S1E10: Help

There was been a recruiter, an army recruiter when I worked at Bank of America who wanted me to come in. Was like, hey, man, you come over and fill out some paperwork for me.

Before Robert Bales enlisted in the military in two thousand and one, he was working in financial services as a broker dealer, but when two planes crashed into the World Trade Center, the twenty eight year old felt compelled to make a change.

September eleventh happens, and I'm literally in watching it happen. That morning when we were long oil contracts and oil and gas futures, the price shot way up. So the guy I'm working for is happy. He's like, man, we're going to make tons of money off this. You know, we're gonna make tons of money. And like the whole time is sitting here and I'm like, man, I can't do this. I was like, this is just morally wrong. And I hear my dad talking to me, Man, life's

What's wrong with you?

Previously, I'm the war within.

I grew up in Norwith, Ohio, blue collar town.

We didn't have much money.

He was really popular before he turned thirty.

Nobody joins the army after September eleventh to be.

The bad guy.

I think that people like Bobby Baals are probably inherently broken.

He started publicly becoming a little bit more unhinged.

Part construe dark Hole, all report over there.

He starts looking for people like who is here? Who isn't.

I was interviewing a little girl and she said to me, I saw many soldiers with lights, and they came and they killed myself.

I'm Mike McGinnis. This is the war within the Robert Baal story. In the mid nineteen nineties, long before his days as a soldier, Robert Bales went to Ohio State University with dreams of playing for the famous Buck Guys football team. After failing to secure a spot on the roster, he searched for a different way to spend his free time.

I thought maybe I had a chance to play at Ohio State. I didn't, you know, But when I got up there, the school wasn't in yet, so I needed to find a job, right, so I started interning at Smith Barney.

At the time, Smith Barney was one of the nation's premier wealth management firms during the rise of Wall Street. It was basically a household name, due in part to a classic commercial.

Smith Bonnie is among a handful of top investment firms singled out for their work in research. Smith Barney they make money the old fashioned way.

As a college kid, Bales was enticed by the opportunity to work in this prestigious industry.

I really wanted to be successful. I really wanted not to have to worry about money the way my mom and dad did. And I want to be able to take care of him. And so I started working at Smith Barney for a broker there and just doing terrible work really, you know, phone calls and envelope stuffing things

Was decided to drop out of Ohio State before graduation to pursue his Series seven exam and become a registered securities trader between the years of nineteen ninety six and two thousand. He advanced in this cutthroat field.

If you go to work in a broker dealer, you're gonna work hard. And so if I'm going to start at the bottom or something, I want to make sure that when I climb to the top of that ladder, it's where I want to be.

What that guy saw.

In me was an aggressive nature, to be tenacious to the point of, you know, telling you what I think and putting it all on the line. And I think that he saw a little bit of just you know, the hunger, you know, the real hunger to do something other people aren't willing to do. My thought process here, I saw not only the money, but I saw what I could do with the money and help people. Like I know it sounds kind of crazy, but you know, who's more important than a guy's taking care of the money.

When someone in bails his position and is elevating your net worth, there's no better friend to have. But when their investments aren't making money, it's a different story. Early on in Bob's tenure as a trader, his firm embarked on a new strategy we.

Called a bunch of people.

Met a bunch of people, and through one of those people, they were talking about individual community bank stocks. So they were very thinly traded, but they were moneymakers, and they were great investments, and they were great investments over time. So we would come in and buy out these blocks of these small community bank stocks, and we would piece them out instead of to five people in town, and piece it out to twenty five people or fifty people in town. And we did very well with this, and

At twenty six years old, Bales was managing over twenty two million dollars of client funds when his company's previously sound model took a downturn.

In nineteen ninety nine, we bought a bank out of West Virginia. On paper, it was the number one community bank in the country. The book value was one hundred dollars more than a share price. I bought stock in it. I put my family's money into it, I put friends money into it, and in September of nineteen ninety nine, they shut the bank down.

Full disclosure here. We reached out to a bunch of people in the hopes of better understanding what happened with this West Virginia bank, Bob's old boss, some form of clients, third parties, nobody took us up on our invitation to talk. What follows is Bob's version of what trans fired.

And what this bank was doing was they were fraudulently keeping their books. They were cooking the books for lack of a better way to do it. They were packaging up loans and selling the loans off, leaving the loans on the books, and basically inflating what they were doing. So the company we worked for basically shut down.

That West Virginia Bank was the first national bank of Keystone. It was supposedly quite profitable, with assets totally over a billion dollars until a regulatory agency discoveredy five hundred and fifteen million dollar discrepancy on their books. The US government would later close the bank, drawing intense scrutiny towards the brokers who touted it as a good investment.

I had purchased for a client this bank stock and the bank went out of business. What I did that was wrong wasn't that I purchased the bank and it went out of business. It was my client was in the hospital at the time and I didn't get his authorization. What I did do, and this is not mitigating because I contacted his wife. I'd taken this guy from two hundred thousand dollars to two million dollars. He's not going to tell me no, right Like, let's be honest about it.

License in May of two thousand. Bails and his Bosses were sued by Gary and Janet Leebschner, an aging couple that had invested with the firm. The suit aledge that the company systematically pressured elderly customers into buying stock in the First National Bank of Keystone, falsely implying that the bank would soon go public. Decades later, Bail still has a hard time reconciling what happened.

I was greedy to like I literally thought we were gonna make millions of dollars off this investment. And I thought it would be enough to where I didn't have to work like that anymore. You know, I think it would have changed my life.

You know.

It was a true feeling of letting people down, you know, like people work twenty years, thirty years for this money and you lose them that money.

Man.

I mean, they trusted me, you know, and think about that. They believed in me enough to give their labor to me, and I screwed it.

Up with the arbitration process. In his own fate and Limbo Biles decided it was time to get out of Ohio and turn over a new leaf.

I really loved Florida. I figured if I had to start over, I'm going to go to Florida because it's son had fun right. So I had a total of four hundred dollars cash, I had a car that was paid off. I jumped in my car twenty seven years old.

Drive to Florida.

Ended up meeting some people from a first Investors group of West Palm Beach and started working trading oil and gas futures. Like I still thought I could get up, you know, like I'm in an industry where I can make money. Once I make the money, I can go back and take care of.

This, you know.

And so that was my thought process. And once I make the money here, I'll come back and take care of these people here, and then, you know, obviously September eleventh kind of changed my mind.

It's SAT fifty two here in New York. We understand that there has been a plane crash on the southern tip of Manhattan. We understand that a plane has crashed into the World Trade Center. We don't know anything more than that.

I have another one.

Another plane just hit right.

Oh my gosh, another.

Plane had just hit hit another building.

Were right into the middle of it. Explosion was definitely looked like it was on purpose.

Sitting in Leavenworth. Documentarian Paul Pulowski asked Bales whether, at such an uncertain moment in his life, America's response to the nine to eleven attacks presented a different path forward.

After everything you've been through, obviously, you know, give banked about where were you kind of seeking some purpose?

You know, that's a that's a good question.

You know, was I seeking purpose in my life? And I would say most definitely when September eleventh happened, it was a way to give back feeling of trying to make it right, you know, trying to make something right, you know what I mean. Hell, I couldn't do anything else right, I may as well try that.

You know.

Bales was already serving in Iraq by the time the arbitration really came in. When all was sudden done, the defendants were fined one point two million dollars in damages. At that point, the trading firm had already filed for bankruptcy and had been expelled from the industry. The elderly couple never got the retirement funds back.

I sure don't think I would have lived in my car if I had a million dollars sitting back somewhere. I sure, don't think I would have went in the infantry.

The rationale behind Baals' decision to enlist after nine to eleven was complex. Yes, he believed it was his patriotic duty to fight terrorism, but in his mind he also had debts that he somehow had to repay.

She told me about it. He could screw up really God previously and made some core decisions.

The soldier ex repalls a conversation where Bailes confided in him about this scandal.

From his past.

He essentially talked about how he was in charge of large sums of money for people, and he ultimately wat I stood all rust a whole bunch of people's party. He was like, I'll have to do something different with my life because I felt so bad at this.

Bob also discussed the situation with soldier David Lesley when they served together. In his retelling of it so many years later. One comment stands out.

I remember him telling me a little bit of his story, and what I gathered the most from what he was saying was that they were people who weren't doing the right thing around him, and he had to take blame for that as well.

He wanted to make sure everyone was protecting, contacting.

It's a point that Robert Bales has made repeatedly. He put upon himself the safety and security of his peers and his loved ones. He bore the burden for the well being of a lot of people like Wade, his next door neighbor with special needs.

Wade half falling down a flight of steps, broke his hip. And so I took a year off before I went back to Ohio State. And so it was a lot of rehab to get him back to normal. It wasn't like this was a job.

This is my brother on deployments too. Bales wanted to be the person in charge of getting everybody back to the States in one piece.

How was the guy that people turned to to bring their loved ones back home? Their family members came and talked to me, and so did I feel responsible?

Yes?

I felt responsible.

Just days before the killings, Bales blamed himself for another soldier's dismemberment. In his mind, he should have shot the person who triggered the faithful ied Asbury.

They took his leg off of not having shot the Afghan. You know, it's hard to say, man, I mean I feel responsible a.

Little bit Why does Bals keep harping on this? Why is he so eager to tell the world that he always takes care of other people? Is there something else that he's implying but not saying about the Kandahar Masaker. During his interview, David Wesley made another interesting remark that we've heard whispers of before.

The army turned a blind eye to a soldier that obviously needed not to deploy anymore.

To me, they're culpable.

What he did was wrong, but he didn't do it without assistance, and a part of me believes that it might not have been him alone.

Outside the wire.

Bob Bels didn't do this alone.

He had help.

The phrasing of Wesley's point compelled our producer Max Nelson to follow up.

You said one thing there that we don't quote people out of context, So I want to check on one thing when you said Bob Bells didn't do this alone yet help.

What you mean by that?

I meant exactly what I said, Bob didn't do this on his own.

I remember sitting on the ground and turning on my camera. I was interviewing a little girl sitting there with her grandfather, and he was saying to her tell her what we saw.

Remember yalde Hakim, the reporter who risked her life to interview the Afghan victims of Bales's attacks and heard some startling perspectives in the process.

But something that stayed with me and that I found quite chilling, was that she said to me, I saw many soldiers with lights, dude headlights coming out of their helmets, and I saw many many soldiers and they came and they killed my father. Another child was saying there were multiple people, and then later some of the adults started to say.

He wasn't on his own.

There's multiple people.

President karas I was then saying, we're hearing that there's more than one soldier.

What is actually going on here?

So that was also clouding the clarity.

That we were trying to establish in terms of whether it was just bails or whether there was more to it.

The United States never took these statements made by the villagers of Alakosai and Naujabien all that seriously. Baiales's name was released to the media almost instantly, and he was the only person tried and convicted under the UCUMJ, But the Afghan witnesses maintained that they saw multiple American soldiers during the Kanahar massacre. Do you believe that Robert Bales

No, it was not alone, but it was the Americans who put the responsibility of this act on this one person. I don't know how it would be possible for a person to go to one village and make four or five people martyrs, and then go to another village and make ten or twelve more people martyrs. This is not possible, nor is it believable to us. One person did not do this.

Another local farmer, Mulla Baran, made a similar argument.

We can say for sure that Robert Bales was not alone. They all did this together. They just presented this one person. We know their military tactics. When the American forces surround the house, they send one person inside to kill. I've seen this before myself. When they claimed that one person had gone crazy and did this alone, we rejected their words completely.

Hick Matula is Mulla Baran's nephew. He was just a child in twenty twelve, but his personal recollections line up with his uncle's theory.

Was Robert Bales alone in this?

He was alone in the room, there were people outside?

Who were they?

They were his friends?

It might sound like a stretch. How could such a serious revelation about this highly publicized tragedy stay hidden for so long? Yalda Hakim had these questions herself after returning home from Panhue, Afghanistan.

Now, after that interview, we spoke to like a trauma person off the record back in Australia.

I was worried about driving that multiple soldier narrative if it had no basis. And one of the things the trauma expert said was.

That sometimes people misplace events in trauma and in a child's mind, they can't quite figure out the sequence of events and it's all mishmash.

March eleventh, twenty twelve was likely the worst day that the Afghans we interviewed whatever hope to live through, And some of the details they reference would imply that the attacks were not committed by a lone gunman, but in an entire platoon. For example, there's this from Hajji Wazir.

Go Quickly there were twenty to twenty five people there, because when people came out of their houses in the morning, they saw the footprints from their boots. About twenty to twenty five people must have collaborated with him in this act. Airplanes were with them, providing light for.

Them, airplanes, twenty five people. These points were repeated by the other villagers.

He was not alone in doing this act. There were two or three airplanes with him that night. I went to the back of our house in our alley and saw the footprints of twenty five American soldiers.

In the military's reports on the incident, there's no mention of planes flying overhead, and the notion of twenty five soldiers covertly executing this mission is hard to fathom. Y all who believes it's possible that the Afghan civilians are confusing the events of that night with what happened the next morning when Bales was evacuated in a massive commotion formed outside VSP BELLUMBI.

I don't know this sure, but it could be the bails came, the incident took place, and then they came to get him, and then that's where you have the multiple soldier theory, where you know then all the other guys came to pick him up, and that's where the helicopters then turned up.

Maybe the Afghan's arm is remembering the details like the aldest trauma specialists suspected, it'd be the easy conclusion to reach, especially when you're trying to prove an argument beyond a reasonable doubt, like Bailes's prosecutor, Lieutenant Colonel J.

Morse.

If I'm conducting an investigation and there are multiple witnesses and all the witnesses say the exact same thing, I got a problem. People don't see things the exact same way, people don't remember things the exact same way. But as a prosecutor, I want to make things as simple as possible. I don't want to make this complex, and I don't need to. I have all the tools I need at

The United States was a global superpower trying to reconcile and move on from the deadliest war crime perpetrated by its military in decades, and if one guy was responsible for it, that's explainable. He's a bad apple. But if multiple soldiers were involved, that signifies there's an institutional problem. Here's the thing. The Afghans aren't the only people who feel this way. Ever since the killings occurred, some of the Americans stationed at the VSP have had their suspicions,

I get woken up very early in the morning and it's like, hey, we need to do one hundred percent accountability. When we're running out there, Gwynn, who is the guy on guard, is coming in and he is telling us this very very important part of the story. He tells us the gate guard has said that two people came in and one person left.

Remember, Bales hit two villages that night, first Alkosi and later Naja Bien. He came back to the VSP in between three load, which is when he and possibly somebody else were seen by an Afghan soldier who was guarding the front gate. When SF Captain Danny Fields was alerted about a problem. That's the intel.

He speaking to the gate guard.

You know, I remember him saying something to the effect of an American left and then an American came back, or he said somebody came back. My instant fear was that maybe we've got one more person inside.

The base than what we should have. The guy on guard says that he's a man in body arm come through the gate. Well, we know Bail didn't wear body arm. He says that I had a beard. Well, Bails couldn't grow a beard. So it's like this guy's talking about, you know, these physical characteristics that don't match up to Robert Bals at all. And the crimes that were committed at each location were vastly different. The first location, Ala Coosi.

No.

Absolutely not. I tried so hard to suppress all that crap out.

Soldier X, the unidentified participant with the digitally altered voice who's been prevalent throughout this podcast. He never told us why he would have ran us formal consent to use this interview. But when we broached the subject of potentially helping to carry out the Candaharm massacre, let's just say, the mood changed.

There's a lot of times where, even at twenty years old, I wish I would have stepped in and stopped it. Do you have a super faces? You're a super little girl's face.

Soldier X is a free man and he didn't have to speak with us in the first place, but he wanted the opportunity to respond to the actations levied against him by the soldiers who served alongside him in Afghanistan.

And after all has happened, I let's just try to walk down of my life like it never happened. And then one of my Jones associates and contact with me. So the bs that they're putting out there they're paying this picture, like, you know, as part of this great conspiracy anxious refting. All right, I was like, well, I guess this is time to confront this and go through this.

This is even after speaking with himself. We've been on Facebook Messenger and he's explained his side of things. But in the reality, there's a lot of holes in his story that directly fly in the face of some of the things that I saw.

Let's dive in on exactly what Alexander claims to have seen and heard on March eleventh, twenty twelve.

The person that woke us up was okay. When he woke us up, he was fresh out of the shower. It might not seem like a huge deal, but when you're in Afghanistan and you're showering less than once a day, you do not take a shower in the morning. His hair was done, and it was gelled perfectly, and he smelled He had like a little bit of Colonne or

Unusual at that point in time. There was someone missing from VSV bellum By. It was a dust one an emergency in theory, there shouldn't have been time to shower. We asked Soldier Ax about this.

That was an accurate that didn't happen. I made a showered up VSP BOMBI later, definitely not before I would and look with them up.

We also asked Private Gavin Jones to confirm or deny Alexander's story.

Yeah, that's true.

You know, as soon as we were able to that dude was straight up like spick and span and showered up and bade it to go.

Then we have actions afterwards where he started cleaning up and throwing away things and walking contraband items to the bird pair. So he's cleaning up these crimes already. There's cleaning up evidence of whatever misgivings and misdeeds.

Were going on, which is very strange that in a day like this you find that you need to throw away a bag of us We essentially thought it was closed because it was a black plastic bag that you didn't see trashking out of it.

Soldier X had a clear explanation from what he remembers being in that trash bag.

One of the CEOs from yourself was like clear, shut up, went threw aways of alcohol and which investigation knows it was just our own stuff? Was anything Bill's or anything like that.

Don't forget who has proven to be drinking liquor and discussing tactics with Bails just hours before the killings, Soldier X the Staff starred with Jason McLoughlin, also known as Mac. When we approached Mac about this podcast, he asked that we fuck off his words.

There is a report one of the people that lived nearby said that she heard two men drunkenly arguing outside. Now two men arguing, okay, that could be anything but drunkenly arguing. That is really, really, really fascinating.

Then there's the issue of a comment that was made after Robert Bales had returned to the VSP and had been detained. Captain Field had called a meeting to discuss what had just occurred.

We're all kind of gathered together like a bunch of little kids on a picnic bench, and Captain Fields is like, Okay, I'm just gonna tell you guys that we're getting reports that there are women and children that are cash dows, and we believe Bobby has been the one that's done it, and he was in there immediately pipes up and says.

He did it for you guys, And this is before we have any idea like what he's intertwined with. He just told us this fully critic thing of like whatever did you know?

He did it for y'all? And that I will never get that out of my head. I can never get that out of my head.

Soldier X remember saying something different in that moment.

Danny Fields was like, you're just gonna a brief about the situation. Like, I was pretty emotionally angry about what was happening. This is a huge situation, and I didn't want a bunch of people going on social media and being like, oh my god, chuck where I'm at right now? And so I gave very clear, concise information to stay up social media.

They might sound like minor, harmless details, a shower trash bag, an attempt at understanding what Bales had just done, but this perceived odd behavior from another soldier stuck with the privates so much so that they alerted the Army's Criminal Investigation Division or see ID.

Of the joes were so nervous and rightfully so that somebody else was involved from the infantry that we finally did it. We broke chain a command. We went to talk to the CID agent and we said, listen, sorry, we don't know how to put this this way, but something else is going on here and other people are involved. You need to talk to these two individuals, that is Mac and immedium. That night they were flown out, okay,

Some of the previous evidence offered by Alexander and Jones could be considered to be here set. But on March thirteenth, twenty twelve, the military flew McLoughlin and Soldier X back to Kandahart. Their deployment was over. That's indisputable.

It was pretty quick crd K and they spoke to us and then they took us back to Canada. Article for the investigations there be I don't know half four times, you know, first by CID officers and then you know, by the prosecuting Attorney's office. It was at hand four times. Why I got to Candahart. They stuck me in a wooden box like a little sleeping area. I wasn't allowed to talk to anybody about my attorney and the chaplain.

And the thing is, if anyone was going to have Bails's back like that, it was going to be because they were on a recon team previously together. That's why we were all very skeptical of him.

They acted like best friends and deployed with Bails previously as part of the sniper section, so they were tight. They had shared experiences of Iraq, and the reason why he was chosen for this deployment is because again Bals got to choose his guys, so he picked somebody at trust and in a relationship with.

In our conversation with him, Soldier Eggs grappled with whether he in some way was accountable for what happened in the Canahem massacre.

There's a lot of emotions, a lot of thoughts I'd go into it. I still figure about those families every day. There's definitely times where I wish I would have stepped in and stopped it, maybe would have prevented something. I'm a firm believer with great power, times great responsibility and I feel like when Bob did that, it took all that wind down that sale, like do you really do you really believe that? Did you step up and do your part to prevent this?

As for Bails, during Paul's eighteen hours with him, there was no grand admission that anyone went with him to Ala Kosai and not to be in just a few remarks here and there, which can be interpreted at face value or not.

I will lay down my life for the guy to my left and right. In some ways it kind of helps me get through prison. What is my responsibility here? I can't go to the facility because then I'm a rat and I won't do it.

Between the years of twenty sixteen and twenty nineteen, we didn't know about this alternate narrative. It's only later in retrospect that we began to question whether the story surrounding one of the most infamous war crimes committed by an American was actually true and ask which version of events would be more in line with the man that we had come to know. The following audio was captured on December fifteenth, twenty twenty two.

Hey Bob, right off the bat, how are you doing these days? You know, I'm all right, I'm doing that.

I'm doing it.

I'm in the same place, you know, I've been in the same place.

For a while.

Yeah.

Yeah, it's been some time since you and I first started talking about your case and everything. Between then and now, we've spoken to a lot of people. Some people were pretty sympathetic, spoke favorably of you, and there were a fair number of people didn't speak so favorably and weren't so sympathetic, And ultimately we thought it was only right that Bob Bales have the final.

Say, Hey, just out of curiosity, how bad was these other.

Guys, like you know, he was my boy.

I mean, I love them, man, and I just want to.

Know what is it? What he said.

Coming up on the war within the way that I see this thing going is bails recruits and goes along with him.

Took us aside and had a conversation with about if you need to make that shot, you know that you've got your back.

On that camaraderie and the military is pretty strong.

If you just do the numbers, it's hard to believe it's just one person.

I'm shocked here. I've got to look into them, whether or not there's another man there.

He's always said it was him and only him, and I honestly think he We'll take.

That to his death.

They would have been impressed with us had we not done what we did, or had I not done what I did.

The War Within the Robert Bailes Story is production of Bungalow Media and Entertainment, Checkpoint Productions and Mosquito Park Pictures in partnership with iHeart Podcasts. The series was created by executive producers Paul Polowski and David check Executive producers from Bungalow Media and Entertainment are Robert Friedman and Mike Power. The podcast was written and produced by Max Nelson and hosted by me Mike McGinnis. Editing was done by Anna Hoberman,