For the last few weeks, Lt. Col. Jonathon Myers, a retired Marine intelligence officer, conducted a sleepless and exhaustive effort to get American citizens and green card holders connected with Marines in Afghanistan out of the country before the Aug. 31 withdrawal deadline.
On Monday afternoon, that mission went from dire and dangerous to clandestine for the hundreds of U.S. citizens and thousands of green card holders and journalists left stranded when the last military plane exited the airport in Kabul.
“The situation as of Monday is gut-wrenching,” said Myers. The Virginia native was part of the American response to the terrorist attacks in Benghazi and the rescue of Capt. Scott O’Grady from Bosnia.
Myers’s last assignment before he retired last year was as an intelligence officer under Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Mark Milley.
Myers has been working with two other retired Marines, Katy Garroway of Maryland and Rico Reyes of Texas. In the final grim 12 hours in Kabul, no matter what anyone in military leadership or President Joe Biden said, no Americans who reached the airport were able to get out, Myers said.
“Within that last 12 hours, I had four buses of American citizens outside the gate,” he said. “They were mostly pregnant women and babies, including a child with spina bifida, just all packed together waiting at the gate.”
Myers said his team paid off the Taliban with a big bribe to allow their buses to go through. “They got to the gate, and there was an aid organization that was supposed to meet us with representatives, with the rosters, and to tell the Taliban to expect them.”
The aid organization didn’t show up.
“I, in panic mode, called, and called, and called all my Marine networks, I got the number for one of the top commanders down there explained the situation and we got in a big argument when he told me the Taliban makes the calls down here,” said Myers.
They never got out.
No Americans were able to get out on the last five jets to leave Afghanistan, as Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of the U.S. Central Command, confirmed on Tuesday. He said that Americans tried desperately to get to the Kabul airport for the final evacuations but could not.
Myers spoke to the Washington Examiner from Germany after Biden proclaimed the withdrawal “an extraordinary success.”
He says what happened in the closing days in Afghanistan is not what any type of success looks like. Based on what he saw, he disbelieves Biden’s claim that 90% of the people who wanted to leave did so.
On Wednesday NBC News reported that of the 120,000 people Biden bragged of evacuating, only about 8,500 of those who left Afghanistan were Afghans, according to initial figures. That’s a tiny number compared to the tens of thousands of Afghans who worked for the U.S. government and applied for special U.S. visas. In that same report, advocacy groups told NBC that when you combine the number of Afghans who worked with the U.S. government with their family members, you are looking at upwards of 70,000 people, most of whom are now in the hands of the Taliban.
Myers said he began this effort after he started receiving messages from his fellow Marines asking if anybody knew how to help the interpreters who had helped them. “At the same time, I got some messages from a friend of mine who was at Transcom, which is the organization that runs all the aircraft for the military. He said, ‘Hey, Jon, if you’re starting to hear about Marine interpreters, hit me up, because I’m working on these aircraft going down there.’”
Myers said he took it upon himself to start tracking down interpreters because there was clearly no plan whatsoever to get them out. “The State Department doesn’t track our allies and interpreters, and the Marine Corps didn’t track them. I was basically feeding all of these names to the Marines down there in Kabul,” he explained.
Myers pulled in a friend of his, Garroway, a former Marine sergeant, and another friend of his, Reyes, a former Marine major and lawyer in Texas, and they started collecting names of people to get out. “I know there’s a lot of efforts going on, but ours has been a little different, because it just so happened that we were well connected with the actual task force doing the mission.”
Myers said what increasingly frustrated them in the weeks and days leading up to the final evacuation was the U.S government repeatedly saying anybody could get out if they want to with the procedures they had in place. “But the fact of the matter is, we could not get anybody through that wall. We could not get anybody through the wall,” he repeats in frustration.
“I even resorted to sending American citizens down to a certain spot. Then I would send them an overhead photo of where they needed to be to meet our network of Marines.”
He told one desperate 17-year-old boy to wear a white shirt with a pink bandana. “So, he went to that spot and he stood there. And then, I coordinated with the Marines inside the wire. When they saw him, he ran and jumped into the sewage canal, full of feces, swam across it, run up, showed his passport, and they pulled him over the wall,” he explained.
“He was a U.S. citizen. That’s how desperate we were to get people over the wall.”
It has been several days since he had any sleep, and the exhaustion, he said, is starting to drain him. “When Katie and Rico and I started doing this we just thought this will be a good thing to do,” he said.
But the weight of not getting someone, anyone out is crushing to them. “Telling people, ‘I can’t help you save your family,’ isn’t anything I ever anticipated. But going through spreadsheets and saying this family can live because they have four members and I have four seats, but this family can’t because they have five members, and I don’t have enough seats…” he says, his voice dropping.
“We should not be doing this. We should not be the ones having to do this. This should have been taken care of by the government. I’m literally telling people that their families are going to die because I don’t have space for them.”
The operation has become clandestine since the U.S. military abandoned thousands of American citizens, green card holders, and journalists to the Taliban.
Myers’s team is still working on “busting people out”; he just isn’t discussing particulars.
The career military man and intelligence officer, who spent three decades at the epicenter of the action, is furious not just with Biden, but also the very military that he served honorably for nearly three decades.
Myers says when people draw comparisons with Vietnam and the failures there, he argues what has happened in Afghanistan is on a whole different level of indifference and negligence of duty.
He is also rigid with anger over the lies of White House press secretary Jen Psaki, who stated the administration was not leaving any Americans stranded in Afghanistan. “They were lying. So many times over the last week, I’ve seen people lie. I literally have stranded Americans calling me and begging me all day long, and at night, and sending me emails saying, ‘We’re stranded. We have blue passports. We’ve been stuck over here. The Taliban is shooting at us,’” he said.
“I sent one American family through the middle of the night on the phone, guiding them through the city, because I had heard that they might be able to get in through this one entry. And the Taliban started shooting at them with automatic weapons, and they were hiding under cars,” he explains.
“This was four blue passports with kids,” he says solemnly.
Myers says his disgust with the military brass comes from how political-class ideals have crept into our national security apparatus. “Important national security decisions that affect our lives, and our troops, are now hyper-politicized. There’s always been some political influence, but they are hyper-politicized,” he said.
Myers said he and his team have transitioned their mission to getting every American citizen they can get out because the State Department didn’t bother. “I got 20 out today,” he explained.
As we speak, Myers says he has American citizens messaging him, begging him for help. He adds that his number, along with his partners’ numbers, circulated widely among American citizens and interpreters who were left behind, beginning before the deadline and continuing on after the U.S. military had left.
“I’ve got this one American woman with an American passport who’s been in hiding for a week and a half, terrified, who had never been contacted by the State Department,” he said.
Myers explains they got her on a bus going up to another place where they can try to fly people.
“I don’t know how much success we’re going to have up there, because I assume the Taliban’s going to decide to stop us being able to fly at some point.”
