![]() 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. 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. I described it as the job of a lifetime and it was culmination of my decade and a half operational part of my career.Īnd 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 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. 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 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 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. ![]() Shield of the Republic is a Bulwark podcast co-sponsored by the Miller Center of Public Affairs at the University of Virginia. ![]() They also discuss the delicacy of working with nuclear land mines as a special forces officer. They discuss his role in overseeing the CIA’s covert assistance program to the Afghan resistance in the war against Soviet occupation in the 1980s, how his experiences as a Green Beret impacted his approach to policy making as a senior official, his academic work at the Office of Net Assessment and CSBA on the revolution in warfare, his return to government in the Bush 43 Administration orchestrating the intensification of the war against Al Qaeda and his role in the bin Laden raid, as well as his thoughts on the endgame in Afghanistan and the lessons of earlier proxy wars for the current fight in Ukraine. Eliot and Eric welcome Michael Vickers, the author of By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations and Strategy (New York: Alfred A. ![]()
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