This is John Batcheter, conversation with my colleague Mary Kessel, Executive Vice President

Stevens Incorporated, previously a senior advisor to the Secretary of State about the

Afghanistan panic withdrawal crisis catastrophe in August of 2021,

asking the question, how is it that there wasn't planning for a disaster like this?

Where was the plan B?

Mary answers in detail about how State Department works, how the State Department she worked

for, Mike Pompeo, was her Secretary of State, how they prepared

for evacuations around the world and did so. But here Mary tells the story of why and

how the Biden administration of State Department under Antony

Blinkin was not successful in evacuating Cabell anywhere near the scale it was needed. The timeline, the panic, the people

left behind.

Mary explains.

It does. The State Department had a bureau that was set up during the Trump years to evacuate

Americans and American allies from all parts of the world. We brought more than 100,000 of our citizens home, for instance, during COVID.

That Bureau was dismantled when Anthony Blinken entered the seventh floor of the State Department because not because it wasn't

working or it wasn't a good thing to have but simply because it was a relic of the Trump years.

So they had degraded their capacity to plan in a thoughtful way to evacuate our people.

And I think it's also important for listeners to understand how these processes work when the president says,

okay, I'm going to get out of Afghanistan.

That triggers a bureaucratic process of meetings

starting at the lowest levels between agencies.

So in this case, the State Department, DOD,

...