Across 39 devastating pages of evidence, Raphael Marshall today lays bare the extraordinary shambles at the heart of the Foreign Office after Kabul fell to the Taliban.
With the militants in control of the country, thousands of desperate Afghan workers and their families appealed to Britain to be airlifted to safety.
Yet the junior diplomat was, at times, the only person left dealing with hundreds upon hundreds of emails, almost all of them pleading for help.
In a detailed written statement to the Commons foreign affairs committee, published today, Mr Marshall – described by the committee as a ‘whistleblower’ – outlines how chronic staffing shortages at the department were compounded by colleagues working from home, refusing to work weekends and sticking to the culture of eight-hour shifts ‘despite the urgency’ of the situation.
The junior diplomat, who has now left the Foreign Office, also suggests the evacuation effort was hampered by delays in decision making by the then foreign secretary, Dominic Raab.
Raphael Marshall (pictured), a junior civil servant, has claimed he was at times the only person dealing with thousands of emails from those desperate to flee the Taliban
Britain's former foreign secretary Dominic Raab answers questions on Government policy on Afghanistan during a meeting of the Foreign Affairs Committee in September
Here, John Stevens details Mr Marshall’s damning claims about the performance of his former department during one of the worst crises in its recent history.
SO MANY LEFT BEHIND TO BE MURDERED BY THE TALIBAN
Mr Marshall, a 25-year-old graduate working at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (FCDO) in Whitehall, was assigned to the Special Cases team.
This was separate from the Afghan Relocations and Assistance Policy scheme that handled the cases of Afghans who worked directly for the UK Government, such as translators.
Instead, the Special Cases dealt with the claims of those at risk because of their links with the UK – including Afghan soldiers, politicians, journalists, civil servants, activists, aid workers and judges, as well as guards and others who worked through sub-contractors.
In his statement, he estimates that ‘between 75,000 and 150,000 people (including dependants) applied for evacuation’ via the Special Cases team but concludes, damningly, that fewer than five per cent ‘have received any assistance’.
He writes: ‘It is clear that some of those left behind have since been murdered by the Taliban.’
5,000 UNREAD MESSAGES
The whistleblower says that many of the emails to the Special Cases inbox were unread, with around 5,000 unread at any one time at the peak of the crisis.
He says many of those pleading for help detailed ‘grave human rights abuses’ by the Taliban, including ‘murders, rapes and burning of homes’.
He says that while the emails received an automated response that they had been ‘logged’, this was ‘usually false’.
Taliban fighters pose for a photograph in Kabul, Afghanistan, on August 19 earlier this year
A SINGLE CIVIL SERVANT TO READ THOUSANDS OF EMAILS
On the afternoon of Saturday August 21 –halfway through the two-week effort to rescue Afghans from Kabul – Mr Marshall reveals he ‘was the only person monitoring and processing emails in the Afghan Special Cases inbox’.
He adds: ‘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.
Around four other people had been rostered to work on the Special Cases team but had not come on shift... I had not originally been rostered but had decided that I was morally obliged to put myself down because I saw the team was not fully staffed.
If I had not, it is possible there would have been no one to process the
