The Jordan Harbinger Show - 979: Adam Gamal | My Top-Secret Fight Against Terrorism Part Two

Episode Date: April 18, 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 2 of 2! [Part 1 can be found here.] What We Discuss with Adam Gamal: How Adam Gamal went from being an Egyptian refugee who barely spoke English to an operative in the United States' 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/979  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.

This episode is sponsored in part by Conspiruality Podcast. You know how I'm always talking about critical thinking and spotting manipulation? Well, there's a podcast that's all about dismantling new age cults, wellness grifters, and conspiracy mad yogis, basically the wild overlap of spirituality and misinformation. It's called the Conspiruality Podcast. The hosts, a journalist, cult researcher, and a philosophical skeptic, dive deep into how this stuff spreads, from Project 2025 and the Heritage Foundation's dystopian vision of the future to how former leftists get pulled into far-right conspiracies.

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Find Conspirality on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and wherever you get your podcasts. Coming up next on the Jordan Harbinger show. It's easy for ISIS to go and recruit this French citizen who maybe finished high school or something, but didn't go to the best schools. And he sells drugs in the street, and all of a sudden they're giving him a purpose.

If you put people in desperate situations, even in France and England and Belgium, they'll be easily recruited as well. 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

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Just visit jordanharbinger.com slash start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. Now, this is part two with Adam Gamal. If you haven't heard part one, go back and listen to that first. This is a continuation of that episode. We just went super long and we ended up with two parts. All right, now we continue with Adam Gamal. There's a story you tell in the book that's quite funny because I think I can completely relate to it. It was something like one of many of your close calls where I think you'd gotten

shot by somebody who was clearly just trying to take you out. And it was outside some place where you were staying. Your thought was, oh, man, if I die, my wife is going to be so pissed off. And I was like, I can relate. Anytime I go somewhere, I'm like, how dangerous is this? Okay. If I'm thinking about going somewhere to do something that has an element of danger, I'm like, oh, man, but if I get injured, hurt or die, Jen is going to want to kill me again. So if you believe in the laws of attraction, like the secret of the book,

and you believe in any of these things, yeah. I did believe all it at that time because honestly, I think what kept me alive was thinking of my wife, my daughter, I had that one daughter at that time,

now I have to, and my mom. I was like, dude, my wife is not 30 yet. If I die now, she's going to be really pissed and how the fuck her life is going to be.

Yeah, yeah. My dad had passed away seven, eight months before I got shot. So I was like, okay, so my mom lost my dad, and then she's going to lose me. And my daughter, who was four at that time, I'm like, she's never going to get to know me. I really believe, even when I made it to the hospital and they checked my vitals, and I made it to the hospital, I would say, like, maybe two hours after I was shot.

My vitals were perfect. The doctor was like, dude, if you don't believe in God, you should start believing. Yeah. My vitals were perfect. Although I was shot in the stomach with an exit wound in the back, I was bleeding for about two hours from the amount of blood I lost, I got taken to the hospital in one of the guards pickup truck in the front seat, not in the back, so people don't think like I was laying in the back of a pickup truck. I was in the front. I could not open the door of the pickup truck

when we made it to the hospital. Right. And I told the guard, I said, just make sure you unlock the door and he's like, it's unlocked. But I didn't have enough strength. But I would say my thinking of my family, what kept me alive. That story is why, I mean, they just followed you back home, this is you were staying somewhere overseas in a dangerous area, I assume, and they followed you and went after you? How did this happen? What I think is, or what we think is, the couple of days before, we were in a mission, so this is a country neighboring to Somalia, so we can say the name of the country. But a week before that, we weren't about like to be in an ambush in Somalia where we had to really escape, but we had like, you know, radio intercept where they were talking about,

like you've taken us out and they thought we were going to move from the airfield where we landed to go to another location, which we used to do like almost every week. That week, by the grace of God, we had equipment in the airfield at that time. So I told that team I was with, it was two Navy seals, me, another guy from my unit and two CIA guys. So the six of us were going there in and out. I said, let's just service the equipment. We haven't serviced this equipment for about a month before we go to the other location. Or you guys can go to the other location. Do you what you have to do?

Then when you come back, you pick us up and then we'll leave together. So the CIA guy said, no, let's just all stick together. We'll be together. And you just service the equipment, you and your buddy, and then we'll go. And service in the equipment, it took us about half an hour, 45 minutes. So the guys were planning to ambush us thought we're not going to the other location. So rather than waiting, for us, they start moving towards our direction. Well, at that time, too, we had like Somali guys on the ground that we were dealing with.

They were helping us, basically. They start, like, some radio chatters going on. The pilot who flew us there was a local from the region who understood Somali. He's as calm as, I mean, this guy I've never seen him, like, you know, never, ever seen him. Angry or he's very, very calm personality, chilled, really, really chill. Like, you think of the guy, like, high in something, but you really, he's really chill. And I saw him, like, saying, hey, we have to leave now. We have to just leave now.

When he starts saying that, the Somali locals guys that they help in us and they had weapons and everything, they were like, okay, you guys just got to go. So we ended up leaving. The pilot took off with the door of the aircraft, like the steps, still down. Oh, gosh. So as we got there, we started and we had like weapons in our backpack. We took our weapons out, put it together. Then we start seeing those, we call them technicals. Those are the pickup trucks with weapons on them.

Yeah. Like crew served weapons. And we start seeing those coming towards us and the pilot took. off and then we start seeing them like getting in a firefight with our local guys. But the local guys we had, like, they were well armed as well. One of the guys was involved in this episode was Somali American. We got the name and everything, and I think the embassy contacted Treasury. Somehow, the guy bank account got frozen within like a day.

His wife, who knew the sister of one of our translators, and our translator was Somali American with top secret clearance. So, but Somali communities connected Like you and I were talking about the Egyptian community So the wife of that guy reached out to the sister of our translator And she met him in the city where we were at That was, so the ambush was Thursday She met the guy on Tuesday

He meets her for dinner So she tells him, hey, my husband wanted to talk to somebody from the embassy And literally she said, hey, my husband would like to talk to the CIA She gave him a phone number The guy left her came straight to my house Wow So when the guy came to my house and he called me. He's like, I have to come to see you now. So there was like a Tuesday evening.

When he came and he told me the story, I said, hey, where are you followed? Well, of course he said, no, he wasn't followed. He doesn't know. He wasn't trained. He's just a translator, civilian translator. So that was Tuesday. Two days after on Thursday, we had the mission in the morning, came back. In the evening, I went out to get something to eat. I came back and three guys were standing by the door of my house. So I didn't see them, obviously. I came out of the car. The house we were in was like a townhouse villa kind of thing. We had bushes, trees, compound, guard. So the guard

opens the door for me. I drive in. I get out of the car. And when I got out of the car, one guy was standing right behind the car and he pulled the trigger. And he shot me in my stomach. Wow. So the whole thing was a setup. That's crazy. I believe it was a setup. Some people say, well, maybe it was a robbery. We will never know the exact reason behind it.

But all I know is, like, I had an expensive watch at that time. They didn't steal my watch. Like rather than trying to, hey, give me what you have, give me your money, know the guy squeezed the trigger. So that's what I believe. Wow. Wow. That whole thing, that whole thing just, yeah, it sounds like a setup from the jump.

It's crazy that it involved people in the Somali community in the United States meeting and exchanging essentially intelligence at that point, I think, right, to set this up as well. That's kind of unexpected. It's interesting that they froze his bank account right away. I'm just imagining some guy rolling into an ambush in the back of a technical manning a 50 caliber machine gun and he's like, blink, and he looks at his phone and it's a push notification from Chase. That his bank account in New Jersey or whatever, California is frozen.

He's like, damn it. What I really think is, turn the truck around. Most likely, honestly, what I think is I think it was in the process before that. I don't think the freeze bank account that quick. I think it was in the process before that. And most likely it just time in, stars aligned. It hit his account at that time or whatever he lost. And that's what honestly, that's what the wife said too.

The wife said his bank account has been frozen. Was it really frozen? Or was it she's just trying to get to the translator who works with us to see so he can connect her to us? I didn't know, honestly. Interesting. Yeah. And then after I got shot, I got in a fist fight with the guy for about five minutes because you don't know how higher a drone goes. I didn't think I was shot.

Right. I thought he missed. Oh, wow. Yeah, because you weren't disabled. Unbelievable. So tell me a little bit more about your time in Africa. You know, it seems like you were there to stop terrorist attacks against the United States. Well, probably against the rest of the world in general, but maybe especially the United States.

Is that kind of the primary goal down there? So the primary goal was to basically track the flood of terrorism coming from the beginning. So Africa, a lot of places in Africa had, and this is no secret, Somalia specifically, used to have a lot of terrorist training camps. Like the videos that you used to see on TV, like guys jumping on monkey boards. And so Somalia used to have quite a few of those. So we knew that that was like recruiting going on for people to go train. And again, unfortunately, we had some Americans even going there. They would travel to one of the neighboring countries and then make it to Somalia.

Then do training, then come out and go fight somewhere else. So our mission was like basically to sketch. bad guys from the beginning, either before they do the training. And if they come in from the U.S., hopefully we can intercept them. We had a good relationship with the FBI. We had good relationship with host nations that we were working at. So hopefully when the guy lands, if we know the guy's intention is to make it to one of these training camps, usually the FBI will take the guy aside with host nation, question the guy a bit,

call the guy's family, and say, we have your son. Your son is going to be a terrorist. and sometimes we didn't get the guys. I mean, they went and they made it to the training and they came back radicalized or they were in the potential to be radicalized and they got back radicalized from those. So if you see it all the way from Mali, Mauritania,

so there is a movie about Mauritania to them, called the Mauritian, the guy who was in Guantanamo. So he can go all the way to West Africa to Mauritania, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso. I mean, he called it in Algeria, Morocco, in Egypt and Libya and Sudan, So you can go, the flood to us would seem like was coming more from Africa. But Mosabas Zarqawi, the head of the founder of ISIS, basically.

There was a letter was intercepted when we were in Iraq from him. And he is basically telling his followers, like, when you recruit, recruit people from Africa. I don't want Muslims from the Gulf. He's like, Muslims from the Gulf, they basically come in to get a ribbon to get a, I went to Iraq and I fought and I came back. He's like, Muslims from Africa coming to die. And that's why I want it. So as from our analysis, from everything, from my reading, it was Africa where it was like this is where they were exporting, radicalized Muslim terrorists.

I know that al-Qaeda and I think it was also ISIS say like Africa is the best place to recruit because these people are willing to die, which is crazy. I mean, why is why are they willing to die? It's just the version of Islam they have there, just so much more extreme than elsewhere? No, they are desperate. It's a desperate fucking life. when you go to these places, it's very hard to go, although a lot of people will tell you like Bin Laden was a billionaire. Well, bin Laden didn't go kill himself.

Bilada had a lot of people killing themselves because of his beliefs, but he didn't go kill himself. It's very hard to go get like a super rich Saudi who goes to vacations in Europe, can travel whenever he wants to, can go whatever he want to, eat the best food, go to the best hotels, have the best cars, and go tell him him, hey, man, leave all of this fun, and go kill yourself.

But if you go to a guy in, let's say, Niger, and I've been to Niger, not with the military, and the guy who picked me up from the airport, he's like, hey, man, you cannot put your suitcase in the trunk of the car because I bought a goat. In his way, he found like a livestock market or auction or something. He bought a goat, and the goat is with him in the car. And he's like, this is going to feed my family for the next two months.

When you go and you see these guys, they live in extreme desperate, So it's easy to go recruit a guy who doesn't have anything to live for it and tell him, hey, man, if you die, you're going to go to heaven. And if you die, we're going to get your family. And to him, he's like, I'm dead already. Life sucks. Right. So that's my humble opinion. It's just easier to recruit from there because people live in desperation. And there's no future. No future, no dreams and no hope. I tell people like, you know what, the guys in Egypt who didn't have a father like mine to put him back in the right track, who didn't have the chance to leave Egypt. who lived in desperation, didn't have the freedom even to dream to express his opinion. He lives in like shitty fucking life. And some guy go and telling him, man, we're going to take you to Afghanistan. For him, Afghanistan is a vacation. Yeah. And he's like, oh, I'm going to go die there.

It's okay. So I think desperation, not just the form of Islam. It's sad, but it makes, I mean, it definitely makes sense. You said you went to Niger even outside the military. What brings you to a place like Niger if you're not serving? That's a very random country to just go ahead and visit on a vacation. Business. I do business.

I do telecom security consultant for some companies. Okay. One thing in the military gave me, gave me some, gave me good skills and gave me big balls. So I go to somewhere like Nigeria, and I'm like, so that's something that from the unit, I can go anywhere and I feel comfortable, and I feel I can win people.

What do you think is the sketchiest, maybe most dangerous place that you've operated in or visited? Is it Somalia? It depends what you mean by, so there is a place was very, very sketchy when it comes to counter intelligence and surveillance. I cannot name the location, but it's in the Middle East. Literally, I was watched in the beginning almost 24-7. You can see surveillance. You can leave your hotel room or your apartment and you come back and you find your duffel bag dumped on the floor, all your clothes is in the floor.

You'll find somebody messing with your, so you find like you've gone out of the hotel and there is a taxi waiting for you already to take you where you want to go. Yeah. From counterintelligence, it's a country in the Middle East that was very pro-Russian. Besides Dubai, where else did you feel like you were in the most danger, perhaps, as opposed to just being watched? So Somalia was very risky. Iraq in the second half of 2004. So Iraq in the beginning was, and people were very welcoming. As a matter of fact, I went out in hits, looking for Saddam Hussein. I went out and over more than 100 hits. I was with a Delta team when we were going. One of the houses we went to, after we blew up the guy's door,

and we went in at like 2 o'clock in the morning, he scared the fuck out of all of them. This was 2003. I swear. After we finished, the old man of the house, he was insistent on us sitting having dinner and team. And the guy was like... After you blew his door off with explosives. And the guy was like, you guys here to free us from the tyrant. We appreciate what he had.

I mean, the guy was like... And I used to see that. I used to go out in the streets by Chowermah, go out to carpet shops because we had guys wanted to buy carpet all the way until, I wanted to say March or April of 2004. And I tell people, March or April 2004, it seems,

after being there for 12 months, the U.S. military, not me, I was in and out. After being there for 12 months, the honeymoon was over. Iraqis hated us. Yeah. They realized that we just created chaos. And then the Abu Ghraib thing happened,

and that made it even worse. Yeah. And it doesn't matter what you tell people. You're like, hey, 12 soldiers out of 120,000 soldiers were bad. And everybody saw this the U.S. military is bad. And I told the guy, I was like, dude, this is the best recruiting video for Bin Laden. We gave him the best. Yeah, man.

He could ever have. Then after that, Iraq was like, really, really. And I went out in the streets a few times by myself after that. I'll drive it like a local court. And I used to see it. And if I wasn't, I spoke the language. I blended in. I would talk to them.

They would know I was Egyptian at that time. There was an Egyptian phone company building the cell towers there. The guys will talk to me. That gave me some opportunities to do some collection because I would go to an internet cafe, like Sony Extreme's Innernac Cafe. And I sat down and the guy was like, what do you do? And I chat with the guy. And the guy's like, hey, the phone service here is really, really bad.

And I'd be like, yeah, actually, that's why I have this equipment. And this equipment, it just measures the cell tower signal. so I can figure out where we need to build new towers. And I would take it out and put it actually right next to the guy that we're trying to, again, I'm not going to say what the equipment exactly does, but the equipment was doing. Yeah, I think we can guess. Yeah. Right?

You can. But again, because I understood the language and the culture, I was able to sit with Abu bad guy, really, really bad guy. I'm sitting having a conversation with him, and he brought me tea while I'm doing my mission. Yeah. Interesting. It's funny because somewhere there's a bunch of bad guys. being like, that guy betrayed our trust. Meanwhile, it's like, but you told me when you're with

the Muslim Brotherhood that it's okay to lie if you're at war. So it sucks what it happens to you. Exactly. Yeah. So screw these guys. Two can play by those rules, that's for sure. Yeah. You mentioned Iraq getting totally messed up because, and this is just my like ignorant-ass opinion, so feel free to correct me. But it seems like one of the biggest mistakes we made was getting rid of all the Ba'ath party. So Saddam Hussein's political party structure alongside Saddam Hussein. because everything falls apart after that, right? Like, in the book, you kind of mentioned, the guy who makes passports at the passport office

just, like, takes the machine. And the guy who decides where, who owns what house at that office, he's just like, I'll take 50 bucks and I'll just make your neighbor's house your house, your house now on a document. And the guy will take the printer for the driver's license and put it in his backyard. And now if you want a driver's license,

you got to go to some dude and just give him money and he doesn't care if you can actually drive. And we did a lot of stuff like that. every civil servant was just unemployed or unemployable. Every qualified teacher or whatever who was Ba'ath Party just wasn't allowed to work anymore. You just can't run a nation like that. Our military is really good at destroying nations, but building them up, kind of clueless from what it sounds like. Jordan, you actually, you spot on.

You spot on 100%. And to show people like how much we did not understand. So basically, everybody was in the government was like in the bath party. Yeah. By choice, by force, by way. whatever. If we end up the two-party system in the U.S. and we have only one party, like, let's say the Republicans or the Democrats, then everybody would be just one party. That was the situation in Iraq. And then even if he did not believe in what the bath party was, he didn't have a choice.

So we went and we said, okay, you know what? All the police guys go home. Well, if he had driving downtown San Diego or Jersey City or D.C., the traffic lights, they work automatically. It goes green, amber, red, amber, green, red. It just keeps it automatic. It's time. They have sensors in the ground. So you don't need a traffic man or a police officer. So well, in Iraq, the people were controlling the traffic where policemen will told them go home. You can't go to work. Now who controls the traffic? Chaos. So no traffic. Then you find neighbors. It explains Egyptian driving. Exactly.

Although we're talking about Iraq, but whatever. It explains a lot of driving in a lot of parts of the Middle East. That's an lot of driving. But yeah, yeah, but honestly, yeah, Egyptian driving too because in Egypt, they have a police guy standing there and controlling the traffic. So now it created this chaos. And like he was saying, the guy who makes passports, takes the passport machine and go home.

Well, Iraq, before that, had a lot of expats, Arab expats from Libya, from Egypt, from Sudan, from Morocco, where they've been living and working in Iraq for, let's say, 10 years. So they picked the dialect. They know how to speak Iraqi. Well, for $100, they were able to go get an Iraqi passport and they became Iraqi citizens. Wow. Maybe if you pay another 50 bucks, you get a birth certificate and you pay another $20 you get a house and you pay another $15 you get a Java's license. So all of those things that we did not take into consideration. And I think that Rumsfeld, when he was pushing for the debathification, was the worst idea ever. And we paid for it. We all paid for it.

I know I'm skipping around a lot, but one thing I thought was quite interesting was that you make the case for diversity both in your unit, in an intelligence units, and in the military. And the idea of diversity in America for many reasons right now is sort of controversial. But this is not like wokeism or whatever, right? This is, you make the case for a real function of diversity, not just like affirmative action, something, something. Like, you've got concrete points. And I would like, you've got concrete points. And I would like, love for you to make that case here because I think it's important you come from a place of credibility when it comes to this of course so I'm really really really really glad to ask that question because first time I've read a review and somebody and I think it was an Amazon or something and somebody just said walk and I googled the word I was like what the fuck is walk woke it's not woken up and then I start reading like I have not been honestly the book went to review like I told you earlier in August of 2021. I think diversity back then was okay.

When I was in the military, our chaplain used to say our diversity is our strength. So let me just highlight this and explain it. The diversity I'm talking about, I'm not talking about I'm an Egyptian guy, let me be part of the best unit in the military because you need to meet the quota. No.

I'm talking about when we have different ideas, different strength, different way of thinking, and you bring all of these things together, given that they all qualified to sit on the table, so you have to make it to the table. And how do you make it to the table? You go through selection process, you join the military, you do an IQ test, you do strength test, let's see how much weight you can lift. All of those, right, whatever criteria they have set in place, you pass it. Well, if we have everybody fighting, look at the same, think the same, we're missing out. So the diversity I'm talking about here is not, and again,

I'm a minority guy. And when I got promoted to E9, which is the highest enlisted rank, and I got promoted in 16 years, which is very fat. Anybody in the military, they'll tell you that's extremely fast. One of the guys was talking with me, he's like, you know why you got promoted? Because of affirmative action. And I was like, okay, at that time, I had one master's degree. I was working in my second master's degree. I had the awards. I had the education. I was deploying more than anybody else. I had three bronze stores. So there was no affirmative action there. I don't need somebody to give me a hand across the street. I can cross the street on my own. Yeah. I don't need a hand to get promoted. I can get promoted in my own. What I need is the same opportunity everybody

else is given. Give me the same opportunity everybody else is given and I'll make it happen. So the diversity I'm talking about is not the bad word diversity. Let's just make. sure if I have three people to choose from and I have a guy who's a unicorn and I'm missing unicorns and the unicorn doesn't know how to speak the language or anything. Let's just bring the unicorn. No, that's not a diversity I'm talking about. The diversity I'm talking about is the diversity that we were talking about before. Whenever the word became a bad word, I don't think it was ever a bad word before. It was more of the U.S. Army was the first a U.S. government organization that ended the segregation. And we have the Indian Americans, Native Americans. We have

the African Americans, we have units. We always looked at diversity as strength. And that's the diversity I'm talking about in the book. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Adam Gamal. We'll be right back. Hey, I know I tell you about six-minute networking all the time. I'm going to tell you one more time. It is free over at six-minute networking.com.

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Yeah, it seems obvious in an intelligence context that you want somebody who understands what's going on, even if that person is the same, or I should say, especially if that same person comes from the same culture as the people you currently are working against, right? Correct. I definitely want to be next to the person

that went to college with Muslim Brotherhood, has personal experience with Muslim Brotherhood, speaks the same dialect as Muslim Brotherhood. The guy who was college roommates with somebody who went and became a terrorist, like that's the guy you want right next to you when you're dealing with these people. So it seems really obvious from that perspective. And that's what I used to tell people. Like, okay, in a lot of my deployments, I was able to go and talk, like again,

and we'll talk about Iraq because it's open. And Iraq, when I'm sitting down with some of the extremist guy in his internet cafe that he owns, I can carry a conversation with him to get the information I need from him, to make him feel comfortable, to let me take my equipment, put it on his table right next to him as he's drinking his tea. Take anybody else who doesn't have the same characteristics and take him there that they would have walking out of the base he would have been shot. I had to get two, three levels of approvals to be able to leave the base and they had to see me like, you know, higher command and this was like, this mission was

involved not just military, it was military and to other agencies and all of them have to say with me, okay, do you know what you're going to do? Do you know the risk you take in? And when they saw me, they felt comfortable. This guy can go and do it because I can carry a conversation. I can. So that's the diversity we're talking about. But you're absolutely right. If I'm going to go.

Yeah. And I'll tell you something. I mean, when I was my last job, I used to fly with my commander a lot. I'm going to certain airports in the U.S. I was like, man, I'm glad he's a white guy. Because guess what? When I'm going through TSA, I'm going with this, the commander. We're both in uniform.

So nobody's looking at me. So it's using the strength, the strength that you have to accomplish a mission. not to give a free lunch. There are no free lunches. Well, you did mention, I think this is, I don't know if this is in the book or just something we talked about on the phone now that I think about it,

but you mentioned coming back to the United States and getting detained by customs, and it's like, what were you doing overseas? And you're like, well, I can't tell you that I was overseas on a mission to make America safer by assassinating terrorists. So I guess I'm just going to say vacation and they're like, yeah,

get into secondary screening, Egyptian guy with an accent. We don't trust you. Yeah, so I think we talked about this on the phone. So yeah, I used to get, I got pulled in the second. there a few times coming back from missions. And some of those times, even I have an official passport.

Like I've read official passport. It shows that you weren't in a U.S. government official job. Wow. And when I came back, the immigration would ask me more questions and my passport would have said I was born in the U.S. And she's like, you know, how come you're born in the U.S.? And you have an accent? And I'm like, I was born, but I'm not raised.

And we would go. And again, I had to get out of jail free card. I can make a phone call. But that's the last thing that you wanted as a guy who's a not. operations. Right. Yeah. So you would deal with these things and I'm like, okay, but when I'm going overseas, guess what? I joke with the immigration guy. I say a couple of Arab jokes and the guy is like, do you want to come over my house to have tea? I was in another country where in Africa, when I had actually the security police officer in the airport driving me to my hotel after joking

with him for a bit. Yeah. And I said that and I mentioned a couple of other instances in the book where I I said, I got guys who living across the streets from a bad guy to invite me inside their house, to sit in their house, drink tea with them and their family for hours. If I didn't look like them, I would have not been able to do that. That's the strength of the diversity I mentioned in the book. 100% it makes sense. I mean, I guess I shouldn't be, I'm not trying to throw shade on customs and immigration for doing their job. I mean, their job is to make America safer. And if they saw you suspicious, and they're not like totally wrong about being a little suspicious.

You're an American with this, but you have an accent. Like, this doesn't add up. Let me just make a phone call. It's fine. But there's another anecdote, and again, I can't remember if this is the phone of the book. But you're in the Chow Hall after a mission, and someone's like, eh, we should just nuke all them Muslims. And it's like, I'm right behind you, first of all.

And I was the one out there while you're on the ship looking at a computer screen. I'm the one who was out there driving around to find this guy that we just took out. It's got to be very frustrating to hear stuff like that. You know, it was more fulfilling than frustrating. Really? And frustrating as well, but it was a lot more fulfilling. And I'll tell you why. So we just finished the mission, and that's the mission in the first chapter.

Just finished the mission. We go to a military base in the area. We get a base there for a few days until just everything calmed down before we'll go back to where we are based, because we were based out of an embassy in the region. Again, a higher command was like, hey, we don't want, you know, like you were in somewhere, and then all of a sudden he coming back to the country. so we want you to stay four or five days till things calm down a bit.

So me and these two other guys, they were with me in the mission. The actual, actual mission, it was just one guy with me, but there was another guy, Marine, actually. It was in the mission with us, but he was doing something slightly different. So we sit in the chow hall, having breakfast,

and it's all over the news that this guy got taken out, and initially they were like thinking, did the French kill of the guy, did the Americans kill the guy, and then we had actually the U.S. spokesperson, went out and said it was, a targeted attack by U.S. military.

Obviously didn't say who were where, who did it or how they did it or anything. But as I'm sitting down and there's a young soldier sitting, as he's having breakfast watching CNN, and he's like, man, I wish we could fucking kill all of these fucking Muslim guys. This line is like, the guy's like having a blast that we succeeded in a mission. And I wanted to tell him, by the way, like, you can't kill all Muslim guys because if he killed all of them, I wouldn't be the guy who's doing this mission. Right.

But at the same time, the fulfilling part was how we made everybody proud of our accomplishment, even though they didn't know how to strike. I suppose that's a good way to look at it, you know, because it would be really easy to just lose a little bit of morale. Yeah. And like, okay, I work with this guy and he still doesn't get it. But it speaks to your point, another point you make in the book, of the danger of dehumanizing the enemy, especially when it comes to peacekeeping missions later on.

I think you make the comparison in the book with World War II. Rebuilding Germany. It was a bunch of French, Brits, United States, and others, of course, rebuilding a state, a country, full of people that just looked pretty much the same, right? German, white people, right? So even though we, I'm sure, you know, you call them Krauts or whatever, but it was like, the people still look like us, right? It's hard. You can't just sort of pick them out on site. But now it's a little bit different, right? I mean, as to this guy's brainwashing in the Chow Hall, it's really easy to look at, people and be like, oh, let's just kill all the Arabs, although they thought you were Mexican, which sort of goes against their point, but we're not talking about the smartest people here. Also, brainwashing's a hell of a drug, right? When you've dehumanized the enemy, it's hard to switch that back off during your peacekeeping mission later on when you're rebuilding the country and be like, oh, I know we just got done calling these people rats for the last 10 years, but now

there are partners and we need to respect them and they're on par with us. It's like, how do you do that? And the answer is, I think you can't. You can't unless you do it from the beginning. So you cannot dehumanize the enemy, but to go back to your example about World War II, Japanese Americans were treated worse than German POWs. Yeah. This was, like I said, I mean, these are American who came from Japanese descent. They were treated a lot worse. And they got taken and put in camps and all these things.

And don't get me wrong, when after 9-11 happened, Arab Americans were afraid of the same thing. They were like, are they going to do the same thing to us? But the brainwash and thing, part of it, when I was in Iraq, so a lot of the units I was part of, we don't wear unit patch. So everybody was in the military. They know every unit has a patch. We don't. We actually don't wear any name tags, no rank, no patch, nothing.

But we had guys who had patches of 9-11. This is an Iraq. So I would chat with them and I'm like, you know, why do you have the World Trade Center and he's like, that's why we're here? Because the guys who did 9-11 were from here. And I was like, there was not one Iraqi guy involved in 9-11. Right. And I said this to a guy, actually, I said there's more than one occasion. I said, if we were going to attack a country because the guys who did 9-11 were from there,

would have been attacking Saudi Arabia. Right. Because 14 or 15 of the 19 were from Saudi Arabia, but we didn't touch Saudi Arabia. So I'm like, so why are we, or we would have been attacking Yemen because a lot of them did training in Yemen and bin Laden was originally from Yemen. So the brainwash and dehumanizing the enemy makes us go extreme. There is a really good book called On Killing. I did a study on World War I.

A lot of U.S. soldiers, they were within shooting range from the enemy. They had the weapon. They couldn't squeeze the trigger and kill somebody because they looked like them. So it's easier to fight somebody who doesn't look like you if we tell you the person who doesn't look like Hugh is less human than you. And ISIS is doing that. ISIS, they go and they say, well, this guy is not your religion, so he's not like you. So it's easier to kill him. So by dehumanizing the enemy, we go extreme.

Again, the best battles are won without a fight. And this is coming from a lot of soldiers who've been through combat. They'll tell you, if we can win a battle without fighting, that's the best thing. That's the best situation. This is from the art of war. This is we have to fight that way. We have to think that way.

And I'm not saying sometimes you have to go and you have to take the fight to the enemy and you have to kick their ass. But you get to define the enemy. Before we go and we say, you know, every brown guy is a bad guy. And then we're going to go after then and say, hey, by the way, no, they're not bad guys. To your point, also just the idea of dehumanizing the enemy, you mentioned in the book beating people, torturing them during interrogations, it just, it doesn't work. And what does work is building rapport and connecting with people. I mean, you can really only

sort of terrorize people to just tell you what you want to hear, not to get accurate information. and that seems to be a realization that we still aren't always coming to here, but every negotiator that I've had on this show has always come to that same conclusion. Like, you really can only scare people to a certain extent. And as you mentioned as well in the book, you were surprised that some of the guys who wouldn't give you any information, you'd monitor a call with their family. They're basically saying goodbye to their family, and the wife's like, oh, sorry you're going to die, but just try and kill as many Americans as you can on your way out.

It's just like the level of fanaticism is truly next level. Yeah, so it's very amazing. Their mindset is like whether they beat us in the war, they win or they die, they win. So if you go in to fight against somebody, his ideology telling him, when he's dead, he's a winner, it's not that easy to beat that out of him. So if you're going to interrogate him and beat that out of him, he wanted to die, right? So what you're going to do is you try to use reason with that guy and use the same reason he's coming from. So you get to speak his language.

If he tells you a verse from the Quran, then you tell him another verse from the Quran. If he tells you a story about the Prophet's time, then you tell him something. So otherwise, you're talking to a guy who's not on the same page as you. It seems like we don't understand a lot of our enemies. You mentioned also in the book how the Russians tend to think much more long term as opposed to the Americans. Can you speak to that a little bit? Yeah. So we had, I think it was a situation was like,

but I don't remember exactly about maybe like seven, eight years ago where they start catching like Russian espionage cells in New York and California around the US. And then when they did the investigation, they looked at these guys. These guys were around for 10 years, 20 years, 25 years. They came to the US in a younger age and stayed there forever. I've seen it in some of my deployments where Russians were speaking Arabic fluently, that literally we did not know, we thought they were native Arab speakers, but they were Russians. So where for us, when we go in somewhere, whether it's CIA or military, you send in a guy to

be working in a country for two years, three years, maybe four years max, that's CIA. For us as military, we're going for maximum a year. If you are working at an embassy, maybe you do a year, two years. But our system is not built for guys staying long. That's one thing. Then the other thing is we don't have the patience for that. We want to come back home. Can you blame them? Like, a Russian guy has to go live in New York. All expenses paid. It's like, okay, that's pretty awesome. People are probably fighting for that job. But if you're like, hey, man, you got to go live in Russia. And maybe you don't get to live in New York. Maybe you get to live in, I don't know, like a suburb of Chicago, that's fine. But if you have to live in a suburb, quote unquote,

of Moscow for a long time, I mean, that could be great on you after a decade or so, right? Your life is on pause. Absolutely. Imagine that if you have to go live in. in Mauritania or in Mali or in Niger or in Afghanistan. So yeah, I see that. But then who would live in those places? Let me give you a good idea. If you actually have immigrants came from those countries, some of those guys were willing.

Like, we had immigrants came from Pakistan. They came in a young age. They joined the military. They went to college. They joined the military. And some of them, if you tell them, hey, we want to send you back to Pakistan and we're going to set up a business or whatever.

I didn't want to, like, reveal sources and methods. But those guys are willing to go. But when you have a guy who was born in North Carolina and you tell him, hey, I need you to go live in Timbuktu. And he'll be like, where's Timbuktu? So strategically, if you want to fight that war, you got to fight it differently. You cannot have the traditional military or CIA assignments of like two, three years in one country. For CIA, you're going to hand your assets to another CIA officer. And then this is something.

and, I mean, it's written by CIA retired officers in books, where like, hey, I work this target and I worked this guy and I recruited the source and after my two, three years, I handed my source to another case officer. We're not there for the long term. Right. That makes a lot of sense. It is interesting. The Russians, I think they're called illegals, right? Because legal spies, if you will, have diplomatic cover. Correct. Oh, I work with the transportation and the liaison for commerce and something like that. Like, they work in the... oil and gas industry. But if you're just here pretending to work at an insurance company, we had a guy on the show, Jack Barski, who was in illegal in the United States for a long time. He just basically

worked at an insurance company, and they were going to activate him at some point, and they never really did, and then they told him to come home. And he was like, no thanks. You know, he stayed here, because going back to Russia, he was from originally East Germany. So going back behind the Iron curtain, no thanks. And he stayed here. He now lives near Atlanta, which is, to my earlier point, He was like, this place is great. I love it here. There's all kinds of opportunity. You want me to go back there and be like the richest person in a non-free country

that's basically the equivalent of going back to black and white TV? No, thank you. You've been to over 60 countries, yeah? That's a hell of a lot of places. How many languages do you speak? I speak four languages. Four, okay. Can you tell us which ones?

Or you're not supposed to? No, you're not supposed to. Okay, got it. I want to ask which of the 60 countries? Obviously Arabic is one of the languages. Arabic and English. All right. So great. I can't ask about the other two. All right, fair enough. 50%. That's not bad. Yeah. I asked you one of the scariest place was, and I think you hinted that it was adjacent to Somalia or possibly Somalia. On the other hand, though, what's a surprisingly awesome place that you just didn't expect to be so welcoming and beautiful and maybe even fun or interesting? So it was during a deployment coming back from a deployment, and it was a deployment to the Middle East, and it was me, another.

unit guy, and we were traveling back, and we had to do transit in Dubai for the first time. And we landed in Dubai, and we spent like a night, and we ended up going, walking around the beach. It was just amazing, and a lot of people say, well, it's the Middle East. Well, if you've never been to Dubai and somebody threw you out of an aircraft with a parachute and you land, you wouldn't know where yet. because we walked around the beach. We saw people on the beach in bikini and on Burkini. Burkini is the bark that totally covered head-to-to-to-law ladies.

Both of them sitting next to each other. Neither one of them is bothered by the other. Both of them enjoying the beautiful. We came during the winter, so the weather was beautiful. Both of them enjoying, the winter in Dubai is like in the 70s. Weather is beautiful. Big buildings are very safe. The airport smelled really good.

and every public bathroom we went to was like smelled really good. And I was like, wow, there is something. And then you go to the hotel and people in the hotel taking your, and this is like a normal hotel. We did not stay in a fancy hotel. Normal hotels, people taking your luggage to your room and they welcoming you with a drink. And like, it was just very impressive.

And then we had the opportunity to visit like a mosque. And my buddy who was with me, he's a tall, white, blonde Jewish-American. And he was like, how is that going to? I was like, dude, it seems like very, very open and very welcoming. And there is a, that was like a mosque, big mosque that it's in Abu Dhabi, so we drove like about 45 minutes. We walked there and we found like a group of monks walking there, getting a tour. So we had monks, Muslims, Christians, Jewish in the same place. And they all felt very comfortable. And again, this is, it wasn't surprised. I mean, I've heard about it, it was my first time coming. It was extremely, extremely impressive. Another place I have to get. give credit to you. Like, I traveled to Kenya one time, and a lot of people think Africa is really, really bad, but Kenya was gorgeous, like the nature and the green everywhere. And so a lot of places are really nice, not as people just imagine. Yeah, I mean, Kenya is definitely, you only hear good things, mostly only hear good things about Kenya. Dubai, like Las Vegas of the Middle East, however, interesting underbelly of organized crime, trafficking, and it's essentially a police

state. So you do have quite a big trade-off, I think, for some of the safety that's enjoyed there. But maybe that's what's required to, maybe you need a police state in order to keep a place like that from erupting into something that's unstable. I agree with you. And I did read about it and study about it. But you have a country has over 170, 180 different nationalities. I think you have to be a police state. So they have cameras everywhere. I think they compete in with London, who has more cameras in the street. And they have facial recognition. of everything. But like I said, for us, traveling through was just extremely impressive, especially where we were coming from. I mean, we came from a very nasty place. It was dust everywhere,

no clean water. Women were covered head to toe, like literally had to toe. You didn't see any faces. You might see some eyes. And it was a police state as well. So you have a police state with some freedom and you have a police state with no freedom. This is the Jordan Harbin. 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. What do they do?

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Now, for the rest of my conversation with Adam Gamal. So I'm curious your take on the Israel-Palestine conflict. I mean, we don't have to do a whole big spiel about this, but a lot of people will say, hey, look, Israel is just creating more terrorists by handling things the way they're doing it. I wonder if you agree with that, your take on that, and your take on Hamas as a terrorist organization. But I'll ask one question at a time. Is Israel just creating more terrorists by handling things this way? So I have a very good example for this. When people ask me, I tell them that Khalid-Chief Muhammad, the Pakistani-Kuete-Kweet-Kewit, lived in Kuwait.

He was the mastermind, KSM. He was the mastermind of the World Trade Center, the 9-11. His nephew, Ramsey Yusuf, was the guy who, in 1993, drove a truck under the World Trade Center. And his plan was to have the truck in between the two towers and blow it up, make the two towers collapse against each other. So when KSM was interrogated, and even Ramsey Yusuf, when he was interrogated, and during interrogations, during our question and we're like, why did you do that? and he's like because of Palestine. And every interrogation, they interrogated the guy even when he's in Guantanamo. He said that.

When you read about him or you, this is nothing classified, he joined the Muslim Brotherhood when he was 16 years old, that we were talking about early on why the Muslim Brotherhood was the foundation for a lot of these extreme organizations. Did that, assisted his nephew in the First World Trade Center bombing in 1993. So he kept doing all of these things. he, his nephew, he has another nephew, was involved in 9-11. So it's like a family business.

And all of this was because he heard some of the sermons by an Afghan, whatever this, like we talked about, like, you know, street imams, a guy who didn't really study. But he was talking about, like, you know, fighting the Soviet Union, fighting the Israelis, fighting whoever supports the Israelis fighting the Americans. So with everything that was going on to take you to that is, like, the more aggression we try to do, the more terrorists we create, the more sympathizer. So you have a guy who came all the way from Pakistan, which is not even in the Middle East, so in the Far East.

It's like it's not even near Palestine or Israel or Jerusalem or not near any of these things. So those acts of aggression and like what I was saying earlier, the more you try to push people, whether in interrogation, whether in beating them up, guess what, you're just going to keep creating more enemies. You can call him terrorists. You can call him something else.

But like I said, I was saying even when we're in Iraq, we're creating more enemies and terrorists than we can handle. So the listener can definitely try to understand from that how somebody came, grew up in Pakistan, lived in Kuwait, by the way, most of his life. So he lived a luxurious life. KSM actually came studying in the U.S. He went to some university in North Carolina. So he came from a rich family. And why did he do that? Because he felt that was like unjust going on. With everything going on now, I do believe Israeli is created.

and more terrorists and more enemies than anybody wanted. I wonder, though, if Israel were to just, we could turn it off like a light switch and it wasn't there tomorrow. You know, there's a lot of logistics that would be involved in something like that, but let's assume it didn't exist. Would these guys just find another reason to wage jihad against the West? Most likely, I mean, if people want it to hate, they're going to hate. So when anybody was asking me before, like,

what do I think a reasonable or a good solution for the whole thing? It's like you have to have two states. I mean, you have two groups of people. They haven't a hard time living with each other, but each one of them claim in the land. And some of them saying, we own this land from 2,000 years ago, somebody said, no, we owned it 5,000 years, and nobody knows. So having two states.

But yes, if you have a switch and you flip it and you go and say, you know what, Israel doesn't exist, this radical groups are they going to end. I'll give you a good example. When the Soviet Union was fighting in Afghanistan, then. So all the Mujahideen and the Afghans and the Afghan fighters, they fought until the Soviets actually left. What happened after that? They fought against each other. Exactly. Yeah, it's kind of like these groups exist to fight things. They're just going to end up. I mean,

even Hamas and PLO were fighting each other before. That's part of the reason that we're in this mess. They're not designed to necessarily govern. They're just designed to take over and destroy things. I mean, they're militaries, essentially. They're still fighting against each other. And it was in a movie before. It was just one of these saying in a movie, like, my business is war and business is good. So it's a business to some people.

Some people, that's how they, if you take ISIS off the face of the earth tomorrow, the leaders of ISIS, what are they going to do? They're like, okay, we have to find a reason. So this is, again, people are using religion. They have agendas to reach certain goals. They'll do whatever it takes to reach those. you have people take Israel out, there would be something else. And by the way, take Hamas out too, that would be something else.

So if we say, you know what, Hamas ends tomorrow, there is no more Hamas. Well, Hamas didn't exist until the late 80s or the 90s. 83. 83. Yes, 83. So before that, there was no Hamas. But that was the PLO. And the PLO were declared the terrorist organization back before then.

It was Fatah too. I mean, so there is always now you have Islamahad. You have Quds Forces, Hezbollah was not there, not Hezbollah. I mean, there is always those things. So unless we educate people the right way and to make sure that people are not easily influenced and going in the wrong direction, we're going to keep having those problems. That's an interesting segue to what I was going to ask you about the solution for terrorism in your opinion.

It sounds like you think the solution for terrorism is essentially education. And I know you do fund some education for girls in Egypt as well. well. Correct. I believe myself even if my dad did not push me towards like getting the right education, then maybe I would have went in the wrong direction. So education going to help people prosper. They're going to help people actually at least critically analyze the information they are receiving. So when somebody's bullshitting them about, hey, if you go to the bathroom with your right foot, not your left foot, you go into hell. If you have an educated person going to look at him and say, you know what, man, this doesn't make any fucking sense. And then I believe to educate

women is crucial because they are raised in us. A lot of people spend more time with their moms than with their dad because they nurture us and they do all of these things. So if we have a population who educated women in the Middle Eastern and any of these countries, I think these countries will prosper. And it would be harder to convince these guys to become terrorists. Yeah, I mean, we spend a lot of money on weapons in these countries. Egypt, for example, your homeland, right? If we put a tiny fraction of that towards education, I feel like it would do a whole lot more. I agree with you 100%. However, I don't think any dictatorship in any of those countries would accept it.

Because, again, if we educate the people there after like, you know, 20, 30 years, the people are going to be like, hey, man, we have an idiot rule on us. So I know in Egypt, the U.S. government was trying to fund education programs, and I think the Egyptian government was pushing back on that. But in Charles Wilson's war movie, it was very clear that we spent a lot of money on Afghanistan and arming them. And as soon as the war ended, we packed our shit and we left. And we didn't spend the dollar in education.

Fast forward to 9-11, it bit us in the ass. So if we think we save them money by not giving them money for education, we're not in the long term. We are not saving money. We're going to end up spending more. It seems like if people aren't being educated, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, whatever, some jihadist group, they just fill in the gap because we see this hopelessness, right, this ignorance. How are we going to rebuild this whole nation? Which I understand, right?

You know, we can't really do that in the first place, rebuild the whole nation. Bad actors, they see that as an opportunity to recruit. I think we talked about it earlier in the show. One of the reasons that the Blind Sheck, for example, wanted to recruit in Africa was because they were so desperate that they were willing to die because their current life was so bad. There was absolutely no upward mobility. That's the best place to go get your ride or die, suicide bomber type soldiers. You know what? You're absolutely right. Let me even highlight this in Europe. So even in Europe, where ISIS was recruiting like in Belgium and in France,

they were recruiting from the underprivileged immigrant population. They didn't really assimilate well because I give huge credit to the U.S. We have good system to help people assimilate with the U.S. system. We have more work to do obviously. We're still not doing enough to assimilate the immigrant population. But in Europe,

even in France, and a lot of people wouldn't do it. So France brought a lot of Africans after the independent of certain countries in Africa. The French brought a lot of Africans like from North Africa, from Algeria. And when you go to Paris, you'll see those populations living in not the best

conditions. And as a matter of fact, the even built bridges between where these people live and the city so they cannot walk to the city. They have to like really walk on a bridge and it's harder for them to get into the center of the city. So there is a void there. There is like desperation. There is a void. Not the best education or some education, but they didn't have the right opportunities. And then it's easy for ISIS to go and recruit this French citizen who was born in France, who maybe finished high school or something. But they didn't have the right go to the best schools, and he sells drugs in the street, and all of a sudden they're giving him a purpose. So purpose is very important, right? So they're giving him a purpose, and they're like,

hey, why didn't you come on fight with us? So this guy, taxes shit, and he goes from France to Turkey, Turkey to Syria, and he goes to that Islamic state of whatever at that time they wanted to be. They recruited from Belgium, they recruit from Africa. But again, you bring the Europeans, and some crazy Americans ended up there as well. So it's easier to recruit. It doesn't have to be only in Africa. If you put people in desperate situations, even in France and England and Belgium, they'll be easily recruited as well.

Speaking of selling drugs in the street, what's this about your neighbor thinking you're a drug dealer? Tell us, maybe we keep it light. Maybe we end in a light note. That's the rumor around town is that your neighbors think you're a drug dealer. Hey, so I'll give you actually two good examples for that. So before I get to my neighbor,

I'll tell you when I first, I guess the station in Texas and further Texas. So I have this small, tiny hookah pipe. It's tiny. It's tiny. Like you can hold it with like two fingers. Me being ignorant. So I got one of this and I put it in my room in the barracks in the military. And I have a big picture of when I was in a basic training, I went and I got a book and it was Malcolm X's life and it has a Malcolm X's poster with it. So I took that and I put it in my room. So I have a Malcolm X's poster in my room. And I have a hookah pipe in my room. Right. So basically, you got your Malcolm X poster and your bong next to each other.

Exactly. So me not knowing anything. And then I think it was like, you know, after four or five weeks, me being there, station in Fort Hood, Texas, they do this what's called health and welfare inspection. I didn't know that to like, you know, a few months after I've learned and I got smarter in the military system and what they do. So they came to my room and searched. Well, they searched, or they cannot search only my room. So they searched all the rooms. and they were like, oh, we know you don't have anything here,

but literally they were searching for drugs. And then, fast forward, like 15, 16 years after, I'm a guy in the Joint Special Operation Command, I don't wear military uniform because the unit I was in. We didn't wear uniforms. You have facial hair. You have weird hair. You travel.

I'm driving a nice BMW. I live in a nice house. And I had a hookah. But this time, I was actually putting it in the back of my deck. And I got it from one of the deployments to the Middle East. and I'm sitting in the back of my deck and I'm smoking this hook and it's dry fruit tobacco. Wendy, every five years, the government does background check

to update your records, to update everything for you to maintain your clearance. So my next door neighbor, a guy was a retired Air Force Major who never said anything to me other than like, you know, I would wave at him. He was very introvert. He would wave from far away. But when they went to ask him about me and he's like, why are you guys asking? And they were like, how were you in his clearance? And the guy himself had a clearance.

who was working for the government. And he was like, that guy seems like a junkie because I see him a lot in his back, in his back, back smoking his hookah. At the end of your update of your security clearance, they do what's called subject interview. So they come and they talk to me. And they were like, hey, they chat and they chat. And they're like, hey, by the way, your neighbor fought this.

So you must be doing a really good job that your neighbor even didn't know you were in the military. Yeah. I was the guy who's deploying. And I disappeared. Like every two, three months, I would disappear for four or five months. So the guy is like, this guy must be like a mule. He disappears and he comes back and he lives in a nice house and he's driving a nice car and his wife driving a nice car. So he thought that was a junkie.

And I looked Hispanic, a brown guy, lives in a nice neighborhood. So you must be. That's so funny. You can imagine the FBI knocks on the door and like, we want to talk to you about your neighbor. And he's like, finally. I knew it. I knew it. And then they're like, yeah, we're renewing his top secret security clearance because he's.

in a super high-level organization that we can't discuss. And he's like, wait, are we talking about the same guy? Not the junkie with the bong that drives a BMW and is only here half the year. Exactly. Yeah, that guy. And sometimes I would leave in the morning wearing shorts and flip-flops and that guy is like, this guy cannot be working in any decent job

that he goes to work just like this. Yeah, where do you go on the swimming pool at the YMCA? Yeah, no thanks. Yeah. Man, this is such an interesting conversation, man. I know we went super, super long. I really appreciate that. and thank you for your service.

And I just, I think it's a really cool angle. You know, I can tell how passionate you are about preserving, well, first of all, preserving your American way of life, which is also your Muslim way of life, assimilating into the United States, but also maintaining like your own unique culture, doing it in the exact sort of right way.

And I just think it's really incredible. Yeah, thank you once again for coming on the show. Jordan, thank you so much for inviting me to your show. I've heard tons of great things about you, so it's really an honor to be with you in the show. I say this all the time for anybody who tells me thank you for your service. I tell them, thank you for allowing me to serve. America is a great country that does open the door for immigrants who don't speak English, to learn some English and be able to join the military and make it to the highest positions in the military,

and you didn't see that in any other country. So thank you. I do really appreciate it, and hopefully you enjoyed the conversation as much as I did. I've got some thoughts on this one, as usual, but before I get into that, here's a preview with the 26th National Security Advisor, General H.R. McMaster, on the greatest threats to the United States. Here's a preview. War is this continuous interaction of opposites, right? You and maybe multiple enemies and adversaries inside of a complex environment. You have to understand strategic empathy to try to

view these complex competitions from the perspective of the other. our divisions domestically right now are one of the greatest threats to our national security? Absolutely, Jordan. They are. And our adversaries are doing everything they can to exploit them. I mean, Russia's masterful at this. When we were attacked on 9-11, you know, Al-Qaeda didn't target Democrats or Republicans, right? They targeted Americans. I think it's time to really demand real reforms, you know, and if teachers' unions are an obstacle, we've got to tell them, hey, you can't strike reform anymore. And we need to demand it. The fact that we're driven apart from each other based on these divisions in our society, what social media is doing to us by driving us apart with these algorithms to show you just more and more extreme information based on your predilections. The fact that, you know, if you're of one political persuasion, you watch one TV network and somebody of a different political persuasion watches a different one.

You're creating two different realities. We're doing this to ourselves, George. We've got to stop. You know, we've got to stop it. So let's think about it. Let's work together to make our Republic better every day. And there are some who don't want to do that. They think that, hey, you can't even empathize.

You're not even allowed to empathize. It's a real tragedy. For more, including General H.R. McMaster's thoughts on immigration and climate change. Check out episode 410 on the Jordan Harbinger show. Man, there was so much we left out. Adam went to Bosnia. Talks about the differences between Muslims there, how sort of secular they were, until the genocide and the conflict, and then Saudi,

radical Islam starts filling the gap. In fact, our Aymand Dean episode, episode 383, he talks about going as part of al-Qaeda to Bosnia and the extreme Islam and how that sort of disillusioned him. He talked about nice, sweet kids, chainsawing people in the head and just, he's like, what happened to us? What's going on? The Muslim Brotherhood, all this stuff, is just authoritarian nonsense with a religious veneer. It's a very interesting overlap between criminal groups, Muslim extremist groups or any sort of extremist group, these people really only clearly care about money. I'm not talking about Muslims in general,

I mean extremist groups. This whole thing with a religious veneer, maybe ISIS is a bunch of true believers-ish, but really the people who smuggled terrorists, they smuggle women, they smuggled guns and drugs before that, the line between straight up organized crime and jihadism and militant extremism is pretty blurred. To that point, the unit also,

before Adam's time, of course, found Pablo Escobar. They hunted Radavan Karajic, the Bosnian Serb leader in hiding. They've done a lot of this kind of thing. And I think, frankly, if we're looking at the war on drugs, the war against these extremist groups, we really do need badasses who can blend in,

know the culture, and know how to operate on the ground, and we're just never going to get anywhere. And we've also shot ourselves in the foot a few times. There was at least a critical shortage of Arabic and Farsi linguists at the time, especially after September 11th, because they kicked out all the gay people. Don't ask, don't tell. Remember that?

That was very problematic, especially for fighting terrorism. And, you know, no matter what you think about homosexuality, I kind of think we need everybody rowing in the same direction here. Do we not? This book, it really was positive about America while speaking some interesting truth about the American dream and the military. And I know a lot of Muslims don't want to join the military. Adam is living proof that Muslims can,

assimilate into Western culture. And I thought that was an interesting note about all this, because right when I was talking with Adam on the phone prior to the show, I said to him, man, a lot of people think Muslims can't really assimilate. The culture is incompatible. And he's like, yeah, there's a reason for that, but it's just not true. A lot of us are quite secular and values of Islam when they're not extreme. Mesh great with Judeo-Christian values of the United States. It's really not a bad fit if you're not a kook. And that should be eye-opening for a lot of us, I think. And I think Adam's just a really good example of a true American in just every single way he came from, the way he assimilated and the way he's helped the country. I just think it's an

awesome story. Of course, now he does security consulting in the Middle East, Africa, et cetera, and we can't show his face or give any other details about him, even if he's not active in the unit, because, well, terrorists be wily as well, and they'll link him to current operations. And that, of course, would be no bueno. All things, Adam Gamal will be in the show notes at Jordan Harbinger.com. show notes, advertisers, deals, discount codes, and ways to support the show, all at Jordan Harbinger.com slash deals. Please consider supporting those who support this show. Don't forget our newsletter.

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Definitely share this one with them. In the meantime, I hope you apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you learn. And we'll see you next time. This episode is sponsored in part by Something You Should Know podcast. Finding a new great podcast shouldn't be this hard, so let me save you some time. If you like the Jordan Harbinger show, you'll probably like Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. It's one of those shows that makes you smarter in a practical, useful way. Same curiosity vibe we go for here, just in a fast, focused format. Mike brings on top experts and asks the exact questions that you'd want to ask, and the topics are all over the place in the best way.

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