Two files, one afternoon
The Black Vault, the online archive run by researcher John Greenewald, posted two documents together on February 29, 2024: a 34-page evaluation from the Department of Defense Office of Inspector General (DoD OIG), titled “Evaluation of the Screening of Displaced Persons from Afghanistan,” and a separate 23-page file labeled “DoD/IG Communications with Garry Reid,” which the site describes as only partially related to the evaluation. The evaluation carries the report number DODIG-2022-065 and project number D2021-DEV0PD-0161.000. It is dated February 15, 2022, and was publicly released two days later, on February 17. The posting does not say why a copy took until 2024 to reach this particular archive, or why it arrived paired with the Reid file rather than on its own.
Eight bases, temporary quarters
The evaluation frames its own subject this way: after the withdrawal from Afghanistan, evacuees were housed temporarily at eight Department of Defense installations. While there, they were meant to go through biometric enrollment (the process of entering fingerprints, iris scans, or photographs into a government database), security vetting, and some system for tracking movement in and out of each facility. That is the report’s own description of the situation under review, not an independent account of what actually happened at the bases.
Where the investigators went
Investigators visited and interviewed personnel at five of the eight installations: Fort Lee and Fort Pickett in Virginia, Marine Corps Base Quantico, Holloman Air Force Base in New Mexico, and Fort McCoy in Wisconsin. They also interviewed staff from U.S. Northern Command, the Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, Army G2 (the Army’s intelligence directorate), and the National Ground Intelligence Center. The memorandum accompanying the report was addressed to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Secretary of the Army, the Secretary of the Navy, the Under Secretary of Defense for Policy, the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, and the commander of U.S. Northern Command. The evaluation states it was built around four questions: whether standard biometric screening procedures were followed, how the department identified and enrolled people never before entered into a DoD biometric database, how anyone flagged as a security risk was subsequently managed, and how movement in and out of the facilities was tracked.
What the report did conclude
This is not a file that trails off after describing its own methodology. It carries actual findings. Investigators determined that DoD’s role in biometric enrollment was limited to staging locations outside the continental United States, where it also assisted in screening Special Immigrant Visa applicants. Inside the continental United States, at the temporary housing sites often called safe havens, the department had no role in enrolling, screening, or overseeing the departure of Afghan parolees. That distinction, OCONUS versus CONUS, runs through the report’s account of who was actually responsible for what.
The report also found that Afghan evacuees were not vetted by the National Counter-Terrorism Center against the full range of available DoD data before they arrived in the continental United States. That finding produced a formal recommendation, the second in the report. The Office of the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security agreed with it but asked that responsibility for acting on it be redirected to that office rather than wherever it had originally been assigned. The Inspector General’s office accepted that redirection and listed the recommendation as resolved but still open, pending confirmation that procedures for sharing derogatory information on evacuees with DoD and other agencies were actually in place. The transmittal memo, signed by Andre Brown, Acting Assistant Inspector General for Programs, Combatant Commands, and Overseas Contingency Operations Evaluations, asked recipients for a response within 30 days, per the timeline set out in DoD Instruction 7650.03.
What the record on hand does not say
What has not surfaced, at least not in the pages reviewed here, is a count: how many evacuees were flagged as security risks in the first place, and what became of each of them afterward, held, cleared, referred elsewhere, or something else. The report’s own scope promises an answer to how flagged individuals were managed; the material available does not carry that answer through to specifics. That is a gap in what has been made public, not a claim about what the fuller report contains.
The three bases left unnamed
Three of the eight installations that housed Afghan evacuees are never identified in the available material, and nothing says whether they were visited, skipped, or simply left out of the pages that surfaced. A few dull explanations fit equally well. Investigators may not have reached every site in the time available. The three unnamed installations might have been judged lower priority, based on smaller populations or shorter stays. Or the detail could sit in pages that have not yet become public. Nothing in what is available favors one explanation over the others.
The Garry Reid file
The 23-page set of records tied to Garry Reid is described by The Black Vault only as partially related to the evaluation, with no further characterization of its contents. Some surrounding correspondence has surfaced on its own: a January 7, 2022, email from a DoD OIG auditor reminding recipients to submit comments on a draft of the report, and further messages exchanged between January 20 and January 24, 2022, arranging calls between the Inspector General’s office and Reid’s office to discuss feedback on that draft. Reid’s own role in the process is not stated anywhere in the public material. A separate batch of 31 pages withheld from this release turned out to belong to an unrelated draft report on ideological extremism within the armed forces, DODIG-2022-095; why that draft was withheld in full is not explained in what is available.
What “released” means here
Only the evaluation carries an official release marking: February 17, 2022, two days after its internal date. The Reid file, by contrast, carries no equivalent marking in what is public. There is no request date, no processing log, nothing to say why it surfaced on February 29, 2024, alongside the evaluation rather than on its own. A wait of that length is not unusual for records processed under the Freedom of Information Act, the law that lets members of the public request copies of government records, particularly material tied to an Inspector General’s office. That explanation is plausible. It is not confirmed by anything attached to the posting. The interval sits there, unexplained on the page.