Former CIA analyst Matt Zeller said Thursday on MSNBC that the gates at Kabul’s international airport were being “welded shut” as roughly 175,000 people in the country still need to be evacuated.
Zeller said, “The evacuation is over. We are now leaving. The gates at the airport are being welded shut. So we are telling the contacts to make preparations to go to ground. We have asked them and instructed them to burn all document s to documents to tie them to U.S. forces, and take pictures of them and burn them to the Cloud. The general advice that has been given is that they need to make it seem as if we never knew — that their lives simply never transpired.”
He continued, “Now we are doing phase two, the Afghan Underground Railroad. We are going begin to figure out ways to get them out of the country.”
Zeller added, “The easy part of the evacuations were actually these last couple of weeks. The Biden administration should be commended for getting as many folks as they could get out. But now the reality is that there is actually probably around 175,000 or more people that we are tracking that are going to need to be evacuated. It is going to take years. I realize that the public’s interest is going to wane … but those of us who have committed to this aren’t going anywhere.”
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