Foreign Office IT chaos: Shocking testimony reveals poor tech support hindered Afghan evac attempts
- Reference: 1638884972
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2021/12/07/foreign_office_it_chaos_testimony/
- Source link:
A massive shortfall in PC availability, lack of login for secure IT systems, disjointed IT systems and a desperate attempt to fall back onto printed paper methods all contributed to chaotic scenes at the newly merged Foreign, Commonwealth, and Development Office (FCDO), according to written testimony put before Parliament today.
"On the evening of Saturday 21 August, the soldiers were issued one FCDO computer for every two soldiers. These did not work because FCDO IT had not issued the passwords to unlock them. These computers were finally unlocked on the afternoon of Sunday 22 August. Until this, the soldiers worked with one computer shared between roughly eight people," said former desk officer Raphael Marshall in [1]his evidence [PDF] to the House of Commons Foreign Affairs Select Committee's Inquiry on Government Policy on Afghanistan.
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"This obviously considerably reduced their efficiency and speed. I printed out A3 spreadsheets for the soldiers but this was no substitute for a computer. The soldiers clearly needed computers to email travel documents to Afghans selected for evacuation," he said.
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As opposed to a simple loss of efficiency or increase in costs, these computer problems potentially may have led to a loss of life. Between 75,000 and 150,000 people applied for evacuation under the UK government scheme.
"The vast majority of these applicants feared their lives were at risk as a result of their connection to the UK and the West and were therefore eligible for evacuation," Marshall said.
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"I estimate fewer than 5 per cent of these people have received any assistance. It is clear that some of those left behind have since been murdered by the Taliban," he said.
The failure to issue soldiers with sufficient computers for more than 12 hours delayed dispatching travel documents and would therefore have reduced the chance of selected Afghans being evacuated, and consequently may have directly resulted in the deaths of people unnecessarily left behind, his testimony read.
Chaotic technology support also extended to the phone system, Marshall said. Soldiers calling up Afghan nationals for evacuation were issued a paper list of logins for the department's non-secure phone system. But the phone system was not suitable for classified information and did not work without logins.
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"On the night of Monday 23 August, the soldiers lost this paper list in the handover between shifts. This would have prevented them from calling any Afghan nationals to the airport. My colleagues and I obtained phone logins for them from my Fast Stream WhatsApp group, the British Embassies in Beijing and Tokyo (who were online), and other sources," Marshall said.
While the former desk officer said he tried to get around the phone log-in problem by contacting the British Embassy in Washington, it found the situation in the UK so implausible that it assumed an email to FCDO Security was a Russian phishing attempt.
Marshall was told to apologise for breaking security rules and that the correct course of action was to request new logins from the relevant IT team the next morning. "This would have wasted around 12 hours at a crucial moment to protect the integrity of an unsecure phone system," he said.
Meanwhile a lack of integration between the IT system of the newly merged departments also contributed to difficulties, Marshall said.
"A group of around six FCDO staff formerly in DFID volunteered to assist. It was hard to integrate them effectively because we could not share live documents or give them access to the inbox because the DFID and FCO IT systems are not yet integrated. They were visibly appalled by our chaotic system," he said.
The merger of the Department for International Development and Foreign Office was announced in June 2020, a full year before the Afghan crisis. In July 2020, [7]Deloitte picked a £3m contract to define the "operating model, organisation design and toolset strategy" for the merged departments.
Users also lacked basic computer training for the task in hand which contributed to the failures as well, Marshall said.
[8]UK's £5bn National Cyber Force HQ to be sited in Lancashire beside Defence Secretary's constituency
[9]UK MoD data strategy calls for social media surveillance on behalf of 'local authorities'
[10]UK Ministry of Defence tries again to procure £1.7bn tri-service recruitment system
[11]UK Ministry of Defence apologises after Afghan interpreters' personal data exposed in email blunder
He testified: "I was impressed by the soldiers' professionalism. However, I believe that some of them were likely using Microsoft Excel or Microsoft Outlook for the first time in a professional context. I understand that some administrative mistakes reflected this lack of experience, including sending 91 travel documents from the wrong email accounts which meant that we did not have a full record of them. Again, this was not the soldiers' fault," he said.
The FCDO told us: "UK government staff worked tirelessly to evacuate more than 15,000 people from Afghanistan within a fortnight. This was the biggest mission of its kind in generations and the second largest evacuation carried out by any country. We are still working to help others leave.
"More than 1000 FCDO staff worked to help British nationals and eligible Afghans leave during Op Pitting. The scale of the evacuation and the challenging circumstances meant decisions on prioritisation had to be made quickly to ensure we could help as many people as possible. "Regrettably we were not able to evacuate all those we wanted to, but our commitment to them is enduring, and since the end of the operation we have helped more than 3000 individuals leave Afghanistan." ®
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[1] https://committees.parliament.uk/writtenevidence/41257/pdf/
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Ya@TPAMXskwGGmiXWZFjnQAAAMM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Ya@TPAMXskwGGmiXWZFjnQAAAMM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Ya@TPAMXskwGGmiXWZFjnQAAAMM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Ya@TPAMXskwGGmiXWZFjnQAAAMM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_security/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Ya@TPAMXskwGGmiXWZFjnQAAAMM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2021/11/02/foreign_office_it_contract/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2021/10/04/national_cyber_force_hq_samlesbury/
[9] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/30/mod_data_strategy_social_media_surveillance/
[10] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/24/mod_armed_forces_recruiting_programme/
[11] https://www.theregister.com/2021/09/21/mod_email_fail_afghan_interpreters_data/
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: "fewer than 5 per cent of these people have received any assistance"
Time to watch the movie Brazil.
Re: "fewer than 5 per cent of these people have received any assistance"
Probably so that they could prove to the squaddie guarding the door to said plane / gate to the airfield where the plane was taking off from that they were one of the people that we thought would be murdered and not some random chancing their luck.
But yes I know what you mean.
Re: "fewer than 5 per cent of these people have received any assistance"
There's also the probability ISIS would manage to get suicide bombers onboard, one to cause havoc at the gates and others to slip through and join the queue.
Disgraceful ...
This whole episode will no doubt feature in some future textbook as an example of how NOT to organise an evacuation.
Reading the story here and elsewhere only emphasises the utter disconnect between the frantic efforts of people at the sharp end, and those seated comfortably in the upper echelons of Whitehall, demanding that their procedures must be followed.
That the evacuation of dogs from an animal rescue charity was prioritised ahead of people who had actively put their lives on the line, is frankly unbelievable. (Did I read that right, or have I misunderstood something?)
There should be resignations ... but there won't be.
Re: Disgraceful ...
Modded up, but...
" and those seated comfortably in the upper echelons of Whitehall "
I'm prety sure he was [1]in Crete at the time. Paddle-boarding*
" This whole episode will no doubt feature in some future textbook as an example of how NOT to organise an evacuation. "
I'm sure it will, but I'm equally sure that Raab's successor won't read it, same as Raab wouldn't have read it had it already existed. Sadly.
* I've mentioned this in a conversation with people before, but I said "water-boarding" instead of "padding-boarding"... which totally changes things. Although, somehow, I'm not sure it isn't plausible!
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2021/dec/07/fresh-questionsdominic-raab-role-afghan-rescue-debacle
Such is the way of things.
Sudden emergency -> government organisations flounder. By the time the senior FO officials realised that expected lifespan 1 of Afgan government control was shrinking faster than a snowball in hades it was probably to late to do anything other than what actually happened on the ground.
Most government administrations just aren't set up to be able to change how they operate quickly and there's no easy to understand graph that can be pushed under the nose of a minister to get the point across. Maybe they should've developed an emergency evacuation IT system that can be dropped into situations like this, but I'm having a hard time thinking of any remotely similar past event to precipitate that.
Every competent military on the planet looked at the 'book' status of the Afgan military in July (some 300k troops trained with all the correct kit) and will have arrived at an expected time span for maintaining operations as everyone else left, how many would have settled on 'They'll give up almost immediately'.
1 In early July locals expected the govt to last until the end of the year, by late July it was maybe October and by mid August the Taliban are arriving tomorrow.
Cluster-F* of magnitude 11, on the Cluster-F* scale which goes from 0 to 10
"... it found the situation in the UK so implausible that it assumed an email to FCDO Security was a Russian phishing attempt."
You have reached peak-stuff-up,
when your mates think your message,
is a phishing attempt.
Insane, simply insane.
So, this mess starts with the Foreign Office not having the capability of identifying it's operational requirements and outsourcing that job.
Then the Foreign Office, being the organisation responsible for dealing with foreign crises doesn't have a plan for dealing with foreign crises, or any staff available to work outside of normal office hours. This is bridged by the army getting pissed off that it's planned it's end of moving people 3600 miles from Afghanistan to the UK via plane, but it isn't being told who it to move so it provides army staff to do the Foreign Office job as well, but the Foreign Office can't provide them with computers, phones or logins.
Ye bloody gods.
You'd think that in extremis you'd be able to stick a crisis team of couple of dozen people on functional equipment at your DR site. Assuming they have one, which you have to doubt given the level of competence shown here. The mind boggles. If we ran our company like that we'd go out of business.
Organisation
Admittedly it was a bit closer to home, easier to organise, and much easier to tell who was friend or foe, but we managed to evacuate 340,000 ish people from a beach in Dunkirk in a little over a week in 1940, without a single spreadsheet, email, dbase, mobile phone, password/logon, management consultant or satellite comms. We even managed to give them a biscuit/sandwich and cup of tea and put them on a train home once they got to Dover.
"fewer than 5 per cent of these people have received any assistance"
Okay, one question : why the blazes was it so important to email them documents before evacuating the people you knew were going to be murdered ?
Wouldn't it have been better to just load them on the planes, get them to security and then let administration catch up with the situation ?
Or is that too much to ask from a "civilized" country ?