Longform Best of 2012

The emotional toll on drone pilots.

A clandestine meeting between Western journalists and Hezbollah fighters in a Beirut strip mall.

The story of Bowe Bergdahl, a soldier who walked off his base in Afghanistan only to be captured by the Taliban.

On Jack Idema, a con-man who once ran a pet hotel before reinventing himself as a black-ops secret agent in Afghanistan, and the history of counterinsurgency theory.

Inside the attack on the U.S. embassy in Kabul.