Ira Glass

Previously on Serial.

Sarah Koenig

From This American Life and WBEZ Chicago, it's Serial, one story told week by week—sort of. I'm Sarah Koenig. In very early July of 2009, just a few days after Bowe went missing, a woman named Kim Harrison went to her local police department in Portland, Oregon.

Sarah Koenig

The person missing was Bowe, of course, a person missing from a place roughly 7,000 miles away.

Sarah Koenig

So complicated. Here's what happened. Kim is a close friend of Bowe's. They're like family to each other. He's friends with her kids. Bowe listed Kim in army forms as a person to notify if something happened to him. So on June 30, 2009, army officials came to Kim's house to tell her he was missing.

Kim is not a person to sit by. That is not her nature. That first day, she thinks, How could I fix this? What can I do? Who can I call? And then she thinks, Interpol— her friend who happens to be high up at Interpol, the International Police Force.

She calls him, and he says maybe Interpol can help. They're nonmilitary, nonpolitical. They have cooperative agreements with police in more than 180 countries, including Pakistan. They'd been helping investigate the Mumbai terror attacks that had happened about seven months earlier, which meant they'd been looking into Taliban activity in India and Pakistan.

Interpol can actually move around in Pakistan in ways the U.S. military cannot. So Interpol—worth a shot. To get an investigation underway for Bowe, Interpol would need to issue something called a yellow notice—Interpol's version of a missing-person report, that gets distributed to police departments all over the world.

To get that going, though, you need to establish the situation as official police business somewhere—anywhere, apparently—which is why Kim ends up at the Portland PD. She needs them to file a missing-person report so that Interpol, in turn, can generate the yellow notice about Bowe. And they do. They make the report. Kim sends Interpol photographs of Bowe, some stuff with his fingerprints on it, DNA samples.

The best thing she had for that was a Halloween mask he had worn. They all went as Alice in Wonderland characters, and Bowe was the Cheshire Cat. So she sent the Cheshire Cat mask to Interpol. It's all ready to go. The last thing they need before Interpol can issue the yellow notice is permission from—

Sarah Koenig

Kim has notes she took from that time. And in them, it says the DoD denied the yellow notice 12 hours after it was requested. A certain colonel calls her and tells her the DoD was working in concert with the FBI and the CIA and that Interpol involvement could complicate, jeopardize, and delay the investigation and the search. And, P.S., that it was, quote, "in her best interest to not get involved," unquote.

I'm quoting Kim's own notes here, but the point is, she was annoying, she says.

Sarah Koenig

And so, she keeps going. (Women.) Later that same day, a Sunday, Kim calls the colonel back. (She somehow gets his home number.) And he reiterates: he does not foresee the yellow notice going forward. Kim calls her congressman. She calls a senator. Maybe they can pressure the military to change the decision. No dice. That was that.

The question Kim is left with to this day is what if the DoD had said to Interpol, yes, go ahead. Could it have worked? Could Bowe have possibly gotten home sooner? When I heard this story, the question I was left with was, what the heck? Surely Kim hoofing it to the Portland PD is not the way this is supposed to work. So how is this supposed to work?

I talked to a bunch of people who worked on behalf of the military to get Bowe home, some on the record, some on background, and they all talked about how much of a doozy this one was, how there was just no handbook.

Sarah Koenig

It's not like there was a cadre of people inside the United States government who had experience on how to untie this particular knot. Nobody had done this before.

Sarah Koenig

Of course, it wasn't a military operation that finally got Bowe home. It was diplomacy. We negotiated with the Taliban, and traded him for five men out of Gitmo. And that in itself is a fascinating story, and we'll get into all that. But for this episode, I'm going to lay out the twisty, turny, and often emotional path that came before the president signed off on that trade. Because before the most powerful person in the United States took hold of Bowe's fate, he was in the hands of well-meaning people much, much lower down the chain, or not in that chain at all. Because that's where the search for Bowe lived for years.

The same day Bowe walks away, the DUSTWUN goes into effect. For about a month and a half, there's this intense, no-holds-barred military and intelligence effort inside Afghanistan—all this equipment and hundreds of people redirected to search for Bowe. The nerve center for all that activity was back in the States, in Tampa, Florida. That's where U.S. Central Command is headquartered, known as CENTCOM.

CENTCOM has a group of people whose whole job is to find missing or captured people. They're in PR—not public relations, but personnel recovery. I talked to two people who worked in the PR office at that time. They're intel analysts, and they might search for anyone who's been reported missing from a conflict zone, not just U.S. military personnel, and not just Americans. Could be a contractor, someone working for an NGO, a hiker, foreign nationals, reporters.

I imagine their office as a super-high-tech workspace, like the way NASA looks in the movies.

Sarah Koenig

That's Andrea, not her real name, and Michelle, also not her real name. They told me the office is cubicles, computers, telephones. Andrea and Michelle did not want to talk specifically about Bowe's case, since it's ongoing in military court. But what they told me applies to his case, and to lots of other cases they've worked on. Also, these women didn't want to use their real names because anything Bowe-related is so sensitive, so hot, they worried they might suffer repercussions just personally if the public knew they tried to bring Bowe home.

Anyway, their job didn't stop when the DUSTWUN was called off. They kept going until it was over, five years later. Again, Andrea and Michelle can't talk about the particulars of Bowe's case, but they were pretty candid about what made their job especially tricky. They said there were a bunch of factors.

First of all, at that time, Andrea and then Michelle were kind of it for Afghanistan in terms of personnel recovery. DoD had a good system for recovering downed pilots in Afghanistan, they said. But other than that, there was no solid system in place to track people who went missing. Here's Andrea.

Sarah Koenig

That's Michelle.

Sarah Koenig

Many more people had gone missing from Iraq than from Afghanistan, so it made sense Iraq was much better equipped for these events. But still, what that meant is that at a certain point, Michelle and Andrea realized, We can't do this job from Tampa. They started rotating in and out of Afghanistan, usually for months at a time, so they could manage their cases from the ground.

When someone goes missing, the PR team turns on every intelligence asset they can. Those assets might be people—that's called "humint," for human intelligence. Or "signet," signals intelligence—communications you pick up from cellphones or electronic messages. Or "geoint," geospatial intelligence, such as images of the landscape.

And their job, ideally, is to layer all this intel to get the clearest picture they possibly can of where the person is, and then, if you can get that far, hand that information off to the people who can actually do something about it: either militarily (can we send in special forces, for instance? Can we engineer an escape of some kind or a drone strike to set the hostage free?) or

diplomatically (Can we get our ambassador in whatever country to try to negotiate for our hostage?) or a civilian option (remember when Bill Clinton went to North Korea in 2009, and got those reporters out of prison there?). In Bowe's case, all of that work, all of those potential avenues were stymied by the defining fact of his geographical situation. He was in Pakistan.

In Afghanistan, DoD—which Andrea and Michelle are part of—DoD owns the battle space, meaning they have control, they have authority to direct operations and use whatever assets they need. That's why the DUSTWUN for Bowe could be as far-reaching and aggressive as it was.

But once you no longer own the battle space, you have to start relying much more on other U.S. government agencies that might be operating in Pakistan. Pretty much any three-letter agency that has a personnel recovery element.

Sarah Koenig

It's the CIA that has authority for U.S. operations in Pakistan, though. So you really need the CIA.

Sarah Koenig

Trumped, for instance, by current events. That often happens, that current events and politics on the ground in whatever country gets in the way of your PR mission. During Bowe's case, we had some very rough patches in our relations with Pakistan. Take 2011. As one former counterterrorism analyst told us, quote, "You couldn't possibly have a busier backdrop than in Pakistan at that time," unquote.

That year started with the Raymond Davis debacle. Remember that one? It was bizarre. Davis was a CIA contractor who opened fire on two guys riding a motorbike in the middle of a crowded intersection in Lahore. Several people were dead by the end of it. It caused a huge uproar in Pakistan. He was thrown in jail.

Then you had the U.S.-led NATO air strikes on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border that killed 28 Pakistani soldiers. The Haqqanis, based in Pakistan, attacked our embassy in Kabul and NATO headquarters. Sixteen people died. And that same year, the US raid in Abbottabad that killed Osama bin Laden.

Sarah Koenig

Bowe's friends and family were also agitating on their own. And at certain points, their unofficial efforts became intertwined with official search business in curious ways, in ways that actually approach success. Kim, for example—back to Kim.

Kim lived in Idaho when Bowe was a teenager. He spent years hanging around with her family, and they were sort of home base for Bowe for long stretches. He'd stay with them, work at the tea shop they ran.

Kim is the odd adult who actually loves teenagers, and she loved Bowe. She understood him. She worried about him. She'd do anything for him, just as she would for her own kids.

Pretty early on in the search for Bowe, Kim was shut out by the military, but she kept scheming, kept calling people. She studied maps.

Sarah Koenig

It wasn't a sinister move by the government or anything like that. It's just someone concerned about her safety. Bowe's parents were also active throughout, trying to figure out what they could do. They decided not to speak to me on tape for this story.

And, an aside here. I read nothing into that decision apart from their best intentions for their own family, and for other hostages still in captivity. They've been completely gracious to me throughout this process, and I'm grateful to them for it. End of aside.

Perhaps things like what I'm about to tell you about Kim were happening to Bowe's parents too. I just don't know for sure.

Anyway, Kim says in November of 2009, she did something.

Sarah Koenig

About six weeks later, Kim is at home in Portland, and her cellphone rings. It's a weird number. She doesn't answer. Rings again. There's a message.

Sarah Koenig

So she cuts and pastes the message into one of those online translator sites to decipher it.

Sarah Koenig

That's not what it actually said, just a for instance. Kim understood the gist. This guy had information about Bowe, and he wanted something in return.

Sarah Koenig

Kim calls a friend. "What should I do?" Her friend tells her, "You need the FBI." She contacts the FBI, and eventually the FBI translates the message.

Sarah Koenig

It sounds too good to be true, right? But, incredibly, this guy checked out. Kim can't say how the guy was connected to Bowe's situation or what proof he provided, but apparently he checked out to the extent that the FBI began exchanging emails with him.

Sarah Koenig

When she got that first call, Bowe had been a prisoner with the Taliban for about six months. He was going through the worst winter of his whole five years. He was the coldest, the sickest, the hungriest. Of course, Kim didn't know any of that, but she was hopeful. Maybe this could spring him.

Kim doesn't entirely know, because her communication with the FBI was a one-way proposition. Their mantra to her was "need to know," for good reason. All Kim does know is that for two years running she signed releases so that the NSA could monitor her phone, her computer, her TV. They could follow her if they wanted, or hang out in front of her house. And then, after that two years was up, nothing.

Sarah Koenig

I found out what happened. The FBI cultivated this source for a while, and then passed him along to the Department of Defense. And it turned out this guy, who called Kim on her cellphone one day because of some secret thing she did on her own to get her number to the Taliban, this turned out to be one of the best leads they ever had in Bowe's case.

One person tasked with finding Bowe told me, quote, "I thought for sure that was the answer," unquote. But they could never quite make it happen. The guy wanted to bring his relatives over. And if you bring nine people to the U.S. under some version of witness protection, a government agency is going to have to take care of them—for their whole lives, maybe.

And, my source told me, none of the agencies raised their hand. Even so, visa papers started to be drawn up, just in case. And then the guy withdrew. He didn't respond when asked for details about his family members for the paperwork. Over the years, when they'd go back to the drawing board at DoD, trying to think up solutions for finding Bowe, someone would always write this guy on the list.

What about him? He was willing once. He's still there, still active. Let's try him again. But no one pursued it.

One intel expert told me, if you have all the tools you need, you can find someone in less than 30 days. That's not to say you can rescue them in 30 days, but you can at least find them. In Bowe's case, DoD did not have all the tools they needed, and was never able to say with 100% certainty where Bowe was.

The U.S. didn't have reliable human intelligence sources on the ground in Waziristan. The Haqqanis have that area locked down so tightly and are so good at propagating misinformation that they either couldn't get intel or couldn't trust what intel they did get. So to figure out Bowe's exact location—which neighborhood—which compound, they needed, for instance, drones. And the drones have to be what's called "unblinking." You can't look away.

But DoD doesn't have drones operating in Pakistan, so you have to ask other agencies to take a look for you, such as the CIA. And occasionally they would. They might give them a few hours here or there. But it wasn't nearly enough. Because unless, say, Bowe happens to get escorted to the latrine on that day at that time, you're not gonna see him. You need to watch and listen solidly for, say, a week to catch who's going in and out, what they're saying. Maybe you follow one of those people.

In other words, the drones give you a much better chance of pinpointing his location. And with a location, you can at least plan a rescue operation. One former DoD employee told me, quote, "It was literally two years of asking for drones," unquote. The CIA declined to talk to us for this story. They referred us to the DoD.

But here's what was going on. The CIA, or the NSA, or other agencies, they have their own bosses, their own priorities. These priorities aren't general and ethereal. They are specific. They are written down. They must be approved by the president. For the CIA, their priorities were things like targeting top al-Qaeda and Haqqani members. And while hostage recovery might have been on the list, on their radar, it certainly wasn't at the top.

And Bergdahl specifically wasn't on anybody's list. So it's understandable that the CIA can't just turn over their resources and manpower to a PR mission that isn't their own. In some instances, these other agencies were doing the best they could under the circumstances. This tension is shot through all of these hostage cases, not just Bowe's. Are we doing enough?

The answer to that depends in part on where you're sitting. If you're Andrea and Michelle, this is all you think about all day, is getting your hostages home. What else can we do? They said they had to fight complacency, malaise, because their priority wasn't everyone's priority, even if on paper it was supposed to be.

Michelle said they'd have to get wily sometimes just to get the meetings they needed.

Sarah Koenig

They'd do the most basic things just to remind people that, yes, there are American hostages in Syria, Afghanistan, Pakistan. They'd put up posters, make those rubber bracelets. Here's Michelle.

Sarah Koenig

That's Andrea. Caitlin Coleman and her husband, Joshua Boyle, disappeared, in Afghanistan in 2012. Caitlin was pregnant at the time.

Sarah Koenig

I just want to talk for a second about this very human thing that overlays, again, not just Bowe's case, but all these hostage cases. Take Colin Rutherford. He's a young guy, a Canadian. He was freed from the Taliban last week after more than five years. He'd been traveling in Afghanistan when he went missing. And the day he was released, the Canadian press covered it, not the details of how and why, just the fact of his return.

And the online comments immediately were things like this: "Who goes on vacation to Afghanistan? Bonehead." Or this: "Headline should read, 'Idiot Rescued.' Who cares about the details?" And while I'm tempted to be all sanctimonious and say, That's awful. How can people be so awful? The truth is, I've thought things like this. I mean, it's great they're home, but also, it's their own damn fault. I admit it.

And I'll wager we've all thought things like this, right? It's not unconflicted. Which makes us no different than a lot of the people charged with finding, say, Caitlin Coleman, or Colin Rutherford, or Bowe Bergdahl. The only difference is, those people are not supposed to think like that. Circumstances of capture are not supposed to come into play.

Andrea and Michelle told me repeatedly they really do not care about circumstances of capture. First, you get the person back, and then come consequences, judgment, punishment—not the other way around. Because there isn't a hostage situation out there that doesn't involve some aspect of wrong place, wrong time, some element of human error.

The surprise of their job was their colleagues didn't always feel the same way.

Sarah Koenig

In Bowe's case, of course, the "why should I care" attitude was doubled, maybe even cubed, by the information that he'd walked off on his own, by the hardship he'd put other soldiers through, by the rumors of treachery. Lieutenant Colonel Jason Amerine, now retired, also worked on Bowe's case.

Sarah Koenig

Jason said he was once in a meeting with a general, and they had to cut it short because the general got so worked up about the fact that Bowe had walked off. The general was emotional about it, Jason said. It's not that people refused to help or refused to do their jobs. Everyone I talked who was involved in Bowe's case said so many people tried so hard on this one.

It's just that you start to wonder. If this attitude is lurking all the way to the top, then what ideas are not getting through? What's not even getting proposed, because someone low down fears saying something unpopular? Several people told me that for quite a while Bowe's case languished, because no one working on it was influential enough to make big decisions.

Sarah Koenig

This is a person I'm going to call Nathan. That is not his real name. He doesn't want to use his real name, because although he's no longer in the military, he's still working for the military sometimes. And what he did in Bowe's case was so out of school, so not done, that he worries about the consequences for his current job.

Nathan did not work directly on Bowe's case, not officially, but he was very close to it, watching from the sidelines, watching all these people not be able to accomplish much of anything.

Sarah Koenig

Again, we're not talking about why Nathan got so personally frustrated, but know that he did, especially when it came to what officials were saying to Bowe's parents, Bob and Jani Bergdahl.

Sarah Koenig

The only way to make that happen, in Nathan's estimation, was to push the topic up higher than the captains and majors who were working on Bowe's case. It needed to go as high as it could go until it reached someone who could afford to expend political capital on Bowe—meaning, ultimately, the president himself had to get involved.

So Nathan started thinking about this. How do you catch the president's attention? He did what an intel analyst does. He thought, What assets haven't we tapped? And it came to him: the Bergdahls. He thought if you could get Bowe's parents to push some buttons, maybe Bowe's case could get unstuck.

About a year and a half into the case, Nathan sent a message to the Bergdahls on Facebook. He said to them the things that nobody else seemed to want to say.

Sarah Koenig

Nathan said contacting them was the scariest thing he'd maybe ever done. Because he wasn't a high up guy. It wasn't even his job to look for Bowe. And while it wasn't illegal—he wasn't telling them anything classified—contacting them was so unprofessional in the world he comes from.

Sarah Koenig

The Bergdahl's were the sad, scared, fierce, determined parents of a POW. Nathan says he made it plain to them: You have more power than you know. People will take meetings with you. People will return your calls. They're going to at least give you five minutes.

And Bob was no slouch. He knew how to use his five minutes. He'd studied the conundrum of his son's circumstances. He began to learn Pashto, pored over Islamic law, read about Pashtun tradition to see if there was some loophole he could find, some argument he could make for Bowe's release. He understood the history and the politics of the region, and he was already knocking on doors and asking questions.

Nathan tried to leverage that.

Sarah Koenig

The chairman of the Joint Chiefs is the principal military advisor to the secretary of defense and to the president. Bowe didn't have 25 media companies writing an open letter urging action by the secretary of state, as sometimes happens for foreign correspondents. He didn't have ransom insurance, as employees of private companies sometimes do.

His parents weren't swish DC players. They were people who lived in rural Idaho. Bowe's case wasn't going anywhere. They needed someone heavy to think Bowe was worth thinking about. And then they needed that person to give it a push.

So that was the plan—apply pressure in myriad ways. Make it so that people with influence just happen to start hearing about Bowe Bergdahl from various sources. Get them to perk up, take an interest, and in that way, inch closer and closer to the president.

Nathan began talking to the Bergdahls regularly, maybe monthly, maybe weekly, depending on what was going on. He started guiding them. "You know that person, or that group, or that commander who says he's doing everything he can? Well, he could be doing this."

Sarah Koenig

A question might be, if the United States could pay blood money to get the CIA contractor Raymond Davis out of a Pakistani jail, could they maybe do something similar for Bowe? Some sort of ransom-ish payment that isn't ransom? I'm making that up, but that seems like a good question, right?

Sarah Koenig

Nathan said it worked. He can't be specific about how it worked, but he says it worked. Bob's Rolodex filled up with people at the Pentagon, and also the White House, and the State Department. And Nathan believes the continued pressure created a sense of urgency about Bowe's case and got it on the desks of the people they were aiming for.

There was another part of the strategy too—to make noise, sometimes publicly, in a way they hoped would keep Bowe safe.

Sarah Koenig

In May of 2011, just a few days after the Bin Laden raid, Bob released a video on YouTube. He addressed Mullah Sangeen and the Haqqanis, but his main message was straight to the Pakistani government.

Sarah Koenig

Pasha was commander of Pakistan's intelligence service, or ISI. Kayani was the Pakistan army's chief of staff.

Sarah Koenig

There's another striking thing about this video, and that is Bob is asking something of Pakistan so directly that American officials would not. Our soldier is there. We know they know he's there, somewhere in what's called the FATA, Federally Administered Tribal Areas. And all this time, the U.S. is setting aside billions of dollars in aid and military support to Pakistan.

According to a recent congressional report, between 2002 and 2014, we gave them roughly $30 billion all told. It's big money, yet we don't seem to be able to say, hey, Pakistan, give him back. Why is that? Well, again, lots of experts later, now I see why. Diplomacy isn't a snap-your-fingers kind of business. It's a long game. And in the long run, we'd like to stay on decent terms with Pakistan for some important reasons.

Pakistan has nuclear weapons, which we'd really like them to keep a lid on. We'd also like to keep our air and ground supply lines open in Pakistan. That's how we get stuff to our people in Afghanistan. Pakistan helped us track down important al-Qaeda leaders and some Taliban, and we'd like that to continue.

Many influential people in our government would also like our drones to keep flying, and sometimes killing people, inside Pakistan as well. And we've got long term development goals there too. We'd like to keep helping Pakistanis with education and clean water, maybe because we're just nice like that, but more likely because we want to keep them on our side.

Because if Pakistan goes the way of, say, Iran, becomes our enemy, plus those nuclear weapons, that's a scenario we'd very much like to avoid. So while we might risk our relationship with Pakistan in order to take out Osama bin Laden, we are not going to jeopardize it, not to that degree, for one U.S. serviceman. We are not gonna come out publicly and boss Pakistan around, even if we could do that, or call their leaders a bunch of liars.

Ambassador Marc Grossman, who was the State Department's special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, told us he did bring Bowe up in meetings with high level Pakistani government officials, but he didn't expect them to do much. He said expectations are low, but you do it because it's right, and you never know what's gonna happen. And he said, if you say to the Bergdahls and to the public, we're doing everything we can, then you'd better be doing everything you can.

In 2012, 2013, a couple of army generals decided to do something separately. One of the generals realized the PR team at CENTCOM was woefully understaffed and wasn't getting anywhere. He assigned an elite unit to the task, a Delta Force team—a big deal. The CIA was roped in more, which helped, but even so, the PR team never got the intel it hoped for.

And then another general, a soon-to-be-four-star, also got involved—a general Bob Bergdahl also met with, incidentally.

Sarah Koenig

That's Jason Amerine again. He recently retired from the army after 27 years. Jason is one of the most celebrated soldiers of the Afghanistan war. He was there in 2001, commanding a Special Forces team that fought alongside Hamid Karzai in southern Afghanistan. The army even made an action figure out of him. Jason is as close as you could get to putting G.I. Joe on the Bergdahl case.

His stellar career nearly unraveled last year in connection with his work on hostage recovery, which maybe you heard about. Last year, he testified before Congress about, among other things, the dysfunction in U.S. hostage policy.

Back in January of 2013, Jason was leading a team of strategists at the Pentagon that were supposed to find solutions to some of the army's biggest problems. This group worked for General John Campbell, who was in charge of operations and plans for the Army. My producer Dana Chivvis interviewed Jason.

Sarah Koenig

Jason and his team decided to do an audit of Bowe's case: Who was doing what all those years? Why hadn't it worked? What they found is that the effort seemed to be moving along two tracks. SOCOM was trying to put together plans. (SOCOM is Special Operations Command, which runs elite units. Think Delta Force or Navy SEALS.)

And then Jason said they could see that the State Department was on it, trying to work with Qatar, trying to get the Taliban to the negotiating table. In meetings he had had with the FBI and others, Jason learned Bowe wasn't the only one being held hostage by the Haqqanis. There was Caitlin Coleman, and Josh Boyle, and their child. And there were others also nearby.

Warren Weinstein was being held by al-Qaeda. He was subsequently killed in a drone strike. Knowing about all these others shook Jason pretty hard.

Sarah Koenig

Jason's mission had been to try to figure out how to get Bowe back. Now, he added another mission. Why not try for more hostages? Maybe all the hostages? So Jason's team comes up with a couple of alternatives. He starts shopping around one idea in particular, and he gets pretty far with it. But then he can't tell who exactly is in charge.

Sarah Koenig

Jason took the problem to a congressman, which rather surprisingly led to Jason being investigated by the army. Eventually that was all dropped. The congressman, Representative Duncan Hunter, a veteran of both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, proposed legislation to try to fix hostage policy.

Other people I've spoken to in government say Jason's assessment, at least in Bowe's case, wasn't quite accurate, that the various agencies were more aware of each other's plans than Jason gave them credit for. But still, everyone I talked to agreed with Jason that our system for dealing with hostages wasn't great.

Cooperation between agencies was shaggy. Policies were sometimes inconsistent. People weren't on the same page. That was especially clear after reporter James Foley was killed, gruesomely and publicly, in Syria a couple of months after Bowe came home.

In December of 2014, President Obama ordered a review of how the U.S. deals with these cases. And six months later, he announced an update in hostage policy, saying that he'd met with the families. Quote, "I acknowledged to them in private what I want to say publicly: that it is true that there have been times where our government, regardless of good intentions, has let them down. I promised them that we can do better," unquote.

When I first started looking into this question of what did we do to get Bowe back, frankly, I didn't think it would be all that difficult to answer. Which, silly me, maybe, but still, at least I thought the answer would be linear, that a chain of events would reveal itself, one link leading to another, attached to another. Instead, I found a bunch of people whose stories were all pretty different, but whose central theme was the same; frustration. Why aren't we doing more? Who's blocking this effort? Why?

They described struggling against a tangle of competing interests they couldn't control, and sometimes couldn't even see. It sounded as if there was a scandal to uncover. And maybe there was dishonesty, and even malevolence in some corners, but mostly, I think it's because the truth is, there's a limit. There have to be limits on how much we risk, how much we give up to get one person back.

And for a long time, Bowe loomed small. To put it coarsely, he wasn't worth it. He was tucked in among so many other crises, a small fire smoldering among all these giant fires that also need to be put out. The time to deal with him is when he becomes something else, something useful, a way to put out a bigger fire.

Bob Bergdahl told me the family was always against a rescue attempt. He said he studied the Afghanistan-Pakistan border in minute detail on Google Earth for two weeks after Bowe went missing. Based on where he figured Bowe was, he thought a rescue in a place like Miram Shah, even for an elite special operations unit, wouldn't be viable. It was just too dangerous.

Quote, "We thought it unethical to risk the lives of numerous individuals, especially when we knew back-channel communication was possible or even actually happening. We believed Bowe would agree with that ethic," unquote. Mark and Bowe talked about not exactly this, but they talked about how much should have been sacrificed to find him in that initial DUSTWUN period.

And Bowe said, in an ideal world, which he gets isn't the one the military lives in, but if he could have directed the initial search, he would have made it voluntary. And he would have been OK with soldiers who hadn't volunteered, because he gets that they didn't understand his true motives.

Sarah Koenig

But what if they had known exactly why he walked? What specifically Bowe was seeing? Would it make any difference? Next time, on Serial.

Serial is produced by Julie Snyder, Dana Chivvis and me, in partnership with Mark Boal, Megan Ellison, Hugo Lindgren, Jessica Weisberg, Page One, and Annapurna Pictures. Ira Glass is our editorial adviser. Editing help this week from Joel Lovell. Whitney Dangerfield is our digital editor. Research by Kevin Garnett. Fact checking by Michelle Harris. Copyediting by Anaheed Alani.

Our music is composed by Nick Thorburn, Fritz Myers, and Mark Phillips. The show is mixed by Kate Bilinksi. Kristen Taylor's our community editor. Other Serial staff: Seth Lind, Emily Condon, Elise Bergerson, and Kimberly Henderson.

Special thanks this week to Viva Hardigg, Ari Shapiro, Theo Padnos, Jessica Goldstein, Jeff Eggers, Caitlin Hayden, and Dan Markey. Our website is serialpodcast.org. This week, we've posted the video of Bob Bergdahl appealing to the Pakistani government, and we'll put more stuff up there next week too, so keep checking. Again, that's serialpodcast.org.

Serial is a production of This American Life and WBEZ Chicago.

Ira Glass

Coming up on the next episode of Serial.

Sarah Koenig

Oh boy.