The worst two and a half years of Mark Frerichs’s life began with a fatal car crash. On a snow-and-ice-covered road north of Kabul on January 31, 2020, an oncoming car drifted over the centerline and hit his vehicle head-on. After Frerichs regained consciousness, he saw that his driver and bodyguard, along with the occupants of the other vehicle, were dead. A group of young men with handheld radios pulled Frerichs, a fifty-seven-year-old American civil engineer and Navy veteran, from the wreck and dragged him to a waiting Toyota Corolla. They stuffed him in the trunk, ripped off his boots, locked him inside, and sped off, tossing him violently as the car careened down rutted dirt tracks. After what felt like several hours, the driver stopped the vehicle, pulled Frerichs from the trunk, and forced him at gunpoint to change into a shalwar kameez, the local garb of a long tunic and pants. As Frerichs did so, the driver glared at him. “Taliban good, America no good,” the young man said. “That’s when I knew,” Frerichs recalled.
After he spent what he thought was two days in the trunk, his captors brought him to a compound with a dry well. Fearing he would be killed, Frerichs attacked and briefly overpowered one of his kidnappers. “I thought they would drop me in the hole and leave me for dead,” he recalled. “I’m gonna go out with a bang. I’m not gonna let these punk kids do me like this.” A second kidnapper appeared, threw Frerichs to the ground, and beat him. He spent the next several days in two bunkers: one was connected to the well, the other was beneath a mosque.
Days later, after another jarring ride in a trunk, he arrived in a small city and was locked alone in a room with his belongings. Frerichs found his Nokia phone, powered it on, and for a brief hopeful moment had a signal. “The phone fired up and just got connectivity,” Frerichs recalled. A guard burst through the door, turned off the phone, and beat him again. U.S. Special Operations Forces, who had been searching for Frerichs, picked up the signal and conducted a rescue raid in the city of Khost, about twenty miles from the Pakistani border. When Navy SEALs arrived, Frerichs was gone; he had already been smuggled into Pakistan—or to a Taliban safe house in the porous border region—by a new set of guards.
Frerichs’s new captors were likely members of the Haqqani network, a powerful Taliban faction that had turned kidnapping into a lucrative wartime enterprise. Over fifteen years, the Haqqanis and other Taliban factions abducted more than a hundred foreigners, including aid workers, journalists, Korean missionaries, Canadian tourists, the American soldier Bowe Bergdahl, and, lastly, Frerichs.
Once hostages were taken over the border into the remote tribal areas of western Pakistan, the captors and their captives would be outside of the reach of U.S. forces because Pakistan barred them from conducting military operations on its soil. European and Asian governments, desperate to save their citizens’ lives, paid the Taliban millions in ransoms. And, as the U.S. tried to wind down the war, it ignored an official policy against making concessions to hostage-takers and freed Taliban leaders from Guantánamo Bay.
After several weeks of living in chains in a dirt-floor cell, Frerichs heard good news from his Taliban captors. His guards told him that the U.S. was on the verge of finalizing a peace settlement with the Taliban to end America’s longest war. The message filled Frerichs with hope. “I was thinking, Maybe a month at the max I’d be here and they’d get things sorted out,” he recalled.
As Frerichs waited for his release, President Trump’s Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, Zalmay Khalilzad, finalized the settlement with the Taliban’s lead negotiator, Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, in Doha, Qatar. Prisoner exchanges were a priority for the insurgents, and Baradar and Khalilzad agreed to an unprecedented swap: the Afghan government, which the Taliban had barred from the talks, would release five thousand Taliban fighters, including those convicted of murder and kidnappings, in exchange for one thousand Afghan-government soldiers and police. On February 29, 2020, with Secretary of State Mike Pompeo joining as a witness at the ceremony, Khalilzad signed the agreement and set the course for a full American-troop withdrawal from Afghanistan.
Neither Khalilzad nor Pompeo had requested Frerichs’s release. Three days after the signing, Trump spoke with Baradar by phone in what remains the only conversation between an American President and a Taliban leader. Trump, it seems, never mentioned Frerichs, either. “We had actually a very good talk,” the President told reporters at the White House.
Representatives for Trump and Pompeo did not respond to requests for comment. In written responses to questions, Khalilzad said that he knew Frerichs had been kidnapped but did not know that the Taliban were holding him when he negotiated in Doha. “Our intelligence and law enforcement sources believed that he had been kidnapped by a criminal group involved in narcotics,” Khalilzad said. “It was weeks after the signing of the agreement that we came to believe that the Haqqani faction of the Taliban had ‘acquired’ Mark from the criminal gang by perhaps paying for him.”
A former senior U.S. national-security official who spoke on the condition of anonymity questioned Khalilzad’s claim that he did not know of Frerichs’s abduction by the Taliban. “We knew as of late January that he had been kidnapped. It was apparent to many in the U.S. government that he was being held by the Haqqanis before the Doha deal was signed,” the official said. “It should have been a condition of our signing that agreement to have him freed.” The official said that they believed that Khalilzad was so eager to sign the deal that he did not raise Frerichs’s case. “It’s a travesty.”
Khalilzad dismissed the criticism. “This is incorrect. U.S. senior officials including myself did not know that the Taliban had Mark, when the Doha agreement was signed,” he said. “Had it been known, perhaps the President and the Secretary of State would not have gone forward with signing the agreement.”
Christopher Miller, who served as the last Secretary of Defense in the Trump Administration and was the Senior Director for Counterterrorism at the National Security Council when Frerichs was kidnapped, told me that Frerichs’s abduction and the SEALs’ attempted rescue were reported across federal agencies, including the State Department. Khalilzad, as the top U.S. official in Afghanistan, knew, or should have known, about Frerichs’s plight. “I’m sure there was disagreement at the time of the intelligence that a criminal element had taken him, but it was irrelevant because we knew he would end up with the Taliban.”
After the Biden Administration’s chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in August, 2021, Frerichs was abandoned once again. All told, the last American hostage of the U.S.’s longest war spent more than two and a half years in captivity before being freed in a prisoner swap last September. “I felt like collateral damage,” Frerichs told me. “I didn’t think I was going to get out of there.”
As winter turned into spring outside the mud hut, Frerichs’s hope of being released faded. Raised in Lombard, Illinois, a working-class suburb of Chicago, Frerichs had begun performing magic for his family as a young child. They’ve called him Magic Mark ever since. With no money or plans for college, he had enlisted in the U.S. Navy, where he deployed on the aircraft carrier U.S.S. America and later passed the Navy’s rigorous months-long diving school. After his service in the military, he spent two decades working as a journeyman contractor and builder. In 2005, Frerichs left the U.S. for government-contract work in Iraq; soon after, the Bush Administration increased troop numbers. In Baghdad, Frerichs managed multimillion-dollar projects at the American Embassy and renovations of Iraqi schools, medical clinics, and mosques.
In 2009, he was back home in Illinois, and, as the Great Recession sunk his construction business, he journeyed to Afghanistan, where Western aid money was flowing in tandem with the Obama Administration’s vast troop surge. In Kabul, Frerichs jogged and did yoga to stay in shape. He also started doing magic again. Walking through a park in the heart of the city, he bought two white doves for a magic show he had begun performing on his days off. When Kabulis left him donations, he gave the money to local street children. But, after Afghan security officials told him the show was attracting too much attention, he shut it down immediately. Mindful of his safety, he never lived in one neighborhood for more than a few months. A decade after arriving in the country, Frerichs was running a sprawling construction company that employed hundreds of Afghan construction workers. When he was abducted, he had accumulated millions of dollars’ worth of equipment and had been thinking about selling his company and leaving Afghanistan to retire.
In captivity, Frerichs lived cut off from the outside world, trapped in a twelve-foot-by-fifteen-foot room with a small opening in the exterior wall, which let in a bit of air and enough light to discern if it was night or day. His bed consisted of two small donkey blankets on the dirt floor. Barefoot, with his wrists and ankles in chains, he thought about Harry Houdini and tried to continue his daily yoga practice. There were no books or radio, and, other than a driver who spoke some English, there was no one to talk to. “Just alone with my thoughts for thirty-two months,” Frerichs said. To stay alert, he held conversations with himself. To keep track of the days, he balled up pieces of toilet paper and hid them under his blanket. “Count thirty, I knew it was a month.” Every meal was bread and water; once a week, his guards brought him a flap of mutton fat and skin that he deemed inedible and tossed in a hole in the dirt that served as his latrine. His health steadily declined. (A Taliban spokesman said that Frerichs was fed lahndi, a dried, salt-cured meat that is an Afghan delicacy.)
After his guards looked him up on LinkedIn and saw he had been a Navy diver, they started calling him “commando” and harassing him. Boys in their late teens and early twenties, they took pleasure in charging in, tossing his blankets, and searching for weapons they accused him of stashing. Omar, the largest guard and the only one to introduce himself by name, relished in beating him. “He had no problem kicking me in the head if I didn’t comply,” Frerichs recalled. On several occasions, they came in the night, told him he would be killed, and conducted a mock execution, blindfolding him and firing a blank round near his head. “They called themselves soldiers, but I beg to differ. I was more afraid of being hit with an accidental round than with a purposeful round,” he told me. (The Taliban spokesman acknowledged possible rough treatment when Frerichs was captured but said that beating prisoners was prohibited.)
The driver who spoke English was the most humane. From him, in the spring of 2020, Frerichs first learned about COVID-19 and that a hundred thousand Americans had died in the first months of the pandemic. “I thought it was just propaganda,” Frerichs recalled. “In hindsight, I guess he was telling the truth.”
After more than a year in captivity, Frerichs’s guards moved him before dawn one day into the back seat of an S.U.V., his head and body wrapped in a thin black cloth. Through it, he could see the landscape whizzing by, mile after mile of what he soon realized were poppy fields; the rows of white flowers that helped fund the Taliban’s military operations stretched into the distance. At one point, his guards pulled off the road and parked near a stream. They left him chained in the S.U.V. while they passed the afternoon firing off rounds from a .50-calibre machine gun, taking selfies, and eating watermelons that grew on the edges of the poppy fields. Later that night, they drove him several hours to a different village and locked him in a second dirt-floor cell, just as isolated as the first. To this day, he doesn’t know where he was held.
He had given up on yoga by then. With his ankles chained just a half-stride apart, his legs had become too atrophied. He no longer counted the days; collecting the little balls of toilet paper had grown too depressing. Now Frerichs measured time by the changing seasons. “Not knowing what day it is, not knowing what month it is, not knowing what time it is—the days, one just merges into the next,” he told me. One of the few breaks in the monotony was filming proof-of-life videos. The script was always the same. First, Frerichs identified himself. Second, he described a recent event to prove that he was still alive. In a video recorded in early 2021, he cited the January 6th insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, videos of which his guards had shown him on their phones. Like first-year film students, they directed him through endless takes and retakes to get it just right. They attempted to do this a half-dozen times, he said.
One of the U.S. officials who saw the videos was Ambassador Roger Carstens, the State Department’s Special Presidential Envoy for Hostage Affairs—a position that was created by President Obama to help bring American captives home, and was kept in place by President Trump. After two videos recorded early in Frerichs’s captivity, his captors had him add a new line. He stated that he would be freed in exchange for Haji Bashir Noorzai, a Taliban financier and tribal leader who was serving a life sentence in a U.S. federal prison for drug trafficking.
Noorzai was one of the many Afghan warlords and opium traffickers that the U.S. government had relied on as allies and paid C.I.A. assets after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, in 2001. He had flown to New York in 2005 with assurances of amnesty from U.S. authorities if he continued coöperating as an informant. After eleven days of questioning in a Manhattan hotel room and infighting among federal agencies about whether to recruit him or indict him, Noorzai was arrested on drug-trafficking charges, and later convicted and sentenced to life in prison. In 2013, Lieutenant Colonel Jason Amerine, a U.S. Army officer who led a Pentagon effort to bring home Bowe Bergdahl, raised Noorzai’s name as part of a possible trade. Ultimately, the Obama Administration released five high-ranking Taliban officials in exchange for Bergdahl, hoping it might aid peace negotiations. The Taliban continued fighting, but didn’t forget Noorzai. “Once it was within the realm of the possible, the Taliban kept asking for him,” Amerine said.
When Frerichs’s guards told him that Noorzai had been in a U.S. prison for more than fifteen years, he assumed the worst. “I figured if they had him that long, they wouldn’t be in any hurry to let him go.” He wasn’t wrong.
Khalilzad confirmed that the Taliban offered to free Frerichs in exchange for Noorzai. He said that Mullah Abdul Ghani Baradar, a Taliban co-founder and their senior negotiator in Doha, made the offer. “Many weeks after the signing of the Doha Agreement, Mullah Baradar informed me that the Talibs had located Mark, pried him away from the criminal gang and that he was in good health,” Khalilzad said. “I then pressed for his immediate and unconditional release.” When the Taliban offered to free Frerichs in exchange for Noorzai, the Administration declined the offer. “The Trump Administration rejected exchanging Haji Bashir for Mark,” Khalilzad said.
Two months after Biden took office, the Taliban made the same offer: Noorzai for Frerichs. The new Administration did not agree to the proposed prisoner swap. A full year after Frerichs had been taken captive, his case continued to linger.
Frerichs’s younger sister Charlene had lost her patience. Since the day that two F.B.I. agents had arrived at her door and told her Mark was missing, she had been the family’s point person with the federal government. Eric Lebson, a former national-security official who works pro bono with the families of hostages, helped her navigate Capitol Hill and keep her brother’s case alive in the press. In Senator Tammy Duckworth, of Illinois, they found their most powerful ally against both Administrations’ inaction. During the Trump Administration, Duckworth had seen Khalilzad as unable or unwilling to brief her on Frerichs’s case. “I was going through the process of asking and not getting a response,” Duckworth told me. “I said, ‘This is not acceptable.’ ” The Biden Administration was more responsive, but calls with Secretary of State Antony Blinken; the national-security adviser, Jake Sullivan; and the White House chief of staff, Ron Klain, left Duckworth with the impression that Frerichs’s case would not be prioritized without her intervention. In an interview, Duckworth told me, “My job was to keep pushing, pushing, pushing, until they get tired of Senator Duckworth asking about this.”
Following an Oval Office meeting in April 2021 about hate crimes against Asian Americans, Duckworth asked to speak alone with Biden. For the first time, she discussed the Noorzai trade with Biden directly. “He took me aside, and I was able to plead my case with him then. The President was very engaged,” she told me. She argued that Noorzai “was not a danger to America and someone who was likely going to die in prison.” Still, Frerichs’s case dragged on.
After the Taliban seized Kabul on August 15, 2021, Frerichs’s guards cheered in triumph, and he wondered if there would be anyone from the U.S. government left to retrieve him. “I kept asking if the embassy was closed,” he recalled. He again assumed that he was doomed. The totality of the defeat stunned him. “It showed me what a waste it all was,” he said. “A waste of resources and a waste of time. Twenty years and it accomplished very little. I think most of the American public forgot why we were even there.”
Six months later, in March, 2022, I received a proof-of-life video of Frerichs—the first to be made public in the more than two years of his captivity—from a source in Afghanistan and wrote a story for The New Yorker about his languishing case. The video showed Frerichs in ill health, breathing shallowly, and pleading for his life.
Duckworth met with Attorney General Merrick Garland, who told her that, though he could not support the trade as the nation’s top law-enforcement official, he would adhere to a decision by the President to free Noorzai. “He was incredibly gracious and thoughtful,” Duckworth said. “The Department of Justice could not recommend a swap, but to have a conversation with him, where he understood the uniqueness of this situation, was very helpful.” Several weeks later, the President finally approved the exchange and the State Department began negotiating the details with the Taliban, a process that would last through the summer of 2022.
Nearly a decade after he proposed swapping Noorzai for an American hostage, Jason Amerine said he supported the prisoner swap that freed the convicted drug trafficker. “Any of our warlord allies could have been arrested,” Amerine said. “Practically all of them were involved in illicit trade, in illegal activities.” He added, “It would be an overstatement to say that putting Noorzai in prison cost us the war, but it was emblematic of a lot of decisions that cost us the war.”
After direct talks about the trade finally commenced, Frerichs’s captors moved him, in a blacked-out S.U.V., to a series of makeshift cells with boarded-up windows in various houses on the outskirts of Kabul. When he arrived, Frerichs took his first shower in more than two years. “It was fantastic,” he recalled. “I didn’t care that it was cold.” His hair was matted and tangled. His body was crusted over with a layer of grime so thick it felt like sandpaper, and the water ran off him in rivulets.
To make it appear that he had been well-treated, the Taliban brought him an exercise bike, dumbbells, rotisserie chickens, and, for the first time in more than two years, took off his chains. He was also given a selection of navy-blue polo shirts to change into, which were embroidered with titles like “Diplomatic Security Team” and “Instructor: Anti-Terrorism School,” apparently left behind at the U.S. embassy. Next came multivitamins and American products that had been pilfered, he assumed, from abandoned military bases: peanut butter, protein shakes, energy bars, energy drinks. As his captors worked to hide two years of abuse and neglect, he read the food labels for entertainment, and listened for hours each day to a local boy selling ice cream from a pushcart, a ritual announced with a toy megaphone that played just one song, over and over: “Happy birthday to you . . . happy birthday to you . . .”
As his release approached, Frerichs grew rebellious. On his final night in Kabul, his captors locked him in a tiny bathroom, where he slept on the floor under a thin blanket. In the morning, they cut his hair and trimmed his beard, but, when they presented him with a spotless new shalwar kameez, he refused it. “I knew at that point they wouldn’t hit me anywhere that would leave marks. I said, ‘Fuck you and your clothes, I’m wearing these nasty clothes to show how I’ve been treated.’ ”
A negotiation ensued. Frerichs tried to keep one of the embroidered polo shirts as a memento. But his captors insisted he wear the shalwar kameez, and didn’t like the appearance of the dark shirt underneath. Eventually, Frerichs acceded to their fashion dictates: a shalwar kameez, a cheap blue sport coat, and his first pair of sneakers in years, that were two sizes too big. They blindfolded him, drove him to Kabul’s airport, took a photo of him with two Taliban commandos, and handed him to a U.S. government official who walked Frerichs to a cargo plane where Ambassador Roger Carstens was waiting for him. “Noorzai went off, and Mark came on,” said Carstens.
Frerichs appeared frail at first. “I got to witness him return to life,” Carstens told me. “Blood was flowing back into his face, his body, his limbs. I’ve never seen that before—never seen someone go from maybe not quite shock to seeming to become more animated every minute over a period of hours.” Frerichs relished every moment. “The best treat was when I got on the plane, they handed me a duffelbag with all kinds of clothes I would actually wear. Apparently they knew a lot about me,” he said. He changed into the Army-green sweatshirt Carstens had brought him, looked down at the word “Freedom” on the front, and flashed Carstens a giant smile.
The euphoria of Frerichs’s first moments back home—when the F.B.I. and the Chicago police whisked him, his sister Charlene, and her husband, Chris, off the tarmac at O’Hare in a private motorcade—has given way to the more prosaic challenges of starting over. All of Frerichs’s personal identification and the savings that he hoped to retire with were looted from his company in Kabul. Without a driver’s license or passport, he couldn’t vote in November’s elections. “It’s like my house burned down, and I’m trying to piece the records back together,” he told me. Readjusting to American culture after thirteen years has been “kinda rough,” he admitted. “I’ve never seen people so polarized and talking about politics so much . . . it seems contrived. It doesn’t seem organic,” he said.
Frerichs jokes about his P.T.S.D., but, when he goes out to eat now, he sits with his back to the wall. He wants to retire, but, with his life savings gone, his options are limited. He’s been staying with friends and family, and has been meditating, focussed on regaining his health. He is running and doing yoga again, but the years in chains left his arms weak. “It’s been three months, and it feels like they’re still on my wrists,” he told me. “It’s easy to say now it wasn’t that bad because it’s over. Going through it, not knowing day to day, is it going to be another week, another year? That’s the toughest part.”
There is also kindness. His father gave him a mountain bike, which he rode to see old friends who still live in the neighborhood. One of his high-school buddies works at a car dealership, which offered to donate him a car. At the dentist, the office manager recognized Frerichs from a local-news broadcast and refused to let him pay for the visit. Frerichs has even reunited with his girlfriend from junior high school, whom he last dated when he was twelve years old. “We reacclimated very quickly,” he said.
About the U.S. government, Frerichs and his family feel a swirl of conflicting emotions. Of course, Frerichs said, he is grateful to be alive and home. “You can’t argue with results,” he told me. “I wish it would have been expedited.” Frerichs sees both himself and Noorzai as collateral damage in the same larger game. “He was a C.I.A. operative. That tells you everything,” Frerichs said. “We’re all just flavor of the month.”
Charlene and her husband, Chris Cakora, are also grateful and relieved, but their ordeal is still raw and compounded by their brother’s testimony of trauma, torture, and abuse. For those in government who had the power to free him earlier, they have inescapable questions: Why was their brother’s safety ignored for so long, and what for?
Among all the officials they dealt with directly, they said Khalilzad, whom they spoke with on several calls between April, 2020, and January, 2021, stood out for his lack of concern. “Out of all people, Zal should have known how Mark was being treated,” Charlene said. “He’s the expert on all of this and didn’t care.” Khalilzad said that, after the signing of the Doha accord, he had repeatedly pressured Mullah Baradar, the Taliban negotiator, and took credit for Frerichs’s eventual release. “Maybe I’m not a good hand-holder, but I can tell you that, ultimately, it was my effort, persistence, and ceaseless ‘pestering’ of Mullah Baradar that finally brought our hoped-for outcome,” he said.
Charlene flatly rejected Khalilzad’s claim. “For Zal to claim he is responsible for getting Mark home is an incredible amount of hubris,” she said. “It ignores the fact he was aware of Mark’s kidnapping and refused to raise it with the Taliban in the critical month prior to signing the peace accord. It ignores the fact that he had to be prodded to even raise it with the Taliban after signing the peace accord, when he was facilitating the release of thousands of Afghan prisoners.”
Charlene and Chris said that, when the F.B.I. shared proof-of-life videos with them in early 2021, agents told them not to discuss them with anyone, and that going public, in fact, could cause the kidnappers to harm Mark. “They said it’s a privilege to see these—‘for your eyes only.’ We knew we could screw up any moment and derail the project,” Charlene said. In hindsight, there seemed to be little U.S. government effort to free Frerichs for more than two years. In the end, what saved his life was publicity and the persistence of a handful of people with the power to influence the President.
Afghanistan is still on Frerichs’s mind. What gets him out of bed each day now, he said, is a sense of responsibility he feels for the Afghans who worked for him and whom he had sponsored, prior to his abduction, to legally immigrate to the U.S. Roughly a dozen workers were not approved for visas because, when they needed him to verify their paperwork, he was a hostage. They call and write to him, telling him that their families live in fear of Taliban reprisals. “They’re just terrified,” Frerichs said. “Brave people, but some of them sound on the phone like I sounded on that last video, inches away from death,” he said. “I can’t just abandon them like that.”
Last December, Congress failed to pass the Afghan Adjustment Act, which would have provided tens of thousands of Afghan refugees living in the U.S. with paths to legal residence. Without it, they live in profound uncertainty, not knowing if they may yet be deported back to the place they have just escaped. “We just happen to be fortunate in where we were born,” Frerichs told me. “We could have just as easily ended up in their situation. It’s the luck of the draw.” ♦
An earlier version of this article misdated the Oval Office meetings between Senator Tammy Duckworth and the Biden Administration.