Transcripts of interviews from three top State Department officials with the House Foreign Affairs Committee explain they were rushed to Afghanistan with virtually no time to prepare for the U.S. withdrawal. Additionally, the officials admitted there was no established emergency evacuation plan in place when they arrived.
CNN reports on the three officials, John Bass, Jim DeHart and Jayne Howell, who “were all plucked from unrelated assignments and rushed into Afghanistan in the hours after Kabul fell to the Taliban due to their extensive experience in Afghanistan.”
The transcripts “are the latest tranche of more than a dozen interviews conducted by the committee as a key part of Republican Chairman Michael McCaul’s ongoing investigation into the 2021 evacuation that involved the deaths of 13 US service members.”
CNN reports of the transcripts, it says was exclusively obtained by the news outlet:
The new details paint a picture of the chaos outside the Kabul airport and the ad-hoc nature of the evacuation, something that top US military generals suggested could have been mitigated if the State Department had called sooner for a “noncombatant evacuation operation” – known as a NEO – for remaining US citizens in Afghanistan.
“I cannot emphasize enough to you that minute to minute, what was happening was changing,” Howell said in her July 2023 interview.
DeHart said they had to “create from scratch tactical operations that would get our priority people into the airport.” He added: “we were roughly as effective as we could be under the circumstances.”
Bass, who served as the top State Department coordinator on the evacuation efforts on the ground, echoed those sentiments.
“We were already in the midst of executing an evacuation that substantially exceeded I think the scope and scale of what had been contemplated,” explained Bass.
