EXCLUSIVE'I've never heard from her since that day': Dog saviour of Kabul Pen Farthing reveals how his wife left him in the most unexpected way as his life fell apart after Afghanistan
Former British Marine Pen Farthing is a man who has the Commando spirit writ through him: he never gives up. But a year after miraculously escaping the bloody chaos of Kabul, with 171 cats and dogs from his animal rescue charity as Afghanistan fell to the Taliban in 2021, he was ‘one push’ away from doing just that — giving up entirely.
‘I was in a despair so total that I couldn’t see how to live with it,’ he tells me.
The reason for his despair? Following his courageous campaign to airlift the charity’s animals and workers to safety, as the Taliban seized control of the capital, he found himself caught up in the middle of an atrocious smear campaign that cruelly accused him of putting pets before people and British soldiers’ lives at risk.
There was online abuse, death threats and even some of his Royal Marine ‘brothers’ turned against him, condemning him as ‘a coward’ who ‘should never wear the green beret’.
The former Marine smiles alongside Kaisa Farthing at an Afghan 'wedding' celebration thrown for them by friends in Kabul
He lost colleagues, friends and, hardest of all for him to bear, his marriage to his Norwegian wife Kaisa, 34, which came totally out of the blue.
‘I thought I had the world and then I didn’t. It had all gone,’ says Pen. ‘The day before, we were in Norway together at this amazing sauna. I had to fly back [to the UK] for something on the Monday and Kaisa was joining me at the end of the week.
‘We kissed and cuddled at the airport. I said, “I love you” and she said, “I’ll see you on Friday”.’
‘I got on the plane and turned my phone off. When I turned it on in the baggage hall at Heathrow, there was a message from her saying it was over. I’ve never heard from her since that day — not once.’
Pen, 55, tells me the weeks that followed were ‘just a blur. Tears, wine, rum — lots of rum.’ Staring at the screen of his phone hoping for a message from her. None ever came.
After four weeks of ‘moping around and not getting anything done,’ colleagues at Nowzad, the charity he founded, suggested he should take some leave, so he went climbing in the Tyrol mountains in Austria.
Rumours were flying that Pen was friends with then prime minister Boris Johnson and that it was Boris who gave clearance to Operation Ark. Pen has never much as spoken to him on the phone, let alone met him.
‘So many times while climbing, I thought, “What if I just ended it?” Sitting on a ledge with nothing but hundreds of feet of air beneath me, one push and it would all be over. I just didn’t see a way forwards. The flak we were getting. The lies.
‘The Royal Marine instructor who’d told my godson I was a coward and shouldn’t wear the green beret. I thought if I just let go...’
Pen Farthing, the founder of animal charity Nowzad, strokes two rescued puppies in Afghanistan
He reaches his arms in the air and sways backwards to demonstrate: ‘Then I won’t have to think about it any more. It’ll be done and I’ll have peace.’
You know by the pain on his face he’s back in those mountains, but he pulls himself up. In the end he couldn’t do it. ‘I couldn’t give up,’ he says.
Today Pen is much changed from the newly married 51-year-old who watched shooting stars on a balcony in Kabul with Kaisa, before the return of the Taliban.
The couple had met there in 2019 when Kaisa was working for an NGO and married two years later.
Last winter he shut himself away in his Exeter home to write his account of Operation Ark, as his mission to rescue the charity’s cats, dogs and 67 members of staff and their immediate families became known around the world.
He says it was a ‘therapy’ of sorts. ‘People were telling me to write the book for a long time but, after Kaisa, I didn’t want to bring all the memories back up. Then, when I did start, I couldn’t find a publisher. No one wanted it. They said my brand was “too toxic”.
‘Eventually we found one who was prepared to take a chance. I got it all out. It’s done. I’ll no longer have people asking, “How’s your beautiful wife?” or “Are you the clown who put pets over people?”
‘Operation Ark was about people and animals. Our 67 members of staff and their immediate family are now in the UK. We got them out on September 11, 2021. We never abandoned them.
‘People can read the book and actually understand what we went through — and all because the British government was so incompetent [evacuating Kabul] that it would rather drag a man through the mud than admit its mistakes.’
He shakes his head.
I first met Pen two days after the plane carrying 77 cats and 94 dogs finally took off from Kabul International Airport, on August 27, 2021.
The city was falling apart as the Taliban roamed the streets with Kalashnikov assault rifles and Pen had to wait in an airport hangar for 24 hours for diplomatic clearance.
Anyone who could was making frantic calls to whoever might be able to help him out of the hellhole.
Outside, chaos had been unleashed, and 13 US servicemen and 170 Afghans had been killed in a suicide bombing attack the day before. Was there a hotline to the prime minister? As Boris himself said; ‘Total rhubarb’.
Indeed, Pen was eventually granted clearance so close to the wire that there wasn’t a single British soldier left at the airport when his charter plane landed in Kabul.
Forty-eight hours later he was red-eyed with exhaustion when, owing to Covid restrictions, I met him in the grounds of a quarantine hotel in Oslo after he’d offloaded the animals at Heathrow with staff from the airport’s animal reception centre.
Kaisa was there too, but contact was not permitted. She’d managed to get out a week earlier. She’d been employed by a non-government organisation mentoring young Afghan women and could have been shot — or worse — if she’d stayed.
The day they were reunited, I could see it took every ounce of Pen’s self-control not to give Kaisa a hug. She was, he says, ‘the love of my life’.
Both were totally unprepared for what would come next. The smear campaign against Pen began within minutes of his plane leaving the runway.
Pen says his Norwegian ex-wife Kaisa left him unexpectedly through a text message and that he has no heard from her since
There were reports his animals were disease ridden and would have to be put down. Not true. Claims he’d abandoned his staff. Again, not true. Allegations British soldiers had been diverted from evacuating civilians, including the many brave interpreters who assisted the British army, to deal with Nowzad’s animals. Another lie.
‘Operation Ark was about people and animals, it was never pets before people,’ Pen says. ‘As I entered the airport, the charity was texting the Foreign Office saying we had about 100 seats on our charter plane and offered to give them to anyone who was stranded. Nobody responded. That was the third time we’d offered spare seats for evacuees. I’d also offered them in person at the airport.
‘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 — rather than about the s*** show that was going on in Kabul.’
The campaign against him continued apace, deflecting attention, he says, away from what were later condemned as the ‘serious systemic failures’ of the catastrophic Afghanistan evacuation by the Foreign Office.
Two weeks after the evacuation, Nowzad received a letter from the Charity Commission saying it was being investigated for improper use of charity funds.
‘Because we’re an animal charity we were being told we shouldn’t have spent money on people even though we were getting our staff out of a country that was about to go back to the Dark Ages. We’d been completely transparent about it when we asked people to donate.
After rescuing animals in Operation Ark, Pen found himself caught up in the middle of a smear campaign that accused him of putting pets before people and British soldiers’ lives at risk
'The next day the BBC ran the story that Nowzad and Pen Farthing were being investigated. Literally within days of that story going out, people were emailing us saying they were going to stop their donations. Everything was turning to s*** and we hadn’t done anything wrong.’
Pen and Kaisa had intended to remain in Norway to recover from the ordeal of leaving Kabul, but Pen knew he had no choice but to return to the UK.
They went to their newly-bought home in Exeter which they intended to renovate but had never seen. It was a mess, with peeling wallpaper and damp everywhere. Meanwhile, the online abuse and non-stop questions from the Charity Commission came thick and fast.
‘We [the charity] were fighting fires constantly. The pressure just kept coming. Kaisa and I had planned to spend a year or so in England to do up the house while we sorted out my visa to live in Norway post-Brexit.
‘I’ll always remember looking at her when we were coming back here saying, “We’ll explore England. I’ll take you out. I’ll show you places. We’ll go climbing.” But we didn’t do anything. Absolutely nothing.
‘I was totally focused on what was happening with the charity. Usually, we have trustee meetings three or four times a year but we were having them on Zoom every night. You’d finish getting frustrated about the day then you’d look at the house and it was just s***. How do you solve all these problems? Open a bottle of wine. It makes things seem a little bit easier.
‘I was struggling. It was just like, drink, go unconscious, fall asleep tired and stressed not knowing what the hell tomorrow was going to bring.’
Pen began receiving death threats over email, phone and on social media after he airlifted animals out of Afghanistan
Few could have imagined how truly hellish his life was going to become until a whistleblower gave evidence to a cross-party committee of MPs less than four months after his heroic escape from Kabul.
Former Foreign Office civil servant Raphael Marshall said he believed British soldiers’ lives were put at risk in order to bring Nowzad’s animals into the airport and that the charity’s staff had been prioritised above British Army interpreters.
Pen began receiving death threats. ‘We were getting emails, phone calls, messages on social media saying, “How dare you put British soldiers lives in danger?” Or “I know where you live scumbag – watch your back.” It was absolutely crazy.
‘I’d get incredibly angry about it – incredibly upset and hurt. I’d crack open a bottle of wine and plop myself in front of the TV or go down the pub instead of doing something with Kaisa.
‘There was no real conversation in the evenings. I’d be sat there literally arguing with everybody on Twitter. I couldn’t let it lie. I didn’t register at the time how annoyed Kaisa was getting. She started going back to Norway. I was so blinkered at the time I couldn’t see what was happening to us.’
Then in June 2022 he received that text from Kaisa as he landed at Heathrow.
The Foreign Affairs select committee never discovered who, in government, authorised Operation Ark.
The facts are, that on August 25 the then Defence Secretary Ben Wallace tweeted, at the extraordinary time of 1.33am, that the charity’s staff had been cleared to be evacuated to the UK. But, to this day, no-one, not even Pen, is any the wiser as to who gave that clearance.
In January a letter signed by Boris Johnson’s parliamentary private secretary, the former MP Trudy Harrison, came to light, confirming that the staff and animals had been cleared for evacuation by the Foreign Office, which, many claimed pointed the finger firmly at the Prime Minister.
Pen says: ‘She was a supporter of the charity. We asked her to write an official-looking letter to show at Taliban checkpoints. I could hardly rock up and show the Taliban a copy of [Defence Secretary] Ben Wallace’s tweet could I?’ Again, he shakes his head. ‘There have been so many lies. So much deceit.’
Indeed, in May 2022, Nowzad was exonerated by the select committee which reported: ‘At no point [during the evacuation] were animals prioritised over people ... our civilian military on the ground were never diverted from evacuating civilians in order to deal with Nowzad’s animals.’
Last winter Pen shut himself away in his Exeter home to write his account of Operation Ark
Similarly, after a ten-month investigation, the Charity Commission cleared Nowzad, which Pen still runs, of any wrongdoing. But by then, Pen’s marriage was over.
‘Kaisa just left everything,’ he says. ‘All her stuff was still hanging up in the cupboard. Even her gran’s jewellery was left in a little box. She hadn’t planned it. For whatever reason that day, she said, “I’m not coming back.”
‘I tried for months to reach her – to find out why. We hadn’t even had an argument. Even her father said he didn’t know. He said she wouldn’t talk about it and, if I went over there, she wouldn’t see me.’
You know it still saddens him but less so with the passing of time.
‘Maybe we were just in a bubble in Afghanistan. Then, suddenly, we came back and it was just the stress of the aftermath. If we’d been going climbing and exploring the mountains and I’d still been doing my charity stuff…’ He shrugs. ‘But obviously all of that fell apart.’
It says much about Pen’s character that he’s able to say this without bitterness.
‘I’m no longer losing sleep and I’m not going to get stressed any more because I literally almost drank myself to death and did something stupid on a mountain,’ he says.
‘I have a personality that keeps me fighting. I wonder how many others are thrown under the bus by the government and never get back up.’
* Operation Ark published by Claret Press is available from Amazon and all good bookstores priced £12.99.
