The Jordan Harbinger Show - 978: Adam Gamal | My Top-Secret Fight Against Terrorism Part One

Episode Date: April 16, 2024

What's it like to be one of the only Muslim Arab Americans fighting terrorism in the US' most secret military unit? Adam Gamal shares here in part 1 of 2! What We Discuss with Adam Gamal: How Adam Gamal went from being an Egyptian refugee who barely spoke English to an operative in the US Army's most secret special forces unit. The unit's tasks range from counterterrorism and hostage rescue to counter-narcotics operations. The ethical and emotional complexities of covert operations. How top secret operatives navigate cultural nuances while making personal sacrifices for the greater good. The importance of intelligence, adaptability, and the unseen battles fought every day to ensure American safety. And much more... Full show notes and resources can be found here: jordanharbinger.com/978 This Episode Is Brought To You By Our Fine Sponsors: jordanharbinger.com/deals Sign up for Six-Minute Networking — our free networking and relationship development mini course — at jordanharbinger.com/course! Like this show? Please leave us a review here — even one sentence helps! Consider including your Twitter handle so we can thank you personally!See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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I was leaving Iraq. I made it to Qatar. The unit commander contacted me like, hey, there is a hostage situation and a kidnapped soldier in Iraq. We need you to go back. So I had to call my wife and say, hey, I'm sorry, I'm not coming.

I have to go back. And those are the things that a lot of people don't realize. So people are, oh, military guys are really cool, and they deploy and, like, special operation guys, and they get paid more, and they jump out of aircrafts, and to call your wife, the day you're supposed to arrive back home

and you tell her you're not coming, dude. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger. On the Jordan Harbinger show, we decode the stories, secrets, and skills of the world's most fascinating people and turn their wisdom into practical advice that you can use to impact your own life and those around you.

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My guest today, Adam Gamal, is a former member of The Unit. The Unit is a Tier 1 special mission unit where intelligence and special operations meet. The Unit has another name, but we're not allowed to know what it is. We're also not allowed to know Adam's real name, what his face looks like, nor meet him in person to do this interview. So there's quite a bit under wraps here. This conversation, it is quite a tale. Adam moved to the United States from Egypt at the age of 20, speaking virtually no English, and went on to infiltrate terror organizations, collect intelligence, interrogate detainees,

catch-and-kill, high-value targets, and a whole lot more. We cover terrorism, special military operations and intelligence gathering, as well as some fun stories about Adam's travels. You can only imagine whether this guy has been and what places shine in this industry, if you can call it that. He's also great at telling his ridiculous story of immigration to the United States. It's quite humorous. was very generous with his time, and as you'd expect from any special forces operator, a true patriot in so many ways, I think you're going to love this conversation.

Even if you're not into the military hurrah stuff, there's just so much here to chew on. And FYI, there's some F bombs in this one that we didn't bleep. So if you're offended by that, well, you might want to skip this one. Now here we go with Adam Gamal. When we talked on the phone, I was like, okay, it's like a military guy, I spent through some stuff or whatever. But then it was, the more I looked at it, the more, it really is kind of a unique story. that we'll get into, I'm sure.

But first of all, early in the book, you're talking about calling in an airstrike, and I think it was an al-Qaeda terrorist in Somalia. It's like, well, there's a mosque on site, so we can't do an airstrike? What's the deal with that? Can't you see if a mosque is empty? Is it just you can't blow up a mosque?

What's the rule there? So it was basically at that time, US government rules. For us, we had the rules of engagement. According to Geneva Convention, according to international law, according to our own U.S. constitutions and whatever the government puts in place. At that time, it was, if we're going to have a strike on a mosque, it needed presidential approval.

So we would have to take the mission. We used to call it like target package. So we'd take the target package to you through Secretary of Defense all the way to the president. The president will have to approve it, say yes or no. But what I was trying to explain to people, the definition of a mosque is different. Guys have like a room in their house they pray at. They have like a corner in their backyard. They pray it.

We wouldn't call that a mosque. So for people who didn't understand the culture, they would go and say, well, they pray in there. It must be a mosque. But to go back to your question, too, not all the time you can have, you cannot see what's inside the mosque or inside the room. So sometimes we go on target based on what we can see

and sometimes what we cannot see, but we have our own ways of knowing what's inside, if that makes sense. Yeah, it does. I just wonder why don't bad guys just hide in mosques most of the time if it's harder to strike a mosque? I mean, wouldn't that just sort of make it so that if they're a target of opportunity, they can get away most of the time? Because they know that, oh, well, it's going to take them at least a couple hours to get approval, by which point I'll be gone, or they might not bother at all. Yeah, but they cannot live inside the mosque. They can't be there 24-7. And when we were tracking guys, like, for example, that guy, we were tracking him. 24-7, like where he sleeps, where he goes to eat, where he's at. At that time, it was the best time to minimize collateral damage was in the super early hours of the morning, like four or five o'clock in the morning. And at four or five o'clock in the morning, the guy was doing his morning prayer. So it was, we had to balance, I had to balance between taking a guy out in the middle

of the day where you have a lot more collateral damage or taking him at night right after he finishes his morning prayer or right before he goes to his morning prayer, we just needed to understand that I needed to explain to people the definition of a mosque. So a mosque is like a church. But if you go to the side of your house and you decide to pray, that doesn't make, if you have a bedroom or like, let's say a meditation room and you make it a prayer room, that does not make your prayer room a church or a mosque. So that's what we were trying to work on. But yeah, guys cannot hide in a mosque or in a church or in a synagogue 24-7. They have to be. come up. Yeah, of course. That completely makes sense. It's just, it's an interesting story in that,

one, that the rules of engagement seem to hinder a lot of the anti-terror stuff that we're doing. And I appreciate that they're trying to avoid just making more terrorists by blowing up mosques all the time. That seems like a wise strategy. However, it's, it was also interesting to me that at this point in time, you're an Egyptian guy who's an American at this point, right? And you're fighting terrorism and you're in the position of explaining what a mosque is to people. It's like, wow, we really are starting from anti-terror 101 over here. Like, this is what a mosque is and is not. That just shows you how far behind the learning curve we were at the time. To give you a good, like, anecdote of this. And two years before that, I called one of the military intelligence branches

that they trained, like, for interrogators. And I called the guy, I put it in the book and I called the guy and I wanted to change my job to be an interrogator and he's like what language and I said Arabic and he's like I couldn't have any need for Arabic and I was like I'm a native Arabic speaker you didn't have to send me to school to learn Arabic when we send guys to defense language institute in California DLAI for Arabic we send them for over 54 or 55 weeks so over a year and then when they come out of there they're not proficient at the language at that level operational level yet so I'm going to save them like hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars time and everything And the guy was like, well, but really we don't need any Arabic speakers.

So I was like, well, if you don't need any Arabic speakers, I don't know what to tell you. But that was like literally two years before 9-11, but it was six years after the First World Trade Center. And it was two years after the embassy bombings in Kenya and Tanzania. So we were seeing radicals and we were seeing like terrorism and terrorist attacks. But we still couldn't grasp. So when you go and you explain to people like, you're absolutely right, when you go and explain it to people what's a mosque, what definition is of a mosque? Without burning the book to your listeners, bin Laden was not the first guy who got buried at sea.

Again, the first guy got buried at sea was in Africa, and it was me and a State Department person saying, okay, if a Muslim guy got killed and he's taken into a back of a ship, what do we do? Do we give the body back? What do we do? So those things that you're absolutely right, without having the cultural understanding,

you're right, we're way behind. You know, that mirrors my experience perfectly with the whole language learning thing. I joined the Marine Reserves in college, and one of the commanding officers, I went in and I said, hey, I can't make my Russian and Arabic classes because I have to march in a field, and I need permission to stop this marching in a field thing because I can't attend either Russian or Arabic classes during that time, and that's the only time they offer the class. And he's like, well, you've got to make your schedule around us, not the other way around. And I'm like,

but I'm taking Russian and Arabic, and he was like, we don't need languages, pal, we need nuclear engineers. And I was like, are you kidding me? One, I'm not an engineer. So I'm not even in engineering school at the time. And I was just thinking, this is just wrong. It's blatantly wrong. The president of the United States at the time, George Bush, was talking about how we needed all these language learners. And I was like, do you just not watch the news? I mean, what's going on here? And it just showed me how kind of the military is so far even behind other elements in the government, at least this level of the military, that it was just brain dead, that you wouldn't want somebody to be learning both Russian and Arabic.

But instead, you know, we really need you marching in this field at 9 a.m. every day. You can't take two of these mandated, required languages that the Defense Department has put on a website saying we need more of. It was just mind-blowing. Absolutely. That's right. To add to this, you know what's a PMCS. So primary military check something.

It's like basically, where do you go to the motor pool to check if the vehicle works properly or not? I don't remember because I've been out for a while what PMCS stands for, but it's something that military units they do every week where they send soldiers to the motorpool to check their vehicles. Preventative maintenance checks and services. That's it. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

So before 9-11, I went to the FBI for like a temporary duty for three months. And part of it was to translate the al-Qaeda manual, which we had for a few years at that time. I had good contacts at the FBI, and there was like a deal between an agreement between the FBI and DOD. They can borrow linguists. So I called the FBI that I worked with during the USS School bombing and the Al-Qaeda manual translation. and I told that the lady at that time, I said, hey, we have about 7, 8 Arab speakers in the unit.

I was in Fort Bragg at that time. Now they called Fort Liberty. We're not doing anything other than going to the motor pool to check to do the preventive maintenance on our vehicles. Yeah. And she's like, yeah, but we cannot ask DOD. So I go to the unit command,

then I'm like, we can send guys if it's time for us to deploy, we'll bring him back to a week before and then we deploy. It's not like we're going to wake up overnight and say we're deploying tomorrow. And everybody said no. So we had fully qualified Arabic speakers,

checking the vehicle, the Martian, the jump in, all of those things to like military guys, to some military guys, were more important than your language maintenance. And I'm like, if we don't maintenance on vehicles, why don't you do maintenance on language? That's a really good point. Yeah, you'd think after 9-11, they were like,

oh, you're a person who moves boxes in a warehouse, but you speak Arabic. Your job is changing tomorrow. Here's when your flight leaves, right? Like, you're flying to this place to train in translation and interrogation, but instead it was like, well, make sure you've moved all those boxes in that warehouse with that forklift, pal. Not that that's not important. It doesn't have to get done, but it was just like, we have a critical shortage of language

speakers. But this problem seems to be not just in the military. I mean, you mentioned how unprepared the FBI was for 9-11. You said you'd had the al-Qaeda training manual for terrorists had been in the FBI's possession for literally years beforehand and nobody had bothered to translate it because it was just like, some terrorist training manual

probably says some stuff about terrorism, whatever. Yeah, part of that was, so there was another guy saying with me, an FBI, he was an older guy, so I'm assuming he was a contractor. So he retired, I think, from the FBI as a translator. Then they brought him back as a contractor. And he was sitting down and translating the Quran.

And I was like, by the way, I can go buy a Quran in English for $20 from, like Broadway, like downtown, like right around the World Trade Center. I was working in Federal One Plaza at that time, which was like 10 minutes away from the World Trade Center. Rather than the guy translating the Al-Qaeda manual, he was translating the Quran. And I'm like, just totally wrong priority. When we asked, like, why nobody was translating the Al-Qaeda manual before, they were like, well, it has a lot of military terms in it. So we needed people from the military to come and help. And as I stated, actually, it was really easy for me to translate because

the military part of the al-Qaeda manual was already translated from English, from field manuals, U.S. military field manuals. Some guy was working for Bin Laden translated that from English to Arabic. So for me, I was like, I just have to find the English version. So it really could have been done,

but it's sad. Like, I'm afraid, like, now we're feeling, we're going through the same rhythm of life is good, nothing's going to happen, you know, all as well. And when we become complacent, that's when we get hit. Yes, of course. And I think a lot of us agree with that.

How long was the Al-Qaeda manual in the U.S.'s possession before it got translated? Do you know? I don't know the exact time. If I go back and I put it in the book based on research I did at the time. But if I remember correctly, they had it like maybe for two years. I have to go back and look at it. Yeah. But it was like maybe two years.

It was taken from an al-Qaeda cell in, I think, Manchester, UK. The tender guy, they found material in his house. And one of the material they had was the Al-Qaeda cell. okay the manual. Yeah, of course, 9-11 woke us up, but it was a pretty heavy price to pay for being so complacent. You mentioned earlier burying terrorists at sea. What is the deal with that? Because I'd never heard of burying anybody at sea, you know, on purpose other than bin Laden. That was kind of the first, I think most of us have ever heard of it. So what's sort of the deal with that? Is that the whole idea that there's no grave for this person? It's kind of like how I think

Hitler doesn't also have a grave. You don't want people kind of go into this martyr grave. and making a thing out of it. Is that the point of this? It is partially, but it's a combination of things, actually. It's like when we go on a hit like that, whether that one we did, if we go in and to kill the guy on site and we have guys there,

they take the body to make sure that they got the right person, they do DNA. But whether they do that, they take it on a back of a ship, usually. In Somalia, that was like a Navy ship where they took the guy to do the DNA to make sure we got the right guy. And then if they give the guy back to the family,

there would be a shrine, that would be all of these things, and then that would be, like, after doing the DNA and all of these, it was kind of like very hard. So what we did is we said, okay, let's assume the guy died at sea. So in Islam, when somebody dies at sea, what do you do? Because in Islam, when somebody dies, you bury that person within 24 hours. You're not going to keep the body for, like, two, three weeks or two, three months,

or you're not going to put him in a fridge and none of that, right? We did the research, and it was like, okay, if the guy died at sea, He gets buried at sea. And that was the burial. And then there is a prayer is done. So we brought a Muslim chaplain. The Muslim chaplain did the prayer. So we gave the guy a full Islamic service for his burial, but they get buried at sea.

So the guy who got buried at sea first was not bin Laden. And there was a guy who took out in Somalia. Yeah, that's interesting. And it seems like it's probably a decent practice. Just like you said, you have to take the body. You got to get this intelligence. You don't want to be doing that on site, right? you're not going to have somebody running a DNA test in a combat zone where you just took a bunch of people out.

I suppose that's why. You bring them back to the ship, handle the business on the ship. And then do they literally just dump the body in the sea after that or do they cremate the body or something like that on the ship? So it's not cremated, but they put them in a coffin. They actually do, like if you would bury somebody in land, they do the whole thing and then they just do the burial at sea. And then they drop the body at sea, not just throw it, but the body is put in a coffin and everything. They put weights in the bottom, and so it stays in the bottom of the sea. It's not something you normally think about, but yeah, people occasionally die even of just

freak accidents, right, on ships in the Navy. So there's got to be a room that's essentially a morgue with coffins, a chaplain, an undertaker of sorts, and they just handle that business. You know, I never thought about that. If a U.S. soldier, let's say, has an accident on a boat, or if it dies in combat, essentially, quote, quote, at sea, do they freeze the body and bring it back to the United States or do they, they don't bury those people at sea, correct? No, they don't bury them at sea. They bring him back to the United States. So there are a couple of differences there. We couldn't give the body back to the family because it would have been a lot more processed. And again, in Islam, you bury them. Out of respect to the death, you bury them as soon as you

can, which is usually within 24 hours. And then when it's something like that, they do, like I said, when they do fly a Muslim chaplain, they fly the Muslim chaplain. He does the prayer. They fly the undertaker who knows how to clean the body before burial within the Islamic traditions, Muslims, they wrap the body in a, you know, like a usually white coffin, like cloth. They do the wrapping, they do the cleaning, they do the whole thing. But if it's a U.S. soldier, they take it back. But this, like, it goes back to where there was no airplanes and ships used to be, like,

that Titanic stayed in the sea at sea for, like, months. So if you, back then, when people were dying at sea, you couldn't keep the body at sea for five, six months. So usually they used to, even non-Muslims, he used to bury them at sea as well. But right now, obviously, for your soldiers, the ship has all that what's needed. In addition to you can fly an aircraft, like, you can fly a helicopter to a naval ship to carry the body and take him, and then they fly in back home. Right, yeah, that makes way more sense than anything I proposed earlier, I suppose.

Yeah, right, so the Islamic tradition stuff stems from the age of empires, right, sailboats, where it's like, oh, we're not going to be back for three or six months. We have to figure this out. We can't just keep his body on the ship, and that makes a lot of sense. Tell me about growing up. I know you started off as like a skinny kid with asthma. How do you end up in a top level special forces unit

in the United States? You end up there by pure determination, by having grit and by being a bit lucky. So to take you back, I started in an early age. I had an accident where I walked to the Mediterranean in January. My grandfather was visiting us. He was not visiting us.

He was actually sick and he was recovering in our house. So they left the door open of the house and me not being a kid, like six, seven years old. I just walked out and I made my way to the beach and stayed in the beach for a bit so that I developed asthma at that time. Then I was taking, like, you know, they put me in a lot of medication and the doctor was like, you know, how severe the asthma was that most likely I wouldn't survive past like 11 years old. But I started playing sports. I started pushing through. My mom wouldn't allow me to just be a lazy kid. pushing through that and then growing a bit older, I was studying law. I was in law school in Egypt.

And law school in Egypt, as you know, like, it's after high school. So I had a college professor and he's like, the law that you study in, you got to memorize it for the test because most likely you'll never practice it because Egypt was under martial law at that time. And he anticipated it to be under martial law for a long time, which he was correct. So Egypt was under martial law. Wait, wait. So you're learning civilian law, and it's like, you're going to be a lawyer, but here's the thing. You're never really going to practice this because we have a military dictatorship. So just, you know, take the exam and then go get a different job. Is that what I'm hearing? That's exactly what you're hearing. And this is coming from a college professor used to be the Minister of Justice. So he was the Secretary of Justice, basically, before he was teaching in college. So a guy who knows what he's talking about. And he's like, so most likely you guys will not practice this because we're under. emergency law, and it's basically martial law, and it's going to be there for a while. He was correct. Like I said, it was under emergency martial law from 1981 to 2011 when the Mubarak regime

was ousted. So I left Egypt in the early 90s, like 91. I took off. It was right after a desert store. And I borrowed money from my mom for the ticket, borrowed $500 from my sister, hid the $500 in my shoes because I was terrified, took a flight, came to New York, and landed in New York in the summer of 91, and I'm like, okay, what, like, what did I do? Let me put a pin in that for a second. So you're growing up in Alexandria, Egypt, which is kind of like, is it fair to say it's kind of a special city? Because it's not really, well, it's an Egyptian city, but it's also kind of a was built by the Greeks, right? So it's got a little bit of a different flavor maybe than some other places in Egypt. Absolutely. So Egypt, Alexandria, actually at that time, at the time I was growing up,

more Greeks. We had Greeks, French, Italians. We had a few other nationalities they were living there. So Egypt, because it's on the Mediterranean, and Europeans loved it. And Egypt, before the military regime took over in 1952, used to be actually a very nice place with good economy. It was like really booming. So a lot of Europeans moved there, and when they moved either, they went to Cairo because they worked in something government related, but the majority of them went to Alexandria. So when you go there, actually, you'll see a lot more Roman artifacts, then you will see Islamic artifacts or Arab artifacts. It's more European-style city. Or it used to be, now it's like deteriorating just with the military, not doing a good job.

But yeah, you absolutely right. So growing up there, you have the uniqueness of it's a port city. You see ships coming. You see Navy guys coming, commercial Marines come in. They hang out in the city. So you end up seeing all of these foreigners who are coming. And I think what I've read once, like people who live on ocean or sea or they are more attracted to travel because they always, the grow up wanted to know what's on the other side of that, this big body of blue water. What's on the other side of it? So you always want to see. So the curiosity make a lot of people living in coastal cities, they travel, they leave. And I was one of those. So I ended up at age 20, I ended up leaving. How did you see Islam change in Egypt when you were younger?

Because I know it used to be this place. When you look at old photos of Egypt, it's like women in shorts and skirts dancing around. But I've been to Egypt, of course, much later than that in the year 2000. There was no women walking around at all unless they were covered head to toe and often their face was covered. I mean, it was definitely not the black and white Egypt from photos. Absolutely. And as you see like pictures from before, like from the 20s and the 30s and the 40s and even when you see movies from that time, you'll see like actresses like, you know,

how they dress, you know, wear many skirts and all this. So ironically, by the way, when you look at pictures from Afghanistan in the 40s and the 50s and the 60s, all the way till the 70s, was the same thing like Egypt. You see like girls going to college, like dress Westerners style, if that a better way of saying it. Then what happened is when the military regime took over in the 50s, they played this nasty game where Arabs and Egyptians in particular, our emotional and religion plays a big, big role in their life. So when the military took over, at that time, the Muslim Brotherhood were, like, moving. They were like, they started in that 1928.

That's when the movement actually started with the Muslim Brotherhood. So, like, fast forward, like, you know, 15, 16 years after, the military is about to take over, and the military wanted to get the general population around them. So what do you do? You go and you find a movement that actually has some popularity, which, is the Muslim Brotherhood, and they had like a marriage of convenience for a bit. Then after that, the military realized, okay, the Muslim Brotherhood are actually more popular than us. They risking our ruling. So they took a lot of them, put them in jail, executed

their leader, and then they were basically banned from like 1956, 1957 all the way to the 70s, to like 74, 75. Then Sadat came. But Sadat came after Nasir. So that was the president who did the peace accord with Israel. When Sadat came, now he's fighting, he had another enemy, which is like, you know, the socialist party, which was Nasser's party. They were very loyal to Nasser. They were very socialists. And he wanted to counter that. So how does he counter that? He takes the Muslim brother out of jail. And he started beefing the Muslim Brotherhood message. And even Sadat, who is my hero, but he made a few mistakes like anybody else. They used to call him the president, the leader, the believer, the believer, leader.

So he actually made himself, like, you know, more conservative from a religious perspective, most likely than he was. But it was like, you know, a lot of leaders play those games. And so he did that. And he took those guys out. And then we started seeing a lot more of that preaching of, hey, a woman should cover their hair, women should cover this. As a matter of fact, growing up, a woman wearing pants was not a good thing to do.

Like, they used to talk about this on, like, those people preaching. They used to talk about, like, you know, if a woman is wearing pants, she's not conservative enough. She's not good. She's this. She's this. She's that. So we went from women wearing miniskirts and shorts to women wearing pants as wrong. And that kept going and going and going and kept the situation just kept getting worse and worse until when I was in college.

And the Muslim Brotherhood started, they started the grassroots movement way before Obama did. This guys started at in a way where they started preaching and talking to kids. So when I was, you know, eight, nine years old, they used to, like, approach kids like my age and take us to the mosque and talk to us and, like, you know, saluting the flag is haram is forbidden. Doing arts in school, doing music is forbidden. And when they teach you that, when you learn this at that early age, that becomes engraved, fortunately, my father kept me away from all of this. But you had other people who actually just went that route.

And when they ended up going that route, that's how we ended up having. So the Muslim Brotherhood was the foundation that Islamic Jihad was built on it. That was like a Jama, Islamia, was branch out of the Muslim Brotherhood. Then after that you have al-Qaeda started out of that. So Iman Zawahiri was member of the Muslim Brotherhood before that. Then fast forward, that was like a Nusra front, which basically was the beginning of ISIS. So it keeps getting, like, more radical and more radical and more radical, and then we don't know what's next.

You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Adam Gamal. We'll be right back. If you're wondering how I managed to book all these great authors, thinkers, and creators every single week, it's because of my network. And I'm teaching you how to build your network for free over at six-minute networking.com. This course is all about improving your relationship building skills and inspiring other people to want to develop a relationship with you. It is not cringy.

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You can find the course at six minute networking.com. Now, back to Adam Gamal. What span of time was this? I mean, how fast did everything go downhill? because it sounds like once they kind of opened up the Muslim Brotherhood can of worms, women started covering up. You mentioned in the book there's like street imams that basically just preach super conservative Islam, regardless of how accurate it is. I'm asking because I feel like this stuff always happens much faster than people think. That authoritarian oppression comes at you pretty fast.

Yeah, I agree with you. So I think that the whole thing, like you felt correct. Like I said, growing up in the beginning, we used to have, so as a kid, I lived right by a major road, which is like one block away from the beach. So we used to have like an Easter. We used to have like these parades. And you would see like, you know, Mickey Mouse and the Easter Bunny and, you know, Santa Claus around Christmas. So I saw those things as a kid who was maybe eight, nine years old.

When I was like, you know, 12, 13 years old, so in a span of like, you know, four or five years, then those things went away. And then they said, well, the economy is bad. But it wasn't because of the economy because those things were not, they were like mainly by companies. by people. So within four or five years, just people went and they started saying, this is Haram and this is Haram and this is Haram. So it goes a lot faster than a lot of people think. Then if you want to add to that too, during that time, right, a bit after that, it was the Soviet Union-Afghan War. So during that time, again, the U.S., Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia,

they played this game of like, let's just push people to go fight the Soviet Union, which when you look at it as a, it's a good cause, but again, the way they took it and the way they pushed people to go, they start pushing. So I grew up seeing Mujahideen going to Afghanistan fighting for five, six months, and coming back. And when they came back, some people held them as heroes, and some people looked at them as radical extremists that we don't want to deal with them. But all of these things were happening under the government's watch. Then how to motivate people to go fight in Afghanistan. You have this street imams that you're talking about,

and they'll go on cassette tapes back then, and they'll preach, and they'll say whatever. And these cassette tapes were, like, everywhere. I mean, like, everywhere. They were giving them away for free, all you don't have to buy them. They were, like, giving them away for free. And you can just, you ride a taxi,

you can hear it in a taxi, you ride a, you go visit a friend, you can hear them playing it in their house. And the government allowed that to happen because for whatever reason, either it suits their agenda or they were so, I don't think they were that ignorant. But these guys start talking about like everything was forbidden,

everything was haram. So it became so suffocating to the people there. And you'll see a lot of people left Egypt in the 60s and the 70s. It almost sounds, it's weird because as a podcaster, it's like tapes making their way around and changing people's mind. It's like that's so grassroots. But it's really hard to stop that kind of stuff, right? It's hard to stop people from sharing a cassette tape with a crazy message.

It's wild how popular that stuff was because clearly that stuff struck an underlying nerve or cord, I should say, with the population, if you could hear it at your friend's house and in a taxi. It's like Joe Rogan kind of only for terrorism. Really not ideal to have viral appeal like that. But it says something about the society. Would you agree? Yeah, absolutely. But here's the attitude too.

How do you protect society from stuff like that? When you have a good education system that teaches you critical thinking and like, how to analyze the information, how to actually take a piece of information and analyze it and critically think about it. Then you can go and say, okay, a guy told me singing the national anthem is Haram. I'm like, okay, he's an idiot. So you can go now, you can be the best podcaster and you can go and say, we should burn the U.S. flag everywhere. Then people will be like, okay, man, Jordan went crazy. We're not going to listen to him anymore. Because people are educated enough to make this idea, right? Although we have people saying, let's burn the flag.

Look, as somebody who's mission, the whole show is about critical thinking and helping people analyze information, let me tell you, by the time the message of this show gets its shoes on, the crazy idea of burn the flag or become a terrorist has already made its way around the world a thousand times, right? So, like, that's the problem is us inoculating the population against nonsense ideas is a much harder process than distributing a nonsense idea in the first place. My audience would be a hundred times larger if all I did was distribute nonsense ideas because that stuff is so popular. Correct. Correct. Correcting misinformation, it's unfortunately much slower. So yeah, so that's what I was saying.

So at that time, so if you want to like calm back this kind of thinking and people are educated enough, then they can actually listen. But in Egypt, the education system is like, you know, we tell you, it's built on giving you receive information, you memorize the information, we ask you in the test, what was the information and you spit it out. But we don't teach you how to think or how to critically analyze and how to digest and dissect information. It was very easy for these street imams to influence people. As a matter of fact, after the revolution in Egypt in 2011, that was a election, I think, in 2013. It was the Muslim Brotherhood and a former Air Force general. And the Muslim

Brotherhood candidate went around mosques and he said, if you don't vote for me, you're going to hell. And some people actually believe the guy and voted for him. And they said, well, this guy represents God. Again, that's what I was like preaching a lot in the book. And I'm not preaching. Like, trying to explain in the book is like, hey, when we give people the proper education, we all live a better life. Whether it's formal or informal education, you then have to go to school to have education. I agree. This is a good message. There's a story in the book. about you running for, I think it was like student council, and the Muslim Brotherhood guys go in and they beat all you guys up and then they file police reports that say that you beat them up.

The illustration of this story is perfect because you go up to the guy and he go, why did you beat us all up and then say that we beat you up? And he goes, it's okay to lie about things because we're at war. And it's like, oh, so you will literally just make stuff up. Doesn't matter what it is because you are right and everyone else is wrong. And you can't really fight an organization like that unless everybody's on the same page because you have to know they're just going to lie. Everything they do is to take over power.

There's no rules other than when. Correct. So basically by any means necessary, right? Right. So I tell the guy, and the guy is like, well, and he credited it to the prophet, and he said, well, the prophet said, we have three occasions.

We are authorized to lie during those. three occasions and one of them is war. And I'm like, so who you are at war with? And he's like, what a tour with everybody? Who does not believe what we believe? And these guys, they were so organized that they orchestrated the ass weapon during a day where there's a soccer game between the two major teams in Egypt. So nobody's in school because everybody watching the game. They gave us a room to have a meeting in the fifth floor so you cannot jump out of the window unless you're planning and killing yourself. And they put us in the end of the hallway. So these guys, guys planned it. So it wasn't a random business go beat them up. It was like, okay, we're going to have a

plan. So we cannot underestimate their sick mind and go and say, well, and we have a lot of those guys in the U.S. by the way, and they've been in the U.S. since the 60s. And they have believed that they're not going to change unless, like I said this in the book as like, you know, some grass, you can water it and you change the color and you make it really green grass. If you start early on with that grass. Some grass already is longer as old or grown enough that you cannot change it. You're just to get a weeded out. And I'm not saying go kill people. I'm just saying that's how the GWAT was. It's like, you know, when you, there are people who are hopeless cases and you cannot just to try to convince him to change their minds. So we have to look at how these organizations,

radical organizations and not just Islamic radical organizations, honestly, in the radical organizations, We have to look at how they recruit the people they join them and we go and we say, how can we fix this? But if we just watch and wait for them to change their mind, that's not going to happen. What made you want to come to the United States? Was it the idea that, like, look, Egypt is full of these Muslim Brotherhood guys, the other sides of military dictatorship, there's no future here, or was there something else going on? It's mainly all the above plus, right?

So, okay, Muslim Brotherhood were, like, you know, moving faster than a lot of people thought. Although as a kid, I was seeing that. I was a kid anymore. I mean, I was in college. So I can see that. Government was military, military dictatorship. So based on what's your last name, what family you came from, how rich or poor you are, you have no hope. What I was telling, I firmly believe this, I came to the U.S. to give me the right to dream.

And a lot of people don't take this for granted. The U.S. actually gives you the right to dream, that you can actually walk down the street and you say, you know, You see this house, one day I'm going to buy this house. I'm going to own a house like this. In Egypt, you don't have that option. You cannot go and say, well, here's a couple of million dollar house. I'm going to work my ass off till I buy it. So you don't have that option.

There's either you poor or you're rich and where you were born and how you were born and what family. And you can have one or two exceptions. But even the exceptions of successful people in Egypt, they left Egypt. Like, you know, some of the best doctors in the world are Egyptians. They left Egypt. one of the best soccer players in the world, everybody knows him, Mosala in Liverpool. He left Egypt.

Noble Prize winners who originally from Egypt, they won it when they were in the U.S. So it's seeking better opportunities than seeking a land where you have the right to dream. Speaking of dreams, tell me about your first night in New York City, because that was more of a nightmare, I think. It's a good way I was going to tell you it, so isn't a dream. So I land in New York, but literally, I mean, I had a booklet. it, they give it to you as an international student. You have a booklet that has all the economic places to stay at. I had the addresses of all the YMCAs.

Oh, yeah. One of them was in New York City, and I get off the plane in New York, and I tried to talk to the bus driver who I don't understand what he's saying. He was nice enough to like, okay, dude, just sit here, took the booklet from me after asking him 10 times. And it was his way of like, dude, stop fucking asking me questions. when your stop comes, I'll let you out. Yeah, yeah, of course.

Yeah, like YMCA, why MCA? All right, just sit here, I'll tell you when to get on the bus. Exactly. Just stop talking and that will be okay. Yeah. So I get on the subway, we get off. I had a friend, he was traveling with me. Me, not speak in English, I knew English more than he did.

So it was like, you know, clown show. Couldn't make it out of the subway station to go up. It was a Sunday. Finally, a police officer after asking him a few times, took me by the hand and took me out. And he's like, here's the street. So it is raining. And I'm like, dude, it doesn't rain in Egypt in July.

I mean, it's raining in the summer. We had a suitcase. I have my $500 hidden in my shoes. Well, I bought like, you know, the subway ticket. I think it was like $1.25 at that time. So I have whatever left from the five. So I'm hiding the money in my shoes. I'm terrified.

I see the police officer is like, he pointed the YMCA. We go there. And I had a phone number of a friend. He was in the Boy Scouts in Egypt with me. His mom gave me his phone number. And she's like, he's in the U.S. He's been in the U.S. for her. I wanted to say it was a year or two before me. I get coins and I'm dialing his number from a pay phone in the YMCA.

There is a community bathroom in the YMCA, the paid phone by the community bathroom. So I go and I dial the number. And what his mom didn't do is she didn't put one plus one before the area code. Oh, she didn't dial one before the area code, right? Okay. She didn't write it. Or she didn't write the one. Right.

I'm dialing without the one. It doesn't go through. I kept doing that until like about 2 o'clock in the morning. Finally, there is a junkie standing by the bathroom. I think he got sick and tired again of seeing me. The guy when I smoked his join and he's like this foreign kid coming. So he took the number, he took the quarter, put it there and dialed the number for me. Finally, my friend ends.

I told him where I'm at. He's like, go back to your room, move your bunk bed behind the door so nobody can break into your room. And do leave. Don't get out of the room till I come and pick you up tomorrow. So my buddy's in the room. I go back to the room. We push the bunk bed behind the door. I take the $500.

I put him under the install of the shoes. And I put my socks there. And I'm like, okay, if somebody comes to the room, they wouldn't be able to find the money. So I was really terrified. I mean, because when I landed there, too, I had just seen pretty woman, Julia Robert and Richard Gron. I was like, dude, what happened to the limos? What happened to Julia Roberts?

I mean, what happened to all the pretty women that I'm going to. see in the streets and the limos and, you know, like, well-dressed men, and that was none of that, by the way. None of that. So I was like, they're not at the YMCA in Harlem at four o'clock in the morning. And I was like, did I land in the wrong country? So next morning, we ended up going to New Jersey. And the journey started from there. That's so funny. My friend is also Egyptian and grew up and his whole family is in New Jersey. I don't know how big the Egyptian community is there, but there's a distinct possibility that you are either related to or know somebody from my friend's family, unless there's just a zillion Egyptian people in New Jersey, which is also

possible. It's a huge Egyptian community, and I have no idea. And when I came, and everybody was like, hey, man, when you go, there is a mosque in Jersey City. Just go there, and you'll find people that you know, and you'll meet them. And then they'll tell you where to go to school, where to live, where to get a job. So I don't know why Jersey City, but everybody comes to Jersey City. The fortunate one, the lucky ones, they go there as a stop and they leave.

I think the unfortunate ones, the unlucky ones, they ended up going and stay in. I was lucky. I went there for a bit and I left. Trapped in New Jersey, the American nightmare. Yeah, no, it's probably not that bad. It's not. New Jersey's the butt of every joke, as you know. It's really not that bad of a place.

I know. We need something to kick, I guess. I don't know. It's like, poor New Jersey. When I tell people like I lived in New Jersey, like, put you exit. I'm like 14A. So, but what I didn't tell you to, like, who did I meet in the mosque? So I met the blind chief, the guy who was behind the World Trade Center.

Oh, the bombing, you mean, the blind shake. So tell us a little bit about who this guy was. So this guy was originally, most likely, was one of the Muslim Brotherhood guy, advanced a bit to whatever came like Jamah Islamian, like came after the Muslim Brotherhood. And he was the guy who issued the fatwa for killing Sadat. The president of Egypt. The president of Egypt. at that time. And he said because Sadat did the peace agreement with Israel, it's okay to kill him.

Because whatever, he came up with some, like any of the other crazy imams. So he came up with this and he's like, so he ended up being prosecuted. And I don't know if he spent time in jail or he came out. But then after that, he was helping pushing people to Afghanistan with the war against Soviet Union. And then according to public record, a few years after CIA helped him, issued him a visa from the U.S. Embassy in Sudan, and he ended up in the U.S. He ended up in Jersey City in the mosque. So here I am, I walked there, and maybe my second or third months, I'm in the U.S., I walk there and I see him, and I hear people saying, you know, Sheikh Omar is here,

Sheikh Omar is here. His name is Omar Abder Rahmanned, and we called him the blindshar. He wasn't doing sermons or anything. I mean, he was just, he would go pray. I think he was married to an American Muslim lady to get his green card or whatever. but he would sit down and after Friday prayer he would sit down and people would sit around him and ask him religious questions like you want to ask a priest like is gambling okay or not in religion

so one time I'm curious kid and I said I'm like I want to hear what these people talking about those are the people who beat the fuck out of me in Egypt and here I come to the US and they are here still I mean what the fuck I sit down and I'm like let me see what they're saying and what kind of crazy stuff they're talking about I think of the second question that somebody asked him was like, is oral sex allowed in Islam or not? So these guys who've been studying religion for God knows how long and, you know, they come into a Friday prayer and they sit down and they're going to talk about like, you know, how they're going to solve the world's problem. And what are they going to ask the guys like, you know, is oral sex allowed or not?

Yeah. I mean, dudes be dudes at the end of the day. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm like, okay, I'm saying in the wrong crowd and got up and left. If people are interested, what he said is he said it's allowed. So if people are curious. Yeah. But it's like you think like, I'm going to ask this guy, like, why did God put us on earth? And it's like, hey, can I get BJs or what?

Yeah. All right. Like I said, deep thinker. It is the guy with like, you know, the big thinker, the scholar, the guy's being studying religion forever. I'm going to ask him like, how could I be a good human being or like why God put us on earth or tell me the history of this religion or that religion. But I know that the question was literally that.

And I was like, okay, fuck all of you guys. I'm leaving. Yeah. Well, it also shows you like the level of thought people put into, they're like, I'm going to die for my religion. What do you know about it? I just know that I'm allowed to, you know, get oral sex. And what's the history?

I didn't ask any of those questions. I didn't ask any of the big, like, those other questions. It's just like, this is the stuff that's important to guys who are in their early 20s or whatever who are the ones that they're recruiting into this extreme version of religion. It's just, it's insane. It's literally insane and a waste of air. How was immigrant life, though, in the first few years?

I mean, you talk about having dentistry done basically in some guys, how is people ripping you off at work, playing chess in the park for money. I mean, that's quite a grind. So what a lot of people don't realize is like, you know, the majority of immigrants, legal immigrants, so I don't want people to get all bent out of shape. But immigrants, when do they come, they come in because they're are seeking a better life. And they'll do whatever it takes. They'll work hard. They'll study hard. They'll grind. So first month, first three months, actually, I'm sleeping on the floor and not like

having a mattress on the floor. No, sleeping on the floor. I didn't have money. I barely got a job. I'm going to take English classes in the evening to learn English. I'm working in a factory that the guys were like Lebanese. Again, nothing against Lebanese people, but these guys decided not to pay me after like, you know, three, four months. And you're like, you like, you're like, like, okay, now I don't have money. What am I going to do? If I want a mattress in the trash, took a mattress from the trash, put it in the room, and I'm like, okay, I'm going to bring a blanket and just put it on and sleep on it.

This is part of it. And you like, you know, you work in gas stations. You do whatever it takes. Because whatever you have here at that time, still better than your home country. You still, you know, you went and you work, then you, now I can go to school. Now I can learn English. Now I can maybe learn more than English. Maybe I can get a college degree better than what I was going to have from there.

And then I didn't even know how to drive. So I've learned how to drive with all of these different jobs. And then finally I found a job with a guy his name is Jim. And he's Jewish-American Israeli, like originally from Israel. So he and I could not be any different. I'm from Egypt, Arab-Muslim. He's Jewish, Israeli, American. But we both had the same common goal, like, you know, looking for a better life and looking for how to make America home.

So it didn't take us a week to click to like, you know, we had the same. same ideas. We had the same common goals. We had the same opinions. You do that and you do that a bit and then you're like, okay, how do I make this home? How do I make this country really home? It's not cliche. I'm not trying to recruit people to join the army. But I was like, here is a key actually, can get you to be as American as anybody can argue with you. And it was joining the military. And I felt like it's a debt that I owed the country I'm going to make home. And I decided to join the military. But during that time, whether the things that people take for granted, just the right to dream, or even understanding the immigrant community, like, we were to save money. If you

come in from Egypt, it was cheaper to buy a ticket from Egypt for a trip. So when we would go to Egypt, we'd take one-way ticket, come back, have a round-trip ticket. But then at that time, the airline was the only phase that you see when you get in on a flight for an international flight. Like, you came from Egypt. I would buy your ticket from you and pay you, you know, some money and you give me your ticket and I'll fly to Egypt and a ticket that it says Jordan on it. And nobody knew that. So those are the things that I'm talking about, like, immigrants, they knew the ends and outs of those things. They knew, like, who's faking a driver's license somewhere in Brooklyn? Who's getting people to marry for a green car? Immigrants knew those things.

So it's a valuable resource for us to just ignore. them and say, well, you know, you just arrived, you know, two generations before you, and my family came in Ellis Island and they took the keys with them and they locked the door and nobody else can come behind. No, it's still a country of immigrants. And if you don't bring him in and have them part of society, they got to become part of a Guinness Society. And you don't want there. This is the Jordan Harbinger show with our guest, Adam Gamal. We'll be right back. If you like this episode of the show, I invite you to do what other smart and considerate listeners do, which is take a moment and support our amazing sponsors. All of the deals, the discount codes,

the ways to support the show are all searchable and clickable over at Jordanharbinger.com slash deals. If you can't remember the name of a sponsor, you can't find a code, you're wondering if we even have that sponsor. Just email me, Jordan atjurbaner.com. I am more than happy to surface that code for you. It is that important that you support those who support the show. Now for the rest of Part 1 with Adam Gamal. It's interesting. In the book, you highlight the idea that the American dream is the right to dream, whereas in Egypt under the Muslim Brotherhood, you don't have the right to dream. You're not supposed to do anything like that. It's not really a part of the culture, which is, it's hard to wrap your head around that as an American. Like, wait,

you don't want upward mobility if it's not somebody who's in our organization that believes what we believe. I mean, that is such a toxic thing to grow up with because basically you're forcing all your best people to join this weird militant organization where they're focused on totally different things. So of course people leave if they have potential and the ability to do so and go literally anywhere else. Well, maybe not literally anywhere else, but certainly to a free country like the United States, a relatively free country like the United States. So you joined the military. How many Egyptian immigrants with shaky English are in basic training with you at that point? I would imagine it's a lonely journey in the beginning. I was the only guy. Yeah, I bet.

I was totally the only guy for people who know me in person. A lot of Egyptians look like Mexicans or pro-Rican's. So everybody spoke to me in Spanish because everybody thought I was pro-Rican because nobody even fathom like the idea of having an Egyptian guy in the army. So yeah, I was the only guy. And basic training, I was the only guy. In advanced training, I was the only guy. Well, I'll tell you, actually, the first Egyptian I met, I met in Fort Hood, Texas, wasn't his way out of the army. It was an older guy spent four years in the army and he was leaving the army at that time. I think he was a tanker. But no. And there wasn't that Arabs in general. I think as a military, we're not doing a good job in recruiting in those

immigrant communities. And then at the same time, the immigrant communities, the Arab American immigrant community, we're not doing a good job adapting, like some immigrants, whether Arabs or non-Arab. Some immigrants, when they arrive to the U.S., they have achieved their goal. Their goal was to arrive, and they stop it. And that's it. Yeah. And I'm like, no, that's the beginning of the journey. You just arrive to the beginning of the journey. That's one point. I'm trying to put a lot of emphasis on, on the book and in my interviews, to speak to the immigrant community. Don't settle for the status quo.

I mean, you came to this country to make it home, to make the best out of your life. So go to school, join the military, go work hard, start the business, do something other than just saying I'm going to come and stay in this. So like you and I talked a few minutes ago, but it must be like a gazillion Egyptians in Jersey. Because they come and they stay. Well, you have like another 49 states. He can actually travel, go to a different state, buy a forum or like go forum somewhere or go cow tipping in Wisconsin or go do something else, like explore America.

The peak of American life. Exactly. That's funny. I understand that. It's true, though. People do, they stay and they get settled, but that's also like very much human nature. You know, like my grandparents were immigrants. One of my grandparents, I should say, was an immigrant.

The other ones were also already had been born in Detroit. but their parents had immigrated to Detroit, and then my parents stayed in Detroit, and then I moved, and then suddenly my cousins started moving. And I was like, oh, you know, it's funny that you ended up moving to California. My cousins, a bunch of my cousins told me, oh, I never would have left Michigan, but then you left, and then you left, and then Christina left, and then Steve, and it's like, oh, you guys left because I left, and they're like, yeah, we saw you moved,

and then you were living like a different life, and you didn't move back home after five months. So we moved, and we realized we like it better over here. You really do need to see somebody break the mold. It's tough, though, and that's kind of like what you're doing, right? You broke the mold, joined the military, moved to a different place, and you're showing other immigrants like, hey, you don't have to just stay in New Jersey or Dearborn, Michigan, or Cupertino, California, wherever your family moves to Arcadia, I guess, for the Chinese, a lot of the Chinese, or Vancouver, right?

There's a lot of places you can go. I would imagine, though, if, man, if you're like the only Arab that you even knew in the military, surely you're dealing with some racism at that point in time just because you know you're talking about joining a military full of people who are fighting other people that look like you not necessarily being on the same team. Yeah, absolutely. So I want to go back to your point about people not moving.

It's exactly what's in the book, Who Moved My Cheese? I was the first mice who just decided, you know what? I'm not going to say who moved my cheese. I'm going to go out and find more cheese. So I found a lot more cheese. But to go back to you, yeah, so when you, you join the military and you're not white, you're not black, you're not Puerto Rican, or you're not Hispanic, you must be the enemy. That's just how the equation goes, right? You must be the enemy.

And it was right after Desert Storm. So my second day of basic training, the drill sergeant, they set you in the floor, it's like a big call. They set you in the floor, they trying to break the ice. The drill sergeant goes around and he's like, you know, every one of you guys tell me your name, what are you from, and why did you join the army? And you have the guy from Hawaii. He's like, you know, I'm from Hawaii. My name is John Smith. And I joined the Army because I want a better education.

Or I joined the Army because I want to serve my country. I want to pay for college. I have student loans. So you have all of these different reasons. I didn't get to tell the guy my reason. I said, you know, my name is Adam Gamal. I'm from Egypt. And the guy was like, what, hold on, hold on.

Before I even told them why I joined the Army. And he's like, where are you from again? I said, I'm from Egypt. He's like, didn't we fucking kill all of you Arabs in Desert Storm? I said as a matter of fact, no, you have one left. It's saying here. Oh, my gosh. What a horrible thing to say, though.

I mean, so ignorant and gross. And let me add to this, that Joe Sojourn's last name, because it's a very common last name, was Vasquez. So you can imagine. Vasquez. Vasquez? Exactly. So I'm like, this is coming from a brown guy just like me. Yeah.

My battle buddy was from Pennsylvania, a blonde kid with blue eyes, one of the nicest guys. right after that, I mean, we walk back to our, like, as we walk into our bunk beds and the guy's like, hey, man, don't let something like that bother you. So I tell people, for every person that you meet who's either ignorant or, I didn't want to say the guy was racist because I don't think he was racist. I just think he was ignorant. But for every person that you meet who's ignorant, there are at least maybe 99 who are good-hearted kind people who are willing to just show you the rope and take you with them and the way. And, and. And, and. And. And. like I said, a lot of things I mentioned in the book, like, about that guy is like, you know, the last day in basic training. When we'd spend time with his family. I go to Fort Hood, Texas. My first patrol sergeant is a great guy who is like, you know, taking me under his wing literally, like, take me under his arm. And he's like, and I'm short, so it's easy for him to take me under his arm. And he shows me and he teaches me those things. So for every, like, I don't want people to be scared, like, oh, the military is like full of racist people because it's not. But I did. I did encounter those. And I want this to be more

positive and more incursing and, like, inspiring. So this is not about me complaining about somebody being racist in the military, because we have racist people in Egypt, too. So we have him everywhere. That's true. I just thought it was, you know, you're the only guy there, sure that must have happened. Tell us what we can learn about the unit. I know it's tough because you can't even mention the name and it's like, there's no other books about this unit. It started in 1981. No one other than you has really written about this, correct? It's basically still totally secret. So correct.

So we have journalists who did like, you know, investigative journalists. And they got like, you know, he sat in a bar, got some information from, I'm the first actual operative or operator that was member in the unit that wrote a book about his life and about the unit. So it was a very hard balance to tell a story and at the same time protect national security. It's an organization made of, it's a mix of a special operation. in Intel. So imagine that you take Delta and CIA and you put them together and NSA and you put the three of them together and you come up with a guy who's capable of being one of the three.

So that's the objective of the unit was created after the Iran hostage situation. And that was like at that time, okay, we have door kickers. And I'm not going to say like it's easy to become a Delta guy or a Navy or like a SEAL Team 6 guy. It's still hard, but it's a lot more physical. So like, you know, go to the gym, 20 hours a day, get muscle memories and how to shoot. You're going to pick it up, then the more you should, the more calm you are when you shoot. You can train what we call hard skills. We need to go to soft skills.

How to blend in, how to be the gray guy, how to be the guy who's not going to sit and talk about, let me tell you how many times I jumped out of an aircraft and let me tell you how cool I am and let me just show you, how you want to go to the gun show, let me show you the guns. But for us, as an organization, we were a bit different. mentally different. We were more, I don't know I say we were more intellectual, but we were more like thinkers. We more want to solve problems. You give us a problem, we'll put our brain behind it and we'll sit and think about it and do it. And then it's made of, you know, like men and women

and I call them like, you know, shadow warriors who nobody knows anything about them. I wanted people to know, like there is an organization that and we got approval from DOD, just we went through all the process. It sat with DOD for 13 months, the book. They took some stuff out. change some stuff to protect sources and methods. So the book went to DoD in August in 2020, so literally almost three years ago. This is what it first went for review and it sat with them until 2022.

Late 2022 is then when we got it and we talked about it. But the organization itself, I cannot obviously say the location, but when I was there, we had people deploying in over like 20 plus countries in war zones, non-war zones, working out of embassies, not working out of embassies. But we were going after like the real, real, real bad guys.

And our main job was not to kill them. Our main job was to find them and fix them. Fix them is like, I did like the story that we talked about in the first of the book is this guy was been tracking him for a few years. Now we know exactly what he's at. Fix him is like, okay, he's going to be in this location for a few days, a few weeks or whatever, for us to be able to exclude the target. That's the unit.

Our selection process is not classified. But to maintain the integrity of it, I didn't talk about selection or training. Part of our training obviously is classified. Another part is like, you know, how to do land navigation, how to do defensive driving, how to shoot, how to jump out of an airplane. Those are common things like for special operation guys. I thought that was, I was like, wait a minute, this training, there's a lot of gaps, but it makes sense that they made, they had to remove a lot of that stuff. It is sort of clear, though, that brain power is part of the focus. And I know people idolize seals because of their super impressive physical and mental training.

But I always figured, and I wish I'd known this when I was younger, because I may have actually stayed and joined the military instead of leaving the reserves. I figured there had to be room for people who can speak multiple languages, blend in with various cultures, develop relationships at a really expert level, but maybe can't, I don't know, like swim five miles in the ocean while carrying a cinder block or whatever. Like that stuff is amazing, but whenever I saw that,

I was like, well, I can do that. All I can do is learn languages to fluency very quickly and connect with people really easily and get them to tell me things that they don't normally talk about. Like that,

I was like, ah, but there's no real use for that. The state department was interested in that stuff, of course, and other organizations were interested in that stuff. But the military was like, we need nuclear engineers.

And I was like, all right, this is not the crew for me, that you either need to be able to, swim five miles in the ocean without a wet seat care and a cinder block, or you need to be able to be a nuclear engineer. So I just, I left for that reason. So the thing is for us, too, what are the guys who are swimming and they throw things in the

bottom of the pool? We did some of these things, not absolutely not to the extent like the Navy Seals do. I think a lot of people love the Navy Seals because the Navy Seals love to write books. Oh, people know them very well. Yeah, that's part of it. Sure. But guys, I have a lot of friends, like Navy Seals, and I have a lot of friends from Delta. I have a lot of friends from CIA and NSA, and they are all great Americans.

It's just everybody brings his own strength to the table. We couldn't do it by ourselves. We couldn't do it without having other guys with us. For them, it's the same thing. They couldn't do it without having other people around them. So it's a good ecosystem in the Joint Special Operation Command, and especially when we partnered a lot with the CIA and NSA, we were able to execute targets a lot better.

But you're absolutely right. Having people with, like, you know, the language capability, the cultural capability, the people who are, like, what you're doing now is like you get people to talk, right? And you get them to tell you stories that most likely they wouldn't say it somewhere else. Having that capability being a good listener, being attentive to, even in business now, like for me, understanding when to shake somebody's hand, understanding when, how to treat an older guy who's older than you. And I've seen it in Iraq, I've seen it in Afghanistan when you see like a young captain who's 23, 24 years old. Captain America, he feels he's better than everybody else in the world.

And he sits with a 70-year-old tri-bar leader in Afghanistan, and he just sits and he crosses his legs and he has the bottom of his shoe in the face of the older men. Well, in a lot of cultures, that's not a good thing. So you do that, and then right there, you just lost an ally. You just lost the guy who could have been your own. What I tell people, like, understanding culture, it's like the commas and the periods of the English language.

The commas and the periods are too small, but they change the meaning. It could be a question. It could be a sentence. It could be the end of a sentence. You not know in the culture is basically you just have a sentence running without any commas, periods, question marks, just the sentence is going. And then you're going with it. So I tell people, just those small things in the culture have a lot of meaning and people

should understand it. And I was promoting that when I was in the military, like, guys, we need to learn these things. It's not just the language. We need to learn those things because we can win horse and minds a lot faster than just go and talking down to an older man. You know, the punctuation analogy is really good. It makes a lot of sense. There's a saying in English that I'm sure you've heard, which is punctuation is the difference between helping your uncle Jack off a horse and helping your uncle Jack off a horse. Yep.

And I'll let that one sit there for people who need a minute. I've heard that way. Hey, it's not mine. So feel free to go ahead and throw that, sprinkle that in your. media tour. Yeah, I will. But let me take a note. Yes, yeah, write that down.

Only the important stuff. What types of missions, you sort of touched on this a little bit, but what types of missions was the unit involved in? I mean, one, in the book, you mentioned finding kidnapped generals. Like, when I heard that, I was like, wow, how often does that happen? That seems like something that should probably never be allowed to happen. Yeah. So the unit is involved in missions where, so we were basically getting our tasks.

from like secretary of defense level. Three main missions, J-Soc, joining Special Operation Command in charge of three main missions. Counter-narcotic, counter-terrorism, and hostage rescue. Those are the three main missions. Counter-insurgency is something that came up after and I'm still trying to understand

what the fuck is counter-insurgency. But it's something like some general came up with it and it sounded cool. But those are the three main things. So whether it's a counter-narcotic, like killing Pablo Escobar. Counterterrorism, the Bin Laden's and the guys I talked about and Abbas Abbas Zarqawi and you name it. And all the way from, I'm from Egypt, so I can say this, all the way from Bonfuck Egypt to the other Bonfuck Egypt.

Right, right. So from anywhere, I deploy it to places. So I'll say the name of this city just because it sounds really cool and it's not classified that people were there. But the name of the city is Wagadougu. So for your listeners, they can Google it and figure out where the fuck is what. Wagadougu. Yeah, you know, it's funny. I've heard of it before, but now I'm like, where is Wagadugu again? Is it Ghana? No, it's Burkina Faso. Is it Burkina Faso? Yeah, Burkina Faso. Some place of the military dictatorship. Yeah. Burkina Faso. And then you can be, maybe you'll end up in

Tombok, too. Or you end up in Banfakig. In Mali. So you can be. Which also has a military dictatorship right now, which aligned with Burkina Faso, I guess coincidental. And the one thing with a lot of these places that has a military dictatorship. While they have military dictatorship, the environment is ripe for extremist groups. Because those extremist groups, sometimes they partner with the military, they don't partner with the military, they go against the military. And then, yeah, there is a lot in the Sahara region, in West Africa going all the way, the sub-Sahara, there is a lot of smugglers. So they smuggle weapons, they smuggle. And if you are a smuggler, you can smuggler terrorists as well. And then the smugglers are just their main

goal in life is to make money. unit or other joint special operation units, they go to these areas to track down bad guys who are being smuggled through, and you never know, like, the underwear bomber was from Nigeria. Yeah. And then they make it all the way to East Africa, to Somalia. From Somalia, they can cross the Bab and Mandab's trade to make it to the Arabian Gulf, and they can make it up. So it's not, it's connected, and they can travel around.

So General McChrystal, one of the greatest generals in our recent time, is like he used to tell us all the time. It takes a network to defeat a network. If we're not operating as a network, so basically you have to, if your enemy speaks Chinese, you need to understand Chinese. If your enemy speaks network, you need to understand network. So that's why we were everywhere. So we were deployed to a lot of different locations.

I traveled. I deployed more than 12 times in the 10 years I was there. After that, I left and I went to another organization, was doing something else, and then I retired in 2016. But the unit itself, so those three things, the counter-narcolic, hostage rescue, and counter-terrorism, that's why that, okay, there is a general got kidnapped. Or when I was in Iraq, I was leaving Iraq, coming back to the U.S., I made it to Qatar. The unit commander contacted me like, hey, there is a hostage situation and a kidnapped

soldier in Iraq. We need you to go back. So I had to call my wife and say, hey, I'm sorry, I'm not coming. I have to go back. And those are the things that a lot of people don't realize how hard on any family those things are. So people are like, oh, military guys are really cool and they deploy and like special operation guys and they get paid more and they jump out of the aircrafts. And no, but to call your wife, the day you're supposed to arrive back home and you tell her you're not coming, dude, they need some balls. You're about to hear a preview of the Jordan Harbinger show with the go-to person to help negotiate a hostage situation in Syria when no other intelligence agency would help.

When you have a hostage negotiation, especially in a war zone, the hardest thing to do is to actually figure out who the hostage takers are. And the rumors are off the charts. Proof of life is getting that authentication, that you're talking with the people who actually have the person. And you want to know, of course, that the person's still alive. You ask him for some question or some nickname, something that no one would be able to know. And if they can't come back with that answer, you walk away. The person I had to flag down and find who held this Westerner hostage was probably the biggest Capagon dealer in the the country and they often use the same distribution routes for the captagon as they do for human

trafficking. So the same people who take little girls from villages and send them to the Gulf, to Dubai, to Riyadh and Saudi Arabia, to other places there. They fill also stomachs of the girls with drugs and use them as couriers while also shipping them as the product itself. The first thing you have to do is tell the parents to stop doing something that they want to do and that every schmuck under the sun, telling him to do, which is to seek public support, right? To get public statements, to do Facebook campaigns. The Secretary of State say how we're not going to leave a stone unturned until this awful act is being brought to justice. What just happens with that is your price went up before you even started a negotiation.

You do not want to drive up the perceived value of the hostage. Sometimes people are taken hostage just for the shock value of executing them. What you're going to do with the campaign that you're doing right now is going to get your child or your spouse killed. How is pissing off the people who hold that person's life in their hands helping you? By the time I get involved,

it's usually too late. To learn all about the nuances and negotiating with criminals and human traffickers, check out episode 617 of the Jordan Harbinger Show. All right, that's it for part one, part two coming soon,

might already be out, depending on when you hear this. All things Adam Gamal will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. I got to admit, there's not a whole lot. It's not even really his name.

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