Original subtitles

We're all products of where we come from and how we're raised.

I'm from sadness and darkness, the land where they kill a girl before she opens

her eyes.

At a very young age at CIA, you can be making decisions that are life or death.

I feel they cut my wings and put me in prison.

We are in tenuous situations. We are taking risks.

We have to put lives on the line for a greater goal.

I'm a girl in the land of the men.

Beat me, kill me, bury me.

I don't have a right here.

I don't have a voice here.

At the airport in Kabul, thousands of Afghans also trying to flee.

We're watching the country crumble.

You've got to get people to the airport and get them out of the country.

Now all of a sudden there's a credible threat about a suicide bombing.

It is a ticking clock.

This is what authoritarianism leads to, these impossible choices.

I will raise my voice. I will get out of the grave.

I will stand for my rights.

One day, I will show you my power.

I remember I was watching the news, and I remember seeing people

fleeing from crisis and grabbing onto anything they

can to create a better life for themselves.

The one image that I'll never forget is the image of the lady passing her baby

over the walls at the Cobble Airport compound.

And having my own child and just thinking what sort of desperation must a

be in to do that.

And that's incredibly moving.

I'm Laura Thomas, and I spent over a decade at CIA.

I left the agency just a few months before the U .S. government announced

it would be withdrawing from Afghanistan.

My first assignment was in western Afghanistan.

The CIA originally was there to root out al -Qaeda because al -Qaeda had used

Afghanistan as a base to plan the attacks of 9 -11, but it was also to

the Taliban from coming back to power. Unfortunately, that all came to a halt

during the 2021 U .S. military withdrawal.

Our military mission in Afghanistan will conclude on August 31st.

The Taliban immediately pushed forward.

Ghazni is the 10th provincial capital to fall to the Taliban in only a week.

And a lot of the Afghan government collapsed.

We could see on the maps, it looked like one of those election nights where the

counties are turning color for who they voted on. All these provinces, they're

just turning over to Taliban control.

And it happened super quick.

My name is James Mulligan, and for 20 years, I was a special agent with the

Diplomatic Security Service, U .S. Department of State.

As the timeline was drastically compressing, everybody knew that those

falling dominoes were stopping Kabul.

I went to the office, and I was busy with my own job when I heard that the

Taliban are in town, being a girl, working.

With a humanitarian development organization living the life that the

are against that, it was really scary for me.

My family is still in Afghanistan. I don't want to put their life in danger.

Therefore, I'm not using my personal name.

We start talking to the people in the office and asking them to get to the

secure places.

We were looking at the situation and saying,

It's getting dicey now.

We're watching the country crumble.

Everyone was screaming, and our security guards were trying to help them to get

to their house. But one of my colleagues, she was with me. We both

wearing the long black hijab that the Taliban wanted women to wear.

And I was really scared about going out, and they would shoot us on the street.

The airport is America's last toehold in Afghanistan.

The Taliban has overrun the capital city, Kabul, and taken over the

palace.

I'm at the airport inside the terminal.

Thousands of people.

They had literally rushed the civilian terminal like what you see in a zombie

movie and broken through the doors.

and run out onto the flight line.

I was in Europe with my family on vacation when I saw stampede -like

conditions at the airport.

It was just a madhouse.

There were Taliban roaming in the area and beating people.

For people who had worked with the U .S. government for decades, we're in

danger.

The Taliban, they're going to take retribution. They're going to take

these people.

So for many of the Afghans, this was their one chance at getting out of the

country before potentially being found and executed by the Taliban.

It didn't matter that I was on vacation. I mean, I need to find a way to help.

We knew we already lost our rights.

That failed to encourage other Afghans to go to the gates. People from all over

Afghanistan, from different provinces, even the people who never worked on

behalf of the U .S. government before, they all get together inside the airport

so they can leave Afghanistan.

The only way out is through Kabul's airport, where desperate scenes play

I was glued to a screen.

for 18 hours straight trying to figure out how we can help people. And at that

point, I connected with Laura. My name is Michael Moreno, and I was a case

officer at the CIA.

Laura and I worked together in the Middle East, and we were collecting

intelligence, recruiting spies to tell us secrets. I was a counterterrorism

She focused on different topics.

It was a natural connection to make because you very quickly realized that

had to get everyone who was competent and had an understanding of this type of

crisis and how to manage it, you needed to get them together and talking and

working on this.

I remember seeing the airplane take off with Afghan

clinging to the landing gear.

Hanging on for dear life, trying to escape that country and the fate that

thought awaited them at the hands of the Taliban.

The first thought in my mind was, I wonder if my interpreters are out.

So my interpreters, I mean, they were always the first people that went out to

greet sources.

And it was essentially their way of searching the source. And they would

them a hug to see if they had a suicide vest or not.

I couldn't forget that.

They were out there risking their lives for me, and I wanted to make sure that

they were okay.

The CIA is totally dedicated to the safety of its assets and

getting them out of harm's way when things go bad.

And even though this wasn't actually our job,

This was long after I left the CIA, but it's almost a professional obligation.

So we were like, how can we get people out? You would need to exfiltrate

someone. Well, Laura can do that.

At CIA, I did have an experience with exfils, and if there were an opportunity

that I could help, I wanted to do it.

An exfiltration is getting someone safely out.

of a place where they're no longer safe.

If it was someone that you worked with while you were there, that's the person

you're going to go after first.

The next day, we were able to push the people outside with the airport and gain

control of the footprint, which would allow the consular officers to safely

adjudicate as many people as they could for flights out.

So I reached out to my interpreter and asked, are you OK?

He said he was fine. He was in the U .S., but his fiance was still in

Afghanistan. And she had turned in her Afghan passport to the U .S. embassy

weeks prior because they were worried that this could be the eventual result

that the Taliban would take over.

But she hadn't received her passport back yet. So she had no documentation

whatsoever. He asked if there was anything I do, and I said, I'll check.

At the airport in Kabul, thousands of Afghans who helped fight America's

war are also trying to flee.

Those are those Afghans who worked for the U .S. as translators or helped the U

.S. in some way over this 20 -year conflict.

This interpreter and I, we had worked together in Afghanistan for a long time.

He knew that I would need as many details as possible.

So immediately I asked him, I said, please send me.

a copy of your passports and me, every photo that shows a copy of her Afghan

passport, any documentation she's ever had about a U .S. visa, all her contact

information, her address in Afghanistan, your address in the United States, all

your phone numbers, your email address, her email address, all the phone numbers

of all family members, what she's wearing.

Laura is methodical in her approach to planning.

She's thoughtful about...

resources and contingency. So she was uniquely suited to do these types of

operations.

I'm no longer part of the government.

I have no say in anything.

I'm certainly not in Afghanistan on the ground. I'm certainly not a policymaker

in D .C., but I would do everything in my power to try to get her out.

But there's tens of thousands of people, and not all of them can get rescued.

I was trying to coordinate getting all of my interpreter's fiancé's

And then that led to me reading a lot of different message boards and being on

Slack channels.

A group of Tillman scholars created a Slack workspace that grew from

20 people on day one to, at its peak, 1 ,800 volunteers.

People would turn to Laura and I and say, hey, this situation is happening.

want your opinion.

It was all -consuming.

A lot of what I saw was Afghans reaching out, explaining their connection with

the U .S. government, the work that they had done.

There were thousands, tens of thousands of them.

Mike and I started sharing information, who we were talking to in the military,

former colleagues, trying to strategize how could we work together and how could

we help.

I'm in France.

We had rented an Airbnb, and I had a little makeshift command center in the

Airbnb's bathroom.

I began calling the Afghans on the ground, calling their relatives in the U

and some of the individuals that I was passing the information to, when they

heard that it was me who was vetting some of these Afghans, they said, keep

information flowing.

I think it was because I worked at CIA and I had the recommendation of those

working on.

Afghanistan that this was Lauren, and we trust her judgment.

I grew up in a very small town of North Carolina, one stoplight down in the

middle of nowhere.

My parents were very much service -oriented people. Just the way I was

it was very much about giving back to others. I know that that influenced me

want to be in a role where I could help other people in some way.

I remember my freshman year was when the 9 -11 attack occurred.

I just thought, what can I do to help prevent something like this from ever

happening again?

So I started studying Arabic with the hopes of making it more likely that CIA

would hire me.

You know, the goal is to protect Americans, but also help protect all of

collectively want peace in the world.

At one point in my tour in Afghanistan, I was made the chief of base.

I was in charge of all the personnel on the base and the facility.

Certainly, I was young. That was my first tour.

I heard some grumblings, like, she's young, she'll get us killed.

Is there a feeling that you have to prove yourself?

Absolutely. I remember there was one new GRS officer, and I think he was

probably quite shocked in that I was in charge.

As chief of aid, the potential that you could make a decision that ends up

getting someone killed is a pretty heavy thing to carry around.

I took it very seriously.

A while later, we were driving around, and we see an Afghan in the distance

waving his hands frantically. The one GRS officer that was worried about me

being chief said to me very clearly, Chief, do I have your permission to

the seal? Breaking the seal means opening the car door, rolling down the

I believe it was his way of saying that I recognize now that you're the one in

charge and that's okay.

During the time of the withdrawal, I was communicating directly with my

interpreter in the U .S. who was then communicating with his fiancée.

I also began compiling her documentation, and I would put the

together, and I started passing it to colleagues.

There was one other lady.

who was truly an absolute hero in all of this.

She was helping escort a number of Afghans on the ground. She helped keep

calm.

I was connected with them because I was working with a humanitarian

organization, and I was asked to help a group of people.

I had to provide them a place to get together. That was my house. I had to

gather all of them and took them to the airport.

They were scared.

The women were all wearing hijab. The kids were crying.

It was really hard.

I had to sit with them, talk to them, and give them the feeling that they will

be safe.

By working on behalf of the U .S. government, I knew I'm putting my

life in danger, but I couldn't stop myself from helping.

When I was growing up, It was not easy to go to the school because of the

Taliban. We faced lots of challenges.

When the war started, everything changed. The life of Afghan girls

As a girl, I started going to the school.

I still remember the first day that I went to the school.

Life was full of joy.

Because of the experience, while I was growing up, I didn't want another kid

to have access to their rights.

In the early morning, we had to leave for the airport.

This is the layout of the airport. North is this direction.

North gate was here.

East gate, the Abbey gate here.

At these gates...

First things they did were lay out concertina wire. Then they would put

because the crushing just got so much. You needed something substantial.

And we were that front door that said to people, you're either coming in or

you're not.

So we start moving to the airport.

When I shared my location, they were checking that on satellite. They were

tracking basically my phone number.

Because they were checking to see which way would get us closer to the airport.

And also the gate that we were going to, it was my first time going to that

gate.

What I was hearing from folks in this Slack channel was that there was a CIA

gate, which didn't surprise me at all.

The CIA were operating a Liberty Gate or Freedom Gate. It had various different

names. It was right here in the vicinity of the western edge of the airport.

It was my understanding.

They would move certain barriers and only open the gate when they needed to.

It was also guarded by their own security forces, and they kept everyone

shooting at the ground or shooting over their head.

People that knew about this and had contact there were having way more

than at many other gates. And so there was this kind of quiet effort to put

folks...

In front of that gate, in front of the CIA gate.

We took the bus there and waited out of the gate for more than nine hours.

Eventually, I'm put in touch with an individual who identified himself as

I believed him to be GRF.

He was working a gate.

They had a specific location for staging.

They passed it to me.

and I am the person who's ferrying the messages.

We were asked to stay at the gas station, so people were coming to our

I gave Ryan a list of families that I had, and then he would send me up the

queue of which family, okay, send them across now.

And there was a family, it was Fiancio, one of the interpreters that was already

in the U .S.

I didn't have 100 % guarantee that they were certainly on a list.

But I told them to follow all the directions that they got from the

I send them across.

I tell them to walk.

And then I wait.

And I'm sitting there waiting for probably 10 minutes before I get

another message from them that they had gotten successfully on the other side of

the gate. They were okay.

Obviously, I felt relieved.

Anytime someone makes it through such a harrowing situation, I was relieved for

them that they got across and that it worked.

There are a lot of quiet successes in the CIA.

You don't necessarily celebrate those, but it's not like, hey, good news, I got

someone else out. She was doing her job.

It was just past midnight, and I was about to go to sleep, and I...

I remember picking up my phone one last time and scrolling through a Slack

channel, and I saw a post that said, U .S. Citizen Baby Stuck in Kabul.

And I opened it, and I looked at it, and I put my phone down, and I closed my

eyes, and I said, I need to just go to sleep.

I lay there for about a minute, and I just couldn't turn my brain off.

All I could think about was my own child.

I sleep peacefully, happily in the next room, and not wanting to take that for

granted. And so I got back up, and I just got back to work with vetting the

story of the lady with the baby.

So the baby had a U .S. passport, but the mother did not.

And I am working with the mother.

As well as the husband, who was in the U .S., on how to direct her to get her to

the right location so we could get that U .S. citizen baby out, along with the

mother.

What assurances can you give to women and girls that their rights will be

protected? Our women have the same rights.

They're going to be working shoulder to shoulder with us.

We want to assure the international community there will be no

against women, but of course within our religious framework.

That's a lie if I've ever heard one. A complete window dressing as the Taliban

started to take power.

I mean, this is the same regime that was stoning women in stadiums publicly for

their perceived violation of the law.

Girls couldn't go to school.

It was just a human tragedy.

The actions were different from their words.

One of my colleagues called me, and he was beaten really badly.

Kids were crying.

Women were crying.

They're threats. They're...

suicide bomber en route to this gate.

The challenge is that often the rumor.

In my tour in Afghanistan, we would get the same threat reporting almost every

day. It felt like Groundhog Day. You just never knew which day it might be

I'll never forget the first Taliban member I met.

Just a very imposing -looking figure.

At CIA, we are not social justice warriors. We're out to collect

You have to put your personal opinions aside.

I'm there to get information, not to argue about women's rights with the

Taliban.

As we were in the debriefing, the Taliban member tells me, yeah, I have a

suicide vest in my car.

And I remember very explicitly telling him, if you ever do that again, all of

security, they have my authorization to shoot you.

Laws can change overnight, but culture rarely does.

And so as soon as they claimed that they would respect human rights, women's

rights, they would allow women to go to school, they would allow women to work,

I knew it was a lie.

to say whatever needed to be said in order to continue raking in foreign aid.

And they would renege and they would change course as soon as the world

its attention and the media news cycle moved on.

So I'm on the phone with a number of Afghans on the ground.

And I am talking with the father in the United States.

I told him, your wife should only bring the clothes that she's wearing.

enough formula and medicine, anything for the baby, the baby's documentation.

She was four months old.

She was lovely.

I would think her future differently from other kids.

Her smile, I still remember, but after a few hours, she just started crying.

She was tired, and I could feel that, tired of all the noise happening around.

The mom.

could not figure out how to get onto any of the other gates. She could not get

close enough to show her baby's passport.

The mother was really scared.

As I was talking with the father in the United States, I told him,

send your wife and child to this location.

Don't bring anyone else. No one else will be allowed to go with her.

And within a minute, he was calling me back.

lobbying for his brother, the uncle of the child, to be the escort and saying

why she and the baby couldn't leave without the uncle.

It was literally life or death for these people.

We were the judge, the jury, and in some cases probably the executioner of not

allowing people to come in.

And literally saw these like cheerful goodbyes.

Seeing her in Afghanistan, I was looking a dark future for her.

A girl who has no right.

A girl that in future, when she will, she grow up, people even won't count her

as a human being.

I had to tell him many times, the uncle will not be able to go through.

He responded as I think anyone would, denial and why?

I can't do it any other way. I absolutely empathized and understood why

were pushing the bounds of the guidance that they were being given.

Where I come from and how I was raised was to connect with people and to...

to care about the feelings of others.

At the same time, you can never really predict how someone's going to react in

such an intense situation that's incredibly emotional because you're

someone to give up essentially everything they know and to never look

mean, that's a very weighty decision.

He threatened that he wouldn't let the wife and the baby go through the gate.

if his brother couldn't go too.

And that's when I had to be very direct with him and also had to appeal to the

emotional side.

I sent this message.

Aja Jan, you hold the world in your hands.

You're in charge of your family.

You know as well as I do that there are two types of people in this world.

There are those who wait, and there are those who act.

You're the type of person who acts.

This is your wife and daughter's last chance, and you hold their future in

hands. If you don't let your wife and child walk through that open airport

right now, they will never get a second chance.

Your little girl will grow up under Taliban rule and never know her father.

You can't go back. You'll be killed.

They might be killed because of you.

You have only two options right now, and they aren't negotiable.

Let your wife and child proceed without the uncle, or leave them behind forever.

Eventually, she let him through.

News from Afghanistan, where there are significant casualties, including some

Americans from a suicide attack outside the country's main airport in Kabul.

When I heard about the Abagate bombing, it was gut -wrenching.

Over 180 people were killed, 13 U .S. service members, in one

of the most catastrophic losses of U .S. life since 2011 in Afghanistan.

You know, it was horrific.

I mean, these were the grains that we worked with every day.

It was such a target -rich environment between the amount of people that were

physically in that footprint of the embassy perimeter and the amount of

that were there.

I mean, there is a lot of irony in the situation where people are crowding

around these gates for the chance at getting out and having a shot

at a life very different than the life they would live under the Taliban.

Yet at the same time, they're going into the lion's den as far as a threat

scenario. It was really scary.

And I had to leave the gate. And because of the security to treat, I was asked

to go back to home.

I was in touch with the mother of the child right before she went through the

gate. A few hours later, I called her.

She said she was on the aircraft.

and she sent me a selfie of her and her child on the aircraft.

I don't think that I had the time to really think about, well, I'm not going

send them to a location for staging because there could be a

suicide bomber. I mean, there could have been a suicide bomber anywhere.

It is always...

You're thinking about the risk versus gain in any scenario.

Today, desperate Afghans returned, hoping to get a seat on one of the last

evacuation planes out.

Almost immediately, the regular operations kind of stopped.

At this point, it was clear that we're kind of like on borrowed time.

It is a ticking clock. And even if formal handover isn't happening for a

days out.

The likelihood of it being sooner is high.

Never left her family behind at the age of 25.

And then I talked to my family, and my mom was thinking about my security.

She asked me to leave.

She wanted me to be secure.

All the stories, how they are killing people secretly, being in trouble with

family, makes it more dangerous.

I had to leave my family behind and go back to the gate.

They only gave me 13 minutes to come back to the gate, and that was the last

chance. And my house was far from the gate.

It seems impossible for me to go back to that gate.

I didn't have a car. I wasn't allowed to get a taxi as a woman.

But my dad drove me back.

Because of the traffic, we couldn't make it.

to come to the gate by the car, so I had to run.

We know that it's only a matter of time before the gates close and that the

messages we're exchanging could be the last.

As I recall, I had about five families that I had laid out in order of

who was going to walk and in what order across the gates once I got the go

-ahead.

And one family Went through. I got confirmation where I got to another

And they wouldn't walk towards the gate because the guards were shooting.

And they were afraid they were going to be shot. And they kept telling me, the

guards are threatening to shoot us. We can't walk. We can't walk.

They're going to shoot my son. We can't walk.

The family talking to me is frantic, saying that they're shooting. They're

shooting at us. They're shooting at us. They're going to kill us.

And I said, walk. They will not shoot you. They were shooting because they

trying to do crowd control. They're trying to keep people back.

You must walk. I'm assuring you, I have it on good word from the American on the

other end, that they won't actually shoot you.

How do you convince a person that you're talking to on the phone to walk towards

a person holding a gun, threatening to shoot them?

How do you convince them to trust you?

How do you convince them that just beyond that barrel of a gun is freedom

them and their family?

All they have to do is walk.

The family talking to me is frantic.

Meanwhile, I'm trying to get a word in and saying they won't kill you. They're

not going to shoot you. They're shooting over your head.

Continue walking.

You have my word.

You have the word of the American on the other side of the gate that they will

not kill you.

When I think about if I were in their shoes and someone is pointing a weapon

me and shooting, I would be terrified. Would I want to take my small child and

I'm just going to walk towards the gunfire?

Just because someone on the other end of the phone tells me it's okay to trust

them?

I don't know what I would do.

This is what authoritarianism leads to, though, these impossible choices.

We know that the gates are likely to close very soon.

Go back to the family. They're afraid.

And I argued with them for probably 30 minutes.

And I was trying to say it in every way that I could think of that would try to

get them to act, and I just couldn't do it.

They just refused to walk, and they didn't get out.

I think back of what could I have said differently, what could I have done

differently. I don't know. All I know is I couldn't get them to walk.

I went to the next family on the list.

It was a father who had served as an interpreter and his wife and his three

children.

One, I remember a very young little girl. He had sent me pictures of

him with his family all holding their Afghan documentation.

I was texting him saying, you're up next, you're on deck, you're about to

through in 10 minutes.

As I was telling that family that it was their turn to walk, I got

a text back from the father.

The Taliban just arrived. It looks like control of the gates has been passed

over to the Taliban.

And then right after that, I received word that the gates closed.

We finally get told, that's it, we're done.

I knew that was the end.

And then I had to tell that father and that family that they weren't going to

make it in.

The last U .S. troops have left Afghanistan, officially marking an end

America's longest war.

Social media showed the Taliban celebrating their return to power

heavy gunfire.

We knew it was coming, and we knew that we had a limited amount of time, but it

was brutal having been immersed in that for two weeks and doing everything we

could. And at a certain point, you're like, well, okay, like, we can't help

anyone else. We're done.

Children, their pictures, especially the little girl, and just thinking to

myself, now she's going to grow up under the Taliban.

And if only the order had been different, maybe her life would be very

different.

I never thought that I would leave my family in that situation.

I even couldn't say goodbye to my siblings.

I just knew that I'm leaving.

Leaving everything behind.

My hometown.

My friends.

My family, the people that I love.

Sometimes we don't recognize the enormity of situations at first

until you see something so visceral and moving as someone falling from

an aircraft or passing a baby over a wall.

Everything in a mother pushes us to protect our children.

giving up your child in hopes that they have a better future than you.

It is absolutely the depth of desperation, but it's also the depth of

I had to run half of the way for a few miles, but I made it on time.

It was a long flight.

I was worried about my future.

I was scared.

Once I got the last message that the U .S. government had left, I flew back to

the United States and walked down the jetway and walked in the immigration

terminal and see all these people huddled in front of me.

And I knew these were the Afghans on all of those.

that were being evacuated.

I see just rows and rows of Afghans.

It was extremely emotional for me because I

saw them all standing there.

I had some sense of what they had gone through and what they had left behind.

And I also kept thinking about the children that

were on my list that didn't make it out and how they weren't standing there.

Still keep a photo of that family on my phone.

I thought a lot about why did I keep arguing with the one family who wouldn't

walk? Why did I not put this family?

Up before them, I wish I had done things differently.

I can't bring myself to delete it because I do want that reminder. And it

reminds me of the state.

It reminds me what authoritarianism leads to, what fanaticism leads to.

That's a lesson I don't ever want to forget.

We are nearly three months into the Taliban takeover of Afghanistan, and the

list of human rights violations against Afghan women is growing.

Women have been denied the right to work and a secondary education, and there

are also reports of widespread harassment.

I see the future of Afghan women differently.

I still have hope for them.

I see the kids going back to school, maybe not soon.

But in a few years, when I moved to the U .S., I still continue working for

humanitarian organizations.

I'm still helping people around the world, including Afghanistan.

That's my goal, to inspire women around the world.

How lucky are we in the United States that we have someone like that who is

getting her American citizenship? She is the type of person that makes this

country what it is.

And we're the lucky ones for having her.

When I first met Laura, I thought I'm connected with her. I thought I know her

for ages.

And I see that we had the same hope for Afghanistan, for Afghan women.

I feel privileged that I was able to be the person making some of these

decisions.

the right thing, the ethical thing, to the degree that I could.

In many ways, it was very rewarding to have a chance to serve again, doing some

good in the world. You know, that's the whole point. The whole point of this

career is to help.

The idea that in very small ways I could help shape a little bit of that role

that the United States was playing and still plays is very important to me, and

I think important to almost anyone who spends most of their...

career and life, working in service of something that's bigger than themselves.