Mark Frerichs is a 58-year-old American civilian contractor and a former Navy diver. He was abducted in Kabul last year, right around the time the Trump administration was finalizing the deal that would end the United States’s troop presence in Afghanistan after 20 years.
His initial captors reportedly turned him over to the shadowy Haqqani network, a group on the State Department’s list of terrorist organizations, and it’s believed that the Taliban took custody of him sometime last year.
Frerichs’s family is worried that with U.S. troops now beating a hasty retreat from Afghanistan, the efforts to free the Navy veteran may fall by the wayside.
“This puts a time stamp on Mark. … We have 150 days to get him home or our leverage is gone,” his sister Charlene Cakora told CNN last month after President Joe Biden announced the Sept. 11 deadline to complete the withdrawal of U.S. and coalition forces.
“President Biden, I know you want the troops home, but what if Mark was your son?” she said.
The U.S. point man in negotiations with the Taliban, Zalmay Khalilzad, said he has raised the issue with the Taliban since Frerichs first went missing last year, but so far, efforts to secure his release have failed.
The Feb. 29, 2020, agreement between the U.S. and the Taliban mandated a swap of thousands of prisoners with the Afghan government, but Frerichs, whose whereabouts at the time were still uncertain, was not part of the deal.
The case has some parallels to that of Army Pvt. Bowe Bergdahl, whom the Taliban held for five years until former President Barack Obama engineered his release in 2014 by trading five high-level Taliban prisoners in Guantanamo for his freedom.
However, Frerichs was kidnapped while living and working in Kabul as an engineer on construction projects. Bergdahl abandoned his post and walked into the hands of the Taliban.
In 2017, Bergdahl was dishonorably discharged from the Army after pleading guilty to desertion and misbehavior before the enemy.
The charges carried a possible life sentence, but Bergdahl got off with a reduction of rank and a forfeiture of pay.
The case still rankles Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, a decorated Green Beret who led the team that hunted for Bergdahl, a search that left several U.S. troops with life-altering wounds.
Waltz said Bergdahl wasn’t just a deserter. He was a defector.
“I know his version is that he abandoned his post and was captured by the Taliban. But I can tell you our understanding out there on the ground is that he defected to the Taliban. He actively went to them. That’s something I’m very familiar with,” Waltz said.
“We knew that he had stacked up his gear, his weapon, left it all behind — the emails to his father denouncing the United States. Yet we still pulled out all the stops, everything we could to find him,” he added.
Waltz contrasts the massive effort to secure Bergdahl’s freedom with the ineffective diplomatic efforts on behalf of Frerichs.
“It’s a great point to contrast that and the trade that we made for [Bergdahl], despite knowing what he did, with Mark Frerichs, Navy veteran who was taken hostage in the middle of the negotiations,” Waltz said in an interview with the Washington Examiner.
Waltz faults Khalilzad for being too anxious to conclude negotiations with the Taliban successfully and overly concerned that insisting on Frerichs’s release could kill the deal.
“That agreement should have never been signed in February of 2020 while the Haqqani network and Taliban were holding an American hostage,” he said.
The Taliban have learned a valuable lesson dealing with the U.S. over the years, whether negotiating a withdrawal plan or a prisoner swap. If they hold out long enough and the U.S. wants it bad enough, eventually, the U.S. will pay the price.
The Taliban have offered to release Frerichs in return for Bashir Noorzai, an Afghan drug kingpin, who was convicted and sentenced in a U.S. court for drug trafficking, according to an unnamed official quoted by the Washington Post.
So far, the U.S. has rejected the swap.
The U.S. is offering a $5 million reward for “information leading to the location, recovery, and return” of Frerichs under its Rewards for Justice program.
But Waltz, who is in touch with the Frerichs family and is advocating on its behalf, said that with U.S. troops now solely focused on packing up and leaving, the prospect of a rescue mission by U.S. commandos is fading fast.
“To now see us give away all of our leverage to get him out — the ability to rescue him, should we be able to find where he’s located — I can tell you the family is just beside themselves,” Waltz said.
“As someone who’s gone through survival training, one of the most devastating things your captors tell you is your country doesn’t care about you, they’re abandoning you — that you’re a lost cause,” he said. “It’s just utterly devastating.”
For Bergdahl, whom former President Donald Trump labeled a “traitor,” the U.S. gave up five high-value detainees.
“I would love to have a follow-up on what those five Taliban, the most senior of the kind of cabinet officials that we had in Guantanamo at the time, are doing today,” Waltz said.
“My understanding is they are actively recruiting, fundraising, and supporting the insurgency.”
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
