by Todd Greentree
©2025 Todd Greentree
Keywords: intelligence, special operations, strategy, Afghanistan, gray zone, Cold War
Mike Vickers is an American national security legend. His memoir tells the story of how he earned his status among the current generation of military and civilian leaders.
Memoirs are a special form of literature. Military commanders, senior officials, and statesmen write them to tell their versions of how their lives intersected with history. Comprehensibly, they desire to place themselves in the best light, even when admitting to faults and errors. The modern form has its exemplary antecedent in Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, written after his two terms as president while he was dying of cancer, and culminating with his account as Union commander in the Civil War. In contrast to Grant’s authenticity, some authors subject their memoirs to reputation-protecting distortion. For example, see Henry Kissinger, White House Years, Years of Upheaval, and Years of Renewal. Vickers largely avoids crossing that line, using as his model From the Shadows and Duty, the two outstanding memoirs by Robert Gates, who served every president from Jimmy Carter to Barack Obama, was Secretary of Defense and Director of the CIA, and one of Vickers’ much-admired bosses.1
The book is a soldier’s story written large. A lover and guardian of the secret world, Vickers scrupulously thanks the Department of Defense and CIA classification review boards and frequently keeps the curtain closed. Overall, however, he is straightforward and convincing. He tells readers he has written an “analytical memoir” out of duty—to history, to the American people, and to future intelligence officers, special operators, and strategists (8). The first half tracks the unique evolution of his career, beginning with the later years of the Cold War through September 11, 2001, and its aftermath. The second half cycles thematically through the nation’s contemporary experience of war, arriving at the challenges of great-power competition and future war that are with us today.
Vickers is informative, detailed (including extensive notes), and matter-of-fact in style, with the pragmatic perspective of a soldier and intelligence officer. This pragmatism does not mean that he lacks romance. Although By All Means Available is no Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence does turn up. And, as might be natural for someone who came of age beneath the big white sign in Hollywood, California, Vickers seeds the narrative with TV and film references such as Mission Impossible and The Magnificent Seven, and James Bond appears as a role model, albeit not in the index. Charlie Wilson’s War, the stylish 2007 Mike Nichols film about America’s first Afghan war, starring Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman, based on the book by George Crile, portrays Vickers as a nerdy CIA weapons expert—which is roughly accurate by Vickers’s accounting. Notwithstanding the Hollywood version, young Mike Vickers was the real-life architect of strategy in the hot war in Afghanistan that helped bring the Cold War to a peaceful conclusion. It made his reputation.2
Vickers’s uncommon trajectory from high school student with strabismus (crossed eyes) to senior defense and intelligence official was much more than being with the right people in the right place at the right time. He undertook a hero’s journey from the beginning, heeding a call to adventure, ready to face adversities with courage and determination and dedicate his life to something larger than himself. He also possessed a native aptitude for strategy, starting with always looking up and ahead in his life. Inspired by a teacher and aspiring to the elite, Vickers decided to become a CIA officer, but lacking a college degree, he determined his best route was to first join the Army and become a Green Beret. It worked, and he reported to the Special Forces Qualification “Q” Course” in December 1973. By that date, the last US combat troops had departed South Vietnam, the anti-war movement divided the country, and the US military was deep in crisis. Vickers confesses to mixed feelings about Vietnam but does not reflect further.
Vickers’ hyper-focused dedication to mission became a hallmark of his entire career—and a critical strength. The patriotism is implicit. With his head in the game, he quickly jumped onto the fast track, learning the arts of guerrilla warfare from storied Vietnam warriors, becoming a weapons specialist and 10th Group Soldier of the Year in 1974, leaping from Officer Candidate School to first in his Special Forces officer class and, in effect, transforming himself into an accomplished instrument of war. (I first crossed path with Vickers in the early 1980s, when he was a lieutenant in command of a 7th Group counterterrorist Operational Detachment Alpha (ODA) conducting an embassy survey and intelligence collection mission in El Salvador, where America’s new counterinsurgency strategy was still a gamble.)
In 1983, Vickers joined the CIA, where, instead of becoming a case officer, his Special Forces skills quickly led him to the paramilitary International Activities Division (now Special Activities Center.) He soon found himself accompanying US troops and getting a taste of combat during Operation Urgent Fury, the haphazard invasion of Grenada to expel the Cubans from the island and demonstrate President Ronald Reagan’s Cold War prowess.
The next year, Vickers began to make his mark in Afghanistan, far on the geopolitical periphery, where twice in four decades America would go to war, first for better and then for worse. Shortly after the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan on Christmas Eve 1979, President Jimmy Carter expanded a covert action program by arming the Afghan resistance in an open-ended effort to “bleed the Soviets,” as National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski liked to put it. Soon after Vickers joined a team of dedicated CIA Cold Warriors in 1984 as an Afghanistan covert action program officer, he recognized that the highly motivated mujahideen had the potential to do more than impose costs on the Soviet Army. Over the next 18 months, he devised and implemented a strategy to defeat and drive them out of Afghanistan “by all means available” (an NSC review of the Afghanistan program being the source of his title) (8, 141). Reagan signed National Security Decision Directive (NSDD) 166 on March 27, 1985, formally turning the gray zone war into black and white.3
Vickers’ first-hand narrative of how the asymmetry of US support, combined with a determined insurgency to achieve “escalation dominance,” changed history is a signal contribution of the memoir (139). With him in the thick of it, the CIA marshalled resources from Congress as Texas Democrat Charlie Wilson led the charge and won increased commitments from China, Egypt, Great Britain, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia. It was his design to acquire and deliver the weapons and enablers mix, including Stinger surface-to-air missiles, that would give the mujahideen the wherewithal for the victory that turned the tables on the Soviets. If not quite what he terms “the decisive battle of the Cold War,” the defeat was decisive (3). In Afghanistan, the Soviet Union fell from believing the world was going their way in 1979 to Gorbachev’s bleeding wound in 1986, and its humiliating withdrawal three years later was a significant nail in the Soviet coffin. Clausewitz termed the special characteristic that allowed Vickers to conceive and accomplish what he did “coup d’oeil,” the inner eye that sees the war, judges the situation, and takes resolute action.4
With his mission in Afghanistan accomplished and follow-on prospects with the CIA limited, Vickers departed to increase his intellectual capital. He completed a master of business administration degree at the Wharton School of Business then studied for his PhD under eminent strategic thinker Eliot Cohen at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies in Washington, DC. From there, he expanded his national security horizon, joining the fraternity of master of strategy Andy Marshall in the Department of Defense Office of Net Assessments and, in 1999, cofounding the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, today a highly respected Washington defense think tank.
The blow of the September 11 attacks left Vickers craving from the sidelines to get back into action. His chance came in 2006. In the second of two advisory group meetings with President George W. Bush on the troubled war in Iraq, Bush asked Vickers to stay behind, signaling prized face time and the prospect of influencing an informal moment of decision. Instead, Bush flustered him by citing Charlie Wilson’s War and asking, “Why did you leave CIA?” (223) Bemused, Vickers confessed that he rose too fast and unconventionally and realized it would take a decade before he reached the level of responsibility he had in Afghanistan.
The encounter led to an invitation from Eric Edelman, Bush’s Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, to become Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict. Edelman added Interdependent Capabilities to the job description, which yielded ASD SO / LIC & IC, an awkward acronym even by DoD standards. Vickers’ appointment was confirmed in early 2007, and President Barack Obama kept Vickers on during both of his terms. In the job, he became the “secretary of everything,” with a portfolio that ranged from overseeing the post-9/11 expansion of Special Operations Forces to reviewing nuclear targeting (223). Vickers offers a close look under the hood of his role in US strategy and operations in the war on terrorism, including the global campaign to dismantle, degrade, and defeat al-Qaeda; and Neptune’s Spear, the operation to kill Osama bin Laden. His personal narrative of involvement in the second war in Afghanistan includes friendly reunions with former Afghan mujahideen and more contentious encounters with Pakistani frenemies. (He keeps a greater distance from Iraq). The wingspan of his portfolio encompassed the drone program, cyberwar, counterproliferation, counternarcotics in Mexico, counterinsurgency in Colombia, and military operations in the Middle East. He continued globe-trotting battlefield circulation and added intelligence reform when he moved up the policy ladder to become Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence (USD-I) in 2011. Among the observations he derives from his senior tenure is that the post-9/11 realignment of national security agencies was less important than the new capabilities developed within the organizations, particularly turning Special Operations Forces, CIA, and new technologies into effective instruments of counterterrorism. He also sounds an alarm, echoed by the congressionally mandated Commission on the National Defense Strategy, calling for urgent and fundamental change to the US military and other government agencies that are not prepared to meet the challenges of what he unhesitatingly calls “The New Cold War” (7, ch. 23, 417–44).5
Along the way, Vickers unfailingly reflects a sense of loyalty and common mission among fellow soldiers, colleagues, and partners within the relatively small leadership circle of the national security community. Attributing his success to them, he says, “I was lucky again and again” (471). His individual characterizations tend to stay on the surface, however, and his portrayal of the bureaucracy, while not entirely friction free, is more often scrubbed of the sharp competition that pervades interagency relations in a government of divided authority. He does occasionally bare his steel, fending off a DoD ploy to seize control of the Afghan covert action from the CIA and delivering a blow-by-blow account of Lieutenant General Michael Flynn’s removal as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014, along with shock at Flynn’s controversial associations with Putin’s Russia and Donald Trump.
Neither does Vickers hold back from evaluating faults at two ends of the spectrum. He criticizes presidents for underreaching and for overreaching: Clinton for pulling punches in the hunt for Osama bin Laden; Bush for invading Iraq; Obama for lacking determination in Syria, Libya and the surge in Afghanistan; Trump and Biden for the botched endgame in Afghanistan. He also shares abundant errors he made at every stage of his career and sprinkles them with lessons taken to heart. These begin, for example, with a parachute embarrassment during Special Forces training that demonstrates failure can be a better teacher than success. He admits that, even as he helped shape the war on terrorism, he missed how the Afghan Arabs in the war against the Soviets would metastasize into bin Laden’s al-Qaeda and how the invasion of Iraq would provoke a virulent insurgency and fuel the rise of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), admissions of participation in collective and individual failure.
Without detracting from Vickers’ accomplishments or suggesting he should have been clairvoyant, these lapses raise cautionary issues that coalesce around the over-militarization of US foreign policy in the larger realm of geopolitics. This long-standing concern of former CIA Director and Secretary of Defense Robert M. Gates dates to the early Cold War, when concepts like escalation dominance and proxy wars in the gray zone had their origins in the strategic challenges of great-power confrontation in the nuclear age. In this context, what stands out about the success of escalation dominance through indirect means in Afghanistan is not that it proved a general proposition. Rather, in an era of containment punctuated by two costly limited wars in Korea and Vietnam, the asymmetric vulnerability that rolled back the Soviet Union came toward the end of four decades and resulted from a unique and complex combination of circumstance and determination.6
There are further examples from Afghanistan of the consequences of over-reliance on military power. Vickers gives important new elements about the trials and tribulations of getting Saudi Arabia to fulfill its promise to match US funding for the CIA program in Afghanistan. He does not, however, mention how the Saudi regime’s fear of losing political legitimacy motivated its parallel program that channeled Arab jihadis to Afghanistan to keep them away from Mecca after the seizure of the Grand Mosque in 1979. He regrets that greater effort to reconcile mujahideen factions after the Soviet withdrawal from Afghanistan might have prevented the anarchic civil war and rise of the Taliban that followed. Attention to Afghanistan’s political future during the march to military victory might have led to a different road than the one that resulted in the September 11 attacks. After overthrowing the Taliban emirate in December 2001 and running al-Qaeda to ground, it is not evident that more effective combat would have avoided counterinsurgency quagmire because utility of force was limited in an unnecessary war that no longer hinged on military factors. Vickers supports a popular strategy called “one valley (or one tribe) at a time, ” in which small Special Forces teams would support the Afghan Local Police and community development projects to engage the population and secure their support. The idea was derived from coherent and venerable irregular warfare doctrine but faced real-world problems. It came up late in the war—when the Taliban had become a virulent insurgency. How much time and how many Special Forces soldiers would it have taken to pacify a country with several thousand valleys? Most importantly for current application, at no time in two decades of the second Afghan war did the United States and the NATO Allies it led achieve escalation dominance, despite an enormous preponderance of military power.7
To raise a final issue, as long as the classified wall shields Vickers’ robust assertion that enhanced interrogation techniques (EITs) “contributed significantly to CIA’s understanding of al-Qaida . . . after the 9/11 attacks and provided important intelligence in the hunt for Usama Bin Laden,” it remains just that, an assertion (218). In contradiction, the “Torture Report,” sponsored by Senate Select Intelligence Committee Chairman Diane Feinstein of California and forcefully supported by Arizona Senator John McCain, declassified and released in 2014, concluded that, “Use of EITs was not an effective means of acquiring intelligence or gaining co-operation from detainees.” (There are even dueling Hollywood films: Zero Dark Thirty, in which the CIA and DoD—including Vickers—officially cooperated, and The Report, in which they did not.) Again, recognizing the successes of counterterrorism and the indispensable importance of military-intelligence prowess as the foundation of US power, assessing to what extent protecting American values and interests is best served by all means available, the question becomes, at what cost?8
The heroic character Vickers invokes as he takes stock of his long and exceptional career is not Ian Fleming’s irrepressible James Bond, but rather John Le Carré’s discreet bureaucrat-spy of the Cold War, George Smiley. An apt contrast, it is difficult to evaluate Vickers’ contribution to national security in altogether tangible terms. His career was largely self-made, more than a sum of ranks or positions on an organizational chart. Whether partnering with Charlie Wilson to supply the mujahideen with weapons, arguing for more Predator orbits to target terrorists, twisting the arms of suspicious Pakistani ISI commanders, or shaping forces for future wars, he showed what a mission-focused, strategy-minded Green Beret can do and the United States can achieve. As a senior civil-military leader at the intersections of policy, strategy, and operations, his impact often amounted to grabbing the pen or making the most convincing, best argument in a room of smart and powerful people. As a master of bureaucratic politics, he demonstrated the highest measure of value—he was effective.
The arc of accomplishments comes across in his acknowledgments:
I still stand in awe of President Reagan and former director of central intelligence Bill Casey for believing that it was possible to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan, dismantle the Soviet Empire, and bring the Cold War to an end. I am likewise profoundly grateful to President George W. Bush and President Barack Obama for giving me the opportunity to return to government service, contribute to the dismantling of al-Qa’ida, deliver justice to Usama Bin Laden, expand our special operations forces, and transform our intelligence and defense capabilities for a new era of great power projection (480).
Arriving at conclusions, Vickers proffers 10 principles of strategic leadership. The last one is, “[T]o leave things better than you found them, and to make a difference” (472). This memoir will help history judge. For the present, accolades abound. His retirement ceremony in 2015 included a reading of the letter signed by Obama, which summed up: “For 42 years, you have displayed a knack for being precisely where our nation has needed you most” (474). He is rightly proud to have earned the National Security Medal and the prestigious Donovan Award, named after General “Wild Bill” Donovan, who commanded the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—the progenitor of the CIA and Special Forces— in World War II. Appropriately today, Vickers chairs the OSS Society, founded to honor “the continuing importance of strategic intelligence and special operations to the preservation of freedom.” He leaves no doubt, however, that this job may not be Mike Vickers’ last chapter: “Writing my memoirs . . . has made me realize that I am not ready to give up the fight” (477).9
Alfred A. Knopf, 2023 ▪ 559 pages ▪ $19.45
Todd Greentree
Dr. Todd Greentree is a former US foreign service officer, who served as a political-military officer in five conflicts, including El Salvador (1980–84) and Afghanistan (2008–12). A member of the Changing Character of War Centre at Oxford University, his most recent publication in Parameters was “What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?” (vol. 51, no. 4, Winter 2021–22) He is currently writing The Blood of Others, a book for Columbia University about the wars at the end of the Cold War in Afghanistan, Angola, and Central America and their consequences.
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Endnotes
- Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant. In Two Volumes, vol. I (1885) and vol. II (1886) (Charles L. Webster & Company, 1885 and 1886); Henry Kissinger, The Complete Memoirs: White House Years, Years of Upheaval, Years of Renewal (Simon & Schuster, 2013); Robert M. Gates, From the Shadows: The Ultimate Insider’s Story of Five Presidents and How They Won the Cold War (Simon & Schuster, 1996); and Robert M. Gates, Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War (Alfred A. Knopf, 2014). Return to text.
- T. E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (Jonathan Cape, 1935); and George Crile, Charlie Wilson’s War: The Extraordinary Story of the Largest Covert Operation in History (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2003). Return to text.
- Todd Greentree, “H-Diplo Article Review 966,” review of “The Myth of the ‘Afghan Trap’: Zbigniew Brzezinski and Afghanistan, 1978–1979,” by Conner Tobin, Diplomatic History 44, no. 2 (August 2020): 1–9, https://issforum.org/reviews/PDF/AR966.pdf; Zbigniew Brzezinski to President Jimmy Carter, memorandum, December 26, 1979, “Reflections on Soviet Intervention in Afghanistan,” National Security Archive, https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/document/18120-document-8-georgy-kornienko-was-top-deputy; and Gates, From the Shadows, 144–49; and National Security Division, U.S. Policy, Programs and Strategy in Afghanistan, Directive 166 (March 27, 1985), https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/public/archives/reference/scanned-nsdds/nsdd166.pdf. Return to text.
- Carl von Clausewitz, On War, ed. and trans. Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton University Press, 1976), bk. 1, chap. 3, 102. Return to text.
- “Commission on the National Defense Strategy,” RAND National Security Research Division, July 2024, https://www.rand.org/nsrd/projects/NDS-commission.html. Return to text.
- Robert M. Gates, “The Overmilitarization of American Foreign Policy: The United States Must Recover the Full Range of Its Power,” Foreign Affairs 99, no. 4 (July/August 2020): 121–32; John Lewis Gaddis, Strategies of Containment: A Critical Appraisal of American National Security Policy During the Cold War, rev. and ex. ed. (Oxford University Press, 2005): 87–124; Robert E. Osgood, Limited War: The Challenge to American Strategy (The University of Chicago Press, 1957); Forrest E. Morgan et al., Dangerous Thresholds: Managing Escalation in the 21st Century (RAND Corporation, 2008), xv, 15–17, 34–36, https://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/monographs/2008/RAND_MG614.pdf; and Michael Fitzsimmons, “The False Allure of Escalation Dominance,” War on the Rocks, November 16, 2017, https://warontherocks.com/2017/11/false-allure-escalation-dominance/. Return to text.
- Kim Ghattas, Black Wave: Saudi Arabia, Iran, and the Forty-Year Rivalry That Unraveled Culture, Religion, and Collective Memory in the Middle East (Henry Holt, 2020), 51–84; Todd Greentree, “What Went Wrong in Afghanistan?,” Parameters 54, no. 3 (Winter 2021–22): 7–22, https://press.armywarcollege.edu/parameters/vol51/iss4/3/; David B. Edwards, “The Perfect Counterinsurgent’: Reconsidering the Case of Major Jim Gant,” Small Wars & Insurgencies 31, no. 2 (March 2019): 420–44; Jim Gant, One Tribe at a Time: A Strategy for Success in Afghanistan (Nine Sisters Imports, Inc., 2009); and Adrian T. Bogart III, One Valley at a Time, JSOU Report 06-6 (Joint Special Operations University, July 2006), https://jsou.edu/Press/PublicationDashboard/199. Return to text.
- Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, Committee Study of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Detention and Interrogation Program, Executive Summary, declassified version (US Senate, December 3, 3024), https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/press/executive-summary_0.pdf. Return to text.
- The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) Society, n.d., accessed on January 25, 2025, https://www.osssociety.org/. Return to text.