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The Secret Gate
A True Story of Courage and Sacrifice During the Collapse of Afghanistan
3 of 3 copies available
“Reads like a thriller . . . The Secret Gate is a fast-paced escape narrative, but it is also a morally complex interrogation.”—The Washington Post (Best Books of the Year)
When the U.S. began its withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Afghan Army instantly collapsed, Homeira Qaderi was marked for death at the hands of the Taliban. A celebrated author, academic, and champion for women's liberation, Homeira had achieved celebrity in her home country by winning custody of her son in a contentious divorce, a rarity in Afghanistan's patriarchal society. As evacuation planes departed above, Homeira was caught in the turmoil at the Kabul Airport, trying and failing to secure escape for her and her eight-year-old son, Siawash, along with her parents and the rest of their family.
Meanwhile, a young American diplomat named Sam Aronson was enjoying a brief vacation between assignments when chaos descended upon Afghanistan. Sam immediately volunteered to join the skeleton team of remaining officials at Kabul Airport, frantically racing to help rescue the more than 100,000 stranded Americans and their Afghan helpers. When Sam learned that the CIA had established a secret entrance into the airport two miles away from the desperate crowds crushing toward the gates, he started bringing families directly through, personally rescuing as many as fifty-two people in a single day.
On the last day of the evacuation, Sam was contacted by Homeira's literary agent, who persuaded him to help her escape. He needed to risk his life to get them through the gate in the final hours before it closed forever. He borrowed night-vision goggles and enlisted a Dari-speaking colleague and two heavily armed security contract “shooters.” He contacted Homeira with a burner phone, and they used a flashlight code signal borrowed from boyhood summer camp. For her part, Homeira broke Sam’s rules and withstood his profanities. Together they braved gunfire by Afghan Army soldiers anxious about the restive crowds outside the airport. Ultimately, to enter the airport, Homeira and Siawash would have to leave behind their family and everything they had ever known.
The Secret Gate tells the thrilling, emotional tale of a young man's courage and a mother and son’s skin-of-the-teeth escape from a homeland that is no longer their own.
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
April 25, 2023 -
Formats
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OverDrive Listen audiobook
- ISBN: 9780593677711
- File size: 279907 KB
- Duration: 09:43:08
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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January 2, 2023
An American diplomat intervenes to help a women’s rights activist and her son flee Kabul before it falls to the Taliban in this taut account from journalist Zuckoff (Ponzi’s Scheme). In the summer of 2021, Sam Aronson, a young State Department employee, volunteered to help process more than 120,000 Afghan civilians clamoring to be evacuated from Kabul’s airport. Zuckoff vividly captures the frenetic nature of the evacuation, describing how Aronson fielded pleas from embassy staff and military personnel to help Afghans they’d worked with and shepherded evacuees—whose descriptions and coded names he wrote in Sharpie on his arm—through Glory Gate, a “gap in the airport wall” hidden at the end of a “long, winding service road.” Interspersed with Aronson’s story is that of Homeira Qaderi, a memoirist and critic of the Taliban who initially refused to leave the country, but was pressured by her friends and family to change her mind. The book’s separate strands come together in a tense account of Qaderi’s nighttime dash through Kabul to meet Aronson (who had been contacted by her U.S. agent, Marly Rusoff) at Glory Gate and board one of the last flights out. Drawing on extensive interviews with Aronson and Qaderi, Zuckoff reveals the human side of geopolitics. Readers won’t be able to put this down.
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