Too Secret To Tell
A pseudonymous special ops memoir records tedium and terror in a unit with no name
This is a story of common-soldier counter-terrorism, of the gritty patience of American assassination teams, of the elite but ill-fed, ill-housed and ill-slept donkey work of intelligence operations in dangerous countries.
It is told by a five-feet-one-inch Egyptian immigrant hyper-achiever who brags about being the shortest man in the U.S. Army. He is an Arabic speaker who sometimes pretended to be Mexican to ease his way through American life. He is now a retired sergeant major with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star.
Under a pen-name, “Adam Gamal,” he produced this earnest and sometimes angry autobiography with the help of a lively writer named Kelly Kennedy, herself an Army veteran of the endless wars in the Middle East. Gamal’s real name is a secret, the name of his unit is a secret, his service records are so secret that nowadays the Veterans Administration can’t find them. The book is decorated with black rectangles redacting information that our government found too secret to publish.
So how do we know that anything here is true?
The clue is that it’s all so ordinary, so tedious in the military way. No glamor, no glory.
The most exciting pages are the first eight, describing the minutes before missiles from a U.S. ship off the Horn of Africa hit the house of al-Qaeda’s Aden Hashi Ayro, who led a Somali terrorist group called Hizbul Shabaab. Ayro is everything that Gamal hated about the Muslim Brotherhood when he was growing up in Alexandria—the fundamentalist violence that contradicts the Islam his father taught him.
Now he has found Ayro after a long, frustrating hunt. It’s May 2008. Gamal sends the ten-digit grid coordinates that will bring the missiles within one meter of Ayro’s house.
“I fumble with the radio. We’ve got eyes on ….“ he recalls.
Do the missiles get this guy? Ahhh, not so fast. This book needs all the suspense it can get, and so Ayro’s fate is suspended until page 240, after a book-length flashback that starts when Gamal is six and pretty much ends decades later after he gets gut-shot in a fight with three unidentified terrorists.
The book’s last line: “My story is about the American Dream.”
Origin Story
In July, 1991, at the age of 20, Gamal arrived in New York with $500 in his shoe. It was raining. Very strange—he’d never seen rain in the summer. Then he couldn’t find his way out of the subway. A YMCA in a bad neighborhood looked nothing like the American movies he’d seen. Drugs. Graffiti. He had the phone number of a friend but he didn’t know how to use the pay phone. He ended up in New Jersey, along the way brushing shoulders with the Blind Sheik, Omar Abdel-Rahman, who would be jailed after the first attack on the World Trade Center two years later.
He got robbed. He got a job in a handbag factory run by a fellow Muslim who didn’t pay him. Then he got a good job from a Jew with a clothing store. In 1994 he tried to join the Navy but the Navy recruiter was out. So he joined the Army.
Thus does the American Dream proceed.
He was very good at being in the Army.
He says he “loved basic training.” Nobody loves basic training. In four years he would make staff sergeant. Who gets five promotions in four years?
He was an admin man, like the typists who used to be known as Remington Raiders. Or Chairborne.
“I never wanted to be an admin guy,” he says. He served with a military police unit in Bosnia, where he also read his first book in English, A Time to Kill by John Grisham. He started taking long-distance classes in English and history via the University of Maryland’s online arm. He won Soldier of the Month then Soldier of the Quarter. He became an American citizen. He ended up with the Army Rangers in Kosovo. Then he was assigned to the FBI, translating from Arabic. He became a “cryptic linguist.” He went to jump school.
He was invited to join a unit so secret that he could not be told its name, or his duties. After al-Qaeda took down the World Trade Center, he joined. This is “The Unit” in the title of the book, whose subtitle is: “My Life Fighting Terrorists as One of America’s Most Secret Military Operatives.”
Heinz Varieties
He found himself among soldiers with exotic backgrounds—a Ukrainian, an Alaskan fisherman, a woman who was a world-class swimmer, a guy with a glass eye he’d pop out as a party trick. They tore rank and unit insignia from their uniforms to train with nothing to support them but their own self-confidence. They ate one meal a day and slept in the woods. They got beaten up by interrogators.
They became interrogators themselves in Iraq. Gamal ended up in civilian clothes, driving around in a civilian car looking for Saddam Hussein. He went to Afghanistan, Somalia. He posed as an employee of the phone company. He may have been “fighting” terrorists as a “secret” operative but nothing in his book suggests he was doing anything more glamorous than the gritty and dangerous scut-work of intelligence in the face of the enemy. No reason is given for the super-secrecy—the reason would be secret, of course.
He dodged ambushes until he got shot in one. And then one night he found himself calling in missiles on the house of Aden Hashi Ayro.
Spoiler alert: Kaboom
“And in the continual game of Whac-A-Mole, Ayro’s replacement had already popped up,” he says.
Hit Job
This was Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan, an East African terrorist linked to the 1998 American embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. It took a year of work to locate him near Mogadishu in a pickup truck on his way to see his wife. Helicopters killed him and SEALs grabbed his body for a burial at sea. The whole operation took five minutes.
Endless tedium, a moment of terror—this is known to military analysts as “temporal desynchrony.” The book tries to sell itself as super-secret high adventure but it’s really an account of the boredom and frustration that haunt military operations.
Having heard a few bullets go past my head as a Marine in Vietnam, I suspect that almost anyone can handle the moments of terror. It takes soldiers like Adam Gamal to live with the grinding, year after year. And call it the American Dream. ###
The Unit: My Life Fighting Terrorists as One of America’s Most Secret Military Operatives By Adam Gamal. St. Martin’s Press. 290 pp plus 16-page color photos insert.
Thanks Henry Allen I appreciate your writing immensely