Summer 2021: the U.S. involvement in Afghanistan draws to a close. Twenty years of counterinsurgency had kept the Taliban in check while an international coalition built the Afghan government and army. But it all collapsed immediately. Journalist Zuckoff tells the story of the sudden withdrawal of Americans and their allies and the chaos at the Kabul airport. He focuses on two individuals. Homeira Qaderi, a single mother, internationally acclaimed author, and women's rights activist, struggles to decide whether or not to leave Afghanistan and her family. Sam Aronson, an American diplomat who volunteered to help process refugees in Kabul, ultimately evacuates Homeira. Zuckoff does yeoman's work turning interviews with participants and other primary sources into a nail-biting narrative that vividly illustrates what it is like to live through the fall of a civilization. The Secret Gate is a vivid and wrenching chronicle of both the heart-wrenching decision to leave one's home to escape danger and going above and beyond the call of duty to help strangers. Zuckoff has created a definitive account of this moment in history.

A suspenseful chronicle of a dramatic rescue at the end of America's evacuation of Afghanistan in 2021. In his latest, Zuckoff, the bestselling author of 13 Hours and Fall and Rise, finds his hero in Sam Aronson, who gave up his job as a bodyguard for the U.S. Diplomatic Security Service to become a Foreign Service officer; his first post was in Nigeria. Later, while volunteering to help in Afghanistan, he found himself at Kabul International Airport with only a few weeks before its scheduled shutdown. The author delivers a vivid description of the enormous crowds besieging its fortified gates in blazing heat with no food, water, or toilets. Fewer than 40 officials, Aronson included, screened potential evacuees to ensure that their papers were in order or that they were in obvious danger and needed to get out. Screeners were overwhelmed, and as the deadline approached, superiors increasingly restricted those eligible to evacuate. "Family separations again proved the most wrenching part of the work," writes Zuckoff. "Weeping women clung to Sam. Men cried in his arms. Sam had to pry some away, into the custody of Marines." The book's other major figure is Homeira Qaderi, a 38-year-old Afghan activist, author, and TV commentator, whose memoir, Dancing in the Mosque (2020) was a bestseller. At the time, no one doubted that the victorious Taliban would kill her, but for reasons that remain unclear, she refused pleas to flee until the last day. Aronson and Qaderi do not meet until near the end of the book. Mostly, Zuckoff delivers a gripping account of Aronson's routine during those final days. Increasingly distressed at the tragedies he witnessed, he began to flout screening guidelines, a process that could have derailed his career but apparently hasn't. Only hours before the shutdown, he received frantic pleas from Qaderi's American agent. A last-minute rescue seemed impossible, but he made it happen. An uplifting account of genuine heroics in the latest American military debacle. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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.)