Joshua Mast
speaker
189 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Feb 2025
last heard Feb 2025
Joshua Mast’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
so 2020 comes state department gets involved what happens so um i guess it would be important for the viewers to understand is one the trump administration reaching out was like a lightning bolt it was uh i'm a junior officer i'm a captain at the time i kind of got the like don't do that again but you know it's a baby so it's okay we'll keep keep doing this and so um
I got yelled at a little bit, which was, it was a relief not to get fired. But we pretty much turned around and said, okay, yeah, that makes sense. We're going to act in this child's best interest. We're going to try to get her to the States. And we were working that problem.
But to coordinate with the Department of State, because you need that for visas, we had reached out to the embassy and set up a meeting. And I distinctly remember staying up to like three in the morning, pouring over the classified intel, pulling it together for a briefing. And we went to that meeting, DOD did, to brief them on exactly what we knew.
And the reason that was important was because if this is a foreign child, we wouldn't turn a British or a French or a German foreign fighters over to an Afghan orphanage. We would repatriate them at a minimum. And also, if you're going to actually do a family trace, you'd have to go to the country of origin to see if there's anybody alive and who is safe. Because here's the reality.
We were targeting this group. There was hundreds of them with their families coming back from Syria into this other war zone for a safe space. And we were hunting and killing them. And so our, one of our biggest concern was like, even if you got a family member, if we give this child back to them, is she going to be on another objective and not be so lucky this time?
I mean, that's understanding how sophisticated this unit and this intelligence gathering apparatus is. They're, they're killing this entire network and they're doing it that month. And that, that was the priority in Afghanistan. So like, we are very aware, just because of my background, we,
Going back to that meeting. So instead of what was supposed to happen of an informational meeting, where we're supposed to inform them of what our classified intelligence says, they essentially ambushed us. They brought Afghans to this meeting where we can't brief on a classified level. And they basically tried to do a fait accompli where it's like, hey, how soon can you take the baby?
I mean, like two days after the Trump administration reached out, that's what they were doing. I was in the meeting. And there's been a lot of, we'll get to that later in the story, but the Department of Justice under the previous administration has filed court filings saying, oh, Major Mash knew there was known family at this particular meeting. Mm-hmm.
But in reality, that was the detainee that our guys had taken off of the op. And I was there to tell you that this guy said he brought these people here from a foreign country and has been moving them around and identified these specific people in this compound as foreign fighters. So that was just some rumor because somebody didn't have the right clearance and we were going to clear that up.
And so all of this could have avoided if you're not insubordinate to the administration.
So Sparrow, There was about a two-month period after that meeting where the State Department kind of was like, we're not going to help you, but we're not going to get in your way. And we had successfully negotiated a recommendation from the then-existing Afghan government to send her to the States. The DOD had done that, and it was ready to go.
And so what happened is the State Department came back in, and I have a colonel-sworn testimony. They lied about me and my family, like, oh, we'd done something improper with this, or we didn't tell people. Literally testified under oath here just in October. that the State Department official had lied about us. Then he said it was the most unprofessional meeting he'd ever been in.
And he's the acting staff judge advocate for a four-star command who's in charge of the theater. And he gets told, stand down. State Department's got the lead. They're going to handle this.
And that's when everybody lost their life.
And I'm not trying to ding the entire State Department. I think that there's a lot of hope for the future in how we're moving forward with this. I agree. And morale's high as far as I'm concerned, at least in our unit. But I will say that there are some people that don't reflect our values and they don't reflect
I don't think a proper representation of what America is about sometimes in foreign countries. And we experienced that.
And I would say, Glenn, when I reached out to the hospital and said, hey, we're trying to see if there's other better options for her, they were overjoyed. They were like, let's go. We've been hoping somebody would help. And so we had what we called Operation Starfish, which was kind of a grassroots level to try to get a safe outcome for her.
Yeah, to the point where we were waking up people when the president visited Bagram for Thanksgiving in 2019. We were waking people up like, go find the president, have him meet her. Because it was 100 yards from where she was. And we were so close. And that was when the U.S. policies tried to get her back. So we're like, wouldn't it be cool if they go home on Air Force One? But we were...
From, I guess, from an intelligence perspective, there was never a question of where she came from. This is totally like a gloss made up.
Okay, so I think the best way I can explain this is the terms of the peace, strategically what's going on in September 2019 is the peace deal literally blew up. The president said this is a bad deal. The Taliban's not acting in good faith and announced a canceling of the peace deal. Mm-hmm.
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