Bowe Bergdahl’s release and Alan Gross’ future

HAVANA — The announcement that the United States and the Afghan Taliban guerrillas traded five leaders of the armed organization for Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl must have triggered a veritable earthquake of emotions in Alan Gross, the U.S. subcontractor who has been serving a 15-year sentence since 2009.

Obama’s decision to exchange prisoners with an organization that for decades has been described as “terrorist” and has remained at war with the U.S. before and after the invasion of Afghanistan has the potential to renew the hopes of Gross and his family.

They have ceaselessly asked Obama to reach an accord with Cuba to attain Gross’ release.

After five years of detention in Havana and seeing no significant efforts to resolve his status, Gross adopted an extreme attitude and last April staged a nine-day hunger strike to pressure the White House to begin direct conversations with the Cuban government.

Shortly after ending the fast — which was extremely dangerous to his health — the U.S. agent learned that neither reasonable explanations nor the most dramatic pleas nor the most desperate gestures were enough to move his government sufficiently to act on his case.

Far from giving any sign that might in any way favor a dialogue on Gross, the U.S. State Department on April 30 released its Foreign Terrorist Organizations list for 2013, wherein it reiterated its harebrained designation of Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism, for the 32nd time.

Yet, the State Department itself barefacedly recognizes in that same report that, in 2013 “the Government of Cuba supported and sponsored negotiations between the FARC and the Government of Colombia with the objective of achieving a peace accord between both parties” and that “there is no information that the Cuban Government furnished arms or provided military training to terrorist groups.”

To make things worse, Alan Gross recently concluded that his mission for the USAID in 2009, as a private subcontractor in cyberoperations (shown to be of a secret nature and subversive against Cuba) was a minefield due to the evidence the Cuban authorities may have had at the time about the “ZunZuneo” project.

But the boys at the USAID (and their government overseers) did not warn him about the huge risk he would run on his fifth trip to Cuba.

“Once Alan was detained, it is surprising that the USAID would endanger his safety even further by executing a covert operation in Cuba,” commented Scott Gilbert, Gross’ lawyer.

“On May 2 I shall be 65 and that will be my last birthday here,” Gross told journalist Peter Kornbluh, who has visited him Havana more than once.

Kornbluh confirmed that the prisoner’s mental status in early May was “volatile.” If it continues, the lawyer said, it could lead Gross into other, longer hunger strikes and even desperate and dangerous attempts to escape.

That mental condition could have convinced Gross that he had been abandoned. “I fear that my government — the same government I served at the time this nightmare began — has abandoned me,” he wrote to President Obama in a letter sent in December 2013. In that letter, he pleaded directly with the president, saying that “only through your personal involvement can my release be guaranteed.”

That’s the type of prerogative that Obama assumed last Saturday (May 31) to exchange the five high-ranking Taliban leaders by Sergeant Bergdahl. It was a bold and praiseworthy decision that was immediately criticized by some legislators who argued that the president is obligated by law to notify Congress 30 days before any transfer from the Guantánamo prison.

The White House admitted that the decision to trade was made contrary to those exigencies and said that Washington has “a sacred duty” to bring war prisoners back home.

“Given the acute urgency of the health condition of Sgt. Bergdahl, and given the President’s constitutional responsibilities, it was determined that it was necessary and appropriate not to adhere to the [30-day] notification requirement, because it would have potentially meant that the opportunity to get Sgt. Bergdahl would have been lost,” Susan Rice, the president’s national security adviser, told CNN.

Gross’ fate, in effect, is in Obama’s hands, inasmuch as the Cuban government has announced its immediate willingness to find a humanitarian way out of the case “on the basis of reciprocity.”

To move toward a dialogue that permits an eventual exchange for the three Cubans who remain prisoners in the U.S. — Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino and Antonio Guerrero — the White House should admit that Gross’ life is worth as much as Bergdahl’s and that Gross’ family, like the sergeant’s, also deserves satisfaction.

Gross, who acted like a soldier on the battlefront, was on a mission assigned by his government, a mission of war.

Will Obama — who has ignored the rule of not negotiating with “terrorists” — activate some of the “couple of ideas” that Secretary of State John Kerry alluded to when referring to the Gross case?

In his island prison, what thoughts are going through the mind of the Jewish subcontractor who has felt so abandoned during five long years? Does he see in the horizon a solution to his plight?