On a summer night in 2012, soon after he started as an aide to the commanding general of the Special Forces, Capt. Anthony Aguilar learned that his former West Point schoolmate and fellow Green Beret officer, Mathew Golsteyn, was being investigated for murder. A barrel-chested Texan, Aguilar was sitting at his desk outside Brig. Gen. Christopher Haas’s office when two senior staff officers arrived for an urgent closed-door meeting. About an hour later, they came out: “We need to get Allison on this.”
Allison was Aguilar’s wife, an Army captain who had been assigned to the general’s public-affairs office. She wasn’t typically called in for good news. Even so, when she was summoned to join the meeting, what the staff officers told her astonished her: At a job interview with the C.I.A., Golsteyn admitted to killing a bombmaking suspect he had taken captive in southern Afghanistan in 2010. He claimed to have released the man, shot him while he was unarmed and burned his body. The C.I.A. passed notice of a potential war crime to the Army, which started a criminal investigation. Now the case was being briefed to the general.
Allison was shocked. Golsteyn was a favored son of the regiment. “He was an all-star, basically,” she recalled in an interview last year. “Everybody really liked him.” That his team had burned the body was particularly disturbing to her. “What he was admitting to was so weird.”
When Anthony Aguilar heard about it later, he was less surprised. He had been deployed in southern Afghanistan at the same time as Golsteyn in 2010; although Aguilar had known nothing of the killing, he had the impression that Golsteyn was a cowboy who did what he wanted. But he could tell by the leadership’s alarm that this had the potential to embarrass the entire organization. “Everybody started to get really hush-hush behind closed doors,” he said. “This is gonna create blowback on us.”
With nearly 70,000 military and civilian personnel, Fort Bragg is the Army’s largest base. Sprawling across 284 square miles of pine forest in North Carolina, it is the hub for the secret war the U.S. military wages around the globe. The base is home to the Joint Special Operations Command, which carried out the raid that killed Osama bin Laden in 2011, and the Army Special Operations Command, which oversees elite units like Green Berets, Rangers and Delta Force. During the war against terrorism, both commands swelled in size and importance; Fort Bragg’s denizens referred to it as “the center of the universe.”
That night at headquarters was the Aguilars’ first glimpse of how Army Special Operations leadership would grapple with misconduct by its elite soldiers and how it would choose secrecy and silence over public accountability. By the time they arrived at headquarters in 2012, there was mounting evidence of a breakdown in discipline among the operators, both overseas and at home.
For more than a decade, Golsteyn’s unit, the Third Special Forces Group, had taken a lead role in the war in Afghanistan, deploying on a relentless cycle to fight a guerrilla war far from the public eye. The constant deployments had taken a toll on the men and their families, some of whom struggled with injuries, divorces and substance abuse. “There was a sense that the force was fraying at the edges,” said Paul Toolan, a retired lieutenant colonel who spent most of his career at Third Group, which was also stationed at Fort Bragg. Many operators had come to believe that the war for which they had sacrificed so much had no clear path for victory. “It makes it 10 times worse when you’re deployed so much if you don’t have a good reason for being there.”
The same year, there had already been two major scandals involving the Green Berets in Afghanistan. The first involved Maj. Jim Gant, a former Third Group officer who was charged with abusing drugs and alcohol on an isolated outpost, where he was secretly living with a female reporter he later married. Gant, who was kicked out of the Special Forces, had been praised by military leaders as a new Lawrence of Arabia for his work with local tribes and had been a mentor to Golsteyn. Around the same time, Staff Sgt. Robert Bales, an infantryman assigned to another Green Beret base, had slipped out in the middle of the night and murdered 16 Afghans in their homes, including women and children. Bales, who was sentenced to life in prison, had been drinking and using steroids on the base, and military investigators suspected that he was not the only one. The conventional Army general who led the investigation accused some of the Green Berets of concealing their own misconduct and “placing loyalty and self-preservation before candor.”
Then, at the end of the year, a Third Group team was accused of murdering nine detainees in Afghanistan’s Nerkh district. Like Golsteyn, they were from Third Group’s First Battalion, also known as the Desert Eagles, one of the most storied and decorated units. It might have been a moment of reckoning for Army Special Forces Command and a chance to address the way a decade of irregular warfare had led to widespread rule-breaking that could escalate into criminality. Instead, the Nerkh investigation would be quietly closed without charges in 2022.
Over the years, more troubling events would take place, many of them connected with Third Group. In 2015, a team from the Desert Eagles called in an airstrike on a hospital full of civilians in Kunduz, a city in northern Afghanistan. A federal investigation into multimillion-dollar fraud led to the conviction of several Green Berets and support personnel. And more recently, there had been a spate of criminal activity involving Army Special Operations soldiers, much of it around Fort Bragg. To Anthony Aguilar, this was all a result of a lack of accountability at Army Special Operations Command, which he believed had protected and promoted its favored officers even as their soldiers committed misconduct. “That’s what happens when you have a culture of ‘We don’t follow the rules,’” he told me.
It is rare for former members of the Army’s elite units to make public accusations of wrongdoing against their command. Aguilar told me that he filed complaints about unethical behavior by senior leaders with a military inspector general and Congress, without any results. Eventually, he became convinced that his organization could not be reformed from within and contacted me in 2023 after he read my previous reporting on the Special Forces. “I think the majority of the force has good intent,” Aguilar said. “But over my years in the Army, I have seen a very concerning perversion of authority and power.”
He and Allison agonized about going public; they knew they might be seen as disloyal by their former colleagues or as having an ax to grind. And it’s true that he left the military after being punished by his command, an event that marred an otherwise distinguished career. His records show that he had nine combat deployments and graduated from some of the Army’s toughest schools, like the Combat Diver Qualification Course. In Iraq, he was wounded in action and decorated with the Bronze Star for valor. He commanded multiple Special Operations units and rose to the rank of lieutenant colonel.
But in 2022, Aguilar was relieved of command and later reprimanded by the Army after the police were called in response to a domestic dispute between him and Allison; their marriage had broken down after years of stress from repeated deployments, but they have since reconciled. After he retired last year, Aguilar was the subject of controversy after he worked as a contractor for a U.S. security company in Gaza and claimed to witness war crimes there, which his former employer denied, accusing him of lying.
Aguilar was one of several former Green Berets I interviewed who were willing to talk on the record about the misconduct they claimed to have witnessed. Given the social and economic price that former operators can pay for speaking out, it was often those who had already broken with the force who were willing to do so. In each case, I was able to verify their information for this article with other testimony, public records and previously unpublished documents.
This reconstruction of more than a decade of military investigations is based on several lawsuits and dozens of Freedom of Information Act requests filed by The Times, which yielded thousands of pages of previously unpublished military documents, including reports from criminal investigations, service records and detainee files. I spoke with dozens of people, including former Special Operations personnel, military lawyers, witnesses and law-enforcement agents.
Ultimately, I came to see that what was going on at Army Special Operations Command was more complicated than a simple cover-up of war crimes and other misconduct — more complex and also more alarming, because it allowed people to take part with a clean conscience. To be certain, whenever crimes were committed, there were soldiers who participated or who lied about it. But there were also those who turned a blind eye for the sake of loyalty or their careers or who self-servingly took flawed investigations at face value. Throughout it all, there was an obsession with secrecy, supposedly for the sake of the mission, but one that also left the public in the dark.
In response to detailed questions, a spokeswoman for Army Special Operations Command offered a general defense of its record. “We have fully investigated and adjudicated the cases you cover. In each case, where justified, we have held to account those responsible for any misconduct, ” wrote the spokeswoman, Lt. Col. Allie Scott. “We are confident our actions stand up to the strictest scrutiny.”
Yet when it comes to the Army’s elite forces, public scrutiny has rarely been possible. The details of the Nerkh investigation and the second half of the one into Golsteyn have never been reported. The two eventually became entwined, I learned, and their juxtaposition was revealing. They would receive starkly different treatments by Army Special Forces Command. Golsteyn was doggedly prosecuted, while the case against the team in Nerkh was dropped; in the eyes of the brotherhood, Golsteyn’s true crime might have been breaking their code of silence.
The criminal investigations into the Golsteyn and Nerkh cases lasted for years, and unusually, they were closed and then reopened, which meant they proceeded in two phases. Taken as a whole, they highlight how the military commanders could quietly dispose of cases as they saw fit and, in Golsteyn’s case, just how far they could go to prosecute one of their own — if they chose to.
After Golsteyn made the mistake of confessing the killing in a C.I.A. interview, his case was investigated by agents from the Fort Bragg office of the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division, who arrived at the Desert Eagles headquarters to interview his former teammates. Kevin Kilgore, a Green Beret who served as a staff sergeant with Golsteyn, remembered being called in by Bravo Company’s senior enlisted operator, Sgt. Maj. Haldon Huber. “He said: ‘C.I.D. wants to talk to you. It’s about Matt,’” Kilgore told me. Then he said Huber made it clear where his loyalties should lie. “‘Tell the truth, but remember: Matt’s your brother.’ ”(Huber denied that he ever spoke to Kilgore about the C.I.D. investigation but said he told other Green Berets to tell the truth.)
Two systems of values were now colliding, those of the Army and those of the brotherhood. According to the C.I.D. case file, Golsteyn’s former teammates either denied knowing anything about the killing or refused to talk. “We lied,” Kilgore said. “I know I did.”
When agents spoke to the Marines who had been on the deployment, they praised Golsteyn, with some expressing disbelief that an American would ever do something like that. A search of potential burn sites in Afghanistan turned up no evidence of a body.
Nevertheless, because of his confession to the C.I.A., the Special Forces’ lawyers found that there was probable cause to charge Golsteyn with murder. From their point of view, Golsteyn’s act was like telling a prisoner to run and then shooting him in the back. “These are special operators, and we should hold them to the highest possible standard,” said Nate Bankson, a retired lieutenant colonel and former Special Operations lawyer who worked on Golsteyn’s case. “Oh, the rules are different for them? No, they’re not. In fact, they have to follow them more closely because they get near to the edge.”
The problem for their case was that the C.I.A. would not allow Golsteyn’s full interview to be admitted as evidence or allow the polygraph examiner to testify, citing classification issues. (The C.I.A. declined to comment.) So his commanders chose an administrative punishment, which had another consequence: If the case had gone to trial, it would have been made public; this way, it could be kept secret.
In April 2014, the Special Forces commander who succeeded Haas, Brig. Gen. Darsie Rogers, issued a letter of reprimand that was oddly ambiguous about whether Golsteyn was being faulted for the killing or for talking about it: “During an interview with the Central Intelligence Agency, you admitted to committing a Law of Armed Conflict violation.” The letter continued: “You are hereby reprimanded. Your behavior in this matter manifests a complete lack of judgment and responsibility. You have discredited yourself, the U.S. Army Special Forces Command and the United States Army.”
Golsteyn was also stripped of his Special Forces qualification. His tribe had exiled him, but as long as he kept his mouth shut, the public didn’t have to know. He could resign quietly in disgrace.
In the Nerkh case, the unit involved, O.D.A. 3124, had already been investigated and cleared by Special Forces commanders in Afghanistan, meaning that senior officers were now associated with the case. And the in-theater investigations created a powerful presumption of innocence in the minds of many back at Fort Bragg.
“You did not ever want to question a commander or a decision that was made on the ground,” Allison Aguilar said. “I thought it probably happened, and I still never questioned it. Because as long as the Army had investigated and found it cleared, then I thought, OK, I don’t know.”
But after the bodies of the missing were discovered outside 3124’s former base, the overall commander in Afghanistan, Gen. Joseph Dunford, called in the C.I.D., an independent command that was supposed to be an Army check and balance on its units. There was extensive documentation by the local authorities in Nerkh and dozens of witnesses, and one perpetrator, a translator named Zikria, had been arrested by the Afghan government and incriminated the team. Yet in the first phase of its investigation, the C.I.D. would fail to collect much of this vital evidence.
Because it had been opened by Dunford in Afghanistan, the Nerkh case was led by agents based at the C.I.D.’s office at Bagram Air Base north of Kabul. They never traveled to the former Special Forces outpost where the bodies were discovered, despite the fact that it was occupied by the Afghan Army and was a few miles from a major American base. According to the case file, they interviewed Afghan witnesses by phone, through translators, instead of meeting them face to face.
In October 2013, C.I.D. agents were back at Bravo Company in Fort Bragg, this time to interview members of 3124. Most of the Green Berets invoked their right to legal counsel and declined to testify. The team’s leader, Capt. Timothy Egan, denied any wrongdoing. (Egan did not respond to a request for comment.) Other soldiers who had served at Nerkh also claimed to know nothing. The striking exception was an intelligence officer, a captain from the conventional Army who had been assigned to train local forces in Nerkh. The officer had clashed with 3124 and was kicked off the base after a couple of months; he told investigators that the Green Berets had armed a group of interpreters as “soldiers” and allowed them to abuse detainees. (The officer, who was not accused of wrongdoing, did not respond to a request for comment.)
Even if they wanted to talk, service members who witnessed a serious crime and failed to report it were potentially guilty themselves. One way to deal with this was to grant them what is known as a letter of immunity so that they could testify freely, but the C.I.D. couldn’t issue these on its own — it had to be done by the commanding general at Army Special Operations Command. That never happened with Nerkh, according to the case file. By contrast, in Golsteyn’s case, the Army had given a letter of immunity to his former team sergeant, Grady DeWitt, and then reprimanded him for refusing an order to testify. (DeWitt did not respond to a request for comment.)
Because the case had been opened in Afghanistan, it was Dunford’s chief lawyer, Col. Norman Allen III, who decided whether there was probable cause to prosecute any American service members. C.I.D. headquarters would later find that the investigators had missed important leads, but in May 2014, Allen, who declined to comment for this article, was satisfied with their work and felt that there wasn’t enough evidence to charge members of the team.
The case was closed that July by the C.I.D., which noted in its final report: “Subsequent investigation into these allegations determined USSF personnel were not complicit in the kidnapping, abuse or murder of these individuals.”
By the time both C.I.D. investigations had been wrapped up, Anthony Aguilar had already left for the Army’s graduate school in Kansas. But his wife, who stayed on at headquarters, kept him up to date, because he had learned that his next assignment back at Fort Bragg would be with the same battalion whose soldiers had been accused: the Desert Eagles.
When he arrived at his new battalion in 2014, he recognized the team leader from Nerkh, Egan, who was now working as a staff officer. Several of the operators who served with 3124 continued to deploy to Afghanistan with the Desert Eagles, including the deputy, Chief Warrant Officer Michael Woods, and Sgt. First Class David Kaiser, an operator who took over intelligence duties for the team and whom Zikria accused of killing a prisoner. (Members of the team did not respond to a request for comment.) Many of the senior officers who cleared them in theater continued to rise: Tony Thomas was now the four-star general in charge of Joint Special Operations Command. (Thomas declined to comment.)
Key to the development of a culture of impunity within Special Operations was the accumulation of cases like Nerkh, which created a web of shared histories among insiders privy to their secrets. “There’s a whole group of them that are affiliated and taking care of one another,” Anthony Aguilar said. “Their loyalties are to continuing to cover up and obfuscate what they’ve done.”
Senior officers took their subordinates with them as they rose through the ranks; juniors knew that their own careers were bound up with those of their bosses. The formation of such cliques is a general tendency in the military, but within the insular world of Army Special Operations Command it was especially strong. These bonds of trust were important during combat, but they could also lead to favoritism and cover-ups.
“It is a bit incestuous,” said Bankson, the former Special Operations lawyer, “and that can set conditions for unchecked misconduct, often because everyone has dirt on one another.”
During Anthony Aguilar’s deployment with the Desert Eagles in 2015, the battalion was involved in one of the most notorious airstrikes of the Afghan war, when an American aircraft destroyed a Doctors Without Borders hospital in Kunduz, killing 42 civilians, some of them children. The aftermath showed how the Special Forces could protect its own insiders, even in the face of an international scandal and promises of accountability by the president himself.
Like the Nerkh and Golsteyn cases, what happened in Kunduz had roots in the political contradictions of the war, the high-level dishonesty they fostered and the way the Green Berets were called on to shoulder it all. The year before the Desert Eagles deployed to Afghanistan, President Barack Obama declared that the U.S. combat mission in Afghanistan was over: “The longest war in American history is coming to a responsible conclusion.”
This wishful thinking was built on the delusion, repeated over the years by the brass, that Afghan security forces were ready to stand on their own. As a result, the Desert Eagles, who were supposed to be fighting the Taliban only in self-defense, found themselves hamstrung by rules and lawyers. “It was really hard,” said Michael Hutchinson, a veteran Third Group officer who was then a major in charge of Charlie Company. On operations, his men were supposed to stay out of the line of fire while their local allies did the fighting. In the case of a minor combat incident, like being nicked on the body armor, he said, “even if you’re fine, that’s like a report to the secretary of defense.”
That fall, it quickly became apparent that the Afghan republic’s forces were unable to hold off the Taliban on their own and that the Green Berets needed to get back in the fight. They barely staved off a major insurgent offensive in the south; then, on Sept. 28, the northern city of Kunduz fell to an assault. In a sudden rout that presaged the collapse of the republic six years later, the city’s army and police forces panicked and fled to the airport.
As alarm bells rang in Washington, the top U.S. commander, Gen. John Campbell, ordered the Desert Eagles to save Kunduz. Hutchinson and his men flew in with a group of Afghan commandos, and he decided to strike a psychological blow by retaking the center of the city. “I basically told General Campbell: ‘Here’s what we’re gonna do. It probably wasn’t that many guys. We’re going to go punch them in the mouth, take some key infrastructure,’” he said. “But it turns out they actually did have a whole lot of guys.”
The Green Berets and their Afghan allies were desperately outnumbered inside the city; only with the help of relentless airstrikes were they able to turn the tide. On Oct. 3, after several days of fierce close-quarters battles, Hutchinson called in an airstrike. He would later tell investigators that he had relayed the coordinates of a command-and-control center from which the enemy was firing on his partner forces. But the gunship fired on the Doctors Without Borders hospital for nearly half an hour, bombarding it with incendiary rounds.
Amid international outcry, Doctors Without Borders demanded an investigation “under the clear presumption that a war crime has been committed.” But according to the military’s interpretation, whether or not something was a war crime didn’t depend on the outcome — whether civilians had been killed — but on the intentions behind the strike and whether a protected site had been deliberately targeted. This was part of why the laws of war were so important to the U.S. military: It wasn’t just a moral issue but a shield for when things went wrong.
I traveled to Kunduz shortly afterward to report an article for this magazine and found evidence that some of the Special Forces’ Afghan partners had wanted to attack the hospital, which included wounded insurgents among its patients. Moreover, according to a senior Special Forces officer, back at the battalion headquarters at Bagram, the Desert Eagles had been tracking Taliban leaders going in and out of the hospital and believed they saw fighters storing arms there. Doctors Without Borders, for its part, denied that there were weapons inside and repeatedly warned the battalion headquarters of the hospital’s location while Hutchinson was in the city.
Officers at battalion headquarters told investigators they had given the location of the hospital to Hutchinson’s men. Hutchinson told me he never received the information and had no idea that Doctors Without Borders was in the city. “I didn’t know that hospital was there,” he said.
Ultimately, the military’s investigators accepted the Green Berets’ contention that Hutchinson had given the gunship a different target and that a series of technical failures caused it to strike the wrong location. Nevertheless, they said that both Hutchinson and the Desert Eagles commander, Lt. Col. Jason Johnston, had been reckless in not taking greater precautions to avoid civilian casualties. “The investigation found that certain leaders did not meet the standard and were negligent, which led to suspensions and reprimands,” George Smawley, a retired brigadier general who was then the top military lawyer in Afghanistan, told me.
Shortly after the airstrike, Obama promised that soldiers would be held accountable for any mistakes or wrongdoing. At a news conference announcing the results of the investigation, Gen. Joseph Votel, the overall Special Operations commander at the time of the airstrike, stated that while there would be no criminal charges, at least a dozen service members had been disciplined. “It is important to point out that these adverse administrative actions can carry severe repercussions on the careers and professional qualification of these individuals,” Votel told reporters.
Although his name wasn’t publicly mentioned, Hutchinson, who had been relieved of his command, received a letter of reprimand, as did Johnston. But there was a widespread sentiment at Army Special Operations Command that the men had been unfairly punished for an honest mistake, one that was mostly the fault of the gunship’s crew; indeed, they were heroes who had taken on a mission against all odds and saved Kunduz from the Taliban. Hutchinson and Johnston, who had long been seen as two of the most promising officers in Third Group, were given important assignments and went on to further commands and promotions; Hutchinson would later serve as a Third Group deputy, while as a colonel, Johnston would command the entire group. (Johnston declined to comment.)
When Army Special Operations Command screened a lessons-learned video about the airstrike on the hospital at headquarters, its commander, Lt. Gen. Ken Tovo, praised the Green Berets, saying they deserved valor awards and promotions, not reprimands and ridicule. (Tovo, who disputed that the two officers received special treatment, provided a statement saying he believed that the men on the ground “performed their duties appropriately and remarkably well under extremely difficult circumstances.”)
In the conventional Army, letters of reprimand for commanders for such a grave and embarrassing tragedy would have typically been career-ending. Whether or not the men were being unfairly punished, the lesson was that Army Special Operations Command was able to protect its own, even in the face of Army punishments and public censure — a dynamic that played out again in 2017 when a Third Group team lost four men in an ambush in Niger. There, too, senior Special Forces commanders initially avoided serious consequences to their careers, blaming mistakes by their subordinates, until advocacy by the men’s families led to an outcry in Congress.
Impunity thrived on the aura of secrecy that surrounded Army Special Operations. In each of these cases, the initial outcome minimized the fallout. As far as the American public knew, the commanders who destroyed a hospital full of civilians had been punished, not promoted. The bodies found outside a Special Forces base in Nerkh were all the work of a lone translator. And as for Mathew Golsteyn, he was the hero of Marja.
The problem was that Golsteyn wouldn’t go away quietly.
Even though he had been reprimanded and stripped of his Special Forces qualification, Golsteyn refused to resign. He wanted to be cleared and knew the Army could reopen the criminal prosecution if it decided to. As he explained it to me, his attitude was: “I’m not giving you leverage over me. There’s no way.” The Army had taken away his Silver Star, which he won for a battle that took place before the killing. “They wanted me to make the decision to resign,” he told me. “They were just going to keep trying to humiliate me to do it.”
Golsteyn was determined to fight back. He took leave without pay. A couple of years earlier, he had connected with Representative Duncan Hunter, a Republican from California. Now Hunter began to lobby military officials on Golsteyn’s behalf. Allison Aguilar, who was still working in public relations at Special Forces Command during this period, told me that she remembered Hunter trying to pressure her boss, something that dismayed leaders there.
“It’s like, ‘Do you know what this guy’s accused of doing?’” she said. “Everyone was really frustrated and annoyed.”
Rebuffed by the Army leadership, Hunter decided to go public. On Feb. 3, 2015, he published an opinion piece in The Daily Beast under the headline “Average Soldiers Don’t Trust Their Generals, and They Have a Point.” Arguing that the military was mistreating a war hero, Hunter tied Golsteyn’s case to what he claimed was the “excessive politicization of the military during wartime.”
Hunter had tapped into a much bigger cultural shift that was underway, one that would eventually upend the American establishment. In response to the failures of wars like the one in Afghanistan, a new attitude toward the military was emerging on the political right: for the troops, but against the generals.
At first, Hunter’s efforts seemed to backfire. Up to this point, Golsteyn’s case had been closely guarded by the military. But after Hunter went public, officials leaked the grisly details of Golsteyn’s confession to the news media. Golsteyn then gave an interview to Bret Baier on Fox News, and he again made an unplanned admission. When Baier unexpectedly asked him whether he shot the bombmaking suspect, Golsteyn answered yes. “Bret Baier pulled a gotcha right at the beginning,” he told me.
In response to the interview, the C.I.D. reopened its murder investigation. The stakes were high for Golsteyn; he was facing years in prison, even, in theory, the death penalty. With the full backing of Army Special Operations Command, agents started interviewing his old colleagues and teammates, hunting for new evidence. According to Bankson, the military lawyer who worked on the case, Army leaders said, “‘Well, if he’s going to admit it, we’re going to start pulling the thread more and find more witnesses,’ which they did.”
Once again, Army Special Operations Command used the card that it declined to play with the Nerkh investigation, offering immunity to his teammates and ordering them to testify. This time, they were successful in breaking the code of silence.
In the five years that had passed since their deployment, many of Golsteyn’s teammates had continued their careers in the Special Forces. Kilgore, who handled intelligence for the team, had been selected for higher levels of training, but he told me that the relentless demands of the job, combined with an injury during a parachute jump, had pushed him into a downward spiral of opiate addiction. He was caught selling military gear, put in jail and discharged from the Army. He said the callous way that the Special Forces had rid themselves of him had shattered his faith in the brotherhood. “They really put me through hell,” he said. “When you’re a good ol’ boy, you’re under their wing. But if you step outside of that, they try to break you.”
He hit rock bottom when C.I.D. agents showed up at his door. He said they laid out details of the killing that could have come only from another member of the team; the agents claimed that it was one of his former best friends. And if Kilgore didn’t cooperate, they would charge him, too. So he told them that when he released the detainee, he knew that Golsteyn and DeWitt were going to ambush him down the road. But Kilgore hadn’t been involved in burning the body; he had only heard rumors about it from the team.
Golsteyn refused to discuss his former teammates’ roles with me, and besides Kilgore, none of them responded to requests for comment. The C.I.D. report redacted their names, including those who ultimately gave evidence against him, but I was able to figure out their identities by cross-referencing details in the case file with other reporting and public information. The testimony from the second phase of the investigation, which has never been reported, shows how four members of his team disposed of the body, which had been buried hastily in a field by Golsteyn. Led by DeWitt, the Green Berets drove back there that night and dug up the corpse, took it back to their base and burned it.
The team’s senior medic admitted to being the driver, but he claimed that he was told they were digging up a drug cache and never saw a body. The senior engineer said that, back at base, he stoked a wood fire in a 55-gallon drum as another Green Beret dismembered the corpse with a hacksaw. “It wasn’t quick.” They fed the body parts in one at a time until they turned to ash.
“Did you think you were covering up a crime or helping a team member?” the agent said.
“Both.”
The agent asked him why he was speaking to them now.
“Frankly, I am sick of lying,” the engineer said. “My integrity is shit.”
At C.I.D. headquarters, reopening Golsteyn’s case seemed to have led to a renewed interest in Nerkh as well. The two cases were moving in parallel, and yet the way they were handled by Army Special Operations commanders would be very different. Six months after Hunter went public, the C.I.D. reopened the Nerkh investigation. According to the case file I obtained, “quality-assurance reviews” by headquarters found leads that “could change the outcome.”
“Very rarely is something going to get reviewed like that,” said Joshua Adams, a former C.I.D. agent at Fort Bragg who worked on the Golsteyn case. “It’s not normal without an outside influence.”
In other words, someone at headquarters had decided that the initial investigators had fallen short. They had done just one interview with Zikria, the translator for the team who had been arrested by the Afghan government and denied being responsible for the killings. The new team of C.I.D. agents tracked him down again. After being convicted by an Afghan court for murder, Zikria was transferred to the giant prison at Bagram Air Base. This time, over a series of interviews with the agents, he eventually admitted he had in fact abused and killed detainees and buried their corpses. He said that the Americans were aware of everything he did and that he witnessed Kaiser murder a man.
In this second phase, the C.I.D. seemed more aggressive and better resourced. By the end of it, the case file filled more than 1,500 pages and included interviews with more than 100 witnesses in the United States and Afghanistan; it also contained detainee files, police reports and photos documenting how the bodies had been found outside the Special Forces base. Although its investigators would still never actually visit Nerkh, they began interviewing local witnesses in person, summoning them to Kabul, where they testified about abuse by the Special Forces. The C.I.D. also obtained and translated extensive records from the Afghan authorities. And in addition to the intelligence officer who had clashed with the O.D.A., they found another service member who was willing to speak against the team: Staff Sgt. Becca Hinds, who served as a civil affairs specialist and Special Operations medic on the deployment. “Whether or not an American committed murder? I don’t know,” she told me. “But I think that there is absolutely zero percent chance that they didn’t know that it was being done.”
Even if the C.I.D. couldn’t prove that Americans committed the killings, it had expanded the investigation to include other offenses like kidnapping, assault, theft and conspiracy.
But as the file makes clear, the Nerkh case had the potential to involve 3124’s chain of command. The C.I.D. interviewed Reid Furman, the Bravo Company commander at the time, who was now a lieutenant colonel at the Pentagon, as well as the Desert Eagles’ sergeant major, Robert Abernethy, who was now the top noncommissioned officer in Army Special Operations Command. (Neither were accused of misconduct; both declined requests for comment.)
The Nerkh case never went to trial. In the second phase of the investigation, Army Special Operations Command never issued letters of immunity to pressure the team or other service members to talk, as it did in Golsteyn’s case. Despite the extensive evidence and witnesses that the C.I.D. assembled in its reinvestigation, a Special Forces lawyer decided in 2018 that there was no probable cause to charge any Americans. O.D.A. 3124 was cleared of wrongdoing. The investigation was closed by the C.I.D. four years later. Its results have not been made public until now.
The contrast between the way the Army pursued Golsteyn and its handling of the Nerkh case was again made clear by a development in 2018. Someone tipped off the C.I.D. inspector general that Mark Delacruz, a lead agent on both the Nerkh and Golsteyn cases, had been lying about his combat decorations and pretending to have earned a Green Beret tab. Delacruz, who declined to comment for this article, was demoted several ranks and kicked out of the service. Any evidence that Delacruz had been involved with was now vulnerable at a trial.
Yet despite this, the Army persevered against Golsteyn and prepared to bring charges against him. For Golsteyn, the contrast with Nerkh was galling.
“What was striking to me is how the command reacted,” Golsteyn said. “They’ve got bodies. They’ve got family members. They have protests. They have, now, media. No one lost a tab. No one was charged. Investigation closed.”
Anthony Aguilar was now at a job back at headquarters, where he noticed that DeWitt, Golsteyn’s team sergeant, had been recalled from an overseas assignment in preparation for the trial. Aguilar had little sympathy for his former fellow cadet. “Golsteyn is a war criminal,” he said. “Being in the Army doesn’t give you a license to kill indiscriminately. That’s wrong. It’s counter to American values and our way of life.”
But he, too, saw the hypocrisy in the command’s treatment of the two cases, the way their contrast illuminated how the Special Forces culture of impunity worked. “It became a vendetta with Golsteyn,” Aguilar said. “With Nerkh, when everything broke, those guys on the team didn’t say a thing. It’s like Fight Club. If you talk, you’re a rat.”
On that day at the C.I.A., Golsteyn had violated his tribe’s cardinal virtue of silence. Much worse, by publicly fighting the Army, he had drawn in outsiders. Golsteyn told me that by eliminating a threat to his men and the mission, he had only done what was right, and his commanders knew it. “If we were sitting around this house and having beers, and I was like, ‘You wanna hear a story?’ They would’ve gone, ‘Fuckin’ A, Matt. Good work.’”
But now he was pitched into a headlong and increasingly nasty confrontation with Army Special Operations Command. “The first one was very impersonal,” Golsteyn said. “The second half was very personal.”
Camille Baker and Victor J. Blue contributed reporting.
Matthieu Aikins is a contributing writer for the magazine and a fellow at Type Media Center.
Victor J. Blue is a photographer and a 2024 New America Future Security fellow.
Read by Eric Jason Martin
Narration produced by Tanya Pérez
Engineered by Anj Vancura
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