Wild True Story of 171 Cats and Dogs Airlifted From Warzone

LONDON—When the Afghan capital fell in August 2021, former British Royal Marine Pen Farthing raised a million pounds of private funds within days to evacuate 171 cats and dogs and his Afghan staff from the Kabul shelter he ran.

Paul ‘Pen’ Farthing set up the Nowzad charity in Kabul 18 years ago to care for strays, military dogs and the animal victims of war. Over the years, he rescued thousands of cats and dogs and reunited them with soldiers they’d formed bonds with during their deployment in Afghanistan.

As the situation in Kabul descended into a horror show after U.S. and NATO forces abandoned the country and the Taliban seized control, there were traumatic scenes of people stampeding the airport, some even clung onto moving planes and fell to their deaths in their desperation to leave the country. Farthing’s animal-rescue efforts amid the madness caused huge controversy in Britain as he was accused of valuing the lives of ‘pets over people’ and leaving Afghans at the mercy of the Taliban.

“It could’ve been a good news story from the chaos and destruction of those two weeks, but the ‘pets over people’ smear just escalated and stuck,” Farthing said, speaking over Zoom from his home in Exeter, where he’s back for a few days from his animal-rescue work in Ukraine. “If the U.S. and U.K. military couldn’t get people out, what could I have possibly done? We were totally in the lap of the gods.”

While the catastrophic Afghanistan evacuation was unraveling, Boris Johnson’s warring and scandal-ridden Conservative government was taking flak back home in the U.K., particularly as Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary at the time, refused to return from his $1,250-a-night Crete holiday to deal with the unfolding crisis. Farthing became the fall guy and a target for people’s frustrations and fury over the disastrous withdrawal of coalition forces after 20 years. He believes that Defense Secretary Ben Wallace and Ministry of Defense officials who characterized his charity’s Operation Ark rescue mission as ‘prioritizing pets over people’ were just producing an obvious smokescreen for the government’s monumental failings.

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Now Farthing has written a book Operation Ark, a compelling, vivid, and distressing account of what happened in those last days and a damning indictment of foreign policy failures and one of the greatest tragedies of our times. Did we really leave thousands of people to their fates so a bunch of cats and dogs could be airlifted?

The book, which has been seen by The Daily Beast, contains the emails and letters that set out exactly how the rescue really unfolded. It also includes the incredible stories of how U.S. servicemen stepped in to help save the animals’ lives and the extraordinary moment that a Taliban gunman inadvertently stopped them being caught in a deadly suicide bomb attack.

In the end, not only did Farthing rescue 171 animals against the odds, he also got 67 people out. “Yet in saving them, the life I had wished for and dreamed of ended abruptly because of the success of Operation Ark,” he said.

An AK47 to the Head

In the build-up to the crisis, Farthing persistently believed that the Americans wouldn’t completely leave; they had after all maintained a presence in other countries like Iraq and Syria. But by August, as the Taliban swarmed the city, raided homes and even occupied the fire station right next door to the Nowzad compound it was clear that disaster had struck. The number of animals at the shelter swelled to 220 as frantic expats dropped off their pets en route to the airport.

The British Embassy staff even sent the embassy cats to the shelter in a taxi, with a handwritten note that read: “Please take care of the cats, we’re leaving.” In a sign of the British government’s complete failure to plan for the evacuation, the embassy was abandoned with just nine hours’ notice. “Aside from flying the ambassador back, they left all the Brits and Afghan support staff on the other side of the wire. If you take Nowzad out of the equation: Trump signing the Doha agreement nearly a year and a half before; no one sat down and thought what happens if he actually does go through with this?”

Fearing the worst, Farthing knew he had to get the animals and shelter staff out of harm’s way. Originally, after weeks of tumultuous uncertainty, he’d “planned to take the whole shooting match to India: the staff, cats, dogs, the lot, but they refused to give visas to our male staff.” Then he received the news that the U.K. would accept them “with the correct paperwork.” So he launched Operation Ark, securing funds for the plane from his supporters, including comedian Ricky Gervais, actor Peter Egan, and American philanthropist Spencer Haber.

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The day before the evacuation, realizing they only had 102 crates for 220 animals, Farthing was faced with the heart-wrenching decision of who would live and who would die. He had to euthanize 32 of the older dogs, whom they had looked after for many years, burying them in the back garden. A further 16 dogs, who were part of their neutering scheme, were put back out on the streets.

On Aug. 26, after he got the go-ahead to evacuate from Wallace via tweet the night before, Farthing set off for the airport with two buses for his staff and their families, and two trucks stacked with cats and dogs. “We went through absolute hell to get there,” he recalled, including being stopped four times on Taliban roadblocks on the five-mile journey. “When we were only 300 yards away from the British checkpoint, the Talib commander, obeying President Joe Biden’s last-minute orders of ‘no Afghans without visas,’ wouldn’t let Nowzad’s staff members enter the airport, “even though we weren’t going to America” and they had papers permitting them to come to Britain.

“I got down on my knees, pleading with him. He stuck the muzzle of his AK-47 to my head and screamed in English, ‘I have told you! You can go and take your animals with you but the Afghans stay.’ I thought, that’s it, I’m dead. When I realized he’s not going to shoot me, I thought we’re going back and will have to ride this out.”

Moments later, they narrowly escaped a suicide bomb blast which killed 13 American soldiers and over 170 Afghan civilians. “The Taliban, in response to the widespread panic and chaos, started firing their rifles into the sky and tear gas into the crowd and into us. Sadly, six of the cats later died from the tear gas.

“But if we got out and had driven towards the gate, the suicide bomber could’ve walked past us. If he’d seen a bus full of women and children, he could’ve detonated by the side of our bus. If they’d been watching the news and saw the Nowzad people were trying to get in, that would’ve been a massive coup for them. Even that short delay of the Talib commander putting a gun to my head saved us. We were lucky that it happened as it did for us and the suicide bomber never saw us.”

Make it Rain

Back at the Nowzad compound, they “had a good cry and an emotional debate” long into the night about what to do next. Farthing recalls suggesting that they all slip across to Pakistan, but his staff unanimously agreed that his presence would only endanger them and that he should “take the flight and get the animals out.”

In the meantime, he hired a private security company to get his 24 staff and their dependents safely across the border to Pakistan. They escaped 10 days later and eventually made it to Britain. Dominic Raab, the foreign secretary who wouldn’t cut short his holiday, tweeted about their successful evacuation, taking the credit for it.

The next day Farthing returned to the airport alone with a truck full of cats and dogs. He sat in an empty hanger for 13 hours with the animals in scorching 100F summer heat. The animals, tightly packed into crates, with no access to running water were in danger of dying right at the final hurdle.

Then a team of Americans in an old-fashioned red fire truck—“Just like in the movies. Think Backdraft with Kurt Russell”—arrived on the scene and Farthing convinced them to help. They used their hose to “make it rain” and showered water down on the truck where the animals were overheating. “I have no doubt their kindness helped save the animals’ lives,” Farthing writes in the book.

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Despite this being a privately funded humanitarian mission with huge public and political support, Farthing was accused of jumping queues and wasting British military resources. “What military resources? It was something to deflect and they had a lot of mouthpieces in the press who were happy to amplify that message and left us in the lurch.”

Farthing was not given RAF flights for his animals and was literally the last in the queue for a take-off slot from the airport. “ONLY the Americans helped us. U.S. Special Forces soldiers loaded all the animals into the chartered plane. Yet some journalist tweeted, ‘Here he is loading his dogs up while the bodies are spilled out all over the airport,’ long after the event. The suicide bomb happened the day before we were waiting in that empty hangar.”

Some of the first on the scene of the bombing had been members of the U.S. Special Forces, Farthing writes in the book, “They dealt with horrors I cannot even begin to describe.” Less than 24 hours later, a group of them rolled into the hangar in a shiny black hearse after collecting body parts. Farthing says the leader of the team said to him, “Are you the dog guy? My mama told me if I ever see the dog guy you must help him.” And so they agreed to help load the crates onto the plane. “It will be our pleasure, man, to do something positive from the mess of this fucking shitshow,” he said.

Paying the Price

As the pets over people controversy boiled over, in Farthing’s defense, Ricky Gervais lashed out, tweeting to his 15 million followers: Dear stupid cunts saying we shouldn’t put animals before people. 1. The animals go in the hold where people can’t go. 2. This is an extra, privately funded plane that will allow MORE people to be saved.

Since the animals were in cargo, Farthing says he offered “the actual seats to the government so many times yet they refused. We had a flight with space for 230 people and there was just me sat on it. Desperate people needed to leave, it makes me so angry and sad. Now I realize that for them to accept our seats would be construed as a government failure because it used the seats offered by a ‘pet’ charity to finish the evacuation. My take on it was that ensuring no evacuees took up those spare seats guaranteed the headline would be: ‘Pen Farthing leaves as the only passenger on a chartered flight with his dogs. Seats that could have been used to evacuate desperate interpreters.’ And, funny old thing, that was the headline in some papers.”

He also points out that the argument for saving people above animals was ridiculous since Wallace himself had ‘rescued’ a car from Kabul after broadcast footage showed a Toyota being airlifted onto a British aircraft.

As he goes through the events of his perilous evacuation, Farthing still can’t believe the media firestorm it created that sparked a torrent of abuse and death threats, destroyed his marriage, and sent his life into freefall. “One paper put me on the cover, claiming ‘Pen Farthing is responsible for the deaths of 300 homosexuals in Afghanistan.’ Apparently my flight had prevented them from getting into the airport, then they were killed by the Taliban. They had no evidence of these people being killed. It made me so angry and doubtless affected my and [my wife] Kaisa’s relationship, as I then just sat there at night so angry, cracked open a bottle of wine, because there was nothing I could do about these malicious lies.”

He was also dogged by claims that Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his wife had personally intervened in an effort to fly the animals out of Kabul. “People initially said, ‘You must know Boris, he approved this.’ Well, if we did know Boris, how come it was down to the wire and it literally almost didn’t happen? If he’d said, ‘Yes, I approved the dogs and cats and 67 people to get to freedom,’ surely he’d taken credit for it?”

“While publicly promising ‘we will do everything we can to help Mr. Pen Farthing,’” Boris Johnson did nothing. “We hadn’t even received an email giving us permission to evacuate,” Farthing said. Johnson consistently denied intervening on the animals’ behalf labeling the claim “total rhubarb.”

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Soon after Johnson was embroiled chin-deep in yet another scandal known as Partygate that would be his undoing. While the rest of the country was in lockdown during the pandemic, unable to visit friends and family in hospital or attend funerals, Boris and his fellow Tories were partying in a series of rule-busting boozy bashes in Downing Street and then lying about it despite the video evidence. This latest scandal, if nothing else, took the heat off Farthing. “Literally all the hassle we were receiving stopped overnight when Partygate ramped up. The Tories obviously realized that was the stick they were going to beat Boris with.”

Farthing said the reputational damage was such that all the big corporate publishers turned down the chance to publish this book even though his previous book, One Dog at a Time, on the project in Afghanistan had been a Sunday Times bestseller. He said one publisher even called him “toxic.” And yet, Farthing says, “They publish plenty of books by murderers, rapists and serial killers.”

After everything Farthing endured, he says the relentless attacks and an investigation by the Charity Commission still stings. The charity commission found no evidence of any wrongdoing.

“I look at the situation in Ukraine now, some of the newspapers that totally went for me, they were running front-page stories with pictures of Ukrainian soldiers who’ve been evacuating dogs, saying, ‘Heroes, one minute, they’re saving women and children. The next they’re saving dogs from ruins and putting their own lives at risk.’ I was just like, ‘WOW, I don’t understand this. You actually laid into me for what we did, and we got people out.’ People have said to me that it’s because it was deflection from the absolute chaos, something to distract people from ripping the evacuation to pieces. And three years down the line, I understand that. At the time, it was devastating. It’s taken me a long time to talk about Operation Ark. I kind of shut down, especially after Kaisa just disappeared.”

He looks visibly pained when he mentions his wife Kaisa Markhus—a Norwegian NGO worker whom he met in Kabul. He says she divorced him via text. “Literally, yes, and I haven’t heard from her since. I didn’t even talk to the staff who we’d evacuated because I kind of blamed everybody and Kaisa had left because of what we’d done for Operation Ark. In retrospect, I was so consumed with putting out fires, I didn’t help her deal with all the emotional stuff that she was going through. I allowed all of that to swirl into this big mental pot of darkness and literally jump inside it. Why didn’t I just rise above it all, we achieved what we wanted to do?”

Reflecting on those frantic and bitter last days, Farthing admits the anger and depression has changed him and he is only now seeing the positive side, like getting out his Afghan Nowzad staff who are happily resettled in Britain and are all working as vets (since Nowzad started they have trained over 500 vets, nearly half of them female in the hardline Islamic country.) “If we had failed, that would’ve meant committing them and their families to a life of isolation, forced to live under a brutal dictatorship. It took me a long time to come around to the fact when we had a reunion with all the staff and all the little kids we got out—who are not so little anymore—and they’re all talking in English with Liverpool or London accents, that’s when I suddenly went, ‘We did a really good thing, and my wife leaving was the price I paid for it.’”

The flipside of the firestorm in Afghanistan is that it did put Operation Ark on the map. “It’s helped us with the work we’re doing in Ukraine since the conflict started as well as the continued work in Afghanistan. Although our previous compound in Kabul has been taken over by the Taliban, Nowzad is now operating out of a brand-new facility in central Kabul at the request of the current Afghan government. Thankfully they realized the importance of the life-saving anti-rabies work that we did. We’ve also opened the first-ever 24-hour animal hospital in Kabul, while the donkey sanctuary, run by staff who chose to remain because they didn’t want to leave their extended families, are delivering vital treatment and support to overworked and abused donkeys and horses.”

Operation Ark by Pen Farthing (Claret Press), out July 8, is available to pre-order. To donate to the Nowzad charity, visit nowzad.com

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