The Records Don't Exist

A broken program, a years-long obstruction, and what America still owes its wartime allies

By Matthew Marcellus, No One Left Behind

In February 2020, Charles Wintermeyer agreed to write a letter. He had known the man for whom he was writing for over a decade. They had served together in Zabul province, southern Afghanistan, at a Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT). A straightforward recommendation was needed. A confirmation that Wintermeyer had worked with this person, that he found him professional and fully qualified for a Special Immigrant Visa (SIV) application.

“Basically submitting a letter saying that I worked with this person in Afghanistan,” Wintermeyer said later, “and that I found him to be a very fine person and a fully qualified candidate for the SIV program as I understood it.”

That was what he thought he was agreeing to.

***

Wintermeyer is not someone whose involvement in a cause invites easy dismissal. He served more than 20 years as a Foreign Service Officer, posted across four continents. He was in Rwanda four years after the genocide, Morocco, two tours in Afghanistan, Peru, Macedonia, and Nigeria. Before the State Department, he was in the U.S. Air Force as an ICBM crew commander, then a military attorney. His career was built in the rooms where American commitments are made and maintained.

He had chosen Afghanistan twice. Both times, he had volunteered for provincial postings rather than the embassy compound in Kabul.

 “Those jobs seemed a lot more interesting,” he said. “And being former military myself, I thought it would be far more rewarding to be out in the field.”

Karim, identified here by first name only, for reasons that will become clear, had been one of the interpreters at the PRT. He stood apart. Where some adopted a studied informality, Karim dressed well and carried himself with precision. When the PRT met with the provincial governor, when dignitaries arrived from Kabul, he was the first choice.

They reconnected on Facebook around 2017. Karim had gone on to earn a college degree, gotten married, started a family. In 2020, he reached out asking whether Wintermeyer would write in support of his SIV application.

Wintermeyer agreed. He wrote the letter in February 2020 and waited.

A year later, the application was denied.

***

The grounds of Karim’s denial were that he could not obtain an employment verification letter from the contractor company he had worked for. It had been approximately 17 years.

Wintermeyer did what he had spent a career doing. Google searches revealed the company had been acquired, then merged with a third. He found a contact address. Karim wrote, but received a reply that there were no records.

Wintermeyer followed up himself, asking a narrower question. Was it that they had no records on Karim specifically, or no records on any of the Afghan nationals who had worked for those previous corporations?

The answer was the latter.

“When I realized it was a systemic issue affecting thousands of people,” he said, “I reached out for the first time to No One Left Behind.”

No One Left Behind (NOLB) told him that roughly 60 percent of the emails it was receiving at that point involved people in the same position. These were the Afghan allies who had worked through Department of Defense contractors and could not obtain employment verification from companies that had merged, dissolved, or simply discarded their personnel files.

Wintermeyer knew that there had to be a fix. His proposed alternative was a sworn affidavit from a U.S. government officer, military or civilian, who had personally served alongside the applicant. Not a workaround, but a legitimate substitute for documentation that, for thousands of people, no longer existed.

***

There came a specific absurdity when Karim wrote to a DoD program with his application number to verify his service. He received a reply informing him that his number was not on the list the State Department had provided.

“It was a real facepalm moment,” Wintermeyer said. “What was he supposed to do now?”

The answer, eventually, was persistence. A separate company that had broken off from the original contractor before the main merger had retained some scattered records. After extensive correspondence, they found documentation that verified Karim’s employment on behalf of the U.S. government. The letter arrived in July 2022.

Karim resubmitted it, but the original application had been pending for more than a year past a Chief of Mission (COM) denial, so alongside the documents, he had to appeal that denial as well. COM approval finally came in March 2023.

Then came the COVID vaccine.

***

By 2024, Karim and his family were outside Afghanistan, in a third country, waiting for a consular interview at the U.S. Embassy. The interview went well, except for one requirement. His wife needed either a COVID vaccine or a booster. She could not get one in the third country, and the family had to return to Afghanistan to obtain it.

Afghanistan, in 2024, is governed by the Taliban. A woman cannot travel alone. Their children would have to come.

“As a former JAG and Foreign Service Officer, I would never counsel someone to break the law,” Wintermeyer said, noting with exasperation that the desperate situation brought about risky and very unlikely means to resolve. “But I was genuinely tempted to tell him that if you have the money, maybe just fly your family to Mexico and [risk coming] across the southern border… That’s how absurd the situation was.”

They went back to Afghanistan. They got the vaccine, and they returned. Then, as they fulfilled their medical requirements and obtained their SIVs, they came to the United States.

Wintermeyer flew out to see them. Karim was no longer the young man from the PRT. He had been around 25 when they first served together, and his children were now young. But his family and hers still remained in Afghanistan, and Karim was cautious. If word reached the wrong people, the Taliban would know.

Even in an American city, on U.S. soil, the threat had not ended. It was simply farther away.

***

As of January 2026, the Afghan SIV program has been suspended entirely. No visas are being issued. Tens of thousands of principal applicants remain in the pipeline, some with COM approval, some in third countries on temporary status that may expire.

For those still waiting, the suspension is not some abstract concept hidden in legislative text. Allies in third countries whose authorization to remain runs out face return to Afghanistan.

Wintermeyer has written to ambassadors and congressional offices, and co-authored an op-ed with NOLB board member Howard Manuel. He also had his letters to the editor published in the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. He is retired now and keeps doing it.

"My career was in the U.S. Air Force and the State Department.  I care about these institutions, and I care about my country.  I just don't think it is the right thing to do, to abandon these people."

What does America owe the Afghan allies who worked alongside its troops, whose lives are now at risk because of it?

“I think we owe them. It’s a moral obligation. Their lives are at risk because they worked with us. That’s it.”