At one point at the height of the crisis, he says he was the only person working on the evacuation desk, and was having to make life and death decisions on individuals to be evacuated on the basis of entirely haphazard criteria.
He has claimed Raab showed a misunderstanding of the haphazard process and desperate position at Kabul airport by delaying several emergency evacuation referrals.
Rather than acting immediately, Raab – he said – insisted on further, better formatted evidence. “It is hard to explain why he reserved the decision for himself but failed to make it immediately,” Marshall says.
Marshall claims some of those that needed Raab’s consent never reached the airport, and in another case the team went ahead without waiting any longer for a response by Raab.
Marshall has also questioned whether Downing Street had been correct to tell parliament that all emails from Afghans attempting to leave the country had been processed by 6 September.
The whistleblower also reveals the uproar inside the Ministry of Defence when Boris Johnson ordered an
Afghan animal charity to be given priority for evacuation
In his testimony, Marshall claims: “There was a direct trade-off between transporting Nowzad’s animals and evacuating British nationals and Afghan evacuees, including Afghans who had served with British soldiers.”
The civil servant worked for a team responsible for helping people whose lives were at risk due to their connection with the UK.
In his testimony, Marshall estimates between 75,000 and 150,000 people (including dependants) applied for evacuation under the special case scheme.
The vast majority of these applicants feared their lives were at risk as a result of their connection to the UK and the west and were therefore eligible for evacuation.
In a 39-page statement to MPs on the foreign affairs select committee, Marshall estimates fewer than 5% received help.
Marshall says: “At the height of the crisis on the afternoon of Saturday 21 August, I was the only person monitoring and processing emails in the Afghan special cases inbox.
“No emails from after early Friday afternoon had been read at that point. The number of unread emails was already in the high thousands, I believe above 5,000, and increasing constantly.”
Marshall said that, given the excess demand for places, it was critical that credible selection criteria were applied, but he says this did not happen. Instead, he claims the criteria provided were entirely subjective.
“Staff were scared by making hundreds of life and death decisions about which they knew nothing,” he says.
Specific failings include a rigidly enforced eight-hour working day culture, the inability to match the computer systems of the FCDO and the Department for International Development (DfID) – which had merged with the Foreign Office in 2020, the lack of computers for soldiers in Kabul calling forward selected evacuees, a complete lack of expertise including language skills, and a lack of coordination with US allies.He claims the parallel Arap scheme was equally dysfunctional, saying that on the evening of Thursday 26 August, there were 4,914 unread emails in the Arap specific inbox.
There was confusion between the two email inboxes meaning cases were left for days without anyone noticing, he alleges.
For five nights in succession, he claims no night shift staff were deployed. DfID staff recruited to help “were visibly appalled by the system”.
Yet despite the urgency of the situation, the default expectation remained that staff in the FCDO would only work eight hours a day, five days a week. FCDO employees were only asked to work shifts for which they volunteered.