‘Screw the Rules’
An American State Department official risked his life and career to save Afghan lives.
On the morning of August 26, 2021, a sweaty young American diplomat named Sam Aronson stood in body armor near the end of a dusty service road outside the Kabul airport, contemplating the end of his life or his career.
Thirty-one and recently married, 5 foot 10 without his combat helmet, Sam surveyed the scene at the intersection near the airport’s northwest corner, where the unnamed service road met a busy thoroughfare called Tajikan Road. Infected blisters oozed in his socks. He winced at gunfire from Afghan Army soldiers who fired over the heads of pedestrians in a crude form of crowd control. He breathed exhaust from trucks that jittered past market stalls shaded by tattered rugs and faded canvas. The withdrawal of American forces after two decades of war, the sudden fall of Kabul to the Taliban, and the mad rush to the airport by tens of thousands of desperate Afghans couldn’t stop street vendors from hawking cotton candy, vegetables, and on-the-spot tailoring.
Eleven days earlier, Sam had been home in Washington, D.C. He possessed only a layman’s knowledge of Central Asia; he’d spent the previous two years at the American embassy in Nigeria, and had been a State Department bodyguard before that, for Ambassador Samantha Power and others. But, ambitious and allergic to inactivity, he’d volunteered to join the skeleton staff in Kabul overseeing the frenzied evacuation.
Now, as a U.S. Foreign Service officer and vice consul, Sam had the power to grant U.S. entry to people with American passports, visas, and green cards, as well as to the nuclear families of qualified Afghans who had helped the United States and might face Taliban reprisals. Once approved, evacuees were assigned seats aboard military cargo planes whose takeoffs and landings created a white noise that hummed in Sam’s ears. By the morning of the 26th, the emergency airlift had already evacuated more than 100,000 people. In two more days, the operation would end.
Sam felt like a lifeguard in a tsunami. He and a few colleagues could review the documents of only a tiny fraction of the thousands of people pressed against the airport walls. State Department rules handed down from Washington required him to deny entry to extended families—men, women, and children who clutched at him and begged for their lives. The improvised, chaotic screening process forced Sam to make quick decisions that might be reversed at subsequent checkpoints.
Then Sam discovered a loophole: a secret airport entrance, nicknamed “Glory Gate,” that had been created by CIA paramilitary operatives, the U.S. Army’s elite Delta Force, and Afghan Army soldiers. The service road where he stood was a hidden-in-plain-sight path that led from Tajikan Road to a gap in the airport wall. If he could bring people in through that back door, Sam realized, he could approve them himself in freelance rescues that skirted the bureaucratic process entirely. That is, if he could avoid getting himself or anyone else killed.
Sam faced a terrible choice: follow the State Department’s shifting, confusing, infuriating policies about whom he could save, or follow his conscience and risk his life and career to rescue as many imperiled people as he could.
As the morning heat rose toward 90 degrees, Sam concluded that he had no choice after all.
To surreptitiously bring in evacuees on foot, someone would need to go beyond the end of the service road, cross Tajikan Road, walk more than 100 meters through the bustling street market, and collect at-risk Afghans at the Panjshir Pump, a 24-hour gas station used by the CIA and others as a transit point for evacuees. Then they’d need to retrace their steps without drawing hostile attention from the street crowds or the Taliban fighters who regularly cruised past in pickup trucks.
Unarmed, Sam was not allowed to step beyond the end of the Glory Gate service road. Even being that far outside the airport walls exposed him to danger of kidnapping or death. He needed an accomplice.
Upon his arrival in Kabul, Sam had befriended a 20-year-old Afghan man with a California-surfer vibe who could have passed for his younger brother. Asadullah “Asad” Dorrani had spent two years working as a translator for the U.S. Special Forces. Asad had been offered seats on multiple flights, but he refused to leave without his sister, her husband, and their two young children.
Unlike Sam, Asad wasn’t bound by U.S.-government limits on where he could travel. Then again, involving Asad in Sam’s Glory Gate plan would put the young man’s life at risk.
They connected over WhatsApp and made a deal: Sam would help Asad save his sister’s family, and Asad would escort Sam’s rescue targets from the Panjshir Pump to the service road.
Sam and Asad’s test case was an Afghan teenager. His older brother and guardian, Ebad, had worked for the U.S. embassy in Kabul, which qualified Ebad, his wife, and their children for evacuation—but not his brother. “I take care of him,” Ebad pleaded. “He doesn’t have anyone else. He’s all alone.” It pained Sam to imagine the fate of a 17-year-old on the cusp of manhood in a city under Taliban control.
With Asad translating, Sam spoke by phone with Ebad’s brother and directed him to the Panjshir Pump. Sam told Ebad’s brother to whisper “devils” when approached by a young Afghan man in body armor. Asad had chosen the password because he thought it sounded like something from a movie.
Sam needed the cooperation of the covert American operator who ran Glory Gate, a combat-hardened, thick-bearded man in his 40s whose call sign was Omar. He explained the plan, and Omar agreed to help. On Omar’s signal, Afghan paramilitary guards under his command created a distraction by firing their weapons over the heads of passersby. At a break in traffic, Asad sprinted from the service-road entrance into Tajikan Road. He cut through an opening in a median strip, crossed to the far side, and wove through the restless crowd east toward the gas station.
Days earlier, Asad had seen Afghan soldiers fired on by a sniper at the North Gate, an incident that left one dead. But risking his life for Ebad’s brother might enable Asad to do the same for his sister’s family. He told himself, If there is a chance, I’m going to take it.
Sam waited anxiously at the edge of Tajikan Road. He knew that Asad could find himself with a bull’s-eye on his back, if for no other reason than his American-issued body armor.
Sam also worried about his career. No one in the State Department knew that he’d recruited a young Afghan interpreter. For all practical purposes, Asad was “this random Afghan guy I met in the passenger terminal.” Now Sam had sent him outside the wire to grab some other random Afghan guy who didn’t qualify as a nuclear-family member of an embassy staffer.
What if he gets taken by the Taliban? Sam thought. Ultimately, the State Department, the White House, is responsible, but I will have caused that disaster. If anything goes wrong, Asad is fucked. I’m fucked. My career is over.
After long minutes of waiting, Sam saw Asad sprinting toward him with a wide-eyed young man in tow. Sam and a security contractor pulled them behind Hesco bastions, dirt-filled barriers that looked like huge hay bales.
The security contractor searched Ebad’s brother for weapons or explosives. Finding none, the next challenge was getting the teenager past diplomatic and military security, then reconnecting him with Ebad. First, Sam realized he needed to do one more thing.
“Hold up, let’s take a picture,” Sam said. Shortly after 9:30 a.m., Sam texted it to Ebad with a two-word caption: “Got him.”
Ebad replied: “I will remember your kindness for ever.”
Goosebumps rose on Sam’s sunburned forearms. He recognized that he’d crossed a line.
Once inside the passenger terminal, Sam faked his confidence, adopting a don’t-bother-me demeanor. He didn’t want to explain what he’d done, and he didn’t want anyone to learn that the young man wasn’t part of an embassy staffer’s nuclear family. If that happened, Ebad’s brother would be thrown back into the crowds, and Sam might be relieved of duty and ordered onto the next plane.
Sam rushed Ebad’s brother past the State Department screening officials stationed outside the terminal. He muttered “special-interest case,” to falsely suggest that he was acting under a higher government authority. It worked.
So Sam began plotting to bring others through Glory Gate.
A diplomatic-security officer who’d been in the military gave Sam a ride back toward Tajikan Road. Having seen what Sam had accomplished, the officer turned to him with a question: “Can you help me with my old interpreter? He worked with me up in Mazar-i-Sharif”—the scene of fierce battles—“and I’ve been trying to figure out a way to get his family in this whole time.”
Sam thought, Why are you asking me for permission? If the officer wanted to pull in his onetime interpreter, Sam thought he could simply do it himself. Then it dawned on Sam: The security officer understood the system. Only a State Department consular official like Sam had the authority to designate someone as an at-risk Afghan eligible to enter the airport. Sam nodded. He told the officer to give his interpreter directions to the Panjshir Pump.
When Sam returned to the edge of Tajikan Road, he learned that Asad’s sister, Taiba Noori, was too afraid to make a run for the airport. On a teary phone call, Taiba had told Asad: “I’m sorry, I can’t do it … My children might get hurt.”
“Call her again,” Sam insisted. “Tell her we just made this work. We did the proof of concept. She’s not going to be the first one. This will work!”
Asad called back. Worn down, Taiba and her husband, Noorahmad Noori, agreed to go to the Panjshir Pump with their 5-year-old son, Sohail, and 3-year-old daughter, Nisa.
The Noori family reached the Panjshir Pump at about the same time as the security officer’s former interpreter, his wife, and their two young children. Sam decided that on this second run, they should attempt to bring in both families at once, a total of eight people, an exponential leap from the single target of Ebad’s brother. Sam filled in Omar, who again signaled Afghan paramilitary guards to scatter the crowd with gunfire. Asad ran into Tajikan Road.
Sam paced with anxiety. As the minutes passed, he noticed several Afghan men edging toward a cement wall 150 meters to the west, apparently intending to climb over and sprint toward the airport, even if it meant risking gunfire. Two of Omar’s Afghan soldiers opened fire low above the men’s heads. The would-be wall jumpers retreated.
Amid the gunfire, Sam spotted Asad running toward him, breathing heavily, carrying Sohail. Taiba ran toward Sam, screaming as she dragged Nisa by the hand. Noorahmad carried their bags. As bullets from the Afghan guards buzzed low over their heads, Sam put himself between danger and the people he needed to protect.
He yelled at Taiba to pick up Nisa, then spun the mother and daughter around and placed himself squarely behind them. He hoped the steel plates in his body armor would shield them if anyone shot in their direction from the street. Explosions of gunfire and stun grenades mixed with Taiba’s cries.
“Okay,” Sam shouted, “let’s move!”
Sam led them down the service road into a protective alcove within an alley of cement blast walls.
“Sit down, sit down,” he told them.
Sam grabbed water bottles that felt as warm as toast and gave them to Asad and his sister’s family. The interpreter and his family took cover nearby. Sam exchanged fist bumps with Sohail and Nisa, which made the children smile. Asad radiated relief. Still Taiba wept.
“You’re safe now,” Sam said.
Back inside the airport, Sam’s off-book evacuation initiative came under sudden threat from his bosses, who still didn’t know what he’d been doing.
His supervisor cornered Sam as he entered the barn-shaped building that the State Department and the U.S. military used as a command center. “Good, there you are,” she said. “I need you for a special project. I’ve got to run out for 10 minutes. Sit tight. I’ll be right back.”
She disappeared, and Sam tried not to lose what remained of his cool. Earlier that day, the last official gate to the airport had been closed for security reasons. I’m just getting this thing going, he thought. Now she’s going to pull me for something else? If I’m not out there doing this, nobody will be.
He thought about disobeying her order to wait, but that didn’t seem wise. He could tell her what he’d been doing and ask permission to continue, but she might order him to stop. Shit, Sam thought. How am I going to get out of this?
He texted a colleague on the small State Department team and asked for help. He explained his unsanctioned evacuations at Glory Gate. “She’s trying to pull me for some bullshit project, but I’m getting people off the road right now. If she pulls me, we’re not getting anybody else in.”
Sam’s colleague, older and more experienced in the art of bureaucratic avoidance, calmed him down. He also recognized a way he could capitalize on Sam’s enterprise.
“Dude, you’re getting people in? I’ve got a family I’ve been trying to get in this whole time.”
Sam’s colleague wanted to help a former interpreter from his Army days, to repay the man for saving his life more than a decade earlier. Sam told him: “If you can do damage control to distract her or something so she doesn’t realize I’m gone, I’ll go get your interpreter’s family in, plus others.”
The colleague agreed to provide cover.
As more people learned what he was doing, Sam’s list of target names grew longer.
To keep track, he used a Sharpie to write descriptions and coded names on his left forearm and the back of his left hand. For instance, the security officer’s former interpreter and his three family members from Mazar-i-Sharif became “4 Mazar.” Each time Sam and Asad brought in another group, Sam drew a line through the code. The skin on his arm soon looked like the work of an amateur tattoo artist, covered with crossed-out names of ex-lovers.
During one van ride back to Tajikan Road around 2:30 p.m., Sam realized that he hadn’t eaten anything all day except two Nutri-Grain bars. He found a brown plastic bag of military rations on the van floor marked Menu 4: Spaghetti With Beef and Sauce and shoveled the cold gruel into his mouth.
Sam’s frenetic pace put him in conflict with an embassy email sent that day to all the State Department team members in Kabul. With the tone of a wellness letter, it told them to stay “hydrated, fed, and rested,” and noted that the team was already short-staffed because of illness and fatigue. The email sounded an ominous note as well, instructing them to keep their bags packed and to be ready to leave within 30 minutes in case of emergency.
Back at Tajikan Road, Sam learned that Glory Gate’s intelligence operators had received a warning of a terrorist car bomb heading their way. If it wasn’t intercepted, they expected it to arrive sometime in the next two hours.
Ignoring an impulse to run as far and as fast as he could, Sam sent a voice message to the colleague who was helping him, cautioning that a car bomb might complicate plans to rescue his old interpreter. “I’m going to try to get your guys,” Sam said, shouting over low-flying planes, “but things are really fucking fluid, and we’ve got to move fast because they’re probably going to shut this gate and boot us pretty soon.”
Sam and Asad brought in two more families, again using his “special-interest case” swagger in the terminal. Next, eight Afghan women who were American citizens or green-card holders. The women were members of Afghanistan’s Hazara population, a persecuted ethnic and religious minority who feared genocide under the Taliban.
Meanwhile, Sam watched American covert operatives take defensive action to prevent any terrorist vehicles from entering Glory Gate. They moved blast walls with a forklift and positioned an armored personnel carrier sideways across the service road. When Sam asked one of the gatekeepers for details, he said: “Be ready to pull back. If we say run, run.”
Sam could only hope that if he got that message, he would have time to call Asad and bring him in. Sam told himself this mission would be Asad’s last, no matter what. Asad would be on a plane with his sister’s family by nightfall, even if Sam had to drag him on personally.
When they reached the passenger terminal on the day’s final trip, Sam handed off the Hazara women and the interpreter and his family to another State Department colleague. Sam noted the time: 5:08 p.m. As he looked at his watch, he could see that he’d crossed out every Glory Gate target name on his left forearm.
On that one day, August 26, Sam, Asad, and a pair of State Department security officers—with help from American intelligence operatives, Special Operations Forces, and Afghan paramilitary troops—personally brought 52 people, from 13 families, through Glory Gate. (Several hundred Afghans who’d worked at the U.S. embassy also passed through the gate on buses.)
But there were others Sam had turned down. A United Nations program officer whose family they’d rescued texted him in the afternoon: “My sister and family 4 people are also waiting if possible can you plz help them. She has two kids.” His sister worked at the Afghan presidential palace, and her husband was a contractor for the Americans and the British.
“Sorry,” Sam replied. “I’m on the last group I’m allowed to grab. They’re shutting down this gate.”
This refusal, among others, would haunt Sam: For every at-risk Afghan they’d helped, countless others remained in peril.
Outside the Americans’ command center, Sam stopped in a courtyard to smoke a cigarette, a new habit he’d picked up to calm his nerves. He crushed the butt under his heel and went in. Dehydrated, limping from his blisters, caked in sweat and dust, Sam peeled off his helmet and body armor and sank onto a couch.
At that moment, less than a mile away, a former engineering student named Abdul Rahman Al-Logari walked among several hundred fellow Afghans waiting to be searched by Marines outside the Abbey Gate. Under his clothing, he wore a 25-pound explosive vest. While U.S. officials searched on the ground and from the air for a car bomb, Logari arrived on foot. He drew close to American servicemen and -women clustered near other Afghans.
At 5:36 p.m., he detonated his suicide bomb.
Ball bearings the size of peas tore through the crowd, killing 13 U.S. troops and at least 170 Afghans. The bomb seriously wounded dozens of other U.S. military personnel and many more Afghans seeking evacuation. Bodies filled the open sewage canal that divided the roadway leading to the Abbey Gate. Screams of pain and grief filled the air. Survivors raced to rescue others. Some tried to climb the airport walls. Believing they were under attack by ISIS-K gunmen, Marines opened fire.
Word of the terrorist attack spread instantly through the command center. A voice boomed: “Attention. Unconfirmed report of a blast at the Abbey Gate. Stand by for more information.”
Sam jolted from the couch to full alert. Warnings sounded about follow-up attacks. One report, which turned out to be mistaken, claimed that a second bomb had exploded at the Baron Hotel, across from the Abbey Gate. Sam heard a report of a grenade tossed over the airport wall. Another alert said terrorists had breached the airport, but soon that report was withdrawn.
Oh my God, Sam thought. This just keeps going on and on.
The alert system resumed, with a blaring siren warning of an imminent rocket attack. A robotic female voice repeated: “Incoming, incoming, incoming. Take cover.”
As he huddled in a corner, Sam remembered a lesson he’d learned days earlier: If he heard the whirring engine of an incoming rocket, he needed to sing, to save his lungs from the blast pressure.
While he waited for an explosion or an all-clear signal, Sam texted his wife: “You’re going to see something on the news shortly. I’m okay.”
“If they offer you a plane out,” she replied, “do not be the hero who stays.”
But he did stay, until the very end, and saved more people, in even more harrowing nighttime rescues that took him beyond Glory Gate into the chaos of Tajikan Road.
He left Kabul late on August 28, on one of the last planes out.
To Sam’s relief, when his bosses in Kabul and back in D.C. learned about his unauthorized actions at Glory Gate, they weren’t angry. He’d helped vulnerable people without triggering a catastrophe, so Sam was hailed for his initiative rather than punished for his defiance. A commendation letter described Sam as a hero amid the “apocalyptic” scene in Kabul.
A separate letter from Secretary of State Antony Blinken praised Sam for his “commitment, bravery, and humanity.” It concluded: “I am honored to be part of your team.”
And yet, Sam says his supervisor denied his request for a couple of days off to recover. Despite a pledge from Blinken that no one returning from Kabul would be penalized for seeking therapy, Sam was told to inform the medical office that he’d seen a State Department psychologist, which Sam believed could have triggered a career-threatening mental-health review. Sam pushed back and the request was dropped. Eventually, feeling that he needed a bigger change, he resigned from the State Department and took a job on the global-policy team of a tech company.
Sam remained in regular contact with Asad, who settled in Michigan near his family. When Asad visited Washington, Sam took him to an Afghan restaurant to catch up.
For several months after his return, Sam had nightmares. He drank bourbon or wine to help him sleep. A woman in a headscarf with two young children begging for money outside a Target sparked flashbacks. He felt the dry air, heard the gunshots, and began to tremble. He broke out in tears on the ride home.
Sam felt proud of what he’d accomplished in Kabul. During the last days of a lost war, in a hostile place where he didn’t belong and shouldn’t have been, he’d put the lives of others above his own. But he also carried guilt for all those he couldn’t help, and for all the people he’d turned away before discovering Glory Gate.
“I followed those orders,” he says. “If I could do it all over again, I’d say screw the rules and let them in.”
This article was adapted from the forthcoming book The Secret Gate: A True Story of Courage and Sacrifice During the Collapse of Afghanistan.
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