Bowe Bergdahl
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Bowe Bergdahl is the American soldier John Kiriakou offers as his second illustration of what a country does to the people it gets back in a trade. Kiriakou raises him unprompted, alongside Francis Gary Powers, in answer to a viewer's question about the fate of spies traded home.

The capture

In Kiriakou's account, Bergdahl "was uh a military guy in Afghanistan who just walked off base one day, and was immediately captured by the Haqqani network, who turned him over to the Taliban." The captivity that followed lasted years, and ended in an exchange: "He was held for years, finally repatriated to the United States in a prisoner trade."

The reception

Kiriakou is precise about the distinction he wants to draw, and states the correction inside the sentence: Bergdahl "was not just treated as a traitor, he wasn't a traitor, but he was treated as such."

He cites the political treatment as evidence of how far that went. "Donald Trump during the 2016 election campaign said that he should be executed."

Afterwards

The outcome Kiriakou describes is neither the execution demanded nor an exoneration. "He was in the military for another year. He spent a little bit of time in the brig and um was finally released. He lives with his mom and dad in Idaho."

That ending is what Kiriakou uses the case to prove. It closes his answer on the fate of the exchanged with the flat generalisation that follows from both his examples: "but um yeah, good things don't happen to people who get caught."

The pairing is deliberate. Powers was a professional who did the survivable thing and was resented for it; Bergdahl was not an intelligence officer at all and was punished as though he had been one. In Kiriakou's framing, neither man's actual conduct determined how he was received, what determined it was that he had been in enemy hands, and had come home.

See also

- Spies traded home
- Francis Gary Powers
- Donald Trump
- Taliban embassy raid
