The Secret Gate: A True Story of Courage and Sacrifice During the Collapse of Afghanistan

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. (Apr.)