LONDON: A senior whistleblower has accused a top civil servant of misleading British MPs over the chaotic evacuation of Afghanistan.
Josie Stewart, head of illicit finance at the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office accused Sir Philip Barton, permanent under-secretary at the Foreign Office of making “inaccurate” claims to Parliament.
Specifically, she said his claim that he did not know Prime Minister Boris Johnson had called for staff at animal charity Nowzad to be evacuated, despite others being more of a Taliban target, was not true.
Despite the high likelihood that she will lose her job, Stewart said she feels a “strong sense of moral injury for having been part of something so badly managed.”
During the media cacophony of the Afghan evacuation, the plight of animals and workers at Nowzad in Kabul garnered headlines, despite others — such as those who had worked with NATO as interpreters — being directly threatened by Taliban forces.
It was “widespread knowledge,” Stewart said, in the FCDO crisis center that the decision to evacuate Nowzad’s staff came from Johnson.
In a written statement submitted to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Committee, she said: “I saw messages to this effect on Microsoft Teams, I heard it discussed in the crisis center including by senior civil servants, and I was copied on numerous emails which clearly suggested this and which no one, including Nigel Casey (the prime minister’s special representative for Afghanistan) acting as ‘Crisis Gold,’ challenged.”
The 15-year FCDO veteran added that the decision to approve Nowzad’s evacuation under the “Leave Outside the Rules” scheme “was not in line with policy, as there was no reason to believe these people should be prioritised under the agreed criteria.”
Their evacuation carried “significant opportunity cost in terms of the amount of senior civil servant time spent on the case.”
Last year another whistleblower, Raphael Marchall, said that British soldiers were put at risk to facilitate the evacuation of animals from Nowzad’s shelter, following a request from Johnson.
That claim was denied by Sue Philip in front of the committee, but it later emerged that the Casey had asked an official “to seek clear guidance for us from No. 10 as soon as possible on what they would like us to do” regarding the situation.
Stewart said he considered letters the committee received from Sir Philip in January and Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon, an FCDO minister, in February “to be misleading in claiming that Nowzad staff were included by officials in the potential cohorts to be considered for evacuation if space became available under LOTR.”
She said that while this was “factually accurate, from what I heard and saw, Nowzad staff were included as a late addition only in response to this ‘PM decision.’ This occurred against the previous judgement (sic) of officials.”
Stewart said that she could not “fathom” why either Sir Philip or Casey would have “intentionally lied to the committee, but I believe that they must have done so both in the letter dated Jan. 17 and in the oral testimony given on Jan. 25.”
She said: “I have tried to imagine but cannot conceive of any way this could have been an honest mistake.
“Nigel Casey explicitly testified that he had searched his emails and found nothing of relevance. Yet when I searched my emails for ‘PM’ and ‘Nowzad’, I found more than one email referencing ‘the PM’s decision on Nowzad’ and with Nigel Casey in copy.”
Johnson has previously denied allegations he personally intervened to get Nowzad staff and their animals out of the country, despite leaked emails from an official in the private office of Lord Goldsmith, who told colleagues on Aug. 25 last year that “the PM has just authorised their staff and animals to be evacuated.”
