WASHINGTON -- President Barack Obama's administration told senators it didn't notify Congress about the pending swap of Sgt. Bowe Bergdahl for five Taliban officials because of intelligence the Taliban stood to kill him if the deal was made public.
That fear -- not just the stated concerns that Bergdahl's health might be failing -- drove the administration to quickly make the deal to rescue him, bypassing the law that lawmakers be notified when detainees are released from the U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, congressional and administration officials said Thursday.
They spoke only on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to comment publicly.
Taliban fighters freed Bergdahl on Saturday and turned him over to a U.S. special operations team in eastern Afghanistan. Under the deal, five Taliban militants were released from Guantanamo and flown to Qatar, where they are to remain for a year under conditions that have not been publicly described.
A federal law requires Congress to be told 30 days before a prisoner is released from Guantanamo.
Since Bergdahl's release, administration officials including Obama, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel and National Security Adviser Susan Rice have said the key reason for the secret prisoner swap was evidence that Bergdahl's physical health was deteriorating after five years in captivity.
But on Wednesday night, administration officials told senators in a closed session that the primary concern was the death risk if the deal collapsed.
At a news conference in Brussels on Thursday, Obama said he makes no apologies for recovering Bergdahl, and he said the furor in Washington over the exchange has made the matter a "political football."
"Because of the nature of the folks that we were dealing with and the fragile nature of these negotiations, we felt it was important to go ahead and do what we did," he said.
There was no overt threat by the Taliban but rather an assessment based on intelligence reports that Bergdahl's life would be in jeopardy if news of the talks got out and the deal failed, said two senior U.S. officials familiar with the efforts to free the soldier.
"There were real concerns that if this were made public first, his physical security could be in danger," State Department spokesman Marie Harf said Thursday.
The risks, she said, included "someone guarding him that possibly wouldn't agree and could take harmful action against him. So as we needed to move quickly, all of these factors played into that."
Not everyone in Congress was convinced.
"I don't believe any of this," said Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. "First, we had to do the prisoner deal because he was in imminent danger of dying. Well, they saw the video in January and they didn't act until June. So that holds no water."
The administration had cited a video of Bergdahl, which was shown to senators in a briefing, in its previous statement over concerns that his health was failing.
"Now the argument is the reason they couldn't tell us is because it jeopardized his life," Graham said. "I don't buy that for a moment because he was a very valuable asset to the Taliban."
Several administration and congressional officials said the December video portrayed Bergdahl's health as in decline but not so desperately that he required an emergency rescue. An assessment by U.S. intelligence agencies about the video in January came to the same conclusion, said two congressional officials familiar with it.
Bergdahl remained Thursday in a military hospital in Germany. His hometown of Hailey, Idaho, called off a celebration planned for his eventual homecoming, citing security concerns.
Fellow soldiers have said Bergdahl's June 2009 capture by the Taliban occurred after he slipped away from his platoon's small outpost in Afghanistan's Paktika province after growing disillusioned with the U.S. military's war effort.
Hagel said Wednesday that the Army "will conduct a comprehensive review of all the circumstances regarding Sgt. Bergdahl's disappearance ... but let's first focus on getting Sgt. Bergdahl well, getting his health back ... reuniting him with his family."
A classified military report detailing the Army's investigation into Bergdahl's disappearance says he had wandered away from assigned areas before -- both at a training range in California and at his outpost in Afghanistan -- and then returned, people briefed on it said Thursday.
The report concludes that he most likely walked away of his own free will from his outpost in the darkness of night, and it criticized lax security practices and poor discipline within his unit.
But the question of whether Bergdahl was a deserter who never intended to come back, or simply slipped away for a short adventure and then was captured, remains unanswered.
The issue is murky, the report said, in light of Bergdahl's previous episodes of walking off.
The report is said to contain no mention of Bergdahl having left behind a letter that said he was deserting and explaining his disillusionment, as a retired senior military official briefed on the investigation at the time of his disappearance told The New York Times this week.
The retired officer insisted that he remembered reading a field report discussing such a letter and was unable to explain why it is not mentioned in the final report.
A Pentagon spokesman declined to discuss the report or make it available.
Information for this article was contributed by Ken Dilanian, Deb Riechmann, Robert Burns, Lara Jakes, Bradley Klapper, Nedra Pickler, Donna Cassata and Lolita C. Baldor of The Associated Press and by Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt of The New York Times.
A Section on 06/06/2014