“Just Do It, No Delay”: Inside the Secret Mission to Evacuate an Injured Fox News Correspondent From Ukraine

On March 14, 2022, Fox Information reporter Benjamin Corridor was on task in Kyiv and reporting on the Russian invasion, when the automobile he was touring in was struck by a Russian bomb. Gravely injured, he was rushed to a Ukrainian hospital, the place the severity of his accidents made it clear he wanted rapid evacuation in a foreign country. With the US navy unable to set foot within the nation to help, an effort throughout a number of nations started to get Corridor to security. Jennifer Griffin, Fox Information’ chief nationwide safety correspondent, was instrumental to the trouble, connecting along with her buddy Sarah Verardo cofounder of Save Our Allies, a corporation that helps extract folks from warzones. Save Our Allies had somebody in Poland who may assist—a former particular forces who had performed an important, unsung function in evacuating 1000’s from Afghanistan throughout the U.S. pullout in 2020. He glided by the code identify Seaspray.

After Jen Griffin related Seaspray to Fox executives in New York, and acquired them to log off on shifting me, she turned her consideration to Poland—particularly, who was going to select me up on the border?

As quickly as she acquired off the telephone with Seaspray in Kyiv, Griffin despatched an electronic mail to Pentagon spokesperson John Kirby, who was aboard a U.S. Air Pressure E-4B with Protection Secretary Lloyd Austin, on the best way to NATO headquarters in Brussels. Now that I used to be on the transfer, and wherever from ten to twenty hours from the border, Griffin wanted Secretary Austin to authorize the U.S. navy to arrange a pickup level for me in Poland. Griffin knew the lay of the land within the Center East and Jap Europe.

She’d been protecting the Warfare on Terror for a very long time. She knew that the U.S. Military–operated Landstuhl Regional Medical Middle in Germany had handled the 1000’s of U.S. troopers injured within the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The medical middle was staffed with elite docs, surgeons, and staffers proficient in treating blast accidents and trauma. It was about 835 miles from the Polish border, or roughly a two-hour flight. It was the apparent place to take me, apart from one factor: Landstuhl was just for members of the U.S. armed forces, navy retirees, and relations.

Griffin would want to safe an exemption to have me admitted to Landstuhl as a non-military affected person, and that meant getting approval from Secretary Austin. Her electronic mail to Kirby suggested him that I used to be on my approach to the border. She wished to additional replace Kirby and Secretary Austin and hoped to rearrange a telephone name. Whereas she was strolling outdoors along with her earbuds in, making an attempt to sneak in some train, her cellular phone sounded.

“Are you able to settle for a name from the workplace of the protection secretary?” an operator requested.

Kirby got here on the road. Griffin succinctly stuffed him in on the main points of the prepare journey and tried to convey the urgency of the state of affairs. It’s go time, she stated. We have to lower the forms. Minutes will matter.

Kirby had an apparent query—the place alongside the three-hundred-mile border Poland shares with Ukraine was Seaspray going handy me over?

Griffin had already requested Seaspray for that location, and he instructed her he couldn’t give it to her. Not but, anyway. “I instructed her, ‘Right here’s the deal. They gave us this extraction platform and the one factor they requested in return was we don’t say something in regards to the location till they really feel like they’re in a secure spot,’” Seaspray says. “The entire journey was supersecret and also you’ve acquired world leaders on the prepare and so they don’t wish to be attacked. So I had everyone always hitting me up, Griffin, Kirby, asking, ‘The place will we put the helicopter?’ I simply couldn’t inform them but.”

If anybody knew how irritating that might be, it was Seaspray. He’d been on the opposite finish of that dialog too many instances to depend. On pins and needles, having to attend, not realizing what you must know. However he additionally knew that helicopters transfer quick, and U.S. navy belongings on the Polish facet of the border may scramble to get into place on quick discover. The U.S. Military’s Eighty-Second Airborne Division, which a 12 months earlier had performed an enormous function in airlifting troops out of Afghanistan throughout the pullout, had moved over to the Polish city of Rzeszow, simply sixty miles from the Ukrainian border. The Eighty-Second was in place and up and operating, offering 1000’s of U.S. troops to assist NATO with humanitarian missions and refugees streaming in from Ukraine.

What’s extra, the division was beneath the command of Main Common Chris Donahue, the final U.S. soldier to board the ultimate airplane out of Afghanistan—and somebody Griffin knew nicely. Seaspray was assured the Eighty-Second may have a helicopter on the border pickup spot with not more than thirty minutes’ discover. “They wished to know the situation twelve, eleven, ten hours out to have all the pieces prepared, and so they weren’t very pleased with me once I wouldn’t inform them,” Seaspray says. “Periodically they tried to get me to vary my thoughts, however I held my floor.”

For a number of hours whereas we had been on the prime minister’s prepare, as few as two folks on our workforce knew the precise drop-off location. Seaspray was one in every of them. Dave in Krakow was one other. Dave had been recruited for the mission by Sarah Verardo, who had shut contacts contained in the Division of Protection. In essence, Sarah acquired the navy to deputize Dave, who was nonetheless on energetic responsibility, to function the liaison between the Division of Protection and Save Our Allies, Sarah’s group. Dave had been contacted by Kirby, who instructed him, “In the event you want something in any respect, the secretary desires you to know you’ve got our full help.”

But Dave couldn’t disclose the precise location, both. For the longest time Sarah and Griffin and everybody else knew solely that Seaspray had a secret functionality, an entry level, that he known as “the extraction platform.” They must wait to seek out out any greater than that.

In the meantime, Griffin nonetheless needed to safe Secretary Austin’s permission to not solely use the U.S. navy to select me up, but additionally to get the navy hospital in Landstuhl to just accept me. Griffin understood how the navy works, and he or she knew that securing permission like that might contain many, many layers of navy forms, and, in regular conditions, probably many days. However Griffin solely had a couple of hours to drag it off. She would want an government determination by Secretary Austin, the one one who may lower by all of the pink tape. She would additionally want Austin to make that call whereas flying over the Atlantic on his approach to a vital NATO assembly in regards to the worsening battle in Ukraine.