Don’t Give the Bastards Any Sanctuary

Welcome to Shield of the Republic, a podcast sponsored by The Bulwark and the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia and dedicated to the proposition articulated by Walter Lipman during World War two that a strong and balanced foreign policy is the essential shield of our Democratic Republic. Eric Edelman, a counselor at the center for strategic and budgetary assessments, a bulwark contributor and a nonresident fellow at the Miller Center. And I’m joined by my partner in this strategic enterprise Elliott Cohen, the Robert e Ozgood professor of strategy at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and the Arleigh Burke chair and Strategy at the Center for Strategic and international studies. Elliott, glad to have you.

Well, it’s good to be back, and I’m particularly glad because of who our guest is. Is Michael Vickers, who has just published an incredible truly an incredible memoir called by all means available, which talks about his quite extraordinary career as a special forces soldier and a CIA operative. I’m sure that the high point of his career was getting a PhD at Johns Hopkins University School of advanced international studies. But probably the second high point was when he got hired by a fellow named Eric Edelman at the Department of Defense. Of course, he he rose to be the undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.

Among his many professional accomplishments. Those of you who’ve seen Charlie Wilson’s war will know that he figures and that as he did in reality, as really the Mediways mastermind of our support in struggle of Afghan against their Soviet occupiers. Of course, he was also the guy who was really the driving force behind the raid that eventually killed Osama Bin Laden. And on top of all that, he’s a deep thinker about the nature of war as I can personally testify. So we have lots of stuff to talk about with him, and Mike were delighted to have you here.

Eric, do you want to begin the interrogation or should I?

I’m happy to kick start it. Mike, first thanks a million for joining us. We’re really grateful to have you. Let me extend and revise Elliott’s remarks only a tiny little bit which is to say the book really is terrific. It’s a fantastic read among everything else and it put me in mind more than anything of Bob Gates’s first memoir before he returned to government to be secretary of defense.

So I hope that following in that footstep, you’ll have a chance to go back in the government and have a second memoir as well. Amen. But maybe you could start kind of where Elliott started, which is to talk a little bit about your role in I mean, I’d be happy to have you talk about your time as a green beret, which is a very interesting facet of this incredible memoir, but I think for our listeners, one thing that they’ll be really interested in is the support that the United States provided to the Afghan resistance to a Soviet occupation as Elliott said. Tell us a little bit about how did you get into that it seems like a very unusual kind of first tour essentially for a CIA operations officer. How did this all come about and tell us a little bit about what it was like?

So I had spent ten years as a green beret before going into the CIA’s clandestine service, and half of that time was preparing for World War three should general war break out in Europe or do special operations in Eastern Europe, organize resistance, that sort of thing. And learned a lot of things that turned out to be very useful when I became a CIA officer given where the world was at that time, and we had sponsoring insurgencies all around the world. So after I joined CIA and had to go through various training, I was sent in for the invasion of Granada and then put on a special task force dealing with our responses to the Beirut bombings of our embassy and then Marine barracks. And then after I completed all my training, I was selected for this new job that combine to the Afghanistan COVID action program officer, the single individual that sort of oversaw the program and then the senior paramilitary operations advisor, the sort of the special operator advising the top leader the regional leadership at CIA. I described it as the job of a lifetime and it was culmination of my decade and a half operational part of my career.

At the time I took the job the budget for the program had just been quadrupled by Congress, Charlie Wilson, where the movie name comes from. CIA had asked for a ten percent increase and it got a three hundred percent increase. And so you don’t see that that often in government. And I thought the possibilities have expanded dramatically. Our goal for the first five years of the Soviet occupation was just to make it as costly as possible with no prospect of winning, but with this big increase in resources, I started thinking what could we do to really strengthen the resistance, and so that led on a path, a series of things to provide more complex weapons, dramatically increase the scale, the speed at which we were doing things, so everything went up by a factor of ten.

And about six months into it, I realized that we would have a chance at winning if we doubled our budget again. And that caused the director of CIA a few heart palpitations when I wrote a cable from Islamabad about it, but that eventually went along and congress gave us the money and then we started adding in more sophisticated western weapons, intelligence, training, but things like the Stenger, the blowpipe missile that former prime minister Maggie Thatcher approved, and all those things in combination. And we had a secret alliance with almost every power in the world at the time. China, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, the UK, Egypt, all were in on this and so we were orchestrating large scale but secret coalition war. And so it was just an extraordinary experience and The Soviets escalated at the same time, we did in nineteen eighty five, so we had this cage match for a year, but at the end of that year, Gorbachev started looking for

So let me ask you just a quick question about that. First, I’d like to just point out that I think, although there it’s a wonderful movie, I thought Charlie Sykes war, it does make it sounds like the only thing that was going on was stinger missiles. And I think the one of the great strengths of the book is it really lays out this was, as you said, it’s was a whole bunch of things, not just that particular weapon system, but the scale and and so forth. So I’m I’m curious During the course of your career, you know, you’ve bumped up many times into bureaucracy, doing its thing. How do you assess what held us back from doing those sorts of things until you came along with the kinds of resources that Charlie Will Saletan others sent your way.

That is to say, was there simply a failure of imagination? Was it something else And does that have any implications for where we are today?

Yeah. So I think it does. So one, as you correctly point out, the Stinger was introduced into conflict, the Afghan conflict, in September eighty six, and Gorbachev had already made the decision months before to start leaving. So Stenger played an important role. It was very effective.

It helped ensure that the Soviets didn’t change their mind, but they were on their way out even before that because of all the other we were doing. So it wasn’t just some wonder weapon that turned the tide of the conflict as I try to show. And then to your question about bureaucracy and doing its thing in imagination, you know, the sea I was doing a good job with the mission it was given, but again, all the analysts thought there’s no way we could win no matter what we did. You know, a tough call. And the program was already reasonable size, but it was mostly limited to small arms, things that could the Soviets, but not really drive them out.

And so it took this big infusion of resources then a recalibration of strategy. Our friend Steve Rosen recently retired from Harvard was junior NSC staff, or during this strategic review that President Reagan signed in a then super classified national security decision directive that changed our objective to driving them out. So a combination of bottom up, I think, and a very lean chain of command. One of the things I try to show in the book is that individuals really matter. You can have talented individuals with different skills but some are gonna be more have different attributes, be more risk averse than others.

And I was really lucky that I had two bosses in my operational chain of command that really believed in me and let me do strategy as long as it was working. And in one of them, Bert Dunn had been one of the founding members of the Special Forces and was a fluent Pashtoob speaker, and it was a lean chain of command. It was me, to them, to the director, and then the White House and the top interagency with George Schultz and key people at the state department, Mike Armacost and Morton Nebromowitz played an important role, Freda Clay at Defense and Weinberger. But it was a handful of people that really pushed in this direction and, you know, I was doing the operational stuff. But you saw that again I think in our campaigns against Al Qaeda after two thousand and seven, when President Bush decided to really switch strategy, both of you were there at the time in different roles, the last year and a half of the Bush administration, that again I think was made possible by kind of a confluence of the right people to take the fight to Al Qaeda that way, and then President Obama continued at least for the first four years of his administration and it paid great dividends.

So I don’t know if it’s so much in running of bureaucracy or just streamlining and really making it Bulwark, but it’s much accident, to be honest, as it is designed sometimes. It’s just the confluence events of having a lot of like minded people or not a lot, but enough critical mass in critical positions.

Mike, as I read the book, I have to tell you I was struck repeatedly by how much you and I were traveling on sort of parallel paths and then our careers sort of intertwining with people like Elliot and Al Bernstein who had been my teacher at Cornell and with whom I encountered again at Yale. When you were on the Beirut bombing task force I was working, for George Schultz had to wake him up in the middle of the night when that embassy was bombed and obviously the invasion of Granada, I was in Washington while he was down in Georgia at the Augusta National Golf course, while you were, you know, jumping into Granada with the US task force I was in Moscow working on I had on the desk and then in the embassy, in the period you were running this program, I had the Soviets in the third world brief and I actually wrote a cable in late late nineteen eighty seven saying Soviets were on their way out, which was not greeted with a lot of approbation in the, you know, central intelligence agency because it ran into a lot of the buzzsaw of we, you know, we can’t win and they can’t possibly be on their way out.

That you were talking about, I’m just curious, when did you in your own mind think this is over we’ve won. They’re they’re getting out. When did when did that occurred you and what prompted it? It was really

the question your answer was probably late winter nineteen eighty six. After most of our strategy had been in place, the Stenger decision had been made, the Bulwark decision, our resources had gone up by a factor of twelve and everything was programmed, and Gorbachev started making public noise You know, the bleeding wound and other things that we gotta get out of here. And then we had clandestine reporting on some of that too. The analyst didn’t really buy it yet at that point. And there was a division in CIA, the near Eastern analysts who covered Afthan and the near East were a little more bullish than the Soviet analysts.

It’s kind of, I don’t know, rooting for the home team or something, or the folks you’ve studied them But but I you know, my first thing was, we’ve got quadruple the resources. We really ought to look at our strategy. And maybe we can do a lot more. I didn’t really think we could win at that point or really have this conviction. I just thought we ought to try.

And then one thing led to another over the next fifteen months, really, that by the end of that, I was convinced that they were done. But, you know, part of that too was Gorbachev. Gorbachev was a very different man. In some respects, he was the same guy. But when he came in, he tried to win the war.

You know, he did a big surge. He gave his generals it’s kind of like Obama with the Afghanistan surge. He gave him eighteen months, do your best, win this thing. But, you know, and maybe to consolidate his position, but he was quite successful politically and as you know better than I and kinda consolidating political power. And more he saw this as an impediment to what he really wanted to do, which was transform the Soviet Union, that became dominant.

And so that plus the fact that I thought we were just you know, everything was going up, the the cost of the Soviets was going up so high that, you know, they would they would find a way to disengage.

So can I let me ask a question about the the two big critiques that have been made of the of the Afghan war that we waged, not of you, because, you know, you were doing your job? But I think there are two critiques out there, and Eric may wish to specify these. But one is well, actually, is the Pakistan is gaming us all along. They really were controlling where our resources went to and they went to bad people. And, you know, we we just ended up you know, being people providing the resources, but we’re in some ways chumps for the much more cunning ISI, sort of Pakistan, intelligence service.

The other, which is even deeper, and I think it’s kind of hinted at in Charlie Sykes war, I suppose. And that’s all we did is we created the conditions for the emergence of Al Qaeda in Afghanistan for, you know, radical islamists who we have been arming against the Soviets and all blew back in our faces on nine eleven. How just curious how you react to those two arguments.

Sure. So Pakistan was the front line state with the most risk. So China and Saudi in Egypt were our principal arms suppliers, not the only ones. Saudi provided half the funding the Brits and others helped in a lot of ways. But Pakistan was really the frontline state that made the program possible, and there was always this fear that you would have a Soviet invasion of Pakistan.

Now they did a lot of cross border stuff. They really didn’t have the resource to fully invade Pakistan. Most of their force was oriented toward NATO, then China, then Iran, and Afghanistan and Pakistan was a very distant fourth, which limited their ability to surge in everything else, but we essentially ceded control to the Pakistanese. Because of their territory and their vulnerability for the first five years of the program. And one of the critical things that I felt we had to do to make this escalation of ours possible was to bring that strategic control back to CIA for a while.

And part of CIA’s tradition too, is the field chief of station is really the commander who runs things and for these two critical years all the decisions were made in Washington. They really weren’t made in the field and the job of our chief of station was to really convince the Pakistanis to go along with it which was often bear knuckles fight, but we did succeed in doing that. And our interests were more aligned with the Pakistani then, you know, Zia had this famous quote about he’ll determine the temperature at which the pot boils. But the pot boil hotter and hotter, and he went along with it, including stinger. And so we essentially got our way between eighty four and eighty six and then just continue to execute the last couple years.

So I don’t think it was a case of Wily ones. Now to your question about which groups they favored, they did, you know, there were four fundamentalist groups, more Islamist groups, and three, somewhat more secular traditionalist groups. And the fundamentalists were the best fighters, but they differed a lot. And their favorite was the worst of the bunch led by Golbadine Hekmat who we all knew in later life. And then one group that was pretty good at the time that had the haqqanis in it, a UNis Callas, group, they went over to the dark side after the Taliban took over.

So in Massoud’s group, and Syafs ended up on the other side of that with the Afghan government. And so it was mixed. We had our own independent channels to these groups so we could balance out to some degree what was going where and and the support we provided. And so the challenge for us You know, as I point out in the book, periodically, the Pakistani would convince commanders to do some dumb things like to try to take and hold ground where Soviet air power could hurt them, just bad operational decisions, not wily political stuff or ulterior motives, just bad operations, and so we had those kinds of fights. But it was really when we disengaged, beginning in nineteen ninety with the Pressler amendment that we had to cut off aid after the Soviets withdrew, that things started really going downhill.

And then it takes the communist Afghan government actually outlasts the Soviets. And when the Soviets cut it off, well Soviet Union goes away, they cut it off, then the government falls, Mujardin take over, but you’ve got civil war. And then we’re long gone. We’re out of the region completely long since and the Pakistan is back to Taliban in ninety four to ninety six, Taliban take over most of Afghanistan El Qaeda comes in to the second part of your question. But there’s not a straight line between the defeat of the Soviets and nineeleven.

You know, it’s not inevitable. In other words, one, you’ve got twelve years, but two, there’s series of US decisions of disengagement might have been tough to stay given the circumstances and the law on Pakistan’s nuclear program. But things we did in counterterrorism after nineeleven, I certainly wish we had done before nineeleven. One of the cardinal principles is don’t give these bastards any sanctuary, and we did that for several years. And one of the things we saw after nineeleven is every time they went to a new place, if we gave them eighteen months, the threat to the homeland would go up, you know, and we adjust our policy and take it away.

And so I think both critiques are you know, certainly the one about nine eleven is inevitable is wrongheaded. It depended a lot on US decisions. That we in the Pakistan’s interest weren’t fully aligned in the eighties and that they got really got misaligned after we withdrew, I think is right, and that, of course, caused us problems in our long Afghanistan You know, we needed Pakistan for Al Qaeda. They did alright for that. We needed them for nuclear security and our counter proliferation goals.

They backed people killing Americans for a lot of that war, and we were kinda stuck with this frenemy this unique ally that’s killing Americans while helping with us and that’s the truth.

So if I could just ask one quick follow-up and then over to you, Eric, given all that, how do you feel about the Biden administration’s decision to completely disengage from Afghanistan.

Yeah. I think it was a major mistake. I think just strategically, we had transitioned to Afghan security. And Afghan security was dependent on US aid, small US advisors, and the willingness to use US air power if needed, but that’s it.

And contractor support.

And contractor support. Right. So you needed all those things. You know, it’s not an inconsiderable cost, but it you know, it was a successful transition. And, you know, it would look after our counterterrorism interests in the region, it would look after our counter proliferation interests.

Afghanistan is located between China, Russia and Iran. It’s pretty good real estate. The Afghan’s, you know, not only helped us win the Cold War, they helped us kick Al Qaeda out and then keep them out, and then the problem shifted to Pakistan and elsewhere. And so I think morally and strategically, it was a long headed decision. I don’t like this monism and strategy that even though is our biggest problem right now and Russia is a big problem and it really is about great powers.

You can’t completely ignore Iran nor career that jihadists. You gotta have a grand strategy that deals with them all in some way, and counterterrorism now ought to be a real economy of force effort. But we don’t you know, the idea that it’s a good thing for us to have the Taliban takeover and defeat us after twenty years is just horrendous strategically.

Couldn’t agree more.

Yeah, nor I. I completely agree, Mike. So it’s probably a good segue to a second part of your amazing career. Which is based on everything we’ve just been discussing, you would think this would be a trampoline to much greater success in CIA as a more senior operations officer. It didn’t work out that way.

So talk a little bit about that and how as you describe in the book, you decided to accumulate some intellectual capital after this pretty amazing and stellar performance at CIA.

Yeah. So I had a phenomenal run and I I like to say I got many, many more years of experience in a short period of time because I worked across the agency and with all the seniors and had responsibility for a big chunk of the director of operations resources. And so I knew all the seniors because of my job across different regional areas because of the global scope of the program. And you know, several of them told me, you know, something like this if you’re lucky comes around once in a generation. What are you gonna do the next twenty years while you wait for this to happen again.

And, you know, and that that kind of weighed on me, and I thought I didn’t really want us to just start over. I had almost fifteen years of operational experience. I was offered a couple good jobs at chief of base in a region and others, but it all seemed like it would be several years of stepping back from what I had been doing. And I had I wasn’t a good student in high school. I finished my degree much better at city of Alabama while I was in the army, but I’d never really had a serious, well, I shouldn’t say that.

I’ll offend people. But you know, the Cold War was coming to an end and I thought, okay, time to try something different and then come back into government. And so I went to Wharton first and then decided I really missed national security. And met up with Elliott. Elliott accepted me into his PhD program.

It was kind of a mid career training program in and that’s where I really got all my education. And I think then it set the stage for what happened later. It wasn’t by total design. I mean, thought I might end up teaching for a while or being a strategy consultant you know the story, Eric, I was kind of called back into government by a series of accidents later, or you may have a different view, but

It wasn’t an accident. Yeah.

And I you know, it’s it it’s just I don’t have regrets. I’m very fortunate the way it worked out, and it and it did if I hadn’t done that, I don’t think I would have been able to do what I did later in life. Had I not taken that break and gotten more education and thought about the rise of China and the revolution of military affairs and other things in that period. And so, you know, I credit Elliot and Andy Marshall really for that formative period that helped me do other things later.

Well, while you were working on your PhD with Elliott, which by the way, I think Elliott will confirm this or not. I think it may have broken the record for being one of the longest dissertations that SICE has has awarded?

You know, it was very interesting, but it was the size of a cinderblock.

It’s three volumes in over a thousand pages. You know, it’s four thousand years of history. It took almost that long to write.

Yeah. But while you were doing that, You were also you also were working in the office of net assessment. Talk a little bit about how because we’ve discussed on other podcasts, including recently with Andy Hone and and Tom Shankr about their book, which has the spirit of Andy Marshall kind of throughout it. Talk a little bit about the couple years you worked for Andy Marshall.

Yeah. So it was ninety three to ninety five. I had finished my coursework and was, you know, doing my PhD exams and starting on the dissertation. I had a couple years of course work before that with Elliott and others. And including Al Bernstein that you mentioned earlier, which was fantastic.

And when I went to work for Andy, my dissertation was on the theory and history of revolutions in military affairs going back to, you know, chariots, you know, kinda beginning of organized warfare. And and there was this interest in an emerging revolution in military affairs. Andy Crepenevic was an officer in under Andy Marshall and had written a preliminary assessment about it. And so Marshall was one interested in the PhD work I was doing, but also how I would apply it to warfare thirty years in the future. And so I got this tasking, what would war between the US and China look like in twenty twenty.

And in nineteen ninety three, and one of the things the Chinese had done is they were the best students of desert storm. You know, one of their big conclusions, a lot of foreign militaries have looked at desert storm and said, what do we do to prevent this happening to us? And the Chinese drew the conclusion that do not let the United States build up forces in theater against. Keep modern. That’s kind of the origins of the anti access aerial denial.

So I wrote a paper about warfare in twenty twenty that ended up leading to a series of war games that CSBA and other think tanks did for a number of years. And it turned out to be reasonably accurate about what the world looks like today in terms of the kinds of weapons. We’re seeing not only the Air Force shift to longer range strike and maybe undersea dominance being the central element, but the emergence of space is a contested domain and cyber and all that sort of stuff. So

— unmanned aviation.

Unmanned aviation, exactly. Yeah, and unmanned systems across warfare domains. And so that really got me interested in this future war and China is our next competitor in several decades issue.

So I actually, I’m curious because we’re you know, I’m sure we’ll get into the you know, then your tour back in in in government. But I think one of the things that’s always fascinated me about you, Mike, is on the one hand, you have this incredible career in the, you know, which might call the war in the shadows of covert action, and guerrilla warfare, insurgency, you know, all that sort of stuff. And yet you’ve also had a very, very keen interest in high intensity warfare as represented by that outstanding dissertation of yours. And I I wonder particularly now when we, you know, we’re seeing a very large conventional war in Ukraine. And as you said, there’s you know, people are talking seriously about what conflict with China might look like, and that would be another kind of big conventional war How do those how do you think those two forms of warfare are going to interact in the future?

And I mean in the near future like the next ten, twenty years.

You know, as you said, you know, the cold war was fought indirectly through COVID action and proxy war. And mix of conventional and unconventional, and I had done the unconventional side in the cold war, and then circumstances after nineeleven brought counterterrorism to the center of our strategy with the war with Al Qaeda and its allies. And I had a background in that, and then what was new, the drone campaigns, and things. You know, I adapted to that. Quite quickly.

That was natural. The kind of the future my segue into high intensity conventional war, other than being in the army for ten years, even though the special forces, and being a student of those kinds of things, really came about from thinking about future war and the Andy Marshall problem. How it would change. And so that and the dissertation, as you said, looking at previous periods of significant change, and high intensity warfare. And that took a decade to develop enough expertise in things like space or cyber or undersea warfare and long range strike.

But I did that essentially from the 90s until shortly after nineeleven, then when I started bringing back in the irregular war, I hardly thought about anything irregular for ten years. And you know, so I developed some expertise. And then how it relates to today, you know, the Ukraine war has a lot in common with Afghanistan against the Soviets. It’s conventional war, it’s higher intensity, it’s a lot more artillery and mobile armor and other stuff, but some of the strategic problems are similar. You just don’t have to go through all the covert stuff and as you say, it’s more high intensity.

And then a war with China has a number of dimensions to it, if there is a direct conflict. You know, not only might it require emphasis on some new things space and cyber, but changes in the way we project air power or naval power, etcetera. But you still have this nuclear overhang of escalation risk that we had in the Cold War and And so one, it may deter that kind of conflict. But if it occurs, there will really be that escalation issue to manage if and it may limit war, but it also may turn out to be more protracted than we think in a sense that when great powers go to war, it’s a clash of systems and stuff. And so things like the industrial base matters and how many munitions you can produce.

And all sorts of things. And so there’s a lot of additional factors that would go into that that we need to be prepared for. And then you know, I started wrestling with some of that when Eric brought me back into government and expanded the solar portfolio from just a regular warfare to the department’s operational capabilities, so nuclear weapons on down, and so again it gave me with the defense planning guidance and lots of other things to try to shape the future of the military.

So Eric, we how did how did you find Mike and why why did you decide to pick him out and push him forward?

Mike tells the story in his book, and it’s it’s it’s accurate. I mean Mike had had a couple of meetings with President Bush to talk along with Fred Cagan and some other folks to talk about the surge in Iraq and how how we were managing all that. And made a made an impression on president Bush. Secretary Rumfeld did come back from that and say, we need to find a place for Mike Vickers What he didn’t know was I had already been plotting and planning to try and bring Mike in because we were reorganizing the policy organization. And it was a short lived but I think a useful experiment I wish frankly it had survived Mike might have a view Jonathan Last you you will recall that the late Art Zabrowski had an office of force transformation that was meant to be looking at the future of the forest and of war, he was ill, and that office was was gonna go away, but I thought it needed, that the function needed to be retained, and it seemed to me that it actually fit with with Solik in the sense that Solik was a a unique assistant secretary position that was created essentially to be a service secretary like proponent for special operations.

Because the services themselves, the big, you know, big army, navy, air force marine corps, never really liked special operations very much, and it was one of the recognitions of Goldwater Nichols and then senator, I think, Nunn Warner that that there needed to be some kind of proponents for special operations, but my thought was, we need a special proponents for the future capabilities we need two, so let’s put that all together and as I, you know, I had actually read Mike’s monograph for CSPA on the revolution in military affairs, and I thought, this is something knowing about his background in the anti Soviet War in Afghanistan, I I thought this is someone who knows both about irregular warfare and future capabilities. So he was an ideal fit for the job. We’d already been thinking about that before Rumsfeld told me to give him a job. And so I asked him into the Panagon. We had a discussion and and I think Mike asked if he could check with his wife before he said yes, but it it didn’t take long for him to accept.

And I was It was it was really a great hire, and I was really very glad to have him particularly as he discussed earlier when we started to intensify the anti al Qaeda campaign in in Northwest Pakistan.

You know, and the only thing I’d add to that is, you know, I had two meetings with president Bush on a rock strategy, one in the Oval Office and then a few weeks later with his work cabinet, including Eric at Camp David, and then after the Camp David meeting, Eric said can you come into the Pentagon? I wanna talk to you about Camp David, follow-up? I said, sure. I come in and and then I said, yeah, you wanna talk to me about Camp Dave and he goes, no, no, no, I I don’t need to talk to you about that. And he pulled out this monograph and said, this is what I wanna talk to you about.

And would you be interested in this job? And Before that, I’d been approached for a few things that just dealt with a regular warfare. And I thought, I don’t want to come back into government for just that. And then Eric made an offer I couldn’t refuse. And the interesting thing is the two thousand and six QDR, quadrenial defense review that we implemented over several years, really focused not just on making department better at irregular warfare for the surge and other things, the conventional ground forces, but also expanding special operations forces dramatically.

But it started a new bomber program and expanded the submarine fleet. And so we did a number of things to try to address this world we were in, but also the world we saw coming.

Biopreparedness was another thing.

Yeah, biopreparedness exactly, yeah, That’s what made it a great job.

What was it like going through the Bush Obama transition? Because that’s I mean, This may be a little bit wonky, but it’s that’s a really interesting kind of thing, because there are two presidents excruciatingly different in many respects, of course, you had the same ultimate boss in the person of Bob Gates. I’m just really curious how you navigated that. And, of course, you ended up with a very important role particularly in when it came to finally getting some have been modern.

Let me just say one thing before you answer. Which is one of the attractions of hiring Mike was, I was already thinking, you know, in o six about you know, what what’s gonna happen after the Bush administration ends. And I was quite confident that there was a reasonable chance. Even had Bob Gates not stayed on, that Mike, because of his, you know, reputation, his work at CSBA before he came into government, that he would be able to stay on in the Democratic administration if there was a transition. So just make that point.

So, you know, it was our first wartime transition since nineteen sixty eight and that was certainly on Bob Gates’s mind. And and it was also a party that had been out of power for eight years during this whole new series of wars. And so it was a pretty monumental transition in that regard. And President Obama ended up keeping Gates Me and Jim Clapper, who then ended up becoming DNI a couple years later, he was the undersecretary for intelligence before that. And one of the tasks for me during the transition was to prepare the briefing book for Obama on everything from nuclear weapons to our most sensitive stuff, things you would only tell the president on inauguration day, things you would tell them a little before that, and then there were things president to president, the president Bush passed on to obama, and so it was a heck of an experience, you know, assembling everything that, you know, and I didn’t do the briefing, I just prepared it, gates and than Mullen did it for the Chairman of the joint chiefs for the president.

But there was a lot more continuity in a way between Obama one and Bush two and particularly the last few years when we were all together. Than people realize, I think. One with the Afghanistan surge that Bush wanted to start but and did start, but Iraq was consuming the lion’s share of the resources. And then with the Al Qaeda campaigns and then efforts to try to delay or stop a run from getting the bomb and a number of things that made it little more easy. It was still difficult in a sense.

Some people I knew like Michelle Flori very well, so that part was seamless. Others I hadn’t met before, and so kind of proving my Bonafides to the new National Security Team in the White House situation room took a bit of time, but eventually worked out.

I mean, you had to deal really quite intimately with both, not just the both presidents, but you know, their senior people. And, of course, the National Security Advisors were very, very different kinds of people. You know, secretaries of state were very different kinds of people. You know, it’s really a unique vantage point that you have, very few other people have, I guess Doug Glut did as the deputy National Security Advisor, I just wonder how you’d reflect on sort of style, culture, you know, all that and how to does it actually affect the conduct of foreign policy?

You know, I think what was unusual about President Bush’s last couple years was he made some really big decisions. That presidents normally don’t make as they’re winding down. And particularly against Al Qaeda the last six months, that was extraordinary. It really changed our counterterrorism campaign. And I think he had an exceptional team you know, with Hadley and Jim Jeffrey at the White House and, you know, you guys and Condy at state and Gates, Mike Hayden, at CIA, was a very, very strong team.

And you know, to a large extent, having Gates the same, but Hillary Clinton was a lot of continuity in a way I think with Kandi at state. And Leon Paneta, well, different background than Mike Hayden really took the bull by the horns at CIA. And so Tom Donnlin and Dennis McDonough after the Jim Jones, Jim Seinberg and other stuff in the early part of the administration. And it settled into, you know, the new administration kind of came in wary of a lot of things. Continuity in certain areas, but wary of some and wasn’t initially keen on the surges in Afghanistan, wasn’t sure where they wanted to go initially with the drone campaigns, then they really ramped up, but it took a year to kind of get there.

And so it took a year, I think for that to gel, they were very deliberate about reviewing all the covert action programs and strategies that first year. But once they settled on things by the end of that first year, it looked remarkably similar for a while. And And the styles, you know, even though, as you say, two very, very different men leading the country, you know, there was a lot of decentralized execution for the al Qaeda campaigns and at least for the first couple years of that. And so it seemed, which again was quite different during the second Obama term because Al Qaeda had been beaten pretty badly Iraq was still sort of quiet. ISIS hadn’t risen quite yet.

It was this interregnum and it just looked and felt very There was a lot more White House control of things from twenty thirteen to twenty fifteen, etcetera. So that’s how I describe

really really is interesting. Actually, Eric, of course, you’ve seen multiple administrations come and go, that sometimes the biggest differences are between a first and second term than between the, you know, second term and somebody else’s first term.

Actually, the roughest transition and I I went through every one between nineteen eighty one and two thousand nine was between the Reagan administration and the first bush forty one term. That was the most difficult and and I would say can in some ways contentious transition that that I witnessed Mike, I I do wanna have you talk about the intensification of the Al Qaeda campaign and the Bin Laden raid But, you know, I I don’t think we can let you go without clarifying one thing. So you were the undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence when Lieutenant General Mike Flynn was the director of DIA. And when when Flynn was fired, he has recounted that it was, essentially, because the Obama administration was sort of soft on, you know, soft on Al Qaeda. Would you clarify for our listeners how it looked from your vantage point as someone who had nominal oversight responsibility for, you know, for not nominal oversight responsibility for DIA as undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence.

Yeah. So that’s not true at all. You know, the White House was hardly aware of Mike Flynn until he retired. And you know, at the time, you know, ISIS was had a sanctuary in Syria and was causing trouble in Iraq, but they hadn’t invaded Iraq yet. And Al Qaeda had been beaten down pretty badly.

And none of us wanted to take our eye off the wall. With them. We now had the Syrian civil war and a few other things. But the big challenge, it was really all management and command climate at DIA. And so Jim Clapper, the DNA and I had shared responsibility for oversight of DIA.

And with me acting on behalf of the Secret Podcast Defense. And Mike was just causing a lot of turmoil to where every senior leader from the financial people to the heads of operations, to the heads of analysis, we’re all just saying it was chaos. And so we tried to stabilize it and just couldn’t. And so decided with General Marty Demsey, the Chairman and then consulting with Chuck Hegel, the Secret Podcast, that we would limit Mike’s term to two years, and we gave him eight months notice. So we really didn’t fire him.

We just you’re not gonna have a three year tour, you’re gonna have a two year tour because we need some fresh leadership in here, both for the deputy and the director because they were at war and we just need to bring some stability to this workforce. And also DIA was pivoting like the rest of us from wars with terrorists to starting to focus on China and Russia and needed to build a lot of new capabilities and analysis and collect and science and technology and other things. And Mike showed a little interest in that. He was dealing with personnel and industry and organizational wiring diagrams. And so it reached a crisis point where both Jim Clapper and I thought sake of the workforce we needed to bring in fresh leadership, and we tried to let him down as gently as we could.

It had nothing to do with the international situation or people not listening to them. As far as we knew other than on Russia were Mike saw them as a natural ally. Anyone who didn’t like Islamic jihadists was an ally for Mike. Jim Clapper and I didn’t share that view. Our views were reasonably compatible on on the need to stay on top of the what was left of the jihadists.

So, yeah, it was all about his management at DIA.

You know, it’s a terrible thing. I think we’re unfortunately getting very, very close to the end. I’ll I’m just gonna say this is it’s not only a fantastic read. I think it’s a it’s really gonna be a a very interesting window into this period of time and some of the key events there that people are gonna be looking at for a long time. You know, sometimes people write memoirs and they just It’s like a dropping a pebble in a pond, there’s a ripple or two, and it goes away.

I think this will really be more consequential. I’m gonna go the things I I have no idea how you managed to get as much stuff you classified as as you did. And it’s, of course, on top of that record of an incredible career. So I’m I’m gonna ask one little picky question. That’s my final question.

So when you’re in special forces, As I understand it, one of your jobs was to prepare to replace nuclear weapons in odd places. Can you say something about that?

Sure. So, you know, during the cold war, beginning in the nineteen fifties, we expanded nuclear weapons capabilities almost every weapon system to artillery, to short range airplanes as well as our strategic forces, all across the tactical forces. And then in the early 1970s, developed a capability for our small group of special operators, green berets and navy seals that could emplace a small device at a strategic point to slow down an enemy’s advance or some — but beyond the reach of conventional weapons. And so I was selected when I was twenty three years old for this program to learn how to use the device and all the restrictions that go with nuclear weapons and then to be able to deliver it if necessary into Eastern Europe by parachute or some other means, so I learned to do that with it, with it strapped behind my legs for free fall or in front of my legs for static jump and then all the other things that go with it. It seemed like an exciting idea when I was twenty three years old.

I don’t know so much anymore, but the weapon was retired before the Cold War ended, before the end of the Cold War, and I don’t think we’re going back to those days.

Yeah. So the basic idea is you light a fuse and then run like hell.

Well, you actually had to stay and maintain custody of thing.

Oh,

geez. And and and you’ll see I had to dig a position to make sure someone didn’t walk out after you got the national command instructions to arm it and stop, and it had a timer to where you could get away to a safe position And years later when I was an assistant secretary, a bunch of Sandia physicists came in and they knew about my background with this thing, and they said, you know, we never got that timer to work properly. So

yeah there you go. We are running low on time, but I don’t think we can let our guests escape without at least a cursory recounting of the Bin Laden raid, and you’re rolling it, Mike, and and then we will we will, for sure, let you go. Sure.

So, you know, it was a great hunt, one of the great intelligence operations to find Bin Laden after Torrabora, and it took us nine years and we finally tracked them through the courier in late August twenty ten. And for several months, there were only It was really closely held. There were only four of us in the Department of Defense who knew about it. It was Bob Gates, the Chairman and Vice Chairman and Me. And and then the sort of the Christmas holidays in the beginning of the year, the president asked us to start generating options at CIA, so I participated in that with CIA ranging from B2 air strikes to drones to various kinds of raids, doing it with the Pakistanis or unilaterally, and I attended every meeting at the White House for special deputies, principals, and five meetings with the President.

And I think played a role in convincing people in the end that we could do this raid and that that was the right course of action, one that we should do it. And I remember President Obama’s first meeting with his team. He said, haven’t decided if we’re gonna do this yet, but I’m looking at the options, looking at the intelligence. If we do do it, we’re gonna do it sooner rather than later, and we’re gonna do it unilaterally. And I thought holy crap.

You know, where we got a good chance of doing this. Initially, everyone favored the b two strike, and then eventually, when that had too much collateral damage, another complications. We shifted to a seal raid, one in particular, the one we executed, and then rehearsed the heck out of it, planned for every detail was involved intimately and a lot of that and then saw it through. And the operation was done under CIA Authority, so I was at CIA in the afternoon of the operation where Adam McCraven was reporting in to director Panetta. And then Panetta and I, and Michael Morell, the deputy director went to the White after the operation was done and briefly decided to help the president with his speech and then brief the press around midnight.

And when I left White House grounds at like three in the morning, I heard all these students outside chanting USA USA, and then CIA CI, and I thought, I better just stop and listen to this for a few seconds because I’m never gonna hear this again in my life. My dad then drove back to see I got my car and went on.

What a tale.

Our guest has been Michael Vickers, the author of by all means available memoirs of a life and intelligence special operations and strategy. And as my colleague, Elliott Cohen, has said, it is a fantastic read. Mike, thank you so much for being our guest today.

It’s such a great pleasure to be with you both.

If you enjoyed this episode of Shield of the Republic, leave us Review on Spotify or on Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. We’ll be back next week with a postmortem on the by then, just concluded NATO Summit.