Maj. Jill Metzger surfaced late Friday knocking on the door of a house in Kant about 20 miles from Bishkek, the Kyrgyzstan capital, from which she disappeared Sept. 5. According to various news reports, she told officials that she had been abducted and managed to escape. News reports revealed that Metzger says someone stuck an object in her back pocket with a note claiming it was a bomb and instructing her to walk to a site where three men and a woman put her in a van and drove her out of Bishkek. The Air Force flew her to a medical facility in the region, where a spokesman said she was receiving medical care and counseling prior to being returned Stateside. Metzger was at the end of her four-month deployment as a personnel officer at Manas AB, Kyrgyzstan.
The defense intelligence community has tried three times in the past decade to build a “common intelligence picture”—a single data stream providing the information that commanders need to make decisions about the battlefield. The first two attempts failed. But officials say things are different today.