By Humeyra Pamuk, Simon Lewis and Erin Banco
WASHINGTON, March 7 (Reuters) - As the first explosions from Iran's retaliatory attack sounded across the United Arab Emirates last Saturday, the State Department was still scrambling to finalize a key bureaucratic task - securing approvals for at least three U.S. embassies in the region to evacuate non-essential personnel.
Memos asking State Department leadership to approve evacuations for U.S. missions in Bahrain, Kuwait and Qatar, all of which were already
coming under fire from Tehran on Saturday, were not sent up for clearance and approved until hours after the United States and Israel launched their war on Iran, and in several cases not until the following day, according to two sources familiar with the matter and half a dozen internal State Department cables seen by Reuters.
The release of public announcements that the U.S. was starting to pull out non-essential staff from Gulf Arab countries began Monday, three days into the war. For the U.S. embassy in Riyadh, the approval for authorized departure came on Tuesday, four days into the war and on the same day that it was struck by Iranian drones that led to a fire that damaged the mission's facilities.
The delay was unusual. Typically, the United States starts evacuations for a planned military action well before the event itself.
When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003, staff and U.S. citizens in the region had weeks to prepare, and at least two evacuations began more than a week before the actual operation started. Ahead of last week's strikes, Israel and Lebanon were the only regional embassies with orders for non-essential personnel to depart.
The attack on Iran - the biggest U.S. military operation in the Middle East since 2003 - has put enormous strain on officials from the U.S. and other countries with citizens in the region. But lawmakers, former diplomats and sources involved in the process said the United States was unusually slow in activating contingency plans both for its own personnel and for thousands of stranded Americans.
The State Department's principal deputy spokesperson, Tommy Pigott, said hundreds of people were involved in the effort to help Americans return.
"We are working 24/7 and have contingency plans ready to go and implement when needed, including the ability to immediately activate the task force, which was done here," Pigott said in a statement to Reuters.
ANNOUNCEMENTS VIA SOCIAL MEDIA
One factor underlying the uneven approach, said sources familiar with the matter, was that ahead of the war's start, Trump officials kept contingency planning to a small group of officials.
In one case, officials involved in helping Americans get home had found out from a social media post from a senior Trump official that Washington was now offering charter flights to U.S. citizens, according to two people familiar with the situation.
"No directive came from anywhere," one of the people said.
Pigott said announcements on the task force that the Department created specifically to tackle the fallout from the crisis and charter flights were coordinated with relevant officials.
In another instance, the alert for Americans to leave the region came not through normal State Department channels but again via a social media post.
The top State Department official for consular affairs, Mora Namdar, posted on X on Monday urging Americans across 14 countries in the Middle East to leave and said the U.S. was working to facilitate charter flights for U.S. citizens.
But because that message was drafted outside normal channels, State Department staff were surprised and had to update the department's formal travel advisory system that American companies and others rely on for guidance for their overseas personnel, according to two people familiar with the situation.
As of Saturday, the U.S. State Department said it has completed "over a dozen charter flights and has safely evacuated thousands of Americans" from the Middle East. It did not say from which locations exactly the charter flights arrived.
One flight that departed Dubai bound for Washington on Friday carrying 182 embassy personnel and their families, and 51 private U.S. citizens, was only the second charter to depart from that country, according to a March 6 cable reviewed by Reuters. Since then, additional flights were set to take place.
When asked to confirm if specific plans were finalized ahead of the war to help evacuate American citizens from the 14 countries, a State Department official briefing reporters earlier this week gave a broad response.
"I wouldn't say that specifically. What I would say is, we always have contingency plans, and we're always ready to assist Americans. That's what I would say to that question," the official, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said.
The Department on Friday said it had assisted 13,000 Americans who reached out seeking help to depart.
As the Department rushed to implement plans to help Americans, novelist and filmmaker Mohana Rajakumar in Doha dialed the hotline that top U.S. officials said stranded U.S. citizens should call for help. The recorded audio told her not to rely on government help to depart even as the U.S. government repeatedly says the safety and security of U.S. citizens around the world is its top priority.
"I can tell you every WhatsApp group that I'm in with Americans, nobody feels that way," Rajakumar said, speaking to Reuters from Doha. "Everyone is asking why didn't they tell us to leave given they knew they were going to do this? Why didn't we have the option to leave?"
Officials said that recorded message was later updated.
(Reporting by Humeyra Pamuk, Erin Banco and Simon Lewis; Editing by Don Durfee and Diane Craft)
