tests. Right, right. We're like, everything we're doing is like three steps behind. Yeah. You know, because I think they don't want to scare the public.

Yeah. Even though as bad as it would be to institute something like what they did in Italy would probably be the like thing to do. A sensible thing. Yeah, it'd probably be a sensible, responsible thing to do. But then on the flip side, you've got to ask, you know, would Americans tolerate that shit? You know? Yeah.

Not very well, I don't think. No, no. No. It depends on the part of the country. They're trying to keep people calm. They're trying to keep the markets calm, I think. But they might not be able to plug that week for much longer if you're looking at the statistics and how the cases are ramping up very quickly. Right. Right. This next week's going to be interesting to see how it all plays out.

Yes. I've been having calls all week, been writing, like, frantically. There's a couple of articles I've posted. posted the my day job you know writing as a journalist there's a couple articles up on the website I work for is connecting vets if you go and look at it and there's a lot of good stuff on there that I wrote an article about how how the virus will affect military readiness and I talked to Doc Rocky Farr who's a bit of a special forces legend he's also a doctor professor of pathology And I talked to the woman I had mentioned a moment ago, Tracy Walder, and another retired CIA officer, Sam Fadis.

And so you'll hear their voices in that article. They have some interesting, you know, professional views of it, you know, that I think is worth people's time. But that's about all I wanted to say about that, I think we're going to get into it much deeper on the next episode. Makes sense. Radio Free Brooklyn. So thank you everyone again for joining us live tonight. Really appreciate it. Again, we're here with Michael Ames.

He's the author of American Cypher. He is a journalist. You can see that. Here's the paperback. The paperback just came out. Yeah. And so I interviewed you a while back, Michael. Like what?

Like not a year ago, was it? It was a little, it was like last April. So a little less than a year ago. Okay. Okay. Yeah. When your book first came out, and I was kind of shocked by some of the stuff you had to say, and at the time I had not read it, I finished reading it this week. It's really amazing. But I want to, I guess I wanted to ask you, first of all, like, what's been the response to this book since we published it almost a year ago? Yeah, I mean, it's been interesting. The response has been on one level, well, there's good news and the bad news. I'll do the bad news first.

The bad news is that it's been largely ignored. I think it's been ignored by a lot of the powers that beat. I think there's a lot of uncomfortable realities that we talk about in here that make a lot of different institutions look bad, whether it's the media, whether it's the Army, whether it's the Pentagon, whether it's, you know, other podcasts. You know, a lot of institutions that were involved in this come off looking not great. And it's not like a partisan gotcha kind of book.

No. You went after Fox News with CNN. You went especially hard on that. Yeah, serial podcast. And Catherine Bigelow and Mark Bull. You dropped the hammer on him for the way, in your view, I think, what I took away from the book is you felt that they exploited Birdgall. I think Bird Doll. I think the story of Birddoll is a story of exploitation in many ways.

You know, and I'll just say that, I mean, the good news is that people such as yourself and the reviewers and the people who read the book and the blurbs we have, the reception's been great. It's just been a very small, devoted... It changed my view about Birddall, and, you know, I was very angry with him, and I still am angry with him that he broke faith with his fellow soldiers and walked off the base. but my impression, you know, previously would have been that he was attempting to defect to the other side or something of that nature. Reading your book kind of changed my opinion about that. It's a bit more complicated.

And was that in your mind because that's what you had heard or just because that's something that made sense? I think it's a combination of things and I think I was also susceptible to what was going around the media, the rumor mill in the military. And also, I think what was especially persuasive is, was when his teammates went on television and talked about it. And they reiterated that point. And I don't know if they still feel that way or not. Only one of them, for the most part, was the only one who reiterated that he defected. The rest of them just said what was the truth, which is they walked off.

It was a political spinning of it about him being a defector, a traitor. I mean, I should, I had also like to say at the outset, I try to say at the outset of these things that, while I think, I'm devoted to telling the truth and nothing but the facts. I in no way, my co-author and I in no way strove to defend what Bergdahl did, and our book does not seek to defend or excuse what he did, because as you said, it's inexcusable to walk away from your post in a combat zone. But that being said, a lot of people decided to write Bergdahl's story for him to explain why he did what he did before he ever had a chance to get into himself. This is on page 301.

Fox and Friends, retired Special Forces officer, Lieutenant Colonel Michael Waltz, he said, Birddall was responsible for the death of multiple soldiers that I personally witnessed. Right. I'm glad the Army is going to hold him accountable, but this is just another selfish

act by a soldier who doesn't have regard for the Army in his country. And then there's also the story in here about Jimmy Hatch going on television, who was a seal. he went on an operation that he thought was to rescue Bo Bird Doll. His dog, he was a canine handler, his dog gets killed, and then Jimmy takes around through the leg.

Some pretty rough shit, you know, and his mind, he's like, you know, we were going there to get Bird Doll. We were going there to get whatever he did. He's an American, we have to go rescue him. Well, those are two different cases. Why don't we take them on one of the time? Yeah, sure. Walt, who, by the way, is now a congressman from Florida.

and a very public, a very public congressman with a rising stature, I think probably has eye on higher office. And he is, I'd say, one of many people who've used the Bergdahl story to further his own career and exploit it in ways that really get well out on a limb in terms of what could possibly be true. He didn't witness anyone dying as a result of Bergdoll because that didn't happen. So that's just straight up hyperbole. Yeah, did he ever identify who these soldiers were? I think what he was referring to in that quote is that he sent out a mission of guys, he was a ring beret officer, and he sent out a mission of men to inspect a compound in, I think it was in like Western Ghazni province,

and when they got in there, it was all booby trapped. And as Walt said, you know, by the grace of God, no one got hurt, no one died, but they could have. and that was an example of what was happening at that time was the Taliban was simply baiting the U.S. military. I mean, that's been going on for a long time. I mean, the bad guys in Iraq by like 2005, it was like, you know, they get the cell phone chatter and they'd like, you know, leave the doors and the doors open, the lights on, and they'd have like sandbag positions inside the house and just like those guys.

Right. So, you know, and I mean, I'm a civilian that didn't fight in these wars. That's why I love talking to you about it because I get to hear, you know, your perspective and the fact that some of these things that are incredible stories for civilians to hear are actually things that were fairly common. So, but those guys that Waltz sent in, they probably were lucky. They weren't killed. And, and in, you know, as for, so him saying that he saw people die is just not true.

true. The fact the ongoing myth and legend that six guys died looking for Bergdahl is also not true. And we go into that in the book. We interview the source of that story, who's a former officer Nate Bithet, who has a very public voice and has written a lot, but he hasn't actually revisited this particular topic since he wrote about it initially. He wrote about it initially in that first week of media frenzy when Birddoll was initially released and talked about the six men who died in that period of time when the army was sending everyone on these endless searches. Months and months and months and months of searches.

In his mind, he believed that was true. He believed it was true and I later spoke to him and he later said he didn't write it out in a public way but he said very openly on the record to me and I quoted him in the book and that had he known at the time of writing that, what he ultimately learned from our reporting, he wouldn't have said that. I first met him after I did my story for Newsweek in 2015, which was the first reporting about those searches,

and it made the point that those months of searches were not real searches. Just to clarify for everyone watching in case that point hasn't been made clear, because this is a point that has still not been picked up by the media. It's the critical point I think that's been ignored about the book and a point that serial podcast got wrong, because even they didn't believe that there would be an effort by Army commanders to intentionally hide the best intelligence

on where Birddall was. That's like something only a civilian would believe that the military wouldn't lie about that. Right, right. So just to clarify for everyone watching in case they haven't read the book or read this reporting Newsweek, what it is is within days of Birddoll's disappearance,

overwhelming intelligence had him across, the border in Pakistan within days. Within a week and a half, that fact found its way into official analysis being written by intelligence analysts. And when it was delivered to generals and sentcom and the analyst for this, Amber Dock, who's a source for the book and testified in Burdahl's court-martial testified to this on the stand in Fort Braggman's court-martial. She wrote her report, her analysis that Berdahl had been taken over the border to Pakistan, she submitted it, and it was rejected. And the defense asked her in her 16-year careers as an analyst, how many times did she have her reports rejected? One time. This was the one time. And the reason

for that is they could then send men on missions to find Bergdahl for weeks and months while claiming they didn't know where he was when they already knew where he was. Well, what were they really doing? Well, what they were really doing was fighting the war the way they wanted to fight it. And in the place they were legally able to fight it.

They couldn't go on a cross-border raid and start a war in western Pakistan, which is where he was. They were using it as a pretext to launch more aggressive missions and raids they weren't able to do at the time because of the rules of engagement of coin. all on the border regions.

So they were able to go out there and stir up the hornets nest and fight the war in a more effective way. And an interesting part of this is that a number of my sources and a number of our sources in the book ended up saying not only did they understand what, in hindsight, what had been done, but they agreed with it. So I had a source, Sergeant Johnny Rice say to me, for the initial story I did on this in 2015, I understood that Birddoll is already gone. He understood that they were being sent out on these raids to find him, which were really raid to just fight the war more aggressively at that time, and he supported those decisions.

This is the most controversial part of your book for us, for the guys who served over there, the most controversial aspect maybe is that their chain of command lied on the reports that they lied to their boys and told them that these missions were about Birddoll. And I've talked to, you know, Rangers who saying we were doing intense, you know, 36-hour mission. That was all for Bird Doll. Like, no, it really wasn't, bro. That's the most controversial.

How unusual is that? To do a long mission or prolonged mission. No, to have a mission under false, under knowingly false intel. There is all kinds of funny stuff that happens. I'll give you one example, my own experience. I was on a special forces team. we were in Iraq, when you get a certain cell phone selector for a bad guy, if that bad guy, if that HVT is high on the list, if he's number three, number two, whatever, that will get

swept up by the Special Operations Task Force, by the Delta Force guys, Rangers, etc., all those J-Soc dudes over there, right? I was on that task force when I was in Ranger, Italian. Now I'm on with NSF. what was apparently going on was that as I was told we had the selector for say number two or number three in the country and we were burying it and saying it was the selector for like number 45 in the country so that we got to hold on to the target and J-Sach didn't swipe it up from us so that's just an example of the sort of like funny games that happens and it gets and that is okay who is he being targeted by is

it us or them, okay, whatever. But I've heard so many stories over the years of dudes inventing sources out of whole cloth. Those reports, those con ops, there's shit, bullshit on them every day. That's right after that whole thing in Nijer where people were like,

oh, he falsified the con op. There's information on here that's not accurate. It's like, motherfucker, every con op going up is falsified. That stuff's not real. They're putting on it because it's incentivized, right? So you figure out what the what the commander needs to see. He might even tell you what he needs to see. And then that's what goes on the con-off, not the truth. Sure. Because it's incentivized.

Do you want to go and do ops? You need to go, you know, officers need to go and do operations so it can go on their, you know, it's a bullet on their officer evaluation report. So the whole system is incentivized to support that. We had a, I mean, there was a source in the book and an original Newsweek source who said to me, we were using Bergdall Bergdahl became a language code a tool to do things

I mean and you know much more about this from experience but in order to get the assets that they wanted at the time now I think we may never know because it's interesting the people who didn't

agree to be interviewed for this we interviewed an awful lot of people at an awful lot of level at an awful lot of levels. As high as the then joint chiefs and staff, Michael Mullen, and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagell. And a lot of people, you know, below the general level. But who refused interviews? Mike Flynn, David Petraeus, Jim Mattis,

all of whom were in, and Stan McChrystal, all of whom were in positions at the time of Birddall's disappearance to get the information that he was over the border in passing. We interviewed Mike Furlaw, who was the highest ranking civilian intelligence officer at the time, who was feeding information to Mike Flynn. It's a great part of the book. Yeah, yeah. All those strange cast of characters that kind of came out of the woodwork after he went missing. Well, there were a lot of people who were able to leverage this missing soldier crisis.

And catch in. And cash in on it. So, you know, when we talk about guys, you brought up Jimmy Hatch and what happened to him, was tragic and he talks about going on this mission to rescue Will Birddoll that I take him at his work. I take all of these soldiers out their word when they say they went to do this and I understand why they're angry and they have a right to be angry. I just wish that they could read our book get the full story so that maybe they'd understand that all the anger they feel towards Birddoll maybe they should start looking a little bit a little bit deeper as to what was happening in their

own Chan Command at the time. It's a lot easier to blame Birddoll than it is to look back at your own command and ask, you know, what the fuck was really going on here. Well, and did the people immediately above Jimmy Hatch know that it was false? I don't know. I kind of doubt it. I doubt that someone immediately above him would lie to his face. But as long as somebody above above is manipulating the intelligence, it doesn't know. Yeah.

And I mean, also, what kind of idiot really thinks, like, years later that they're, like, shunting Burdoll around some underground railroad in Afghanistan? Like, who really thinks that's happening? Well, it was happening at the very beginning. Yeah, the first like three days. Yeah, the first like 48 to 72 hours. Like years later, it's like, come on, man. There's an interesting quote here in the book from Colonel Mike Howard in July of 2009.

I think this was a teleconference with, who was this with? Oh, the one that Bergen's parents were on. Yeah, with Bob Burndale. He says, thank you Mr. and Mrs. Burndall for the first time in my career. I have the resources I need to do my job. That's pretty chilling, I think, if you really sit back and think about it, because he had all these resources pushed to him, whatever he needed. Yeah, there was an amazing moment that reminds me of in the court martial in Fort Bragg

when the aviation colonel in charge of the helicopter, I don't know, I'm not going to get my terminology right here, but I'll call it the helicopter floatilla. That's not. What is it called? squadron. Which helicopter? Well, he was the colonel in charge of all the helicopters in Patea province at that time. Oh, it probably was like a squadron or a task force or something like that. Yeah, and he was asked when they set up their assay, his asset, when he put all those birds in the

sky to find bird doll, how large an operation was that? And he said it was the most helicopters he'd ever seen in the sky at any point since Operation Desert Storm in the early 90s. It's insane. And like that moment that you just called out, to me, that that spoke volumes because here they were able to say, we're looking for this soldier when really what they were doing was taking the war to the enemy and the way they wanted to that they couldn't until they had this opportunity. So that marks the first moment when Bergdahl was exploited for other means, for other opportunities. His crisis became someone else's opportunity.

Right. Bergdahl's crisis became other people's opportunity every step of his story, starting with the U.S. military, you know, using the intelligence as a pretext to fight the war they want to, and for the Taliban itself, obviously, to use him as a bargaining chip for their, you know, for the ultimate prisoner exchange. And when he came back, he was exploited by the Obama administration that tried to make, you know, Susan Rice very notoriously, tried to make him sound like he was. was something of a hero, perhaps that he was not what he was, which was someone who deserted for completely mysterious reasons. And then very quickly thereafter, literally the next day, Richard Grinnell, our current acting director of National Intelligence, and I just wrote about this this week for Politico, exploited him for what became what he's most famous for in San America, which is as this

notorious deserter or possibly traitor who Obama traded five. And Grinnell was running like a PR firm at the time. Grinnell is a longtime Republican operative. He worked for, he was the communications aid for a series of ambassadors to the UN in the Bush administration. And when Obama came in office, he was running a little, a little press shop with a deputy. They were just, as far as I know, it's just the two of them. And Grinnell went on Fox News the day after Bergdahl was recovered

and said that he had been told that Bergdahl went looking for the Taliban. Well, we could trace back where that rumor comes from. It was likely a rumor from a mistranslated chatter that was transcribed into a intelligence logs that made its way into Wiki weeks. But the fact is, and that's a longer story that I think people should read the book to hear, but the fact is, is Grinnell didn't, I don't think, care whether or not. Right, right. Nor did whoever told him.

It's just, ah, this is a perfect rumor that we can start putting out there to make this trade look politically as bad as possible. And as I was reading through, you know, there's a chapter or chapters that's, detail, this sort of like propaganda campaign that took place in the media. And as I'm turning the pages, I'm just waiting for one name to come up, just waiting for it, just waiting for it. And then there it is, on 270, Eclipse Eclipse Groups reports that Dewey Clarege shared with Fox News. Like, of course. And, you know, this is, it confuses people. So the headline in Fox, and it was Fox News Washington correspondent James Rosen. The headline was Birddoll declared jihad in captivity,

secret documents show. And this is interesting because you saw it with the steel dossier, is that it confuses the public when you say secret documents. When you say MI6 operative Penn's secret dossier, sounds very official and very classified, right? The dossier, the steel dossier, of course, was a former MI6 guy doing his own thing, commercial endeavor. And he penned this thing. It was not an MI6 document. It was not an intelligence briefing. It was none of that. The same with this. These quote unquote secret documents were a private intelligence network. They were not CIA. They were not DIA. Worse than that, not only were they sort of private, you know, there was no one governing there was no official government process they had to go through. But some of them were recycled from the prior hostage being held by the counties in the same place to Bergdall, who was David Road.

who is a journalist and currently an editor at the New Yorker and at the time he was an editor at the New York Times. And this is another interesting piece of the timeline, which is that David Road escaped his captivity. Nine days before Bergdahl wandered into his own captivity. So. It's like fucking musical chairs. Yeah. I mean, they, you know. And so these private.

I don't know what you want to call on private spies or private contractors who are out there getting this information. Getting information the same way the Army gets information, by the way, which is paying people for it very often, we're just getting information that was frequently Taliban propaganda. I mean, these ideas that Bergdahl, not just, what do you call it, converted in captivity, but changed his name and was teaching bomb-making seminars. This Taliban commander... Abdulabirdal. Abdulabhurtdahl taught him how to use his Nokia phone to set off a bomb.

I mean, the whole thing's absurd. But at the time, there wasn't any information, so it gets out there. And that particular... There's a reason that that got out there, though, eventually in Fox News, because Dewey Clarenge at that point, his contract had run out. And he needed his Pentagon money. He needed his bread butter. everyone who exploits Bergdahl every step of the way is doing it for some other moment.

I was told that a lot of the conspiracy theories about Obama being like, you know, a secret Muslim communist and stuff came from Dewey Clerage. Because he was pissed off that he wasn't getting contracts he wanted. Sure. Yeah, I would believe it. I mean, you know, rest in peace, Dewey. I talked to me all the time to the phone. He was an interesting man. He's a legend in his own right now.

And I understand why. Why is a legend for people in that line of work. In this case, though, I think was someone who didn't care if you had to break a few, you know, if he had to break a few eggs to make this album. It was just jaded to that point. He was jaded to that point. And of course, what that ended up resulting in, Fox News runs this story about, you know, Birddall being a full sympathizer and fully working and collaborating with the enemy. And within two days, you have death threats across the entire town I used to live in the entire county. I mean, just the amount of threats that poured into Bird Doll's hometown was just incredible.

And I don't think, I don't think Dewey cared. And I think the point was to score political points and for Dewey to make it look like he was still in the game. Right, right. But to go on about just more steps of this exploitation. Yeah, yeah. Because then I think it takes an interesting turn when Birddoll does come home and he gets called. I think it was two days or three days after he lands by Mark Bowell, the screenwriter. So how does Mark Bull get his number two or three days after he lands?

That's a mystery that we did not solve, but it seems, but it reasons that it was through Bergdall's stepmother, who is also a character, or not that stepmother. adopted godmother, who was a character in the book, a figure in his life, a very important figure in his life at that time in his life. And she had contacts in Hollywood,

and she was the only one at that time when he came back, who he immediately turned to, she was one of his first phone calls. So Bergdall, now so he went famously, starts talking to Mark Bowle at length, admitting what he did.

And it was for research about this film that Mark Bull wants to make, supposedly telling Burndall's side of the story. And Burndall is just so naive. He's so naive, you just starts talking. And he's traumatized. He's a traumatized prisoner. I mean, the guy spent five years in solitary confinement,

over three of which in a cage. Not speaking English to anyone. Right. And it's very difficult for people who have never been in that part of the world to understand just how austere it is. And, like, bouncing back and forth, like coming back just for, you know, a normal, guy like me going from a place in Syria or Iraq or Afghanistan and then coming back to the

United States. It's a very jarring experience. Now what Birdhole went through is in isolation for like five years. That's like a significant amount of, you know, psychological trauma and talk about fucking transitions. One of the most haunting things I've heard, I heard or learned through this entire thing was, and I say the entire thing, I reported this, you know, was five years. in my life from when I first started reporting it. And something I will never forget was in the court-martial sentence in hearing, they played the recording of Bergdahl's voice in the first few days that he was in Ramstein in Germany. And we had already, at this point in the courtroom, heard him speaking, so we knew what his

voice sounded like. And then they played this recording of Bergdahl within the first five days of his report. recovery and it was a completely different human voice. It was at least an octave higher. It was completely strained. It had a very bizarre cadence and rhythm that was almost lacking. I mean the way Amber Doc describes it in the book is like the lack of any language. He had trouble speaking English when he came back. He had trouble speaking when he first came back and that's when this was recorded and it was recorded and I will tell you that that I still does me chills thinking about it because it was clear that this was someone who had, I mean, his vocal cords had basically atrophy. Right. And you combine that with the stress and the trauma of what he had been through and he could, he sounded like, his voice was like a broken instrument.

And then you're suddenly back in the United States where we got double stuff Oreos and double quarter pounders. I mean, it's like, it's shocking. It really is shocking coming from one culture to the next. Yeah. So he starts talking to this Hollywood screenwriter who tells him he's going to tell his story. And he's naive enough to believe it. And who knows, maybe that is what Mark Bull wanted to do initially.

But that's not what he ended up doing. What he ended up doing was telling a story that was much more in line with the Pentagon's version. Right. And he just handed over the recordings to serial. He handed over the recordings to serial. We don't know how that transaction, don't know the details of that transaction, but they played them in the very first episode of the podcast. It's Bergdall self-incriminated.

And this was before his trial also. Correct. This was not only before his trial. This was the first episode of series. literally aired the Thursday before the weekend that the Army was making the decision on whether or not to send him to a general court marshal or as his and did this podcast help them make that decision according to our sources yes absolutely because I mean that is the way the army operates to a certain extent like if well I mean it's a it's like the whole gallstein thing where like they were going to sweep that under the rug but then he was went on Fox News and like de facto confessed to it. And then the army is like, well, fuck, we got to charge them now. It's like, man, if you just shut up, they're trying to cover it up for you,

dude. Let it go. Yeah. So yeah, I think after that podcast came out, the army is like, well, we kind of, you're like, you force their hand, you know. Well, Fox News was forcing their hand with its reactions to, because the Army was basically doing this by the book. And if you did this by the book as General Dahl did in his 156 report, you saw that Bergdoll, while making an epic, epically catastrophically bad decision, historically bad decision, was not a traitor. Right. Was not even intending to defect because, I'm sorry, not even intending to desert. Because desertion, it implies, uh, he was like trying to feel evil.

of desertion is that your plan on leaving without coming back. So what he eventually played guilty to was only leaving for 24 hours for a day. And so as the Army starts to do this by the book, politically it's just not playing well. And John McCain made a threat that there were going to be hearings if there was not a full court marshal and if there was no punishment. And it just, it carried on it off. everyone who could further their position through Bergdahl's story did that. And someone watching this could say, well, isn't that what Ames and Farwell did in their book?

And what we have said all along is, but we are the only ones who have told this story completely straight. And we know we have because everyone comes out looking back. I thought that the stuff with Mark Bowell, and I don't know, guy from Adam but I mean it all seems kind of part for the course with a zero dark 30 where the administration made the CIA open the doors and bring them in and it's like these these people were selected to make a propaganda film to bolster the official story that they were spoon fed yeah and they made it and when that movie when I finally did watch that movie I was like they it's like got like the Chapman bombing in it it's got the enhanced interrogations like like where the fuck are they even

getting this from like this is like bizarre there is just like like throwing all this stuff together. Well, there's good history that's been done about that. I mean, Jason Leopold and a historian named Tricia Jenkins, and we, you know, we cite their reporting in the book to the degree to which Mark Ball and Catherine Bigelow were really played by the CIA. Yeah, yeah. And what they didn't realize at the time was that people they were dealing with who they thought were just in letting them in and, you know, and opening the doors for them, were actually undercover. We're actually on an assignment. Well, I mean, again, like, how stupid do you have to be? Like, of course this is I-O. Like, they are putting, or PR would probably be the lawful term for it. And if you're making a movie, you probably don't really care. The point is you make the movie. Right. And you can say we had access. And of course, when people have criticized Boal about Zero Dark 30, his defense was, well, it's just a movie. But, but Bigelow would say, we took a documentary approach to it. I remember her saying that in an interview. It's like, no, you didn't. This is a bunch of weird stuff you stitch together.

And it was so egregious that Michael Morel wrote an open letter on the CIA website saying this movie is not reflective of what this agency did, which I've never heard of a director doing that. Amazing. Like, they usually say nothing, absolutely nothing about it. Why do you think he did that? I think because the... Because of the interrogation. That could have been seen. I think there's probably a number of things, but I think...

A couple different things probably played into it, but I think the agency also wanted to, it probably at its heart it had a lot to do with who got to take credit for what. Because the movie makes it seem as if there's this one renegade female officer that basically pushed the agency to do this like unorthodox methodologies and finally found bin Laden when in reality it was a more holistic. It was a team effort. It really was kind of a team effort. It wasn't one person.

just one person in the agency. And I suspect that was maybe what upset them more than anything was that it made it seem like there's this one singular person rather than the team. Yeah. Well, so all of these, just to sort of tie it all together where we've been going, all of these people and institutions and actors leverage Bergdall for their own purposes. And one of the reasons that it matters to me is because of my background story, which is that I lived in Burdahl's hometown. The reason I wrote this in the first place was because Bob Bergdahl,

who's the character in the book, who's a central figure in the book, and made pictures of it in a book, was my UPS driver when I lived in Idaho. Bob. This is a personal connection, and I'm writing about someone who I knew personally

and who I knew as a human being and not just a character character in the football. And I'm curious, since you recently finished the book, how he came across to you. Yeah, I mean, I had always, my impressions, of course, very limited just from like seeing him in those press conferences where I thought they were

very, very weird. Where he has the big beard and the skull cap and it's kind of like, what the fuck is going on here? Well, reading the book, I mean, I think what comes across about Bob Bergdahl is you get the sense that he's this very

strict religious disciplinarian type figure. But what also comes across in it is, I mean, he really loved his son. And he'd do anything for him. And there's this part of the part of what you write about in the book was like he was going to go do like some renegade like vigilante shit in the federally administrated areas of Pakistan. Bob was. Yeah, to try to get him back. Yeah. And so I mean, Bob never lost faith in his son and fought for him, you know, the entire time.

And that was pretty amazing. And it's interesting too because it seems like Bob and Bo had a very contentious relationship all along. You get the impression they weren't particularly close, right? Well, I think they were close, but in a way where it was a lot of budding heads. It was tough love. Yeah, yeah. And a way not that's as similar from a lot of fathers and sons, just more intense perhaps than fully average, but I don't, I wouldn't say they had a bad relationship.

I'd say they're just very strict very very old school yeah yeah yeah but I mean also you know Bob really seemed to believe strongly in teaching his kids values yeah and and and that comes through and it seems to come through in both he he's not immoral that that's not who he is but at the same time like there's something broken inside you know there's just something that's not quite clicking well Towards the end of the book, and I really encourage people to, you know, read to the end, learn about Bob. People will remember seeing Bob, and if they need a refresher, there's a photo insert in the book, and they'll remember, and they'll, and they might think, oh, yeah, I thought this guy was weird for all these reasons. But when they learn about what he went through and how intense he was, and you learn about how similar they were, right?

Bo came up with this idea that was fairly delusional, that he was going to save the lives with his buddies in the platoon by going on this stunt to walk to another base in the middle of the night, to report. bad leadership. Really way out there. There's an aspect that he's completely morally and flexible to the point of absurdity. But in his mind he was right, that was the right thing to do and he had to do it and his own anxiety built until the point that he just had to do it and he did something insane and reckless and incredibly dangerous. I mean it's a borderline death wish. And then what you'll learn towards towards the end of this book is that Bob was going to do something almost exactly the same. Bob was so committed to rescuing his son and knowing that it was the right thing to do

and that he would do anything and he would stop at nothing to get his son back, that he was growing out his beard, he was learning Pashto, and he was connecting himself to the right people, that he was going to fly to Pakistan or Kabul and to start piecing other things and doing it like with a series of notes. He met someone who told him that he gave him a note of safe passage that he could present to someone in one of these feudal kingdoms and coast That would get him into Pakistan and people in the US intelligence world who knew Bob had to say to him you know this isn't going to work

They're not going to because Bob's plan was they'll take me and free my son and what Bob's contacts in the US intelligence is sold him as, no, they're just going to take both of you. Right. Thank you. You're welcome. And knowing Bob and knowing how I went from knowing him as my, I mean, have you ever become friends with your UPS driver? Not really.

UPS is an interesting company. They treat their employees very well if their employees do their job very well. Bob didn't miss a day at work for something like 26 years. years, 28 years, I forget it's in the book. And he was extremely diligent. And they're all about efficiency. They were one of the first companies to do, you know, and Bob's like super disciplined in his life.

Bob's super disciplined, you know, he built a barn for his horses and his young family miles out of a desert canyon. And I knew him as this UPS driver who was diligent and who was always on time, always on schedule, and he was able to retire and take that same mindset. into this single mission of saving his son. And I think not only is it wrong and kind of gross to cast aspersions on him for doing that, but I actually think it's kind of beautiful

in a way that no one in our media was willing to really grapple with. There was a fight, I'll never forget, on MSNBC, a morning Joe that week after he was recovered. There was an on-air argument that blew up between, I think, Chuck Todd and Joe Scarborough about this. Because Joe Scarborough started saying, he actually said, he's a bad father. And Chuck Todd, in my memory it was Chuck Todd, kind of uncharacteristically, kind of lost

his temper and said, you can't say that. And Chuck Todd was right. And we didn't even have the information at the time. But when we, I mean, it's worth noting, if you want to know the Pam Bo Bergdahl's parent's story, this is the only place that's been written. Yeah, it's fascinating how like they literally lived out in the middle of nowhere. Like there's all this like surreal stuff about how they made friends with these Peruvian cowboys essentially. Shepherds.

Yeah, shepherds. But I mean they're like out there working the only, it's like going back in time a hundred years. Farwell and my co-author met Farwell and the late Rolling Stone reporter Michael Hastings interviewed them in-depth in 2012 for the Rolling Stone story, which was the first big in-depth story on the Bird Dog case. They then talked to a variety of media trying to stir up interest in their son after that long Stone Story came out. But after his son was recovered, after they turned into pariahs and they were used and exploited by Richard Grinnell and Dewey Clareage and turned into something they are not, which was Taliban sympathizers, which is absurd.

Which is very odd. It's very ironic, I guess, that Taliban propaganda ended up being a Fox News talking point. Oh yeah. Successfully so. Yeah. And that did not escape the notice of really smart people in U.S. military intelligence. You know, sources of ours saying what it was like to turn on Fox News and watch what they knew was Taliban propaganda being repeated by patriotic, you know, ostensibly patriotic Americans. And that, I think, goes to show how effective Taliban propaganda is, but also how broken our own political means. It's how broken our system is,

because it's like if I can use the enemy's propaganda to get at the other party, I'll do it. Sure. And we've been doing that in other countries for years, and now it's being done to us by everyone. But just to finish that thought about Bob is after their son was recovered, they went totally dark.

They were put under FBI protection. They didn't talk to anyone until they spoke to me shortly before the book was finished and they put a lot of faith in me and Matt Farwell to tell their story the right way and we were honored and if they're watching this they know that we were honored that they put that faith in us to tell their story

because what they went through was a horrific ordeal. Jim Mattis is someone who ends up actually also you may have picked up on that became close to them. Yeah, yeah. He wouldn't come out and say, he said it in public a little bit that first week. He went on CNN and he said,

hey, everyone needs to lay off the family. He should have probably come out and said even more. But him and McMullen seemed like they both. Mullen, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, Mullen, yeah. Abram Mullen. They got pretty close to the family. Yeah. And they came out and said a few things. They, you know, in hindsight, they probably didn't realize how bad the smear campaign that Grinnell started was going to get. So what they said ended up just getting, you know,

drowned out. But what we learned and what they learned is that these, you know, this was a good family of ironically enough for life long Republicans, a military family. Religious family. Yeah, their daughter married a Navy Aviator. They have military throughout their family, and they just were trying to get their son back in ways that, in some ways, on paths that were laid out for them by the P.O.W movement in the 70s, and we go into some detail about that. And also in way is that we're really groundbreaking and that you know God forbid this happens to another family they will be able to look at what the bird dolls did and the bird dolls will have left lessons for other people about how to get their loved ones back and they will I'm sure always help anyone who's in a

similar situation guys people watching this if you have any questions for Michael please drop them in the comments so that we can get them out there otherwise thanks for joining us tonight please subscribe to the channel if you haven't that helps this out there's all kinds of links down the description there's probably a link to michael's book but if not you can find it on amazon here's the hard cover right here michael's holding up the soft cover the paperback that just came out um so thank you for listening yeah for your interest thank you for your ongoing interest in the story i mean i'd like to say while the media has really sort of wanted this to go away and is happy for Birddall to be this deserterter, maybe traitor guy,

as opposed to someone who made an incredibly bad decision, but then survived five years' captivity, escaped numerous times. And when he comes back, yeah, he did some dumb things. He talked to a Hollywood screenwriter, but he also was the single greatest source of actionable intelligence in the fatah of anyone. So it was a goldmine. That was actually something I wanted.

to ask you about that I kind of picked up on when I was reading the book about I wanted to ask you like was he really a gold mine of intelligence because I mean this dude was literally being held in a steel cage for the last three years for the last three years so I'm a little curious how this guy was a gold mine of intelligence well was it that or was it that once we had an American out of there that our strike packages could change because we don't have to worry about killing him anymore I think it's a little bit of both but I do think he's such a unique mind and his memory is so good and so photographic. And his, you know, the lead intelligence analyst, Amber Dock, was such a good questioner that the two of them made an incredible team of producing intelligence because she could encourage him to really get into his mind and get into those memories and remember the sounds about where he was. She would ask him, could you hear cars on the road? Was it a paved road or a dirt road?

Did you hear children? Did you hear animals? But putting all these things together, they could actually pinpoint in, I think, three or more cases. Little mud huts that he was being held in. Wow. Different structures that he was being held in, they were able to pinpoint. And in the months after he was recovered, then that combined with the fact, to your point, that there's no longer American that, and all of a sudden, you know, the drone program is having a very successful summer. Right, right. It's wild stuff, man.

And what do you know about, you know, Bo today? Like, I mean, I'm not asking for his home address or anything. But, like, where, I mean, how's he doing? What's he up to? So I don't know much. I truly don't. Obviously, he remains someone who a lot of people don't like and would wish harm on. Yeah.

So I only get the littlest, you know, kind of like aside remarks about how he's doing. And all I can say is during the court martial, he really clearly, to those of us in the courtroom, wasn't doing well. You could see it. It was a miserable process to put him through. I mean, not only is he tangentially involved in people's injuries that the army never fully. They brought people who are like quadriplegic up on the stand. Like you did this to my husband. Right.

Right. And of course, they were able to do that. It's worth noting because the trial, because it didn't go to trial. Had it gone to trial, there could have been a question from the defense of, is he actually responsible for this? Cross-examination? Is he responsible for this, or is the person who sent this mission out without preparation responsible for this man's injury?

Right. Who's responsible? Those questions never really got to be answered because he pled guilty. And by pleading guilty, he then threw himself with the mercy of the court and these people who suffered unquestionably. were able to, it ended up being sort of a, this kind of like macabre and awful, um, like suffering competition. You know, everyone involved suffered horribly.

And the prosecution's point was that it was all because of Bo Bergdahl. And the defense point, which they never got to take to trial was, no, it's because of the way the war was being done. And I personally found that case more compelling and so did the judge. But to your question, he looked pretty bad at times during that because he was going through something that was just, A, made him feel horrible without anything he had been through re-triggering, reliving his trauma, so he's repeating that trauma over and over again in the courtroom. And not only that, but a big part of his defense was talking about his psychological health and his mental health. So they're just opening and dissecting his entire life in front of, you know, on the record for history in the public. So he looked like someone who, you know, however bad the five years in captivity was, the trial of Earth ascendancy, I should say, was pretty miserable too.

And all I've heard in the last year or so is that he's starting to do better. And I think, you know, just as a person, that's a good thing to hear. and you hope that he gets some semblance of a life back. You think he's out just camping out in the wilderness like he was when he was a teenager, just taking it all in? He always was a loner, and I mean, loner's not even the right word. He always was someone who was strong and on his own and could be on his own. He'd probably do very well in this quarantine situation.

I never doubt to know him very well. I knew him as another person in the town that I lived. him for 10 years and I recognized him but I think he's I think he's just trying to get out of his life and it'll be very interesting to know you know we've you and had conversations about Bobby garwood or about William Cali and it'll be very interesting to know 10 15 years right right what people say about both bird doll in that context Garwood was uh he's an interesting guy I wrote about once he was um he was in the army in Vietnam and how everything went down is very murky right how did he get captured by the VC we don't really know they're calling him the white white white calm

white calm he's still alive yeah he's supposedly he's still out there um he'd be like in the 70s like 75 78 I met people who know him oh really he uh you know there's another um another He has contacts in the POW world, which is interesting. It's very interesting. Because they know what he did, and yet they also are aware that he was a prisoner. And it seems that there's this very, you know, there's this tension there of, well, he's one of ours and he's a prisoner, but he also made a lot of really bad mistakes. And you compare his mistakes to Bergdolls. Bird made one really bad mistake.

Garwood made years of mistakes. The difference is that Garwood acted as a trustee for the North Carolina. Vietnamese communists. I mean, he really did go over to the other side and worked for them. And it's pretty well documented that he... He did tell him when he came back, right? No. No? No. It was like, it was like, go away. Wow. Yeah. He wanted to go away. And he actually took up arms and carried arms out on, like, on NBA patrols.

That's wild. Yeah, and one of the thing, what I was able to write about was I got after action reports from a Marine Recom Patrol that came face to face with. Garwood in the jungle. That's what was in your story. It was pretty amazing, yeah. And I started like trying to, from, I've taken those after-action reports, and then I started taking the POW reports from other American POWs that were in the camps with him. And there's like this time period, two weeks when he was gone that just happened to intersect with the patrol. Even the type, like the type of clothes he was wearing were the same report of, so I was able to like piece together,

like, yeah, it's definitely him. So here you have an actual person who committed treason. and was able to come back and live his life. So the fact that we know so little about Bo, which is he has to be so careful, is a shame. And I just hope that years from now, he is able to get back to some months of life because he did his time. He did his time.

And the soldiers who make a lot of, you know, you've talked to some of them who've gone on the record quite a bit, talk about their anger towards him, but other soldiers who were closer to him have forgiven him. It took them some time, that they have forgiven him.

And I hope people who can read this, and I hope more people who served in Afghanistan at that time and can walk around and say, I went on missions looking for Bo Bergdahl, we'll learn the full history of maybe what those missions were about and can find forgiveness in their own hearts for him as well. I was talking to you before we went on air that I feel like a lot of the anger, and I completely understand the anger from the guys in his platoon,

but I feel like a lot of it is that, it's because they want Birddall to make sense. Like the reason why he walked off the fob, if he was trying to defect, that would make sense. There's like a certain logic there. The reason why he really walked off the fob that night doesn't make any fucking sense. And it's like trying to, you know,

cram a round peg into a square hole. Like it's just not happening. And because you're not able to understand the logic behind it, like I would just get more and more angry. Right. And I would feel like, you're lying to me because like that doesn't make any fucking sense right what the hell are you talking about michael yeah yeah do you want to talk about briefly um like why he did walk off

that day because i don't feel like we necessarily i mean do you did you come out of the book with a like a clear understanding of it it is a hard thing people say well just tell me why well in the book it probably takes five to ten pages to even explain the mindset and all the different fragment fragmented thinking and anxiety that built up to decision. On paper he thought he had witnessed war crimes and thought that his platoon

and his unit was completely out of fucking control which they really weren't. It wasn't like my own. It wasn't that kicking over the grave thing. He did see that. Which is not a war crime but it was certainly a crime against cultural system. Supposedly. I mean I've heard different things about that. I know.

Well yeah and I know Veer Camp when you interviewed him said maybe that happened but we have plenty of sources who who saw it happen this was a it was a battalion commander was a battalion commander yeah and and and and there were interpreters there and there were other soldiers there and he kicked over what what some guys may have called a pile of stones but what the local afghans knew was a grave if you've seen afghan greeves and i i can't speak to that incident but like afghan graves a lot of times especially over like uh in caust where i was like they all like just piles of rocks right yeah right because that's all that's around yeah

So he saw these things and they start living in his head and he has a rich interior life to put it, you know, somewhat diplomatically, that builds into this case of my leadership is completely out of control and they're actually insane. And I need to do something because they hate us so much that they're going to send us, Lieutenant Colonel Faker is going to send us on a suicide mission. and I don't want my friends to die. And if I don't go report him, that's what's going to happen. So I'm going to do this. And it is something that the Army General investigating it ultimately decides. He doesn't use the word delusional, but he said it was not grounded in reality. We didn't find any evidence for that.

And Bergdahl comes up with this plan that he himself, after his five years, refers to somewhat jokingly or self-deprecatingly as my fantastic plan. He knows it was a mistake. So he comes up with this extravagant plan to hike through the middle of night with a disguise and with money to bribe someone, and as he put it to Mark Pol, he was going to be Jason Bourne.

And he was going to be a hero. And he was going to show up at Nassilero, with the other Fob Chat? No No, he was somewhere else Right, Fob Sorry, I'm

Blanking out now But he was going to show up at the Fob And he was going to immediately be a legend Because he was going to show up And he was going to show up in his lord's Right, right, right, right. And he had come through the middle of the night And he was doing it for this morally

good reason And throw me in jail if you want to But I rest, you know, but I saved the lives in my buddies. It's so crazy Like even what that psychopath Bales did makes more sense. You know what I mean? Like you're angry, you know, maybe he's PTSD down. I don't know what the deal was, but you know, the guy lost his mind and retaliated and went killed a bunch of innocent people. Like on the surface of it, that makes more sense.

Burntall's story. I'm not saying there's a moral equivalency. I'm just saying... I mean, maybe from being there for you as a soldier, for me as a civilian, and I think that's also interesting, you know, Farwell as a combat veteran, I'm a civilian. to have both of our viewpoints forming this. I hear what you're saying, but I think to the average civilian who questions some amount of the wars that we fight

and the way that we fight them, and Birddoll gets over there and seize some of the... Oh, God, this is the reality of the thing. There was this interesting moment in the sentencing where the judge asks him, did you understand what your duty was, do you understand what your mission was? And at some point, you know,

Bergdall was answering everything straight, and he kind of cracked, and he goes, well, I just thought it was kind of a joke. And Nass goes, you know, what do you mean? He said, well, we were manning this checkpoint on this road to interdict smuggling of weapons, and we could see that anyone who wanted to smuggle a weapon could just go a quarter mile down the road

and just avoid our checkpoint. And if that's the way we're fighting the war, then that's hard for him to believe that he was doing what he thought he was going to do when he volunteered. Right. There's a weird like cognitive dissidents involved and how you process all that. Like when you're part of an institution and they're telling you to do stuff that everyone knows doesn't make sense, but you go and do it. He made an incredibly bad decision.

He made a decision that put other people for a short period of time in danger. He made a decision that betrayed his buddies even though he was trying to help them, but he wasn't a coward. And if anything, he did something that was incredibly fearless. And however dumb it may have been. All right. So let's take some questions here. All right. Cool Breeze asks, Michael, your book is excellent.

Question, wasn't Bird Doll psych discharge from the Coast Guard enough of a red flag to stop his army enlistment? Seems a very intense episode to just waver him through. Totally. Totally. Yeah. It's funny. Cool Breeze. I'm thinking about how at that moment when he gets to the Coast Guard in New Jersey in February, it was like 35 months.

on our winds off the ocean in the middle of the winter. But yeah, what he couldn't hack it in the Coast Guard. And not to take anything away from the Coast Guard, but he washed out for a reason. And the Coast Guard did its job. The Coast Guard... And they found him in basic training, like, in the showers, cutting himself open, right?

He didn't cut himself, but it was a nosebleed. It was a little unclear how the nosebleed started or began, whether he hit himself or we don't know that. The guy who found him, found him bleeding and there was blood everywhere. I think maybe, I don't try to remember if there was a broken mirror, but he was, he was bleeding and he said, I can't do this anymore. And they took him in the health center, and they gave him a psychological evaluation, and they said, you know, you're done here. Yeah.

You're done here. And you're done in the military unless you get psychological screening and clearance. It's like failure to adapt. Yeah, it was a separation. an entry level separation. Yeah, yeah. And they made it very clear that he was not going to serve in any branch of the military again without screening and a waiver.

And then two years later, after he puts himself through his own training, he goes to the Army recruiting station in Twin Falls, rides a dirt bike down there, and voila, that waiver goes away. It was because it was the surge, right? Yeah, it was 2008. Well, it wasn't the surge yet. It was 2008 being enlisted. But it was starting to be.

I mean, it was a time when it was, everything was going to shit in Iraq, and they needed bodies. But he didn't know where he was going to go. But to the point of the question, I mean, the Coast Guard did its job. The Army managed to paper over this psychological problem, which was clear to a lot of people. You know, Bergdorff, all of his attributes and assets as a human being and even as a soldier, was clearly to a lot of people emotionally unfit to the whole situation and especially to the social requirements of being in the army. And a lot of people knew that it wasn't right. And the Coast Guard did its job and the Army found a way around it. One point I'd like to add to this, which is that

the Coast Guard has divulged all of its papers to show what it did right. Bergdall has testified both in the court-martial on stand and in his 156, confessed everything he did. The only institution that has never actually come clean on this whole thing is the army itself. And it's about time, I think, for people in the army to remark on this. If they come clean, they won't be able to do it again. Another question has come up. Well, someone asked about, you know, how's he doing today? we answered that. I wonder if you can compare and contrast Lynch, I guess Jessica Lynch case

with this one, obviously very different, but still, yeah, hard to compare those two. Well, the interesting thing about the Lynch case is the overlap with Tillman. Are you familiar with that? Was it Tillman's platoon that was on security when they... Tillman got put into some like... Tillman ended up writing home about it. No, no. was in Iraq and he was put on this large elaborate Jessica Lynch operation and he saw how much of a PAO operation of those he saw how much of a of a political movement it was to make it to make this out as to that she was being rescued and that she was this when really she now know she was being

guarded by Iraqi doctors right so the the judge the judge the judge the judge Jessica Lynch episode was the first thing that sort of started to disillusion Tillman, which then led to Tillman's, you know, sort of a domino of a fall in Tillman's history. I've interviewed before Stephen Elliott, who was, it's debatable, who killed Tillman in that friendly fire incident. There's two guys who were shooting who, one of the two, maybe both of them, who knows, but Stephen thinks it was probably him. and he wrote a book about it called War Story.

It's pretty hardcore. Yeah, I'd like to check that out. Yeah. But to answer to the question, I mean, I just think very much apples and oranges, you know. I mean, here's someone where the Army saw an opportunity to take a captured soldier and make it into a story that worked. And with Bergdahl, they had no control from the beginning because he was smuggled in the situation in Western Pakistan where the U.S. just had absolutely no reach.

they had no control the Pentagon had no control of the Bo Bergenel's story from the moment you left the wire. And they really didn't have any control in the end. I mean, it was almost sort of an accident, a lucky accident for the Pentagon and turned out the way it did when everybody

believing, well, I shouldn't say a lucky accident. Soldiers in the company were given NDAs very famously. Yeah, yeah. And very assiduously, I mean, those NDAs went to everyone and they said, you can't fly home until who signed these NDAs. Well, there was a reason for that. It was to scare everyone into silence.

What's hilarious about that is like, I'm surprised the military still makes people sign NDAs because they're unenforceable. Like, what are you doing with this? Well, it intimidates people. Yeah, it intimidates people and then like people get it in your, oh, you signed an NDA. It's like, right. You know, and good for Cody Foll for breaking the NDA. You know, he was the first one to break it. And good for him. I mean, those guys who came out and told their story, you know, I've talked a lot about Grinnell politicizing it. Well, that's true. But those guys did the right thing by breaking the NDA wanting to tell a story. The story needed to be told. You know, it's one of those things where, you know, somebody who, you know, you and I have both spoken to in the past, but he was telling me how

in the invasion of Afghanistan, my old unit, fifth group, fifth special forces group, they had a rule that only, that captains and enlisted guys could not talk to the press. So the ODAs could not talk to the press. And that was so that the colonels could get all the FaceTime in front of the camera and claim credit for everything they were doing. So, I mean, yeah, it's a... It's a political bureaucracy. Yeah, so, I mean, in this case, yeah, the enlisted guys who make them sign NDAs, you can't talk to the press. It's your patriotic duty, soldier, not to talk to the press.

Well, what the only was able to do with that, though, was a... I mean, they made a lot of guys, like Cody Fuller was the first one to break it, angry. rightfully so, but they were also able to control people like my source, Johnny Rice, who figured out what they were doing. Johnny Rice signed an NDA, but he knew the whole time that they were using bird dolls an excuse. So those NDAs were effective and that no one talked for five years. And then once the cap came off, it came off all at once,

and I think, you know, good for them for telling the truth. And that's why I wrote that article this week about, about Rick Grinnell because it was Rick Grinnell who took their story and turned it something purely political and he really weaponized it. What is, where can people find that story? It's on Politico right now. Okay. If you just Google Bergdall and Brunel, you'll find it on political.

I'm going to post it in the comments right now so people can go and read it. Yeah, it goes into more detail about how that whole thing went down and it's grimy, you know? I mean, these guys did what they thought they were doing the right thing, and I would say my personal viewpoint is it was the right thing. You have to tell the truth. And if the political powers that be are trying to cover that up, then the right thing to do is to tell the truth. I think, you know, and I know a lot of them have said, and it wasn't political, it wasn't political. Well, that's true. Their stories were not political. They were just telling the truth, but other people made it political. And Rick Grinnell, who is a very savvy operator, who is now our current acting director of national intelligence, knew exactly how to take a story that wasn't political and make it very political. And it seems that he was rewarded for his endeavors. Oh, yeah. And I don't know.

I was telling you before, I watched an interview with Grinnell. He was like, how is this guy the DNI or the acting DNI? Well, how was he the ambassador to Germany first? He doesn't speak German. And apparently the Germans hated it. I mean, he had no idea what he was talking about. about over there. Apparently. Evidently. Yeah, it's unreal. I mean, I don't know. I mean, we always have political point deeds working as ambassadors, but I'm especially...

Not like this. Not like this. And not also becoming then the director of national intelligence. And the point of the political story is that this Bergdoll thing was a warm-up laugh for him and Trump. Him and Trump worked in concert to turn a story that to the point of the soldiers was not, you know, point of his platoon mates was not a political story, but Grinnell and Trump at the same time made it one. And they made it one of, you know, it will, it was at the time, it remains to many people, one of the Obama administration's worst scandals. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, meanwhile, we, we, the Trump administration goes on to negotiate with the same five guys and now facilitate the release of five thousand Taliban prisoners. Yeah, I was going to ask you about that too. I mean, what do you

make of that. And I've told you my opinion, and this is, well, it's not my opinion. It's what my source told me was a very good source, that those five Taliban guys that Obama released for Bergdoll, that that was all a DIA State Department intelligence, uh, information operation. It was a deception campaign. They called Mildek is a deception campaign. And that those guys were scheduled for normal release all on their own, regardless. And the deception campaign was make the Taliban believe that they were only going to be released. in exchange for Birddoll. So I don't think even that happened.

I don't even think the public... I don't think even the public story that he traded those guys for Bergdoll I don't think that's even true. But now we're in this situation where, yeah... That's true what you just said. That's not been reported and it's classified and yeah, it would be quite the thing.

It is. It was between... I mean, I always... I did read and I was on the impression of those five guys were always slating for eventual release. It was... Rosenberg and Miami Herald wrote about how they lived separately from the other detainees.

They handled themselves and handled their own detainment as prisoners of war. They were not, you know, they were not KSM. They were not there for life. They knew that they were going to be part of some deal eventually. Or regular release. Or according to your source, regular release. It was sent count, it was his DIA and was state, and they put that all together and tricked the Taliban and they gave us Birddall back. and the whole like all the juicy details I'm not really at liberty to say because people

would get burned in the process of that but I think and that would be like an op within an up within an op correct if that's true correct like if that's true there were parts of our own government that didn't know it was true correct interesting and that's how it works right there are some of these things that only 40 people in the entire world know about I mean, at the time Bergdoll was released, there were probably 30 people who knew what was happening. Right. And if your story checks out, there were a lot fewer than that. Let me know the whole story.

But now, yeah, with this so-called peace treaty with the Taliban, they're going to release, what, 5,000 prisoners? Well, it's currently being, it's currently that's the sticking point. But, yeah, the agreement is, you know, with Burdahl, it was 5 for 1 and under Obama, and now under Trump, it's 5,000. thousand for one. And I remember, I remember the angry Fox News reports. I remember the angry boomer posts on Facebook every day about. And let's talk about those five guys. You know, Trump calls them, you know, they were going to go back to the battlefield. They're killing Americans. No, they were never going to do that. They went to live in, in condos in Doha. You know, they... We should be so lucky. Right. Yeah. Condo, please. And not only that, but

read, I mean, I did something last year when this came out for, for, for time about when they were captured. They were working with us. They were, they had struck agreements. They thought they were going to get amnesty because they'd struck agreements with the U.S. authorities. And then when they agreed to meetings

and they agreed to work with us, psych, you're going to the job. And yeah, for all the angry, you know, Facebook posts about how Obama is a traitor because he gave up these guys for a traitor and it's a national disgrace.

and now they're going to release 5,000. I don't know, again, it's just the amazing, you know. Well, in our Afghan allies, you know, people living in Kabul, I see on Twitter, and they're very upset about this. It's just incredible to me that, you know, if there's a dig you can get on the other party, and I don't care if as the Democrats or the Republicans,

like you dig your heels in and go for it. But, I mean, then when your own party does something completely egregious, there's always a rationalization. It's a, yeah, but. I mean, My personal view, I saw someone on, I got into a little bit of an argument on Twitter last week because somebody was saying, these are 5,000 terrorists. Well, we know enough about the Taliban.

I learned enough about the war through researching this book that that's a gross simplification. You know, 5,000 of these prisoners, a lot of them are probably peasant kids. Yeah. Who were recruited into a rural militia. And handed a Kalashnikov. Exactly. And they got rolled up. And guess what?

the end of a war is about compromises and the end of a war is about trades that both sides don't like. And it's always painful. And no one's going to be happy. And might they go back to fight the Taliban? Yeah, they might. Might they go back and herd goats in their village? They might do that too. Might they go home to Pakistan?

Who knows that many of them are even Afghans? But the fact is, if you want to end a war, you're probably going to have to do a few things you don't want to. Yeah, no, absolutely. Wow, man. More questions? I jumped the gun thinking Grinnell fixed the situation between Serbia and Kosovo, that tear of peace fell apart fast as fuck. Do you know what he's talking about?

Vaguely, but not enough to comment. I mean, there's so much dirt out there about Grinnell. I mean, the Politico story was the place that found. I mean, it's in the book, but I can't get enough mileage off this anecdote. That at one point, Roger Stone was a source of mine. I'm not rare in political journalists who had Roger Stone's source.

Roger Stone collects political journalists. And so I was able to ask him about Grinnell and this was going on and he just said to me, I don't know anything about that. And I was, you know, I was asking him like, oh, come on, you got to know something. Like, this was a big deal. And he just goes, now,

Grinnell's too shady. I won't work with a person. Roger Stone. Too shady for Roger Stone. And now he's the Director of National Intelligence, so sleep tight, America. And I mean, Stone, what did he get sentenced to? He took a plea bargain.

Three plus years. Flynn went down for the count. He didn't do jail. He hasn't gotten in jail time. Yeah, he hasn't gotten into jail time. Yeah. I still have a question about Flynn. I mean, a lot of questions about Flynn,

but one thing stands out in my mind from when all this was happening because Grinnell and Trump working together on the Bergdoll story, Flynn being someone who was on the ground and we know, and it's reported in our book, that Flynn was one of the people who knew Bergdoll was over the border that all he tells him. Right, but he knew right away. He knew right away, and he just buried that. He just ignored that. And so Flynn strikes me as a very smart, kind of squirrely guy, but not dumb.

and when he got up there during the campaign 2015, early 2016, and he said, we have an army of supporters online supporting us and carrying our message forward. He must have known by that point that that was a big sci-off campaign by the IRA and

maybe he didn't know it was Russian intelligence, but he must have known that this was not an organic army of supporters on Twitter and Facebook. Oh, you mean during the campaign? For him to go up there and say, we have an army of support out there. As an intelligence officer, there's no way I can believe that. And it's a question that has bothered me forever.

That's an interesting point, interesting insight. And I don't have any... Did he convince himself of his own, like, was he smoking his own stash? Using his own product, yeah. Exactly. Like, did he start to believe that this obvious counterintelligence operation that was supporting the campaign he was a part of was not the thing that he was in charge of doing in unlawful. other countries. Again, it goes back to what I was saying. Like, if you can use it as a

dig on the other party, you just roll with it. Right. It's politics. Just, hey, man, you know, you don't look a gift horse in the mouth. I don't have any real strong insights the way you do on this particular subject. I just remember I went to a debate once during the campaign. It was both Trump and Hillary took turns coming up on stage, answering questions, actually questions from veterans. It was a big canned event. I felt as exploited it is. It was a any of the people that you mentioned here. It was like, let's get the veterans up there and lend credibility to this.

Is it a CNN Town Hall? Yeah, kind of. And it was broadcast, I think it was NBC. It was Matt Lauer. Oh. Yeah, he was the moderator. Also went down for the count. Yeah.

Went down hard. One of the sluggiest people that go down from all accounts. Anyway, sorry. Yeah, I've heard some stories too. But anyways, it was just my observation when Trump and his entourage came out. Flynn was there with the Trump family,

sitting in the seats there just watching the debate. And I just never forget. I was more fixated on Flynn than I was on Trump because Flynn was just sitting there the entire time like... Very intense. Yeah, yeah, very intense, dude. It was just you get the sense he was using Trump to get somewhere. Yeah.

Well, I think a lot of people are. Oh yeah, oh yeah, Pence and all. Yeah, they're all trying to ride this thing into whatever comes next. Right. But with Flynn, that was just like, just a very, you know, casual, informal observation I made that, like, this guy just very stone-faced, watching it. And when Trump started, what was it that Trump started talking about that Flynn started freaking out? You could see it visually on his face. Really?

We've got a lot about Flynn in the book. I mean. I wrote about it in an article. the time. It was very weird to be researching this book while the Trump-flin thing was happening. Yeah. I'd love to know. Do you remember what the moment was or what he said?

I'll pull up the article I wrote and I'll send it to you. I wrote it so it's a good thing I write these things that I'm a writer so I don't have to rely on my memory after two sketches. But yeah, there's something that he started talking about. It might have been something about Russia where he started

wincing. Oh, man. Interesting. But the only other thing I was going to bring up, and I had brought up on our last episode, I don't know if you saw it with our friend Ron. And I asked Ron, I said, hey, first or the second Ron episode? The second Ron. I don't know if I got the second one. Ron Mueller returns our last episode.

Ron has a big problem with our book, and from all I think, Ron is a stand-up guy, and I hope he and I can talk one there because we shouldn't have any disagreement. Yeah, yeah. And I love Ron. And, you know, I like having you on here too. So, I mean, I'm like just the parent caught in the middle. But I asked him, I said, what questions do you have for Michael? Or what questions do you think Michael should have for you?

Like, what should you be talking about? What's the issue here? And all I really got from him, what I took away from it, although he didn't use this term, He felt that you were engaged in some sort of parachute journalism that you had, you had the story already in your mind, and then you went and collected the facts to put together that particular story. Oh, if only that were true. And Ron, if you're watching, you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I think that was his point. If only that was true, because we lived through this.

I mean, we wrote this thing and reported this thing in real time. There wasn't even time to come up with a preconceived notion. But you're part of the liberal. There's two different... A few different points here. One about... Well, the first one about being liberal in the end. One of the best sources that I had originally from Newsweek,

and one of the best sources in this book, and he's an anonymous source in this book, is a former officer. I can't even say which branch he was in. He wanted the truth of this to come out, and when I first contacted him, he said, I'm not talking to you. You're obviously liberal media.

And I said, how do you know that? And he said, well, I looked you up. I googled your name. And I saw your articles. You wrote for the Daily Beast about the NRA. And you're a liberal journalist. That's right. Pinko journalist.

And I said, well, I said, okay, did you read the stories or just the headlines? Because I don't write those headlines. And he said, well, I just read the headlines. And I said, do me a favor. Read a couple of stories and let me know if you still think I'm a biased reporter. And he did. And like a week later, he gets back to me, he goes, all right, fair enough. Let's talk. So I think it's very easy to label people.

It's very easy to put people in categories in our current infotainment, political, entertainment, journalistic circus that we have in this country. And I think the best writers and the best journalists out there are people who work very hard to not be able to fit into all those categories. To the second point, Ron's point, about parachuting. Had I written this book alone, I'd say that would be a pretty, that accusation would carry more weight, but I didn't. I wrote this book with former sergeant Matt Farwell, who served in Pactica, and who had an on-the-ground view of what the war was like, and then who came back and served in a trade-doc, and who lost his older brother in the war, and who lost his old brother in the war, and who, who, who is, you know, who understands the war on a level that I could never understand.

And I learned an incredible amount from him about the war. And I just got such an incredible education through the reporting with him and through going to the, you know, through meeting people at the court martial that I ended up feeling like I had a pretty good sense of how things worked at least when Bird Dog got back that, I don't know. I mean, it's easy to say, hey, you just parachuted in and, you know, and did this. But I reported on it every day of my life for, you know, three plus years and then wrote about it. You know, the whole thing was a, this book took three years to do. So I would just say to Ron, if you're listening wrong.

I mean, I respect everything you've done there, and I just want to know specifics. There were mistakes that were made that we were trawled out. And I just want to know specifically about the Bergdell story, what you think, got wrong in a narrative sense, in a big picture sense, and the things that you and I have talked about here today. This book tells a story of the Army burying intelligence on where a captured soldier was taken and using that buried intelligence as a pretext to fight the war in a different way. Do you hit the troops, Michael? Don't lie. You hit the troops? That's the story of this book. You hate America? That's the story of this book. And another,

I'm studiously ignoring your question. And another story, story of this book is that everyone we met through the trial and through this process of getting the full story here was we met so many incredible people guys and women of honor and integrity and patriotism who did things to their country that I will never match but to meet so many incredible people who worked for institutions that were so dysfunctional was always a weird tension right right you know what I mean you guys were with conviction and passion fighting the war but they're inside a dysfunctional system. And at the court martial that was really clear. You could feel it every day.

Because you got these young court... These young patriotic soldiers who are out there for guiding country, like for them, it's all very, like that shit is for real. And the reason why I think the prosecution's case in the court martial fell flat is because after 18 years, those narratives don't carry as much weight as the case. counter narratives of what are we doing? Right, right. What are we really doing? And are we doing it the right way?

And what was this moment with Bergdall? And was it this thing that you're presenting? And what they presented of as Burbdall was the sole cause of everything that happened, which is an awfully convenient... Right, right. Everything that went wrong in this war. ...explanion for months and years and now decades of failures. So that's a bit of a tangent.

No, but it's true. Yeah. Yeah, they tried to blame the entire war on him in some ways. Yeah. And I don't know. I'm curious why Ron finds this, because I know Ron's career intersected with this at a certain point, but I'm curious what he finds particularly interesting

or particularly objectionable or particularly inaccurate about our reporting. All right, well, someday in the future, maybe we can host the Michael Ron cage match here on the team house. He knows a lot more about the war than I do. I know a lot more about the Burdahl story.

Ron is a wealth of knowledge and we did two episodes with him and I think each one is like three hours and then we probably did like a bonus segments with him and each one of those is probably like 45 minutes and we've still like only scratched the surface of all the wild

stuff he's gotten involved in. And I only listen to one of those and by the way I love listening to it. He has incredible stories. The bonus segment we did last time, he tells a story about flying into Coringol in the middle of this huge firefight. And it was just like, god damn, wild stuff. But anyway, someone's asking what we're drinking here and we're drinking LaFroy. Yeah. LaFroy, if you'd like to sponsor this show, we're available. And Michael brought us this bottle here as a gift for next time. Buffalo Trace.

Kentucky Straight Bourbon. Thank you, sir. Absolutely. We will enjoy that. I think that's about it. Unless you guys got some questions, have you got anything else to add, Michael. I mean, I think we went through a lot of it.

I mean, I guess if you guys have any other questions, get them in real quick, and I'll try to shoot him out to Michael. My only other question is, you know, what's next for you? What's the, you have another book in mind? What are you working on? I mean, definitely, look, this was a three-year project,

so I told myself, five years before I get into another multi-year project. So I'm planning on just doing some magazine reporting. That's a little bit more short-term. You know, a project that only last three to six months sounds good now. Okay. After one of three years. But I enjoy reporting on the government.

I enjoy reporting on systems of bureaucracy and how they are exploited, leveraged, manipulated by various parties. You know, the last story I did before at this start, it was about an oyster farm in Northern California under the Obama administration and how the EPA and the environmental organizations played some really dirty pool and did some really sketchy things. And we had a whistleblower, just like this book is full of whistleblowers. I had a whistleblower who talked about that. His scientific reports were doctored by people in the Department of the Interior. So I love this stuff. I love knowing about how people out there think that they can manipulate systems that only work

if people are honest and have integrity. Systems only work if people treat them as they're designed to work. And that's what frequently falls apart. All right. One last question. Did they locate the location where Birddoll had that long fall that he talks about in the interview where he falls into a dry creek bed? That's a great question. Not that I know of. If it is classified and it's in all of the, I mean,

all of, Bergdahl was interviewed for over 80 hours, and that doesn't even count his 15-6 report, that over 80 hours was just his classified debriefings, and that's all still classified and will be for probably, I assume, most of my life. But I think in terms of locations, there is a math in the beginning of book you have noticed and this map is kind of near and dear to me because it was you know I lived in Idaho for 10 years and I worked in a local newspaper and this map was made by my former boss who was our director at the newspaper and magazine and I worked with her and with another professional mapmaker and we don't know where Bergdall was when he fell but we do know where Bergdahl was when

the first Taliban radio call was made when he was captured. You remember this? Yes. He's put on the back to a motorcycle. He's intercepted. He's intercepted, and all of the reports already had him going west.

And this is what the podcast got. One of the... Look, the podcast did a lot of things great. I don't want to trash it unnecessarily, but the podcast also did a lot of things inaccurately. And the podcast also did a lot of things inaccurately. And the podcast said, oh, they were taking them west. The Taliban reports all had them taking them west. And we have a Taliban source who said they were

taking them west when it was obviously immediately they were down towards the borders as fast as possible. So we do have, and it didn't make it into the final thing, into the final map, the GPS actual spot. Where Bergdahl was when that first radio called the Taliban saying, hey, we got a guy. Oh, interesting. And they were already headed south. towards the border. They made a beeline for the border. Yeah, of course. Yeah, that whole story about him escaping is like pretty horrifying in so many ways. He survived. I mean, something Bob Bergdall said to me about his own son is he just wouldn't die. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, he showed an amazing amount of resiliency for being in captivity.

I think it would kill a lot of other people. Yeah, absolutely. Well, on that note, Michael, I think this is good. I'm going to ask you, stick around for a bonus segment, and I will, because I want, I got some dirty talk. I want to hear the dirty talk that you were talking about,

people lying within the system. Okay, guys. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you, everyone for joining us tonight. Thank you. Thanks for listening. Yeah, thanks for coming on the show.

talking about your book. Again, it's American Cipher. Out in paperback. Paperback is out now. Bookstores this. Go check it out. Thank you for joining us on the show tonight, live, our Corona Party. Hopefully this helped you take your mind off all that craziness for, you know, almost two hours. Yeah. Stay clean out there. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'll have a lot more to talk about on that subject, I think,

next week. I hope so. And next week, Tracy Wolder will be on. She was an expert in biological weapons that worked in the counterterrorism center for the CIA. She has a new book out. We'll have her on. We're going to discuss all of that. And please subscribe to the channel.

If you haven't already, we're also on SoundCloud and iTunes if you prefer the podcast version. And there's a link to our Patreon page down in the description. If you're interested in supporting the stream, and we have like hours and hours and hours of bonus segments we've done with our guests. You can hear the Ron Mueller stories. You know, the first one is about Abu Sabo Baya in the Philippines, and the second one is about the Coringville Valley Firefight. So if you supported the stream, Michael, you would have full access to all of these things for as little as $1 a month.

It's a bargain. It really is. It's like, you know, it's like, man, it's amazing. All right, enough of that. We'll see you guys next week. Thanks for joining us. Thank you again, Michael. Thank you.

All right, see you next week, everybody.