Mr Wallace told the Mail newspaper that he worked round the clock throughout the operation, and also suffered sleepless nights after being sent death threats from animal rights activists who believed he should have prioritised the menagerie of animals owned by UK armed forces veteran Pen Farthing, who ran a sanctuary in Kabul.

 

There is a prevailing sentiment that Operation Pitting was simply too slow to scale up, an accusation Mr Wallace said was unfounded,

 

"When we started the relocation scheme they were not queuing up in their thousands, the country was stable enough. What we hadn’t done then was bring many people back," he said.

 

"But suddenly, as the fabric of the country began to fold, these people became very vulnerable. We didn’t just turn up at the airport and there was a coherent plan. Given another 10 days, we would have got almost everyone out."

 

Mr Wallace said in endeavours of the scale and logistical difficulty of Operation Pitting, it was inevitable that there would be some uncertainty over the outcome.

 

"We’d done a reconnaissance visit some months beforehand but even so, when the Paras and 16 Air Assault went down there, they didn’t know what they’d find," he said.