An Abandoned American Hostage Finally Makes It Home

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. Several days later, following an Oval Office meeting 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.”

Duckworth then 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 the President’s decision 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 after Duckworth spoke with Biden in the Oval Office, the President 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.

An Abandoned American Hostage Finally Makes It Home
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