Defence Committee

Oral evidence: Afghan Data Breach and Resettlement Schemes, HC 1304, Private Sitting

Tuesday 18 November 2025

Ordered by the House of Commons to be published on 26 November 2025.

Members present: Mr Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi (Chair); Lincoln Jopp; Emma Lewell; Jesse Norman; Ian Roome; Michelle Scrogham; Fred Thomas; and Derek Twigg.

I: Person A.

Questions 91 to 163

Witness

Written evidence from witness: – Anonymised (Person A)

Examination of Witness

Witness: Person A.

Q91 Chair: This is part of our ongoing inquiry into the Afghan data breach and resettlement scheme. Could you set the context for us? How did you get involved with assisting targeted Afghans? What did you do to help them?

Person A: The way it started off was very surreal.

when I got up the next morning there were 200 Afghans begging for help in my inbox. I am the sort of person who can’t say no, so I was like, “I’m just an ordinary person, but if there’s anything I can do to help you, I will try.”

From that, I had three SIV cases that went to America. The way things work with Afghans is that when one member of a family is part of the forces, quite often other family members are part of different branches. From that, I picked up a few other cases. At that point, it was mainly just helping with paperwork and making sure that they had the evidence that was asked for lined up. I then volunteered with an NGO for a little bit,

.

Q92  Chair: Which NGO was that?

Person A: It was called              . When it

moved more to              , I was going to call it a day. I got a message from a colonel in the UK that said, “Sixty-five of my guys have been left behind—can you help?” By that point I had a bit of understanding of the ARAP process and I was like, “I’ll do what I can.” From there, it has ballooned. I now have cases from pretty much every branch that was affiliated with the UK. We have got people out to 11 different countries now.

Q93              Chair: Could you explain the size and profile of your contact network among the targeted Afghans?

Person A: I originally started working with the NDS. It was the

unit; I think “Panorama” or “Newsnight” did a piece on them. That was a unit that was affiliated with our security services. From that, we picked up

, as I think they are called now, but it was originally a different

; that is the unit.

Then I was asked to help with some Triples. I have some guys from Triple 3 and Triple 4. We have some Triple 2s. We have guys that have served in the three later units. I have guys from BOST 170. Then we have some quite high-profile guys from the ANA and a couple of politicians. Basically, if they have a case for anywhere that we might be able to help with, we do what we can.

Chair: Thanks for setting that context. My colleague Lincoln wants to

come in.

Q94 Lincoln Jopp: Just so I have the chronology right, the leak had happened but no one in the MoD knew about it. You are now getting involved and helping out. Who was the colonel who said, “Sixty-five of my guys have been left behind—can you help?”?

Person A: That was prior to the leak.

Q95  Lincoln Jopp: What year did you start your              XXX?

Person A: My was just as Kabul was falling. It was August 2021. I helped with the NGO for just over a year. I think the colonel asked me for help in spring ’23. That was after the leak had happened, but before we discovered it. They had been rejected on the grounds they were not eligible for ARAP, when they actually were. Of that original 65, we have only one guy left waiting for approval.

Q96 Lincoln Jopp: Do you know which unit the 65 guys who had been left behind were from?

Person A: It was the NDS .

Chair: We are now going to move on to the data breach and the super-injunction itself. I hand over to my colleague Fred.

Q97 Fred Thomas: Thank you so much for being with us this morning. It is really helpful. I will come back later to the answers you just gave about people in the UK becoming aware that there were guys being left behind for potentially no good reason, but can we just talk about the data breach for a second? You have given us this in writing, but it would be good to hear you say how you became aware.

Person A: I was supporting a family. The dad was quite high up in the ANA. My point of contact with the family was the son, because he spoke good English. He had messaged me the night before and said, “This has been posted on Facebook. This can’t be true, can it?” At the beginning, we were quite dismissive; we were like, “Oh, it’s someone being a chancer.” So we said, “Well, ask him about your dad’s case.”

Overnight, the person who posted on Facebook came back with screenshots that detailed his dad’s case. He was one of the nine in the original screenshot that was posted to Facebook. Of the nine cases in that screenshot, we were in contact with two of them, so we knew what kinds of cases were in the potential breach. I said a word that possibly is not ready for publication, and basically hit the red button, because I knew it was bad. From what we could see on the screenshot, there were sensitive details.

Q98 Fred Thomas: Talk us through what happens next. You think, “Okay, this is part of a bigger breach.” How do you find out? We now know there were 19,000 names. How did it emerge? Give us a sense of what you did and who you spoke to.

Person A: The person who was posting online was posting anonymously in a Facebook group, so we did not know who it was, but they told us straightaway that they had 33,000 lines of this database. I had contacted

—a contact of mine,              , who some of the Committee may know. He is connected into Government at high levels. Obviously, I am just a person on the street; if I ring up the MoD, they are going to go, “Yeah, okay—bye.” We knew it was serious. He basically put the alarm up.

I was expecting either a phone call or someone to come and knock on my door and say, “You need to sign the Official Secrets Act.” Maybe I was naive—I did not know anything about it. We just did not hear anything. I emailed the Armed Forces Minister and got no reply. It was not until I got quite irritated, put a              that I got a response. I did not put any detail   into   it.   It   was   something   along   the   lines   of,

X. That was when I finally got a response.

We told them on 14 August. I did not hear anything at all, from anyone. No one even told me to keep quiet about it. I did, because I understood the implications. Then I was asked to have a meeting with the director of DARR. I assumed it was just about the casework we were doing. After about 20 minutes of talking to them, they said to me, “You’ll get an email in 30 seconds,” and that was the injunction. That was the first I knew anything about it.

Fred Thomas: That was the injunction.

Person A: Yes, I got served the injunction live on a Teams call.

Q99              Fred Thomas: Who was that director? What was their name?

Person A:

Q100 Fred Thomas: What contact have you had with Government, if any, since you got the email with the injunction?

Person A: We carried on talking in the meeting. We had discussions about concerns that we had. We raised the fact that there were terrorist training camps in Afghanistan. My exact words were, “Something big is coming, on the scale of 9/11, and we don’t know what.” Three weeks later, 7 October happened. We knew something was coming.

There was a bit of back and forth. It was agreed that they would speak to us about concerns we had with cases. We have dealt with things via email since then and I have had regular Teams calls with them to discuss particular issues. There is not a single case that has not had an issue, of various degrees, so I have had quite regular contact with them and we have managed to sort quite a lot of cases out.

Q101 Lincoln Jopp: This is absolutely gripping. If we could rewind a touch: you informed Heappey, the Minister, and did not get a response for four days. The press reports suggested that you also told, at some stage, Luke Pollard?

Person A: Luke Pollard was cc-ed on the email and I heard back from his office.

Q102 Lincoln Jopp: So in the original email to Heappey, you cc-ed Pollard?

Person A: Yes.

Q103 Lincoln Jopp: Got it. And you got a reply from Pollard but not from Heappey?

Person A: Yes.

Q104 Lincoln Jopp: What was your motivation for copying in an Opposition Minister?

Person A: I had a feeling that it was going to get sat on and it was going to get hidden. I am just a member of the public and so I was like, “How do we make sure something is done about this?” To me, the logical thing was to inform his opposite party, his opposite Minister. That was the only way I could think of. At that point I did not have half the connections and contacts I have now.

Lincoln Jopp: That makes complete sense.

Person A: I was very worried about my guys, basically.

Q105 Emma Lewell: What did Luke’s response say?

Person A: I cannot remember exactly. It was from one of the guys in his office, and it was that he was going to make Luke aware. At that point, everything hit the fan and so I do not think he ever came back to me on it. I would have to check and let the Committee know because a lot has gone since then.1

Emma Lewell: I understand. Thank you.

Q106 Jesse Norman: Thank you so much for coming in virtually to give us testimony. I want to go through the super-injunction, but before we get there could you tell me a little about how you came to be doing what you were doing? You were assisting people in Afghanistan. Were you working for an NGO or on your own behalf in some way?

Person A: Originally it was just me, in the immediate aftermath of the air lift. It was just, “If I can help someone with paperwork, I will help”. Everything was very frantic at that time.

Q107 Jesse Norman: Did you have an Afghan connection?

1 Note from witness: I spoke to Mr. Pollard's parliamentary assistant. On 23/08/2023 he advised that Mr. Pollard had been on leave, but that he was discussing with him sending a letter to the Minister highlighting my concerns. I didn't get a response after that, but assumed at the time - once I was served the injunction - that Mr Pollard and his staff had also been served.

Person A: No, I had no connection to Afghanistan whatsoever. It was just the fact that I had had all these messages in my inbox              . Like I said, I am the sort of person who cannot say no if I think I can help. Then because of the connections that were made in the first month, there were quite a few of us who joined up with the NGO and we all took our cases under its umbrella.

Q108 Jesse Norman: Do you have a services or forces background?

Person A: No, not at all. My background is .

Q109 Jesse Norman: Fascinating. So you get this information on 13 August, you write to Heappey on 14 August and you hear back on 21 August but before that, on 17 August, the Daily Mail has picked this up. I think that is the timetable?

Person A: I believe so.

Q110 Jesse Norman: Then Wallace gets it, and the High Court receives an application for an injunction on 30 August. You are then served two weeks later?

Person A: On 18 September.

Q111 Jesse Norman: We had 14 September. It was on the 18th—you’re sure?

Person A: I think it is the 18th. I think they set the meeting up on the 14th, but I am fairly sure it was the 18th.

Q112 Jesse Norman: Sorry, you are absolutely right—the meeting took place on the 18th. You then have this out-of-body experience in which you are talking to them, and suddenly, you go from what I think you probably assumed was a constructive conversation about a public potential problem, to being the object of a court proceeding.

Person A: Yes.

Q113 Jesse Norman: Can you talk a little about what that felt like and what the procedure was?

Person A: It was very surreal. Obviously, I have no legal background. I was not entirely sure what it meant; they had to explain to me what it meant. It literally affected every single day of my life between then and it being lifted, because I could not talk to anyone about it. If I was dealing with anything affected by the breach data that I knew about, I had to go somewhere where nobody could hear me or see what I was working on. I had to be extremely careful around my children. I could not talk to my family about it. It was a lot of pressure. The implication was, “If you slip up—if you talk about it—you are going to jail.”

Q114 Jesse Norman: And that was made clear to you as part of the briefing?

Person A: Yes—it was at the top of every single email.2

Q115 Jesse Norman: The email that you got during that meeting—you presumably said during the meeting, “Hold on a second. I’ve just received this email. What does it mean? Can you take me through it?” or something like that?

Person A: She told us it was coming.

Q116 Jesse Norman: When you received it, was that on the same call?

Person A: Yes, it was the same call.

Q117 Jesse Norman: What was your reaction to them? What did they say to you?

Person A: Like I said, they had to explain to me what it meant.

Jesse Norman: In that call?

Person A: In the call. It was just very matter of fact. I was a bit stunned, to be honest. I did not come up with any questions or anything until afterwards, because it was not something I was expecting. As I said in my written evidence, the journalists were told to take legal advisers with them; we weren’t.

Jesse Norman: That’s interesting, isn’t it?

Person A: We had no idea that this was in the offing.

Q118 Jesse Norman: And no legal advice was offered to you?

Person A: No. I was told that I could get legal advice if I wanted to.

Jesse Norman: Right, so it was, “Best of luck. We’re giving you a super-injunction from a High Court. You may need to spend a lot of money even to understand what is going on.” That feels like the tone of it: “We’re not going to support you fully.”

Person A: Basically, yes.

Q119 Jesse Norman: So you are then in a situation in which you have raised this issue, you have messages coming into your account, and you are under not just an injunction but a super-injunction, which stops you from being able to talk about the injunction. What effect does that have on the way you behave—apart from your family, in relation to the people you have been working with in Afghanistan?

2 Note from witness: To clarify, the warning about the consequences of breaching the injunction was at the top of every copy of the paperwork sent about the injunction, not 'regular' emails about casework. Those emails came from the MOD legal team, not the caseworking teams.

Person A: By that point, I had turned my messages off so they could not get me on              . We were mainly speaking to Afghans using

, because it was the safest option at that point. Between reporting to the MoD what had happened—what we had discovered—and being served the injunction, I knew we could not talk about it, even though I had not yet been served the injunction. We told the families we were dealing with that we had concerns that somebody’s phone had been compromised, and we recommended that they moved if they could and changed their phone numbers. Those were the two main details that, if the Taliban had access to this information, would lead to them being traced.

There seems to be this misconception that the Taliban do not have the same sort of facilities that we have. We left it all behind in Afghanistan; they have it. If they have your phone number, they can trace you down to within metres. That is what the unit did.

Q120 Jesse Norman: Did they also have encryption and de-encryption technologies coming out of that, do you think?

Person A: They’ve got everything.

Q121 Jesse Norman: So we left them sensitive material and kit, which they were then using against us?

Person A: Yes.

Q122 Jesse Norman: Okay; that is a fantastic answer. Thank you. I have a final question. So, if I have understood you correctly, essentially you had to be—not necessarily dishonest, but obfuscatory with the people you were working with. You had to disguise the fact that you had received a super-injunction; you could not talk about that with them. You had to try to give them the best service you could without being dishonest or misleading them, but that must have been a very morally uncomfortable position. There are things you know that you cannot talk about; there are things that you might be able to do that would help them.

Person A: Yes, because at that point we already knew they were being hunted. We didn’t know—we will never be able to prove if it was the list that was the reason for it. But we knew there was a specific Taliban unit that was hunting guys who were affiliated with the UK.

I will probably touch upon it later when we come to Rimmer, if you want to discuss that, but one of the things I knew that perhaps the MoD did not know was that the mainframe and the databases for the national operations centre were taken down as Kabul fell. The biometrics database was gone. The Taliban did not have that.

So, when there are comments like, “The Taliban had this information already”, it was in bits and pieces, and it took them two years to put it together. For example, the lie detector results were held on a different server, so they were not deleted, and the Taliban would have been able to glean some information from those files. But the main biometrics database was taken down as Kabul fell. Then, the payroll records were deleted

remotely; I think that it was three weeks after Kabul fell. So, the Taliban did not have those records to identify people.

Q123 Jesse Norman: And therefore your point is that the leak was all the more important and damaging, because that other material had been deleted and therefore gave the leak the special value and prominence that it had?

Person A: Yes. If nothing else, it was a confirmation.

Q124 Ian Roome: I join my colleagues in saying thank you for giving evidence today; it is really appreciated.

I will ask about the impact of the lifting of the super-injunction. On 4 July, John Healey, the Defence Secretary, wrote to the courts to request that the super-injunction be lifted and on 15 July it was lifted, following a decision by the judge earlier on. What was the impact on the Afghans who you worked with of lifting the super-injunction, along with the closure of some of the resettlement schemes?

Person A: On the lifting of the injunction, I was not given advance warning that it was being lifted; I was told after it had actually been lifted. On that Tuesday, I got over 5,000 text and WhatsApp messages. I watched my phone vibrate across the floor, because—literally to a man and woman—every Afghan panicked, because at that point they had no idea if their data had been breached and they had no idea how to check whether their data had been breached, and they were all incredibly frightened.

As I say, they had no way of checking at that point, so their point of contact was me. And they all wanted an answer from me, which at that point I could not give them.

Q125 Ian Roome: I think I know what your answer will be to the next question, which is: how could the Government have handled this better?

Person A: I watched a previous evidence hearing, where Mr Bailey brought up that the FCDO has systems in place for this sort of procedure. When you go back to the very beginning of the Afghan resettlement schemes, I cannot understand why, if the MoD needed to be primary because of the work history of these people, a team from FCDO was not seconded, with that software, to the MoD. To me, that would have solved the problem of the data breach; it would not have happened.

Q126 Ian Roome: What sort of messages were you getting from the Afghans when they learned that the super-injunction had been lifted?

Person A: At that point, quite a few of them thought they had been left to die, because it had been so long since they applied. A lot of them mentioned Prime Minister Johnson’s words of moving “heaven and earth”—“the UK told us you would move heaven and earth to get us out, but you have basically given our names to the Taliban.”

They were very frightened and very worried. With the news coming that the resettlement schemes had closed that day, a lot of them thought that meant for everyone; they did not realise that if you had an open case,

your case would still be processed, so they thought they were getting left behind.

Q127 Ian Roome: I think we are coming on to this later on, so I do not want to pinch anybody else’s questions. In your view, could it have been handled a lot better?

Person A: Yes. My personal thought is that we should have told the Afghans. Even if they were not eligible to come to the UK, if we had told them, they could have made preparations. You are in the position now where quite a lot of Afghans are taking legal action against the Government for the breach.

At that point, if the MoD had turned around and said, “There has been this breach. You are not eligible to come to the UK, but we will fund a visa, or we will fund your passports”, 99% of Afghans would have been happy with that. Now, we have a load of people who have been brought out under ARR that probably would not have been eligible; we have a lot of people threatening legal action against the Government; and, worst of all, we have people who have died.

Chair: You mentioned Rimmer earlier. We will now come on to that section of our questioning, in particular with regard to risk assessments.

Q128 Emma Lewell: I am aware you have only ever met with Paul Rimmer once—is that right?

Person A: Yes, it was a Teams meeting. Emma Lewell: That was 25 March this year. Person A: Yes.

Q129 Emma Lewell: Can you expand a bit more on what happened in that meeting, and, in particular, on what he said when you advised him that there were extrajudicial killings of former ANDSF happening? I am struggling with what changed between your meeting with him in March and his final risk assessment in July.

Person A: It was quite a one-sided meeting where I talked a lot, and he listened and made notes. He acknowledged what I said, but he did not really come back to me on anything. He did not seem to be aware of Yarmouk 60, which is the unit that is hunting forces. He did not seem to be aware of the extent of the extrajudicial killings. He did not seem to be aware of the reprisals.

We talked about the fact there is no way of saying 100% the breach is responsible for what is happening to Afghans, but my opinion is that that does not negate the fact that the breach happened, and we exacerbated or exaggerated their risk—I do not quite know what word I want to use. Their risk factor increased because of the breach.

I was fully expecting the polar opposite of the results that came out on the Rimmer review, because I knew there were other people telling him the

exact same thing that I was. What changed between me speaking to him and July? Nothing—if anything, in July it got worse.

Q130 Emma Lewell: You said there were other people telling him the same thing. Who were they?

Person A: I believe Person B is coming to give evidence to you later on, and there were other caseworkers. It was common knowledge that Afghans were being targeted, so anyone he spoke to should have been telling him exactly the same thing.

Q131 Derek Twigg: Thanks for taking the time to give evidence; it has been fascinating listening to you. I will not repeat some of the stuff, but from what you have said so far, you think that Rimmer reached the wrong conclusions.

Person A: Yes.

Q132 Derek Twigg: Why do you think he reached those wrong conclusions?

Person A: I do not really know. I think, possibly, there was a pre-existing desire to close the schemes that might have influenced things. I couldn’t comment other than that, because it is so polar opposite to what the actual situation is that I cannot understand how he has reached that decision.

Q133 Derek Twigg: That is the important point. You are saying that the evidence on the ground could not in any way match his conclusions?

Person A: Not at all. We have got more than 300 killings documented.

Q134 Derek Twigg: Again, I think you have covered part of this, but just to get it on the record: you believe that Rimmer is wrong to say that the Taliban getting all of the dataset was unlikely to profoundly change the existing risk profile of individuals named there. Is that completely contrary to what you understand the situation to be?

Person A: Yes.

Q135 Derek Twigg: The final point once again covers some of the things you have said, but it is good to get it on the record. Is Rimmer wrong to downplay the risk of the reprisals against the individuals in Afghanistan as a result of their former affiliations, rather than their current threat or resistance to Taliban rule? Did he basically just get the whole thing wrong?

Person A: The thing to remember is that these Afghans are not standing up to the Taliban; they are in hiding. Everything boils down to their previous employment. They do not just target the principal applicant; they target the families. They will take the sons. They will take the daughters. They will hold them for a week. They will beat them. They will electrocute them. Their families then have to buy them back with a “fine” on the proviso that “You need to produce this person by this date or we are coming back for you”.

We have people who have been electrocuted. We have people who have been waterboarded. We have people who have been whipped with the big outdoor electrical cables that are around the thickness of your fist. One of the favourite tactics is to let them go to sleep, flood the cell and then put an electric cable in it. It is horrific, horrific torture. Teeth being pulled. Fingernails being pulled. We have had four-year-old children who have had their arms broken to try to get the family to say where someone is.

Q136 Derek Twigg: If Mr Rimmer was here today, what question should this Committee ask him?

Person A: Why did he come to the conclusions he did when they are quite obviously wrong?

Q137 Derek Twigg: There is no one that you know who understands the situation on the ground in Afghanistan who would agree with the Rimmer conclusions?

Person A: No one.

Chair: It was also interesting that the judge noted how different the assessments in the report were in comparison to the super-injunction that had originally been sought. That is why he noted that it is for others to decide what lessons can be learned. That is one of the reasons why we are here. We just want to delve further into this matter.

Q138 Lincoln Jopp: This is a difficult one for you to guess, but you will have a stronger sense of it than anyone. Do you think that, from the moment that the Facebook post happened, the Taliban were in receipt of the whole list, or do you think that someone was drip feeding it to them? Can the pace of torture and execution give us an insight into when and to what extent the list was in the hands of the Taliban?

Person A: It is very, very hard to give a judgment, but I believe that they have the list. In tandem with that, we had situations where, for example, an officer was captured, and they would get into his phone and get all his

contacts.

The Afghans are in big groups; there will be a unit group where all of one unit are together, and there will then be an ARAP group and a Pakistan hotel group. They gleaned contacts from getting people’s phones. Can we say 100% definitely that somebody was discovered because of the leak? No, we cannot. However, as I have said, it is a confirmation. They had a list to work off to say, “Well, these people worked for the British, or these people worked for NATO.”

One of the things I have mentioned is that there are people who applied for ARAP who did not work with the UK, but they did work with NATO partners, and they did name a NATO officer as someone who could be their reference. In the same way that some of our special forces and our Ministers have been exposed, there was a big potential for NATO partners’ details to have been breached.

I know of a guy who named a French special forces officer as his mentor. It all depends on whether the person entering that information into the spreadsheet deemed that relevant to add into the notes. We do not know what was put in and what was not, but we know the connections that these people had. It was phone numbers and dates of service—some people even gave their GPS co-ordinates.

Q139 Lincoln Jopp: I am trying to make sense of Rimmer’s comments, and I am trying to understand the threat posed by the list, on its own. Is the situation that you described, where these networks bounce other networks, what really affects the threat profile, rather than the original list?

Person A: The best of way of putting it is that the list was probably not used on its own, because of the other things that were happening. Was the information in the list enough to capture someone? Yes, it was.

Lincoln Jopp: Got it. Thank you very much indeed.

Q140 Chair: On the accounts of torture you mentioned, how exactly did that information come across to you? Was that just through messaging, or was it by email? Can you elaborate further on that?

Person A: Like I said, with most of the families that we are in contact with, it is done through . They will basically send photographs. A lot of the time—certainly for the families that have fled to Iran—the internet coverage is very spotty and they are on data packages. They will send it to me as a compressed file, and I will then take the photos out and send them on to the MoD for its evidence.

Q141 Chair: And you sent all that evidence—all those pictures—on to the MoD, so it was fully aware of the sheer scale of the torture that was being experienced by many individuals out there.

Person A: Yes.

Chair: Right, okay. Thank you for that clarification. We will move on to questions about the resettlement.

Q142 Michelle Scrogham: Thank you for the evidence you are giving this morning; it is disturbing, to say the least, to listen to some of the reports that you are telling us about.

I would like to move on to the resettlement. Specifically, when you gave in your written evidence, you said, “As time went on…the ARAP application process was not fit for purpose.” In what ways do you think that it was not fit for purpose? What would have made it work?

Person A: I would like to preface it by saying that everyone who works in this field understands that it was a crisis response in August 2021, and it was all hands to the pump. We know that civil servants were pulled in from everywhere—from all different Departments—and did not necessarily have the knowledge of Afghanistan, and the knowledge of customs, practices and situations.

One specific example for me was that a family were told, “Why can’t you sell your house? Why can’t you fund yourself by selling your house?” To sell your house in Afghanistan, you have to go in front of a magistrate. Well, of course he is going to get arrested, so he can’t fund himself by selling his house. These sorts of questions slow down the process because there is that obvious working time of, they’ll ask a question, the Afghan family will reply, and it might be six weeks before they get a response to that. In the meantime, x, y and z might have happened.

There were a lot of gaps in knowledge. For example, we kept saying to them, “There are payrolls for this unit.” The UK were paying these men and women. They kept saying to us, “No, we weren’t”—yes, you were. It got to the point that I gave them a payroll for the unit and said, “This is what we were paying them.” I don’t know if they had that in advance or not, but I was like, “If I can get it, you can get it.”

It is only probably in the last six months that they have said they have got payrolls for the Triples. These guys kept saying, “You have been paying us,” and the MoD kept saying, “No, we weren’t.” So that gap of knowledge is obviously critical to deciding eligibility. It is hard to put it into words really.

Q143 Michelle Scrogham: You easily accessed the payroll and proved that they are on the payroll. What purpose do you think the MoD had in saying that they hadn’t paid them?

Person A: I do not think the people dealing with the eligibility had the background knowledge of the units.

One of the issues we have had is that the Afghans assumed that we had records. So they would send in 20 photos with no descriptions. Nobody at the MoD would say, “What are these photos? Who are the people in these photos?” They would just go, “You have not evidenced your claim—we are rejecting you.” Or people would send in a little email and it would be, “I worked in such and such a unit in 2018. I worked with Sergeants Steve and Rick,” because that is what they knew them as; they didn’t have full names, they didn’t know units. They could not evidence who their mentors were.

In some cases, we have found the mentors, and they have given letters to say, “Yes, I did work with this man.” But because the civil servants did not have access to the records, or there was not enough information to find the records, it just slowed everything down and ended up with a lot of rejections that should not have gone out, really.

Based on the evidence that the MoD had, you can understand why they came to that decision, but there was no double-checking, for want of a better way of putting it. There was no follow-up. You have to bear in mind that for some of these guys, English is their third language, some of them might not be able to read and write in Dari or Pashto, and it is a very, very stressful situation. It just was not ideal.

Q144 Michelle Scrogham: Can you tell us what the impacts have been on

targeted Afghans because of the Government’s handling of the resettlement process?

Person A: Obviously, a lot of them are depressed. They are very frightened. They have had no income since—well, their last pay was July 2021. Certainly with the Triples, some of these guys were affluent by Afghan standards at the fall of Kabul, but they have had to sell everything that was not nailed down to survive, and they are now destitute. We have kids with malnutrition. We have kids that can’t access medical care, not just because the families are being targeted, but because they can’t afford to pay for it. They have nothing left—down to they have sold kitchen pots and pans to try to survive, because there has been no support at all in Afghanistan for 99.9% of the families.

Q145 Michelle Scrogham: You said that the ARAP process was handled particularly badly during the period of the super-injunction. Has there a been a time when the process has worked better?

Person A: Being polite, no, not really.

Michelle Scrogham: I was guessing that would be the answer.

Person A: It is a hard thing to say, because, like I said, I want to preface it with the fact that it was a crisis response, and things are slightly better. Obviously, hindsight is a wonderful thing, but the same issues are cropping up now, four years on, that were cropping up in August 2021. I don’t think you can say that lessons are learned if you are still making the same mistakes.

Q146 Michelle Scrogham: What could they be doing to make it better, in your opinion?

Person A: Processing time is one thing. There is no reason why, following an approval by the MoD, a family should be waiting 18 months for Home Office approval, when they have already been waiting four years. There is one case, in particular, that was featured on “Newsnight”. They were deported from Pakistan. They are still in Afghanistan. They still do not have their Home Office approval, despite the fact that we were assured it was being worked on, cross-Government, at haste.

They were deported back to Afghanistan with literally just the clothes they were stood up in. They had two newborn babies. They had no money. They had no food. They had no formula. They did not have their mobile phones. Their passports were only returned to them last week, and they were deported in August. They sat in the British high commission from August to last week, so we couldn’t even send them money—they couldn’t collect it at the money exchange because they had no ID.

This is a family who have been tortured. They have been burned out of their home. He served six years with the UK, and, at the time of the fall of Kabul, he was a lieutenant colonel. He is on Yarmouk 60’s list—they have chased him across Afghanistan. As a country, we let that family go back to destitution.

Chair: That is all very sobering. I will hand over now to my colleague, Lincoln.

Q147 Lincoln Jopp: You have talked about problems with processing time, cultural awareness and bureaucratic drag—for want of a better phrase. In terms of the criteria being used for who would be evacuated, did you ever ask what principles or rules the evacuation programme was based on?

Person A: It is quite well laid out. There are four categories. I don’t know exactly how they were come up with—whether it was MoD, whether it was Home Office—but those categories are quite defined in legal terms. The issue we have is interpretation. Certainly with category 4, it is much more subjective.

Originally, there were a lot of people being brought out under cat 4, and then the eligibility requirements narrowed. It became that somebody had to be integral to the British role in Afghanistan, and instead of hitting one sub-criteria, they had to hit one from this section, one from this section and one from this section, which is understandable.

The particular one for me is the Triples units. There has been a lot of focus on Triple 3 and Triple 4, but the UK was integral in setting up all the Triples units. There is Triple 2, who were mentored by Norway, and there is Triple 5, Triple 8 and Triple 9, who were mentored by other NATO countries, but they all had British input. They were all set up by the UK, with UK special forces. They were paid through CSTC-A, from money that came from the UK.

Every single one of those guys is under the impression that they got a

$200 a month payment from the UK, but because it went through CSTC-A, the MoD argument is that they were not directly employed. So they think they were employed by the British, and the Taliban think they were employed by the British, but technically they weren’t, so they are not eligible.

Q148 Lincoln Jopp: Did you get the impression that there was just a sort of pettifogging civil service approach to this, or was there something more concerning regarding why people might not want to get the Triples out?

Person A: I think it goes back to around 2018, when the units were created. Obviously I was not involved in Afghanistan, but I have done a lot of reading on it. The focus was to try to get Afghans to be self-sufficient, but that payment mechanism was there, almost like a safety net, so it was, “We’re still going to pay you, but you’re going to process the payments.” So the payments went through CSTC-A and through the MoI, and then the guys got the payments. It is a technicality. By anyone’s logic, they were paid by the UK, but legally and technically, they were not, so we can say to them, “You weren’t directly employed; we don’t have an obligation to assist you.”

Q149 Lincoln Jopp: So your impression is that it is a strict bureaucratic application of the rules that has stopped the Triples coming back—nothing more, nothing less?

Person A: That would be one way of putting it. I think it is a way of keeping numbers down. Is it morally the correct thing to do? I am not sure. But you could say that about all the NATO countries that were mentoring units and haven’t evacuated anyone.

Q150 Lincoln Jopp: You referred in your submission to some bizarre choices that were taken—to take x rather than y. I think the phrase was “dog walkers, farmers, barbers and gardeners.” Can you just expand on some of those human stories, as to why some people get picked and some don’t?

Person A: It was the ARR scheme. It was because they were on the breach list; that is our understanding. The              has been approved for evacuation, but half of the Triple 3 unit have not. I can quite understand why they are frustrated. You have served 10 years on the frontline, and your case has been delayed and delayed and then refused, and you have had to appeal, and then it has been delayed again. At the point it was happening, obviously nobody knew about the ARR, so the presumption was, “He’s been approved under ARAP. Why has the been approved, but a combat medic has not?”

Q151 Fred Thomas: To pick up on that last point, the BBC has reported several times this year on suggestions that some actors within the UK MoD were deliberately not bringing Triples back into the UK for fear that they would give testimony against UK special forces about things that they may or may not have seen on operations with UK forces. That has been reported by the BBC several times this year. We do not have those networks to Afghans that you do—I am sure you speak with them almost daily—so is there any sense of that among the Afghan Triples and special forces community?

Person A: No. The feeling is more that it is around numbers in general, rather than specific service. I personally have not seen any evidence of Afghans who may have been on those operations being refused. We raised it with the director of DARR. We said that there appears to be blanket refusals.

Batches of 20 or 30 refusals would go out at the same time and all worded exactly the same except for the reference number and name. We were assured, “Oh no, every case is being assessed on its merits,” and then obviously it came out about the one special forces officer who was just refusing applications. That has been mentioned by the Afghans, but no one has ever come forward and said, “I don’t think they’re bringing me because of something I can say or because I was on a particular operation.” No one has ever come forward with that sort of query or complaint.

Q152 Fred Thomas: Can I ask you something else, which is because of your network with Afghans, which we do not have? Are they following and talking about the UK’s Haddon-Cave inquiry into allegations around wrongdoing during a specific time in Afghanistan?

Person A: It is mentioned in passing now and again. They are not overly concerned by it, to be honest; they are more bothered about the ARAP process. They are very on top of the coverage of the breach—I must have been sent links to the Public Accounts Committee report 70 times the other day. They are very on top of that. The Taliban also follow the British press. There is an awareness, but I would not say that it is a priority.

Q153 Fred Thomas: That is really useful to hear. A final question from me: I want to get your sense of how your suggestions to the Department and the DARR team in September have been received? Has there been any response or interaction from Government?

Person A: Bearing in mind that I was asked to put that in, there has been zero response. There was an acknowledgment—“Yes, we have got this”—but that is as far as it has gone.

Fred Thomas: Thank you.

Q154 Derek Twigg: Can I take you back to the earlier part of your evidence this morning? I think you said that it would not have happened if the team from the Foreign Office had been sent across to the MoD to deal with this. Did I misunderstand? Is that what you said?

Person A: Obviously, I do not have the in-depth knowledge of how government works, but to me, if the FCDO is the Department that should be dealing with an evacuation like this, but the MoD is integral because of the history of the applicants, it would make sense to second a team from one Department to the other, because they are working together, albeit they do not talk to each other very often.

However, on the scheme in general, the MoD, the FCDO and the Home Office all have different stages of the process. If they are going to work together on an evacuation, why was it not done to the standing operating procedures? If the FCDO should have been dealing with this, why wasn’t it?

Q155 Chair: You said something very interesting earlier about the fact that you knew that October 7 was coming. What did you mean by that?

Person A: Because of the networks I was building with the guys that I was dealing with, I was getting sent a lot of evidence of things like Taliban troop movements—basically what I would call intel. That was because they did not have anyone else to send it to. A lot of these guys had had British or American handlers who cut them off after the end of the airlift. They wanted to tell somebody, because they felt it was their responsibility to tell somebody.

We were getting reports of all of these terrorist training camps—Boko Haram, Palestinian Islamic Jihad and Hamas were all in Afghanistan. At that point, there were 34 camps; there are a lot more now. We knew something big was happening because of the number of people who were involved, but we did not have information of what and we did not know who the target was going to be. October 7 makes sense, because it was the anniversary of the first day of the bombing; the day the US went into

Afghanistan. We did not know it was going to be Israel, but we knew it was going to be somewhere. Obviously it has come out that a lot of the training was done in Afghanistan.

Q156 Chair: That is interesting. You were getting all this information through those various sources. I am assuming you were passing all of that on?

Person A: I did not have anyone to pass it on to at that point. At the point at which that information was coming through, we did not have anywhere to pass it on to because I was literally just a woman in my kitchen. I did not have a connection into the MoD. We were not taken seriously.

Q157 Chair: You are a lot more special than that, as has become blatantly apparently. So you had all that information pertaining to something building up to an October 7-type incident. This is about lessons learnt as well, so has somebody since got all that information from you?

Person A: No.

Q158 Chair: So that is all still sitting there. That is intelligence which should be—

Person A: We were getting videos sent to us of convoys of American supplies going into Iran, and we had nowhere to send it to. Massive convoys of equipment going into Iran and we had nowhere to pass it on to.

Chair: That is very interesting and no doubt we can build upon that. I know we have just gone over the hour, but I have a couple of quick supplementary questions from Ian and Emma.

Q159 Ian Roome: I was involved with resettling 12 interpreters from Afghanistan on the ARAP scheme. What are your views on the resettlement process? Do you keep in touch with people when they are over in the UK, and how are you finding their experiences?

Person A: I am probably one of the few people who is in touch from them from day one right through to now. I am still in touch with all my families. They are finding it difficult. There is not the support that I would hope would have been in place. A lot of these guys have degrees, even the Triples had done education, and their degrees are not recognised here.

We have guys who spent 15 years in special forces who cannot even get a job in a supermarket warehouse. They are depressed and frustrated. They are facing an uptick in racism. We have had guys who have been assaulted, guys who have been confused with channel crossers, who have been accused of being Pakistani. There have been incidents in schools where basically gangs have formed and that has had to be dealt with by local authorities.

We have had a lot of issues with families who are still waiting for AFMs—the additional family members—to be approved. In some of those cases, it is children. We touched earlier on this issue of the lack of knowledge, and

there is no formal adoption procedure in Afghanistan, so if someone dies, the children will go to the nearest family member. They might not be a biological child, but they are a de facto child. But there is no way of proving it, so we have had issues getting children thorough ARAP because their birth certificates do not match up with the parents. Some have been left behind.

There is one family who were actually here in the UK at the fall of Kabul—he had been injured really badly by an IED—and two of the children are still in Afghanistan, because they have not been brought out. I cannot imagine what it is like to have to give up your entire life, move to another country where you might not speak the language and know that two of your children are back in hell and you cannot get them out.

Q160 Ian Roome: I concur with you there. Some of the people I helped to resettle were high court judges and a chief of police. They had high-powered jobs in Afghanistan. I find it difficult, because the MoD have placed them on military camps and some of these military camps are out in the sticks. I have got 12 families on a military camp in the middle of nowhere and they find it very difficult, so I concur with what you said. Thank you for that.

Person A: Another thing to bring up on that one is that one of the difficulties we had was getting the MoD to understand that the Afghan family structure is very different from western family culture. You have multigenerational families living in the same house. When a son gets married, they don’t move out; they just build another bedroom.

Whereas the MoD were dealing with a nuclear family, the Taliban threatened people as a household. They were saying, “Your adult children don’t come under ARAP. We’re not going to evacuate them,” but we knew that they were at risk of reprisal and there does not seem to be a willingness to accept a lot of the evidence. We had one family who were told, “How can you prove that the Taliban killed your sister?” Well, they don’t leave a calling card. “What evidence would you like from them? We’ve sent you the pictures of a dead body. What more would you like?” They get very frustrated because there have been so many promises made that have not been honoured.

In one family, the principal came out on 8 August—he came out prior to the fall of Kabul. He was promised that his family members would come out in Operation Pitting. They did not make it into the airport before the bombing, and they have since been refused and are still in Afghanistan.

Q161 Emma Lewell: I want to go back to your discussion with the Chair about the intelligence and information you were receiving. You referred to 7 October. Are you still receiving lots of information and intelligence with no one to give it to or share it with?

Person A: Yes. I get sent phone numbers, registration numbers, photographs. Literally within minutes of the Taliban starting a search, we will get a message saying, “They’re searching PD2.”

Q162 Emma Lewell: Do you get that largely through              ? How does that come to you?

Person A: .

Q163 Chair: For the record, before the imposition of the super-injunction, you were able to warn people and say, “If you can move, then move.” But it is also the case that, as you said, “As soon as the injunction hit me, I couldn’t warn anybody of the other cases.” So you were limited in how you could then interact. I just wanted to tease that point out.

Person A: Yes. When the breach was brought to light, my main caseload was NDS officers. It was before I had taken on most of the Triples. So I could warn, in a roundabout way, the NDS guys I was working with, but by the time I took the Triple cases on, the injunction was in place and I could not tell them anything.              XX.

Chair: It has been an absolutely fascinating session. Thank you so much for providing evidence that has been, I think Members would agree, very helpful for our inquiry. If anything has been missed out, or if you think we have not asked the right questions or there is anything that you think we need to ask others, please feel free to contact us. That will be gratefully received.

As intimated, this session is in private, which was at your request, to make sure no details are disclosed, although the transcript of today—without your name—will be available. Thank you very much; that brings our session to an end.