Author Archives: Denise Simon

When the U.S. Strategy is to no Longer Lead

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Symptomatic of when a country is war weary, the rules of engagement are re-tooled, removing hostilities and the will to win fades away, the wake of destruction becomes worse. How many times has this occurred? Korea, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, Syria and more. If it is not up to the United States of America, then who?

Korea

Sudan

Cambodia

Sinjar Mountain, Iraq

Libya

Dafur

Syria

 

Ambassador: US handed Cambodia to the ‘butcher’ 40 years ago

American envoy, a German-born Jew, recalls horrors of Pol Pot’s regime, regrets Washington’s ‘abandonment’ of allies

PARIS (AP) — Twelve helicopters, bristling with guns and US Marines, breached the morning horizon and began a daring descent toward Cambodia’s besieged capital. The Americans were rushing in to save them, residents watching the aerial armada believed. But at the US Embassy, in a bleeding city about to die, the ambassador wept.

Forty years later and 6,000 miles (nearly 10,000 kilometers) away, John Gunther Dean recalls what he describes as one of the most tragic days of his life — April 12, 1975, the day the United States “abandoned Cambodia and handed it over to the butcher.”

Time has not blunted the former ambassador’s anger, crushing shame and feelings of guilt over what also proved a milestone in modern American history — the first of several US interventions in foreign countries climaxed by withdrawals before goals were accomplished and followed by often disastrous consequences.

“We’d accepted responsibility for Cambodia and then walked out without fulfilling our promise. That’s the worst thing a country can do,” he says in an interview in Paris. “And I cried because I knew what was going to happen.”

Five days after Operation Eagle Pull, the dramatic evacuation of Americans, the US-backed government fell as communist Khmer Rouge guerrillas stormed into Phnom Penh. They drove its 2 million inhabitants into the countryside at gunpoint, launching one of the bloodiest revolutions of modern times. Nearly 2 million Cambodians — one in every four — would die from executions, starvation and hideous torture.

Many foreigners present during the final months — diplomats, aid workers, journalists — remain haunted to this day by Phnom Penh’s death throes, by the heartbreaking loyalty of Cambodians who refused evacuation and by what Dean calls Washington’s “indecent act.”

I count myself among those foreigners, a reporter who covered the Cambodian War for The Associated Press and was whisked away along with Dean and 287 other Americans, Cambodians and third-country nationals. I left behind more than a dozen Cambodian reporters and photographers — about the bravest, may I say the finest, colleagues I’ve ever known. Almost all would die.

For the general public, the pullout is largely forgotten, overshadowed by the mass, hysteric flight from Saigon and the end of the Vietnam War three weeks later. But for historians and political analysts, the withdrawal from Cambodia signifies the first of what then-US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger termed “bug-outs.”

“It was the first time Americans came anywhere close to losing a war. What worries me and many of us old guys who were there is that we are still seeing it happen,” says Frank Snepp, a senior CIA officer in Saigon and author of “Decent Interval,” which depicts the final years of the Vietnam War. After Cambodia and Vietnam came Laos; there would be other conflicts with messy endings, like Central America in the 1980s, Iraq and — potentially — Afghanistan.

Today, at 89, Dean, a German-born Jew, and his French wife reside in a patrician quarter of Paris, in an elegant apartment graced by statues of Cambodian kings from the glory days of the Angkor Empire. A folded American flag lies across his knees, the same one that he clutched under his arm in a plastic bag as he sped to the evacuation site. Captured by a photographer, it became one of the most memorable images of the Vietnam War era.

In the apartment’s vestibule hangs a framed letter signed by President Gerald R. Ford and dated Aug. 14, 1975. It highlights that Dean was “given one of the most difficult assignments in the history of the Foreign Service and carried it out with distinction.”

But Dean says: “I failed.”

“I tried so hard,” he adds. “I took as many people as I could, hundreds of them, I took them out, but I couldn’t take the whole nation out.”

The former ambassador to four other countries expresses more than guilt. He is highly critical of America’s violation of Cambodian neutrality by armed incursions from neighboring Vietnam and a secret bombing campaign in the early 1970s which killed thousands of civilians and radicalized, he believes, the Khmer Rouge. Once-peaceful Cambodia, he says, was drawn into war for America’s interests, a “sideshow” to Vietnam.

The US bombed communist Vietnamese sanctuaries and supply lines along the Vietnam-Cambodia border, keeping Cambodia propped up as an anti-communist enclave, but it provided World War II aircraft and few artillery pieces to Phnom Penh forces fighting the Khmer Rouge.

“The US wasn’t that concerned about what happened one way or the other in Cambodia but only concerned about it to the extent that it impacted positively or negatively on their situation in Vietnam,” says Stephen Heder, a Cambodia expert at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Opinion on what went wrong in Cambodia remains split to this day. One view is that the country was destabilized by the American incursions and bombings; another is that Washington failed to provide the US-propped Lon Nol government with adequate military and other support.

In his memoirs, Kissinger says the US had no choice but to expand its efforts into the neighboring country, which the North Vietnamese were using as a staging area and armory for attacks on US troops in South Vietnam. And as Cambodia crumbled, he writes, anti-war elements, the media and Congress combined to tie the administration’s hands, preventing further assistance.

Dean is bitter that Kissinger and other power brokers in Washington did not support his quest to persuade ousted Cambodian King Norodom Sihanouk to return from exile and forge a coalition between the Khmer Rouge and Lon Nol. It was Dean’s “controlled solution.”

“We were also on the telephone with Washington shouting, ‘Help us. We are going under. We are going to leave this country unprotected,’” Dean said in earlier oral testimony. But Washington seemed unmoved.

“Ambassador Dean never had (President Richard) Nixon’s or Kissinger’s support because both of them wanted out of Indochina,” Snepp says.

By early 1975, the embassy’s cables, most of them declassified in 2006, were becoming increasingly frantic.

Meeting me one day, a haggard Dean, who had lost 15 pounds, asked rhetorically: “Isn’t there any sense of human decency left in us?”

“Phnom Penh was surrounded by explosions and a night sky of blossoming flares and streaks of tracer bullets,” I wrote in one of my stories at that time. “Children were dying of hunger, the hospitals looked more like abattoirs and the Cambodian army lost as many men in three months as the US did in a decade of war in South Vietnam.”

The Khmer Rouge were tightening their stranglehold on the capital, shutting down the airport from which the embassy had flown out several hundred Cambodians. An April 6 cable from Dean said the Cambodian government and army “seem to be expecting us to produce some miracle to save them. You and I know there will be no such miracle.”

Congress was cutting the aid lifeline to Phnom Penh. The American public had had enough of the war.

Among Cambodians in the know, some anti-American feeling was growing.

“The Americans give temporary aid but ultimately they think only of themselves. We in Cambodia have been seduced and abandoned,” Chhang Song, a former information minister, said one night in early 1975.

But among Phnom Penh residents I found only smiles — “Americans are our fathers,” one vegetable vendor told me — along with a never-never-land mindset that things would turn out to be all right. Somehow.

“I honestly believe we did not do enough. There was something better that could have come out other than a genocide of 1.7 million people,” Dean says, explaining in part why he, a Jew, felt so strongly. “Now you must understand, I was born in Germany and suffered under Nazi oppression, so how could I turn over a people to the butcher?”

Dean’s abiding emotions are shared by others of his former staff.

Alan Armstrong, the assistant defense attache, is still trying to complete a novel to exorcise what he went through. It is called “La Chute,” “The Fall.”

“I was paid by my government to smile, break bread (with Cambodians) and then betray my friends and colleagues. That’s a heavy burden to bear no matter how many years roll by,” says the retired US Army colonel. “The downfall of the Khmer Republic not only resulted in the deaths of countless Cambodians, it has also crept into our souls.”

Historians, distant from the passions of the actors, differ over Dean’s efforts and American culpability.

Benedict Kiernan, a Yale University professor who has written extensively on Cambodia, says that given rifts within the Khmer Rouge leadership a political compromise earlier in the war might have been possible, resulting in a left-wing dominated coalition and not a fanatical revolution.

“Anything was worth trying to stop the Khmer Rouge before they got to Phnom Penh,” says Heder, the academic, who reported in Cambodia during the war and was among those evacuated from the capital.

Milton Osborne, an Australian historian and diplomat who served in Cambodia, describes Dean’s “controlled solution” as a “forlorn hope,” with the Khmer Rouge determined to win totally and execute Phnom Penh’s leaders. “By 1974, it was not a question of if, but when,” he says.

Snepp believes that Dean, desperately grasping at straws, was “living in fantasy land.”

Washington may have abandoned its ally, but the Cambodian elite also bears responsibility for its own demise. Snepp views President Lon Nol — corrupt, inept, superstitious and half-paralyzed — as one in a long line of similar leaders the United States would back in the following decades.

“What we have seen in all cases is that unless the US has a politically viable domestic partner, neither limited nor massive military intervention is going to succeed,” says Heder.

Timothy Carney, the embassy’s political officer, drawing on his record as ambassador to several countries, says that “tolerating corruption saps the legitimacy and support for whatever authority we are trying to prop up in a country.”

In the final days, Carney’s task was to persuade, unsuccessfully, Cambodian leaders to flee the country.

The night before the evacuation, Dean and his deputy drank some of the ambassador’s fine French wine so it wouldn’t fall into Khmer Rouge hands. The next morning, sitting in his office for the last time, he read a letter from Prince Sirik Matak in which the respected former deputy prime minister declined evacuation and thus sealed his own death. It read: “I never believed for a moment that you have this sentiment of abandoning a people which has chosen liberty. I have only committed this mistake of believing in you the Americans.”

Dean today describes it as the “greatest accusation ever made by foreigners. It is wrenching, no? And put yourself in the role of the American representative.”

His embassy closed down at 9:45 a.m., the evacuees driven 10 blocks to a soccer field shielded by a row of apartment buildings from Khmer Rouge gunners about a mile away. The Sikorsky “Jolly Green Giant” helicopters were setting down. The Marines fanned out to form a security cordon around the landing zone.

But fears of possible reprisals by Cambodians proved unfounded.

Children and mothers scrambled over fences to watch. They cheered, clapped and waved to the 360 beefy, armed Marines. A Cambodian military policeman saluted Armstrong smartly. Disgusted and ashamed, he dropped his helmet and rifle, leaving them behind.

I tried to avoid looking into faces of the crowd. Always with me will be the children’s little hands aflutter and their singsong “OK, Bye-bye, bye-bye.”

By 12:15 the last helicopters landed on the deck of the USS Okinawa waiting off the Cambodian coast. Tactically, the 2 1/2-hour operation had been flawless.

In Phnom Penh, Douglas Sapper, an ex-Green Beret who stayed behind to save his company’s employees, recalled the reaction of Cambodians who realized what had happened: “It was like telling a kid that Santa Claus was dead.”

Five days later we received a cable from Mean Leang, an ever-jovial, baby-faced AP reporter who had refused to seek safety. Instead he wrote about the brutal entry of the Khmer Rouge into the city, its surrender and gunpoint evacuation. “I alone in office, losing contact with our guys. I feel rather trembling,” he messaged. “Do not know how to file our stories now … maybe last cable today and forever.”

Barry Broman, then a young diplomat, remembers a Cambodian woman who worked upcountry monitoring the war for the embassy who had also refused evacuation.

“One day she said, ‘They are in the city,’ and her contact said ‘OK, time to go.’ She refused. Later she reported, ‘They are in the building,’ and again refused to leave her post. Her last transmission was, ‘They are in the room. Good-bye.’ The line went dead.”

 

Who Knew about Bergdahl and Prisoner Swap?

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Per flash traffic: At 0430Z, TF 1 Geronimo reported a B Co missing soldier after he did not show up for the 0900L morning roll call at Mest OP, grid 42SVB 59236 47877 Yahya Khail District, Paktika.  A full search was ordered.  At 0535Z, TF 1 Geronimo initiated DUSTWUN procedures for the missing soldier.  At 0645Z, all remaining units had reported in 100% accountability.   Geronimo TOC ordered blocking positions set in and around Mest OP.  At 0707Z, Predator (VooDoo) was on station in support.  At 0940Z, a Pathfinder and tracking dog team arrived at Mest OP in support.  At 0945Z, Predator (Pfingston) arrived on station in support.  At 1012Z, LLVI receives traffic that an American Soldier with a camera is looking for someone who speaks English.  At 1303Z, Graphic 33(2x F-18) arrived on station in support.  At 1309Z, FF receive intelligence that a U.S. soldier has been captured.  At 1351Z, VooDoo and Pfingston RIP with Predator (Sijan).   At 1520Z, Sijan RIPs with Predator (Kisling) and DUDE-21 (2x F-15) arrives on station to support.  Between 1725Z and 1800Z, B Co conducted 2 breaches of suspected enemy locations with NSTR.  Additional forces were moving into the area to place blocking positions and conduct searches based on all of the aerial and ground based intelligence sources available throughout the day and through the night.

ISAF Tracking #06-2426

Event Title:CAPTURED SOLDIER
Zone:null
Placename:ISAF# 06-2426
Outcome:null

S:1 X US SOLDIER
A: MISSSING SOLDIER
L:VB 592 478
T:300430zJUNE09
U: Bco 1-501
R: INITIATE DUSTWUN

Action operations to find Bergdahl are explained fully here.

So who in the media and in the DC circles knew about Bergdahl from the immediate days he removed his uniform and left America behind? What were the swift demands of the Haqqani network demand for the return of Bergdahl?

Untangling the Mysteries Behind Bowe Bergdahl’s Rescue Mission

It was before dawn at Observation Post Mest-Malak, a U.S. Army outpost surrounded by Taliban-controlled villages in eastern Afghanistan, when the men in Blackfoot Company 2nd Platoon first noticed that Bowe Bergdahl was missing. An Army veteran who says he was one of Bergdahl’s closest friends in Afghanistan and spoke to Newsweek on the condition of anonymity, remembers the moment well. “[Specialist Shane] Cross came over and he whispered, ‘Hey, you seen Bergdahl?’ and I knew instantly he was gone. I said, ‘He’s gone. He’s fucking gone.’”

The U.S. Army boasts that it does not leave men behind, so when Private First Class Bergdahl disappeared in Paktika province on June 30, 2009, the Army was going to find him, no matter the cost.

His platoon-mates all knew Bergdahl was eccentric, a quiet kid who prided himself on the wilderness survival skills he learned growing up in Idaho. He was one of the fittest in the platoon, two of them told Newsweek, and he was meticulous about the gun-cleaning, field-manual-memorizing details of military life. He and his buddies liked to spend nights drinking chai with the Afghan National Police officers stationed up on a dusty hill. He smoked a pipe. Some of the guys thought he was weird, but they all thought he was reliable. “Up until the second he walked away, he was the example of the good soldier,” says Army Specialist Gerald Sutton. “He was always doing his job. We never had to worry about him.” Bergdahl’s close friend from the platoon adds: “He always did what he was told, always there to help you. Always.”

In downtime bitch sessions, when the men talked about shooting themselves in the foot or other schemes to get out of the war early, Bergdahl reportedly said his plan would be to walk to India. Or he said he would shed his weapons and gear, Siddhartha-like, and join the Kochis, nomadic Pashtun tribes whose dark tents dotted the Afghan valleys that looked eerily similar to the Idaho backcountry where he had honed his Man vs. Wild skills. His buddies thought it was just talk. “Everybody wanted to leave. We thought he was just venting,” the friend says. “We didn’t take it seriously. [At OP Mest] you couldn’t even walk outside the base. We were in contact with the enemy anytime we left…. It was like, ‘Whatever, [Bergdahl], you’re full of shit.’”

But he did leave. Alone and unarmed, the 23-year-old was abducted within hours by local Zadran tribe militants, sources tell Newsweek, who passed him up the Taliban’s regional chain of command. He was held as a hostage for five years, and only returned last year after a prisoner swap that freed five Taliban fighters from the U.S. military’s Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp.

04_10_FE0115_Bergdahl_10 From left, Colonel Bradley J. Kamrowski, Ph.D., Major General Joseph P. DiSalvo, and Colonel Ronald N. Wool deliver a press conference in San Antonio, Texas to report on Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl’s return to the United States and reintegration at Brooke Army Medical Center. Drew Anthony Smith/Getty

Ten months after returning to home soil, Bergdahl was formally charged on March 25, 2015, with two crimes under the Army’s Uniform Code of Military Justice: “Desertion With Intent to Shirk Important or Hazardous Duty” and the more serious “Misbehavior Before the Enemy by Endangering the Safety of a Command, Unit or Place.” He is awaiting an Article 32 hearing, similar to a grand jury, and is working a desk job at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio. The Army tries dozens of desertion cases each year (17 men were found guilty of the charge in 2009), and the maximum punishment is five years in military prison, a dishonorable discharge and the loss of back pay. The misbehavior-and-endangerment charge is far more serious, exceptionally rare (according to Stars & Stripes, the last high-profile case was in 1968) and brings the maximum penalty of life in prison.

‘You’re Gonna Be Looking for Bergdahl’

Why Bowe Bergdahl walked into a hostile war zone isn’t much clearer now than it was the day he left. OP Mest was operating without an officer at the time, and according to his lawyer, Bergdahl snuck away to report disciplinary problems in his unit to an officer at a nearby base.

For the men he left behind in Blackfoot Company and the 1st Battalion of the 501st Regiment that night, life in Afghanistan changed instantly and dramatically. “From the second he left until we left the country, our whole mission was screwed up,” Bergdahl’s friend says. “[In] every operation order until March 2010, he was thrown in the mix: ‘You’re gonna be looking for Bergdahl.’”

“It changed the mission [in Afghanistan] for everyone,” says Sergeant Jordan Vaughan, who served in a separate Blackfoot Company platoon and says he was sent on at least 50 missions to find the missing soldier. “We stopped the regular counter-insurgency mission and instead went and looked for Bergdahl.” According to Vaughan and other men from Blackfoot Company, at least eight soldiers were killed on those searches. Platoon medic Josh Cornelison told NBC News last June, “Every single person that died [out there] was doing something to find Bowe Bergdahl.”

In both legal and moral terms, the charge that Bergdahl’s actions led to the deaths of fellow soldiers is the most important and disturbing one he faces, and yet the Pentagon has steadfastly denied the claim. “I do not know of specific circumstances or details of U.S. soldiers dying as a result of efforts to find and rescue Sergeant Bergdahl,” former defense secretary Chuck Hagel said last summer. Bergdahl had been promoted during his captivity.

The families of those fallen men are outraged and frustrated by this apparent contradiction of facts and testimony. “They’re not liars,” says Cheryl Brandes of the soldiers’ claims. Her son, Matthew Martinek, died from wounds suffered during an ambush on September 4, 2009, while on a mission, his comrades told her, to find Bergdahl. “There needs to be an investigation,” she told Fox News. “Why is this such a cover-up? Why can they not just tell us, ‘Yes, your son was looking for another soldier?’ What’s so bad about that?”

The Pentagon cannot answer Brandes without conceding an awkward and troubling fact: On the day her son was flanked by Taliban militants in an ambush that also killed 2nd Lieutenant Darryn Andrews, officials in Washington and Kabul already had overwhelming intelligence that Bergdahl was no longer in Afghanistan.

‘We Assumed It Became a CIA Operation’

From the hilltop guard post at OP Mest, it was just 25 miles or so to the Pakistani border, and, according to a former State Department official who spoke to Newsweek on the condition of anonymity, there was a widespread assumption in Kabul that Bergdahl would be shuttled to Pakistan as fast as his captors were able.

The day he was reported DUSTWUN (Duty Status Whereabouts Unknown), American military commanders working with the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF) ordered a secretive military unit—variously referred to as the intelligence support activity, mission support activity, the activity or gray fox—to track leads about his whereabouts. One of the first officers on the case was an unconventional-operations specialist who was attending a jirga, a meeting of Afghan tribal elders, when he got the call about Bergdahl. The officer, who is not authorized to discuss the case and spoke on the condition of anonymity, says, “I got a call from our guy in Kabul. He said, ‘Hey, we got a lost puppy.’  “We just happened to be talking to the elders in this tribe with knowledge of the area [where Bergdahl went missing],” the officer tells Newsweek. He says he immediately got to work, calling dozens of sources across Afghanistan. “We talked to Taliban lawyers and mullahs, border security police, a lot of people.”  The intelligence-gathering quickly brought precise information about Bergdahl’s captors. “We knew how they were going to move him, where they were going to move him. We figured it would be 48 hours at the most before he was across the border,” the officer says. When he investigated whether the Army could prevent Bergdahl’s captors from taking him across that border, the answer was clear. “There is no way to shut down border traffic. It’s the Silk Road, for God’s sake,” he says. “It’s been a smugglers’ transit route for thousands of years. So [the Taliban] better be pretty good at it. And they are.”

Within days, this officer was told by his superior to give up the search: “I was told to drop it, that someone else has got it.” The following week, he learned that the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC), which planned and executed the most sensitive raids of the war—including Operation Neptune Spear, the mission that killed Osama bin Laden in May 2011—had also been called off. “When JSOC was told to stand down,” the officer tells Newsweek, “we assumed it became a CIA operation in Pakistan.”

The moment Bergdahl was taken across the Afghan-Pakistani border, the search for him jumped its own distinct legal boundary. Rescuing the “lost puppy” went from the purview of traditional military operations to a covert intelligence mission. “Anything south of that line was outside the area of Operation Enduring Freedom,” the military mission in Afghanistan, the officer says. At that point, “it would have taken the president or a CIA operation to call a cross-border raid.”

By the second week of July, civilian and military officials were so confident Bergdahl had been smuggled across the Pakistani border that the JSOC and clandestine special operations units were called off the search…

So why did the Army continue to send infantrymen in Afghanistan on dozens of missions in hostile territory to find him?

A High-Value Hostage

The militants who captured Bergdahl were never coy about their identity or why they had kidnapped him. Two days after he was abducted, they held the Taliban equivalent of a press conference to take responsibility and make their demands. “The case will be referred to Sirajuddin Haqqani and other top Taliban leadership,” Mullah Sangeen, a well-known Taliban commander in Paktika, told a CBS reporter on July 2, 2009. “They have to decide the future of the U.S. soldier, but we would not mind a prisoner exchange.”

The Pentagon was equally clear about the players involved. “An American soldier captured in southeastern Afghanistan is being held by a notorious militant clan, a senior U.S. military official said,” is how CNN’s Barbara Starr put it. Reports by the BBC, The Washington Post, and The Long War Journal concurred: Bergdahl had been taken by the Haqqani Network.

The Haqqanis were a terrorist threat that was well known in Washington and Kabul, and they were a constant source of diplomatic headaches. During the Cold War, Jalaluddin Haqqani was a handsomely paid CIA proxy in the fight against the Soviets, but after 9/11, his family took up arms against the latest infidel invaders. “In Pakistan’s tribal areas of North and South Waziristan, Maulavi [Jalaluddin] Haqqani and his sons run a network of madrasas and training bases and provide protection for foreign fighters and terrorist groups, including Al-Qaeda,” The New York Times reported in June 2008.

In November of that year, the Haqqanis lured Times reporter David Rohde to an interview south of Kabul, then snatched him and immediately smuggled him across the border to Pakistan’s Federally Administered Tribal Areas. “The Haqqanis oversee a sprawling Taliban mini-state in North Waziristan with the acquiescence of the Pakistani military,” Rohde said in A Rope and a Prayer, the 2010 book he co-wrote with his wife, Kristen Mulvihill, about his seven months as a Haqqani hostage. By the spring of 2009, several months into his captivity, Rohde’s situation was common knowledge to then-secretary of state Hillary Clinton, State Department ambassadors to the region, management of The New York Times, American intelligence and law enforcement agencies, as well as the private hostage negotiators and consultants Rohde’s wife and family had recruited.

On June 20, 2009, Rohde fled in a daring and successful escape, the details of which remain unclear. Ten days later, in a stroke of luck for a terrorist group that had made kidnapping a pillar of its business, the Haqqanis replaced the journalist with an even more valuable hostage—the first and only American soldier captured in that war.

‘Looking for Someone Who Speaks English’

Before Sangeen called that press conference, Bergdahl’s captors hurried to make a proof-of-life tape and deliver it to the highest-ranking American official they could reach in Kabul. Having video proof was a high priority for the militants, first discussed in a conversation intercepted by American spy planes about six hours after Bergdahl’s platoon reported him missing. “An American soldier with a camera is looking for someone who speaks English” is how the Army interpreter paraphrased the intercepted radio or cellphone chatter. That message, which was logged in the classified Army record later published by WikiLeaks, matches the memories of men in Blackfoot Company who heard the interpreter’s words over the radio that morning. It is cited as proof by some members of the platoon and multiple media organizations that Bergdahl had gone looking to join the Taliban, that he was a traitor. “That means he’s going to collaborate with the enemy, [doesn’t] it?” Sean Hannity said on his Fox News show.

But according to Robert Young Pelton, a journalist consulted by the military to help find Bergdahl, that message was wrong, a bad translation from the captor’s Pashto language. It wasn’t the young American who had a camera and was looking for someone who spoke English; it was Bergdahl’s kidnappers, hurrying to speak to and record proof of their high-value hostage.

Pelton was working in Afghanistan as the director of AfPax, a subscription-based, conflict-zone information service. For a monthly fee, he provided clients with a stream of information gathered by local sources. “We had subscribers from every venue: media, State Department, [nongovernmental organizations], etc.,” Pelton tells Newsweek. “The military, special operations, came to us and asked us for help [tracking Bergdahl].” One former military intelligence officer who would not talk on the record about the Bergdahl incident tells Newsweek that AfPax was the best source of clean intelligence in Afghanistan at the time.

The day after Bergdahl walked off his base, the spy planes picked up another conversation between militants about their new prize: “Can you guys make a video of him and announce it all over Afghanistan that we have one of the Americans?” the first asked. Another man replied, “We already have a video of him.”

To Pelton, who tracked Rohde and other kidnapping victims in eastern Afghanistan, Bergdahl’s destination was never in doubt: “We knew he was going to Pakistan as soon as [the Army] said they were missing a guy.” Pelton worked with RC-East commanders—conventional U.S. forces in eastern Afghanistan—for about two weeks before he was told to stop. “We went over to their office and they had maps on the wall, and we would point to Pakistan and say, ‘He’s going that way.’ That’s when they told us to wave off,” he says.

Pelton, who wrote about his work tracking Bergdahl for Vice, says, “Everyone knew that Bergdahl was in Pakistan, and now everyone is trying to rewrite history.”

Ransom Demand: $19m and 25 Prisoners

By the time the Haqqanis released their first proof-of-life video to the media, some Army officials had been informed that Bergdahl was already over the border. According to Qayum Karzai, the older brother of then-Afghan president Hamid Karzai, the Haqqanis delivered their first messages, via a courier, to Major General Edward Reeder Jr., commander of Special Operations in Operation Enduring Freedom at the time. The militants wanted $19 million and 25 prisoners from Gitmo, roughly the same ransom demands first made to free Rohde. “Everyone knew he was in Pakistan…the Afghan government, tribal leaders, Afghan reporters,” Karzai tells Newsweek. “Everyone talked about it.” At a time when many feared Bergdahl had been killed, Karzai says he also helped deliver a message from the prisoner to his parents in Idaho.

According to Linda Robinson, a senior policy analyst at the Rand Corporation, who interviewed Reeder for her book One Hundred Victories: Special Ops and the Future of American Warfare, the general learned of Bergdahl’s location from two sources. The first, a former Taliban minister who had joined the Afghan government, told Reeder that Bergdahl had been taken to Miran Shah, the same town where Rohde spent most of his seven months in captivity. The second was the courier. Sometime shortly after Reeder received the first ransom demand, the courier brought a second message that lowered the ransom to $5 million and dropped the request for a prisoner swap. Reeder told Robinson he passed the message up the chain of command, but to his surprise, “none of his superiors followed up on it.”

Reeder declined to comment on this story through an Army public affairs officer. Both retired general Stanley McChrystal, Reeder’s superior at the time, and retired general Mike Flynn, the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency during the search, also declined to answer Newsweek’s questions related to the Bergdahl case. (Reporter’s disclosure: For the first year of Bergdahl’s captivity, I worked in his hometown, and his father was the UPS deliveryman at the office where I worked.)

On July 18, 2009, 18 days after Bergdahl had walked away from his base, the Haqqanis released a video of him to the international press, and ABC News reported that, according to “a person actively involved in the search,” he had been taken to Pakistan. In interviews with ABC News, U.S. officials at the Pentagon and in Kabul denied the claim, insisting he was still in Afghanistan.

‘The War Was About to Be Lost’

The idea that America’s only prisoner of war in the post-9/11 era was being held inside the borders of a key ally in its War on Terror posed some serious problems. In mid-2009, when Bergdahl apparently was smuggled over one of the most dangerous borders in the world, Washington had real concerns over “not wanting to go to war with Pakistan,” says Ahmed Rashid, a Lahore, Pakistan–based journalist and author.

Bergdahl’s abduction coincided with the start of the largest American surge in the 13 years of that war—from less than 40,000 servicemen in early 2009 to about 100,000 in late 2010. In the summer of 2009, the Taliban were ascendant across southern Afghanistan, and, as Robinson writes, the Americans realized “the war was about to be lost.” The escalation affected both sides of the border. On the Pakistan side, CIA drone strikes (that the Bureau of Investigative Journalism reports likely killed many more civilians than militants) rose from 35 in 2008 to 117 in 2010. After an errant ISAF helicopter killed three Pakistani soldiers stationed near the border, the Pakistanis temporarily cut off the ISAF’s main supply artery, and relations between Washington and Islamabad hit new lows.

Rashid, who consulted with both the Rohde and Bergdahl families during their negotiation efforts, says the captured soldier was an inconvenient truth for the Americans. At such a delicate moment, a covert cross-border raid to retrieve one infantryman was a catastrophic risk. Bergdahl was trumped, says Rashid, by the top American priority: “protect the already fragile but still useful relationship with Pakistan to get at Al-Qaeda.”

On Christmas Day 2009, nearly six months after the Army called off its elite special operations and JSOC units from the search, and after commanding officers sent the men of Blackfoot Company on nearly six months’ worth of raids and missions to allegedly find him, the Haqqanis released a second proof-of-life video, a strange and uncomfortable spectacle. A thin Bergdahl sometimes reads and sometimes rambles through a lengthy indictment of American policy:

“And so do I, my family members, my fellow soldiers in the Army and their families, and all the regular Americans, do we or even should we trust those that send us to be killed in the name of America? Because aren’t our leaders, be it Obama or a Bush or whoever, aren’t they simply the puppets of the lobbies that pay for their election campaigns?”

Speaking for the Pentagon, Rear Admiral Gregory Smith called the video an affront to the soldier’s family and friends. “It reflects nothing more than the violent, deceitful tactics of the Taliban insurgency,” he said. “We will continue our search for Bowe Bergdahl.”

‘You Will Be Hunted…’

In the days after Bergdahl disappeared, Blackfoot Company scrambled its platoons. For the first 35 to 40 days, according to several men, the search was “nonstop.” Squads were sent to follow every lead, in any direction. For some, that meant driving to sit in far-off “blocking positions” to intercept any Taliban vehicles that might be stowing him. Some soldiers were sent beyond the reach of the Army’s supply trucks, to desert frontiers where contracted Russian pilots air-dropped food and water from helicopters that looked older than the Americans on the receiving end. The soldiers of Blackfoot Company were also sent to raid distant Afghan villages. Infantrymen distributed pamphlets to Afghan civilians asking for information about Bergdahl. The flyers had pictures of American soldiers kicking down doors and a caption that read, “If you do not release the U.S. soldier then…you will be hunted.”

Bergdahl’s platoon’s missions soon ranged beyond Paktika and into neighboring border provinces. “It was a wild goose chase,” says Bergdahl’s friend from the 2nd Platoon. “We went all over southeast Afghanistan.” But, he adds, “we did whack a lot of people in the process.”

As the weeks wore on, another Blackfoot Company team leader, Sergeant Johnathan Rice, suspected his commanders weren’t really looking for Bergdahl. “Common sense dictates that [whoever took him wasn’t] going to keep him around for long.” But unlike most of the soldiers in his platoon, Rice saw a method in the Army’s madness. “From an infantryman standpoint, we were doing our job for once,” he says. “We were actually going to towns, doing our assaults, raiding places.”

Before Bergdahl went missing, Rice says, his men had their hands tied. “We weren’t able to do ‘hard knocks’—when you hit a target and breach their house early in the morning or overnight. We would need a ridiculous amount of intel to get the green light to do that kind of thing. But if it was a mission to retrieve Bergdahl, it was an instant green light. It was always worded as ‘These people could have information on Bergdahl.’ But my speculation is that they were targets that we wanted to bring in anyway.”

Rice felt his men were now taking the fight to the enemy, rather than “just knocking on the door and asking to have some tea.” Before Bergdahl left, “we were walking through markets buying goats because we had nothing else to do.” During these searches for Bergdahl, “we had excuses to hit high-value targets or hit people of interest.”

“A lot of valuable intelligence was gathered,” Rice says, and Bergdahl was the excuse his commanders needed to do their jobs. “Leadership took the opportunity, and I stand 100 percent behind it.”

The #Bergdahl Lynch Mob

After being held hostage for five years, a pale and bald Sergeant Bergdahl emerged from the back of a militant’s Nissan, allegedly in the border province of Khost, and boarded an American Blackhawk helicopter. Within a day, about 8,000 miles to the west, five Taliban detainees (at least two of whom had been in leadership positions) boarded a U.S. C-17 military transport plane at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and were flown to Qatar, where they would be free but monitored and travel-restricted for a year. When National Security Adviser Susan Rice announced the swap as a triumph for America, further proof the U.S. Army doesn’t abandon its men, the frustrations of the soldiers who had searched for Bergdahl roiled social media.

In the fall of 2009, the Army had the men in Blackfoot Company sign nondisclosure agreements, requiring them to never talk about the Bergdahl affair. But as stories from Afghan War soldiers started showing up on Twitter and Facebook, six veterans of the 2nd Platoon, including Specialist Sutton, were recruited by Republican strategist Richard Grenell for a media tour. They were flown to New York last summer from Michigan, South Dakota, Texas, Washington and California and, says Sutton, put up in a cramped Manhattan hotel paid for by Fox News. They trashed Bergdahl, calling him a deserter first and foremost, but also, some said, a traitor, a sympathizer of America’s enemy and a coward.

Much of the mainstream political media jumped in gleefully, speculating about Bergdahl’s motives, his politics and his religion. They also opined on his parents’ politics and religious beliefs, his father’s “suspicious” beard, how frequently they talked to their son. And most important to the analysts of policy and politics, they talked about whether Bergdahl was “worth it.”

After those soldiers and their families went public, Bergdahl’s hometown of Hailey, Idaho, was swarmed, and the FBI was called in when Bergdahl’s family received multiple death threats. This spring, with each update about his case, including the recent news that he will face desertion and misbehavior-and-endangerment charges, the #Bergdahl lynch mob is roused again, overflowing with the righteous vengeance of those who want Bergdahl imprisoned for life, or worse. “The evidence shows right now that U.S. soldiers were killed searching for the man,” Bill O’Reilly said on his Fox News show in late March. That statement is not quite accurate. The full truth—that the Army sent infantrymen on dangerous missions to find a soldier it knew was no longer missing—is far more complicated, and confounding.

Forged in the political heat of TV news studios, the vitriolic descriptions of Bergdahl’s character and behavior do not match what those who knew him best say about him now. “He was a heck of a soldier,” says Bergdahl’s friend from 2nd Platoon. “He was odd. He was different, which is why the other guys didn’t like him.… He did meditating and Buddhist stuff and people thought it was weird. I’m weird. Everyone is weird in their own way.”

In politics and war, simple myths are more useful than complex realities. The soldiers who searched for Bergdahl did so without question, and in their selflessness, they called upon the military’s essential and sacred codes of honor. The families and small towns that lost men in those searches bear a powerful witness to the horror and confusion of America’s longest war. They deserve an honest accounting of what happened to their sons and why.

And as he prepares to defend himself against the charge that he caused their deaths, so does Bowe Bergdahl.

This story was updated to clarify that Qayum Karzai did not deliver, handle, or have knowledge of the video or ransom demands for Bowe Bergdahl. He helped deliver a letter from the prisoner to his parents. 

Did you get Fired and Replaced by a Foreigner?

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H1B Visa Cap is Suitable For:

Foreign students on F-1 OPT, F-1 CPT or STEM extension

Foreign professionals in specialty occupations, such as programmer analysts, physical therapists, accountants, database administrators, market research analysts, engineers, management analysts, graphic designers, pharmacists, financial analysts, and others with Bachelor’s or equivalent degree

Foreign nationals who have spent at least one year outside United States after reaching the 6-years limit on H1B, to come back and work in a specialty occupation

U.S. companies to employ qualified foreign nationals in jobs that require a bachelor’s degree and specialized skills

So this begs the question, just how deep is the collusion and are there recourses for people that were fired as you read on….

Senators seek probe of claims US workers fired, forced to train foreign replacement

A popular visa program allegedly is being misused by U.S. companies to lay off thousands of American workers and replace them with foreign labor.

And, adding insult to injury, many of the laid-off workers allegedly have been forced to train their replacements, in what one anonymous whistleblower called a “humiliating” experience.

The allegations have caught the attention of a bipartisan group of senators — including immigration hawk Sen. Jeff Sessions, R-Ala., and the No. 2 Senate Democrat, Illinois’ Dick Durbin — who are calling for a federal probe. A letter sent by 10 senators urging an investigation specifically cited reports of the firing and hiring practices at Southern California Edison, California’s second-largest utility. The incidents are concentrated in the IT field, and involve American workers being replaced by H-1B visa holders.

“A number of U.S. employers, including some large, well-known, publicly-traded corporations, have reportedly laid off thousands of American workers and replaced them with H-1B visa holders,” the senators wrote.

In the letter to Attorney General Eric Holder, Homeland Security Secretary Jeh Johnson, and Labor Secretary Thomas Perez, the senators urged the departments to “investigate the unacceptable replacement of American workers” to see whether laws were broken.

The H-1B program is supposed to be used to bring in, on a temporary basis, skilled workers with highly specialized skills not readily available in the U.S. They are often used in the technology sector to bring in engineers and computer programmers.

Further, U.S. employers can hire foreign workers for up to six years and must pay them the same rate they would pay other workers with similar qualifications, or the prevailing wage for that job and location, whichever is higher. This is done to prevent foreign workers from depressing U.S. wages and from being exploited.

But reports have surfaced that the replacements are happening at an alarming rate. And former Southern California Edison workers have complained to lawmakers that they were replaced by less-skilled workers at lower costs.

Anonymous workers who were displaced by the visa holders also submitted written testimonials to lawmakers detailing their firings. Several claimed they were forced to train their replacements, and threatened with losing their severance if they did not.

“We had no choice in this,” one anonymous worker who claimed to have been one of those let go from Southern California Edison, said in a letter. The worker described how when the two vendors were picked – Infosys and TCS, both major Indian companies – SCE employees were told to “sit with, video chat or do whatever was needed to teach them our systems.”

If they did not cooperate, according to the testimonial, “we would be fired and not receive a severance package.”

Another worker described this process as “humiliating.”

In a statement, Southern California Edison said it abides by the law and will cooperate with any investigation that concerns the issues mentioned in the senators’ letter.

The company explained that it’s reducing its information technology department from 1,400 to 860. Of those left, 97 percent are permanent California residents and 3 percent are on H-1B visas.

Southern California Edison said it’s contracting with IT vendors to fulfill certain contracts and that most of those workers are permanent U.S. residents and aren’t working under H-1B visas.

“By transitioning some IT operations to external vendors, along with SCE eliminating some customized functions it will no longer provide, the company will focus on making significant, strategic changes that can benefit our customers,” Southern California Edison’s emailed statement read.

But the senators, in their letter, raised several questions about how the replacements were being done. They said it appears the workers are often not employees of the U.S. company laying off workers – but are contractors working for foreign-owned IT consultants.

The H-1B program stipulates that applicants must have a valid “employer-employee relationship” – and the senators questioned whether that was the case here.

They also asked whether the companies “engaged in prohibited citizenship status discrimination” (against American citizens); and whether the visa petitions showed “any evidence of misrepresentation or fraud.”

Sessions said in a statement that the SCE allegations “ought to be the tipping point that finally compels Washington to take needed actions to protect American workers.”

The letter from senators follows a hearing last month by the Senate Judiciary Committee, which invited Southern California Edison to testify, though the company declined.

Ronil Hira, a professor at Howard University, said at the hearing that the utility outsourced work to two companies, and those companies employed H-1B staffers who were then trained by the employees they were replacing. “There could not be a clearer case of the H-1B program being used to harm American workers’ wages and working conditions,” Hira said.

Republican senators seeking the investigation are Sessions, Charles Grassley of Iowa, James Inhofe of Oklahoma, and Bill Cassidy and David Vitter of Louisiana.

Democratic senators seeking the investigation are Durbin, Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut, Sherrod Brown of Ohio and Claire McCaskill of Missouri.

Sen. Bernie Sanders, an independent from Vermont, also signed the letter.

ISIS Success Seen in Kansas

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John T. Booker: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know

 

Another U.S. citizen is accused of trying to perpetrate a terror attack on American soil in the name of ISIS. That man is 20-year-old Topeka, Kansas, resident John T. Booker who also likes to go by Muhammad Abdullah Hassan. Back in April 2014, Booker was first accused of having desires to carry out a terror attack in the U.S., after those accusations, his family told the media that he was in a mental health facility.

Here’s what you need to know:

1. He Wanted to Kill People With Power Using a Sword

According to the U.S. Attorney’s Office, Booker had planned to explode a car bomb at the Fort Riley army base in Kansas.This was a sting operation with the attorney’s office assuring the public there was never any real threat. He had rented a storage unit in Topeka that he used to store explosive devices. In the complaint, Booker allegedly told an FBI informant that he never intended to kill army privates but rather, people with power. He wanted to do this by using a sword or small gun. The documents state that two of Booker’s jihadist confidantes were FBI informants. He bragged to those informants about his “capture” by the FBI in 2014 for his terroristic threats. One of the FBI’s men on the inside posed as a “high ranking sheik” who wanted to commit a terrorist act in the U.S.

Booker 1

You can read the full complaint against Booker above.

2. He Had Been Scheduled to Begin His Basic Training in the Army on April 7, 2014

 

A Fox News report detailed that Hassan enlisted in the U.S. Army in February 2014 and was scheduled to begin basic training on April 7, 2014. Hassan was on a delayed entry program. According to army officials, he never displayed any anti-American sentiment during the recruitment process. He was discharged from the service last week when army officials learned of his plans. Hassan is being hunted by the FBI and the 902d Military Intelligence Group at Fort Leavenworth.

 

3. He Once Wrote on Facebook ‘I Am Going to Wage Jihad & Hope That I Die’

Booker 2

 

This photo was posted on Muhammad Abdullah Hassan’s Facebook on February 23 2014.

Through postings on Hassan’s Facebook page, beginning on February 23, he posted al-Qaida propaganda materials. There are also photos of Osama bin Laden and a video of the 9/11 mastermind reciting the Quran. On March 15, Hassan posted:

Oh those of the ummah of the Prophet Muhammad(S). I will soon be leaving you forever so goodbye! I am going to wage jihad and hope that i die. I want to be with my lord so bad that I cry but I will miss you guys I am not going to lie. I wish I could give you guys more but I am just a guy who is so very poor.

I am telling you I am so broke that my pockets are sore:) I cannot wait to go the Prophet Muhammad’s(S) door and prank Isa bin Maryam and party so hard that it will rock Jannah to its core. Only Allah knows what the future has in store so that should make you fear Allah much much more.

Booker 3

4. He Volunteered for a Children-in-Need Charity in Topeka in 2012

Booker 4

According to his Facebook page Muhammad Abdullah Hassan from Topeka, Kansas, he went to Topeka West High and the Flint Hills Job Corps. His favorite restaurant is the Orange Leaf Topeka.

John Thomas Booker Jr. graduated from Topeka West High School in 2012. A Topeka Capital Journal article from December 2011, details a group of Topeka West Army Jr. ROTC cadets who were volunteering for a children-in-need program. A Cadet Master Sgt. John Thomas Booker Jr. told the paper how much he enjoyed helping the less fortunate saying “I can’t have a good Christmas if they don’t.”

5. Yesterday, a Convicted Wisconsin Pedophile Was Arrested for Trying to Join ISIS

 

This comes a day after authorities announced the arrest of Joshua Ray Van Haften, a Wisconsin man who is accused of going to Turkey with the goal of joining ISIS in Syria. The Justice Department says 34-year-old Joshua Ray Van Haften spent over a year in Egypt touring the country’s military sites and later traveled to Turkey to find “brothers” who would funnel him into Iraq or Syria. Agents allege that he frequently spoke to his roommates about jihad and once lectured an 11-year-old boy about the coming World War III.

Federal agents arrested Van Haften on April 8 at Chicago’s O’Hare airport after he arrived “in custody” on a flight from Turkey. “We hope this arrest will serve as a deterrent for others who may be terrorist sympathizers here in Wisconsin, across the nation or abroad,” said FBI Special Agent in Charge Robert J. Shields Jr. “They will be held accountable for support of terrorism against our citizens and our international partners.”

Who is hosting the Hacker’s Servers?

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State report reveal 130 compromised websites used in travel-related watering hole attacks

By Bill Gertz

One hundred thirty websites are hosting malicious software on their websites in what the State Department is calling a sophisticated Russian cyber spying operation, according to security analysts.
“These websites include news services, foreign embassies and local businesses that were compromised by threat actors to serve as ‘watering holes,’” according to a report by the Overseas Security Advisory Council distributed this week. A watering hole is a hijacked website used by cyber attackers to deliver malware to unsuspecting victims.
“For example, users may navigate to one of these malicious sites with the intent of checking travel requirements or the status of a visa application and unknowingly download the embedded malware onto their computers,” the report said.
The report identified the locations of the compromised websites as the United States, South America, Europe, Asia, India and Australia.
The report appears to indicate Russian intelligence may be behind the operations. Also, none of the compromised websites are in China, an indication that Beijing’s hackers could be involved.
A total of 15 of the 130 websites used for watering holes were government embassy websites located in Washington, DC, and two were involved in passport and visa services and others are offering travel services.
The embassy targeting suggests some or all of the operations are linked to foreign intelligence services that are breaking into the networks as part of tracking and monitoring of foreign travel.
Another possibility is that the operation are part of information warfare efforts designed to influence policies and publics. Both Russia and China are engaged in significant strategic information operations targeting foreign governments and the private sector.
“The threat actors are likely attempting to gather information from entities with vested interests in international operations,” the report said. “Identified victims in this sector include embassies, defense industrial base groups, and think tanks.”
The report, based on data provided by the security firm iSight Partners, says the watering holes are likely part of cyber espionage operations.
“Analysis indicates this campaign has a global reach, continuing to target users of identified intelligence value long after the initial infection,” the report says.
The compromised websites are increasingly functioning as indirect malicious software attack tools. The compromised sites represent a different method than widely used spear phishing – the use of emails to trigger malicious software downloads.
“Rather than send a malicious email directly to a target of interest, threat actors research and compromise a high-traffic website that will likely be visited by numerous targets of interest,” the report said.
“Watering holes are effective, as they often exploit existing vulnerabilities on a user’s machine,” the report said. More sophisticated threat actors have been observed employing zero-day exploits – those which are previously unknown and evade antivirus and intrusion detection systems (IDS) to successfully compromise victims. Zero-days were used in the widely publicized Forbes.com watering hole in late 2014.”
The hijacked websites appear to be part of a campaign spanning 26 upper-level Internet domains and include affiliations with 21 nations and the European Union.
According to iSight, evidence suggests the campaign is “likely tied to cyber espionage operations with a nexus to the Russian Federation.”
The compromised government websites included those from Afghanistan, Iraq, Jordan, Namibia, Qatar and Zambia. The report recommended not visiting any of those embassy websites or risk being infected with malware.
Technically, the attackers arranged for computer users who visited the compromised websites to be infected with an embedded JavaScript that redirected users to a Google-shortened URL, and then on to websites the mapped their computer systems. This “profiling” is used by cyber spies to identify valuable targets and control that specific victims who are injected with a malware payload.
The profiling is used to identify targets that will produce “high intelligence value” returns, indicating sophisticated cyber spies are involved. The infection also employed a technique called the use of “evercookie” a derivative of the small files that are inserted on computers and can be used by remote servers to tailor information, such as advertisements, to specific user.
While normal cookies can be easily removed, evercookies store data in multiple locations, a method that makes them extremely difficult to find and removed. The use of evercookies also permits long-term exploitation by cyber attackers.
To counter watering hole attacks, users should make sure system and software security updates are applied, and avoid visiting suspicious websites.
In particular, network monitoring should be used to spot unusual activities, specifically geared toward attacks that exploit zero-day vulnerabilities.
“The threat of watering holes is likely to remain high, given their increasing popularity and success in the last year,” the report said.
The report, “Compromised Global Websites Target Unsuspecting Travelers,” was produced by OSAC’s Research & Information Support Center (RISC). It is available for OSAC members at osac.gov. *** But there is more.

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Hacking attacks that destroy rather than steal data or that manipulate equipment are far more prevalent than widely believed, according to a survey of critical infrastructure organizations throughout North and South America.

The poll by the Organization of American States, released on Tuesday, found that 40 percent of respondents had battled attempts to shut down their computer networks, 44 percent had dealt with bids to delete files and 54 percent had encountered “attempts to manipulate” their equipment through a control system.

Those figures are all the more remarkable because only 60 percent of the 575 respondents said they had detected any attempts to steal data, long considered the predominant hacking goal.

By far the best known destructive hacking attack on U.S. soil was the electronic assault last year on Sony Corp’s Sony Pictures Entertainment, which wiped data from the Hollywood fixture’s machines and rendered some of its internal networks inoperable.

The outcry over that breach, joined by President Barack Obama, heightened the perception that such destruction was an unusual extreme, albeit one that has been anticipated for years.

Destruction of data presents little technical challenge compared with penetrating a network, so the infrequency of publicized incidents has often been ascribed to a lack of motive for attackers.

Now that hacking tools are being spread more widely, however, more criminals, activists, spies and business rivals are experimenting with such methods.

“Everyone got outraged over Sony, but far more vulnerable are these services we depend on day to day,” said Adam Blackwell, secretary of multidimensional security at the Washington, D.C.-based group of 35 nations.

The survey went to companies and agencies in crucial sectors as defined by the OAS members. Almost a third of the respondents were public entities, with communications, security and finance being the most heavily represented industries.

The questions did not delve into detail, leaving the amount of typical losses from breaches and the motivations of suspected attackers as matters for speculation. The survey-takers were not asked whether the attempted hacks succeeded, and some attacks could have been carried off without their knowledge.

The survey did allow anonymous participants to provide a narrative of key events if they chose, although those will not be published.

Blackwell told Reuters that one story of destruction involved a financial institution. Hackers stole money from accounts and then deleted records to make it difficult to reconstruct which customers were entitled to what funds.

“That was a really important component” of the attack, Blackwell said.

In another case, thieves manipulated equipment in order to divert resources from a company in the petroleum industry.

Blackwell said that flat security budgets and uneven government involvement could mean that criminal thefts of resources, such as power, could force blackouts or other safety threats.

At security company Trend Micro Inc. , which compiled the report for the OAS, Chief Cybersecurity Officer Tom Kellermann said additional destructive or physical attacks came from political activists and organized crime groups.

“We are facing a clear and present danger where we have non-state actors willing to destroy things,” he said. “This is going to be the year we suffer a catastrophe in the hemisphere, and when you will see kinetic response to a threat actor.”

So-called “ransomware,” which encrypts data files and demands payment be sent to remote hackers, could also have been interpreted as destructive, since it often leaves information unrecoverable.

A spokesman for the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, SY Lee, said the department did not keep statistics on how often critical U.S. institutions are attacked or see destructive software and would not “speculate” on whether 4 out of 10 seeing deletion attempts would be alarming.

U.S. political leaders cite attacks on critical infrastructure as one of their greatest fears, and concerns about protecting essential manufacturers and service providers drove a recent executive order and proposed legislation to encourage greater information-sharing about threats between the private sector and government.

Yet actual destructive attacks or manipulation of equipment are infrequently revealed. That is in part because breach-disclosure laws in more than 40 states center on the potential risks to consumers from the theft of personal information, as with hacks of retailers including Home Depot Inc and Target Corp.

Under Securities and Exchange Commission guidelines, publicly traded companies must disclose breaches with a potential material financial impact, but many corporations can argue that even deletion of internal databases, theft and manipulation of equipment are not material.

Much more is occurring at vital facilities behind the scenes, and that is borne out by the OAS report, said Chris Blask, who chairs the public-private Information Sharing and Analysis Center for cybersecurity issues with the industrial control systems that automate power, manufacturing and other processes.

“I don’t think the public has any appreciation for the scale of attacks against industrial systems,” Blask said. “This happens all the time.”