The OSINT Output Hosted by Tim and Chris

Interview conducted by Jay Heisler, freelance Canadian journalist. Check out our interview with him on Spotify!

Bio: Jordan Kane (LinkedIn profile) is a policy researcher working at the intersection of U.S. national security and technology with a particular interest in artificial intelligence and how generative AI is transforming military competition. She spent almost a decade advising Congress, the Departments of Defense and State, and USAID on issuing ranging from measuring the effectiveness of security assistance to biometric voter verification. Her work has led to the passage of new legislation, been the subject of Congressional hearings, and been featured in outlets ranging from the Washington Post to Last Week Tonight with John Oliver. She has worked in and on Afghanistan, Rwanda South Sudan, and Yemen.

Jay: What is the role of OSINT in the effort to evacuate our Afghan allies?

Jordan: The OSINT community used their skills to identify Taliban checkpoint locations by correlating images with Google Maps imagery to pinpoint how to keep our allies safe in hiding inside the country and help them escape across the border to Pakistan. Others used satellite imagery to assess checkpoints and border crossings.

Another OSINT contribution was the creation of a database for manifesting Afghans on evacuation flights: GetEvacuated.com (no longer available). This was the work of John Casano and team at Strike Labs.io and was a mechanism to safely and securely collect information to facilitate the manifesting of our Afghan allies on flights to safety in the West. The scale of the effort was impressive: it registered the information of 32,000 individuals. For example, the tool could output spreadsheets in formats required by U.S. Department of State intake processes.

A parallel effort was run by a firm called Quiet Professionals, which created a database of Afghans seeking evacuation that used ArcGIS to track locations. That tool also enabled at-risk individuals to upload copies of critical documents like passports, marriage certificates, and SIV recommendation letters. (The Taliban understood how vital these were to our allies reaching safety and soon began confiscating and destroying them.)

(Anyone who was involved in the evac effort can tell you that hastily manually filling out absolutely endless spreadsheets, each with a different format, was so time consuming and repetitive, it became a bad joke during the end of 2021. The goal of these exercises was to secure one of the extremely few seats on elusive evacuation flights for our Afghan allies.)

The database had the auxiliary benefit of providing us advocates with proxy data (mimicking State Department data that was protected by NDA) showing that the U.S. immigration pathways that were prioritized and had the highest likelihood of actually resulting in resettlement were those with the fewest proportion of female principal applicants. One of my friends in the Afghan evac effort, Katie Howard, said something about this that has stuck in my head ever since: “The best way for Afghan women and girls to gain admission to the U.S. is as wives or daughters.”

My evacuation story and the role played by OSINT allies

I worked for the U.S. federal government’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction’s (SIGAR) Lessons Learned Program (LLP) for the better part of nine years. LLP was like a think tank inside the government. Our work resulted in the passage of new legislation (e.g. 2019’s Global Fragility Act, 2022 Diplomatic Support and Security Act, etc.) As part of our work, my team and I cultivated a wide array of confidential Afghan sources. Most of these risked their livelihoods to speak truth to power and some of them risked their lives. These sources told us about President Ghani’s innermost circle of staff and advisors rigging the 2018 parliamentary and 2019 presidential elections. They also told us about the Taliban diverting food aid to military training bases to feed their fighters.

One of my sources had survived almost a decade of threats and attempted assassinations by the Taliban/Haqqani Network prior to the fall of Kabul, including a sniper who killed his cousin while he was driving his car in a case of mistaken identification and a vehicle-born IED. The former internationally backed government of Afghanistan assigned a team of 13 bodyguards to another and his family after he denied Haqqani-linked candidates the ability to run for parliament (which was desirable because it came with patronage opportunities and immunity from persecution for unrelated crimes.) A third survived a bomb that killed her campaign manager when she was running for parliament, but she refused to drop out or quit her job prosecuting terrorism and crimes against women for the Attorney General. When they went into hiding, the Taliban and Haqqani Network started showing up at their homes and beating their family members. In short, these were people of almost unimaginable bravery and service to their country.

Like so many Americans who had worked on and in Afghanistan for years and had many friends there, after the fall of Kabul, I was in a state of shock. About a week or two later my SIGAR boss came to me and told me that our agency had the ability to refer a certain number of people to the U.S. Refugee Assistance Program. Thus began a series of days I spent reviewing hundreds of interview transcripts with Afghans to ascertain who had shared the most valuable information with us at the highest risk to their lives and those of their families. After I compiled the list, we asked which of our sources would be interested in resettlement. When they got back to us, a handful of our sources asked: “but how can we stay safe NOW?” They had not only lost the state-sponsored security they had been assigned by the previous government, but influential members of the new government were now hunting them with the full force of the state.

I used the same tools I had used for years at SIGAR: tapping my network and a complete shamelessness in asking for favors. I eventually connected with a team of veterans who were running safehouses in Kabul and others who were fundraising and organizing private flights out of the country. I was immediately able to get several families into Kabul safehouses. A couple of weeks later, however, one of my sources told me that his wife was in the final stages of pregnancy. The best the team and I were able to do for the family was to present them with an impossible choice: 1) try to give birth unassisted in the safe house with virtual support from a doctor in the U.S., 2) risk going to a hospital to give birth, where Taliban officials would demand to know the name of the father who they were actively seeking, 3) risk being smuggled across the border into Pakistan to be able to access medical care safety. The family chose option 3 and the team got them safety across the border less than 24 hours before she gave birth and experienced complications requiring medical assistance.

We are all incredibly grateful to the OSINT community and our team’s deft use of human intelligence and networks to evade Taliban and Pakistani checkpoints. They were able to regularize the family’s immigration status shortly thereafter and we were eventually able to help them resettle in Europe, where they still live.

Jay: Can you provide an update on efforts to get Afghan allies to Canada?

Jordan: In early 2025, Canada closed intake for its special Afghan resettlement processes, having received enough applications to fill all available slots. Half of these had been reserved for Afghans who specifically supported Canada. For the other half (Special Program #2), Canada prioritized vulnerable groups, including women leaders, LGTBQ+ individuals, human rights leaders, and journalists, among others. (The State Department’s own statistics show the U.S. did the opposite, bringing over mostly male principal applicants and prioritizing the pathways with the lowest portion of female applicants and human rights defenders, etc. The U.S. also prioritized members of CIA affiliated paramilitary groups known as the “Zero Units” and military interpreters, who were overwhelmingly male.)

Even though intake is closed, processing is ongoing for Afghan applicants.

In 2021, I referred an Afghan woman to the (now suspended) U.S. Refugee Assistance Program (USRAP). Sohaila was a confidential source of mine in support of my work at the U.S. federal government’s Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction. I met her when I interviewed her about the public protest against the rigging of the 2019 Parliamentary elections that she staged in front of President Ghani’s office. Sohaila , who the Haqqani Network had already attempted to kill on two occasions, told my team at SIGAR about the President’s innermost circle’s role in rigging that election.

A lawyer, she worked in the Attorney General’s office of the former, internationally recognized Afghan government, specializing in prosecuting terrorism and crimes against women, including rape. She was also a political pundit and women’s rights advocate on national TV outlets like Tolo News. Finally, Sohaila ran for Parliament in the 2019 election, and when her victory was stolen from her through rigging, she organized public protests outside President Ghani’s office. She is a massive inspiration to me and a role model to my daughter. Because USRAP processing is extremely slow and, at the time, the U.S. government was deprioritizing it compared to processing for the Special Immigrant Visa program, I was able to get the State Department to onward refer Sohaila to Canada. (This was after months of living in immigration detention in Emirates Humanitarian City in the UAE, pending U.S. processing.)

Sohaila and I were incredibly grateful that Canada offered her admission in 2022. With her typical charm and force of personality, she landed a job almost immediately! Far from being disappointed that she had gone from prosecuting terrorists to working as a security guard, Sohaila was beaming with pride at the accomplishment when she told me about it.

Jay: Can you give a basic explanation of what SIGAR was?

Jordan: SIGAR was a unique entity in the U.S. federal government, established to oversee all U.S. reconstruction (defined as anything but warfighting) spending in the country. The agency was established in 2008, and then in 2014 the Lessons Learned Program was established at the urging of senior U.S. military and civilian officials who argued that, while audits and investigations were important, there was a gap with regards to systematic analysis and synthesis of complex national security challenges. The agency was always intended to be temporary and will shut down in January 2026.

We were the only such program among the U.S. government’s 74 Inspectors General. There was discussing of folding LLP into another part of government before SIGAR shut down (the Office of Management and Budget was discussed), and it was a real loss for the American taxpayer that this did not come to fruition. Like the rest of the Inspectors General (IG) community, we advanced government efficiency before the Department of Government Efficiency existed. We became a brain trust for our counterparts at in Congress and these agencies, driving legislative and policy change, and consulting on a myriad of issues (should the World Bank’s Citizens’ Charter Program be extended to the country’s least stable districts? What are the best practices in electoral technology in less developed countries? How should NATO assess the effectiveness of security assistance?.)

We produced reports on topics ranging from conflict stabilization to best practices in western support to foreign elections to the most important lessons from 20 years of international intervention in Afghanistan to how to deliver foreign assistance to people living under hostile regimes like Hamas and the Houthis.

It was the highlight and greatest honor of my career to advise Congress, the Departments of Defense and State, USAID, and the former Afghan government on a wide range of policy questions.