By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy by Michael G. Vickers

The least deceptive way to read this endless, muddled and minutia-laden memoir would be to view it as a very long piece of propaganda: a type of limited hangout of all of the covert (and overt) things the United States does globally in its attempts to project power. It can also be read as an attempt at an extended--and I mean extended--defense of the CIA and all of its meddlings all over the world.

This is if you actually read the book. Don't. Piled up with words but saying little of substance, this is the most obfuscatory memoir I've ever read. The author's voice fundamentally irritates: he has a compulsive need to share staggering amounts of unnecessary detail, he comes across as relentless credit hog, and he repeatedly attempts to place himself right in the middle of the action--even when it's clear he wasn't. Perhaps least ethical of all, he has a habit of framing his actions and decisions so they appear more correct and predictive in retrospect than they actually were.

This last habit is a subtle near-mendacity often seen in corporate and bureaucratic environments, where it is a necessary survival skill. You have to be able to string together some sort of loosely believable causal chain such that all successes appear to be yours, while all your failures belong to somebody--anybody!--else. Success has many fathers; failure is always an orphan.

A few examples, some big, some small, some laughable, where the author attempts to place himself, Forrest Gump-like, right in the middle of everything. Describing his early CIA work thwarting the 1980s Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, he repeatedly refers to "my strategy"--as if he were the architect of everything over there, when it really was only his first major overseas assignment (see Chapters 5 and 7 especially, as well as Chapters 8 and 10). We'll see him use vague, resume-speak language to emphasize or exaggerate his level of involvement in events: in one of the more embarrassing examples, the author writes "In four years, I had increased the number of Predator orbits dedicated to the strategic counterterrorism mission against al-Qaeda more than sevenfold, from three to twenty-two" (see page 249) when in reality he really only asked his superiors to grant them. In a 2007 meeting to help President George W. Bush repair a badly bungled strategy in Iraq, he's quick to write that everyone in the meeting "agreed with my recommendations" (page 220).  We see the author exaggerate how many mujahideen commanders he personally met, saying he met with "several" when he really met with three (page 106). Describing an ill-thought-out and ill-executed Afghani raid on a small city, the author writes "I hated watching it" as if he were actually there, and not in his cubicle at CIA headquarters (page 173). And on the events after 9/11, the author writes as if he's right in the middle of the action, doling out little tidbits about what the CIA knew and when they knew it, when in reality he not only had long ago left the CIA, he wasn't even working in government at the time (Chapter 11).

Things become still more painful as the author tells the reader about all the foreign leaders, military figures, government bureaucrats and politicians he became "good friends" with, something that happens so many times throughout this book I lost count. I knew guys like this back in my days working on Wall Street, and they can be found in corporations and bureaucracies everywhere: "good friends" with everyone, affecting themselves as key decision-makers and action-takers, wanting everyone to know how crucial their roles were in everything they touched. The reader cringes from time to time from the author's blatancy, and across nearly five hundred pages, reading this book becomes an increasingly excruciating experience.

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The reader is left wondering: why does this guy try so hard to place himself in the center of events? Why does he so frequently exaggerate his influence, control and involvement? And what could possibly be gained by repeatedly pointing out that he is "good friends" with so many people throughout his own memoir? It leaves the reader in a state of increasing distrust of the author over the course of the book.

Let me also single out Chapter 23: Winning the New Cold War, as the book's worst chapter: it should have been ruthlessly cut. It's filled with pablum (for examples see my notes to Chapter 23 below), and it contains an astonishingly incompetent assessment of the late-2022 battlefield situation in Ukraine, where the author describes the Russian army "on the verge of collapse" (page 437). Given how the situation there really turned out, such a claim should be absolutely mortifying to any self-professed intelligence expert. Mortifying.

So far it sounds all bad. But this book has one redeeming quality: it indirectly teaches many ugly truths about our increasingly arrogant and interventionist government. The author, along with his CIA and DOD bureaucracy, never sees a situation that he doesn't want our country embroiled in. His budgetary "needs" are infinite. And all of his interventions were always successful... or they would have been if the CIA had only gotten the resources they needed. We see a particularly pathological example when the author describes his and the CIA's decisions and actions around al-Qaeda. Deep in the book the reader hears several times how al-Qaeda is "on the precipice" or has even experienced "operational defeat" thanks to various CIA and US military interventions in various countries (see Chapters 12 and 13), only to see the organization shortly afterward burst out "reconstituted," and stronger and better-organized than ever. 

If that's "operational defeat" I must be using a different working definition than the author.

It's an interesting form of the McNamara fallacy. In the foolish Vietnam conflict, the USA appeared to be "winning" all along, because all of McNamara's "metrics" and "assessments" from the battlefield showed success everywhere you looked. Just look at the body counts!

And this is when we should take a step back and take in the sum total of the USA's interventions globally over the course of this author's career. Forget the author's credit-hogging claims and all of his winning metrics. What do we actually see? We see nothing but costly, endless and deeply unpopular wars, increasing global instability, and the USA with fewer friends and more enemies than ever. How can you be "right" about all your decisions and strategies all along the way yet show such consistently pathetic final results? It's only possible if, like Robert McNamara, you mendaciously highlight all the wrong things.

[Readers, for the love of God, please do not read the notes to follow. Don't even skim them. They are there to help me order my thinking and better remember what I read, but they are not worth reading--particularly in the case of this excruciating book. Life is short!]

Notes:

Prologue:

3ff The book opens with an in medias res technique as the author steps off a Russian-made helicopter somewhere in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region in 2009, during the war on al-Qa'ida, and he thinks back to 1985 when he was in the same place helping to guide the Afghan war against Soviet Russia. "Then, as now, I was dressed in standard intelligence officer garb: a button-down shirt, khakis, and sunglasses."

5ff The author says he writes this book for three reasons: his duty to history, his duty to the American people and his duty to future intelligence operatives to pass on what he has learned. [Interesting to note the comments here as the author quotes former CIA analyst Bruce Rydell in the introduction to his "outstanding" What We Won: America's Secret War in Afghanistan, 1979-89 that the CIA's defeat of the Red Army in Afghanistan was "a pivotal event in modern history," ending the Cold War, leading to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the Soviet Empire. [Note that the author quotes someone else making this claim--this can be good rhetoric, but here it just makes an overblown claim sound more defensible than it actually is. We will see the author use this transparently rhetorical technique a relentless infinity of times throughout this book.] Also, note this quote: "I am the only operator and operational strategist whose career ranged from the Afghanistan covert action program in the 1980s to our war with al-Qa'ida during the first decade and a half of this century." The author also lists other theaters he was involved in: Grenada, the Afghanistan war after 9/11; counter-proliferation operations in Iran, counter-narcotics operations in Mexico, activity in Syria to support the moderate opposition during the Syrian civil war, support for Ukraine in the Donbass [by now it should be obvious that the USA had "advisors" in Ukraine in direct conflict with Russia from the very beginning]. "Some of these operations were successful; others were not."

7 "It is essential that America and the West defeat Russian aggression and win the New Cold War against China and Russia. The world will be a much better place if we do." [It's interesting to think about this statement: it could be written (and believed) in earnest by this author, but one should consider it in the context of the fourth turning, in light of the fact that "Clown World" is descending into worse and worse incompetence, and for that matter most of the governments of the West are increasingly incompetent right now. It's also fascinating to hear the author's near-constant language of conflict and his constant desire for American supremacy, a mindset that characterizes so many Boomer-era officials just like him throughout my country's warmongering leadership. One can't help but feel that it's time for this generation to hand over the reins and go away, taking their delusions and grandiosity with them.]

8 "I served under six presidents... I hope all readers will conclude that this book is written without any hint of partisanship. I hope the general reader will gain significant insight into the secret worlds of intelligence, special operations, and strategy, and come away with a better understanding of the importance of individuals in driving world-changing events..."

Part I: Preparation 

Chapter 1: Green Beret

11ff He's a child of Italian and Slovak immigrants, a desultory student, he becomes fascinated with the CIA after one of his high school teachers slips him a NY Times article on how the CIA fomented a Hmong paramilitary operation on the North Vietnamese. He joins the Green Berets, excelling as he begins learning intelligence and infiltration ops.

25ff Interesting description here of a field exercise where he and a team "liberates" a fictional country, "Pineland" by setting up intelligence networks, performing in- and exfiltration exercises, supply ops and psych ops, etc. He gets assigned to a Special Forces group assigned to the Soviet bloc in Western Europe.

Chapter 2: Special Forces Operator and Commander

28ff On his training; a sanitized discussion of Green Berets: created originally by Kennedy and used in Vietnam [of course no comments here on how they were used to start "a covert war to get us into a war"]. On Colonel Aaron Bank, first commander of the 10th Special Forces Group, which would eventually be the author's unit; Bank organized an unsuccessful mission to capture Hitler. [Perhaps it's worth reading about this?] Vickers gets stationed in Germany, works with East European emigres; studies and works on a lot of ultimately useless plans like studying Soviet satellite states for supply and drop zones, also in forming "stay-behind" resistance forces in case the Soviets overran Western Europe [it's fascinating how clueless policymakers can be sometimes: had our leadership ever read any Russian history, they would know this would never, ever happen, then or now, unless Russia was under blatant provocation. These guys should all be required to learn about Russia's dealings with Sweden's Charles XII and on before doing any kind of policymaking.]

32 On Cuba's intervention in Angola's civil war around 1975; on the author's [shocking] near-deployment there with zero preparation, although the mission was called off: "A US military intervention in Angola, even a small, low-visibility one, just wasn't in the cards so soon after the Vietnam War." [Jeez, these guys really want to intervene everywhere don't they?] He gets stabbed in the thigh teaching a hand-to-hand training class; other training, he does the Ranger course; does climbing school in the German and Austrian Alps; he learns to work with "backpack nukes" etc.

38 He already hints at his plans to try to become "attractive" to the CIA; in Germany he learns Czech [this is quite frankly hard to believe--the Czech language is difficult, it has seven different cases; the idea that this guy learned it to any level of fluency is... implausible]; training with British counterterrorism instructors; he becomes an officer and then chooses to be stationed in Panama, near the Sandinista insurgency; he graduates first of 58 in his officer training course; basically he did everything twice: first in the special forces qualifying course where he really struggled, and second here where it all clicked for him, and thus he'd had more training than the higher-ranked officers in his class.

44-5 More false starts: he's almost deployed to defend the El Salvador embassy, almost deployed on another attempt to get the hostages in Iran, etc. At this point the reader cannot help but notice by now that he has been in the Special Forces for eight years and yet was never actually deployed anywhere, much less had he been in combat. But now: "My string of false starts had come to an end" as he's deployed to minor counterterrorism activities in Central America, citing a couple of Honduran flight hijackings where the United States played a minor-sounding peripheral role.

Chapter 3: Going to War with CIA

52ff [It's interesting to hear the author's James Bond fantasies here, it's also perhaps disturbing to think that an entire generation of CIA operatives may have watched too many James Bond movies]. The author goes through a whole huge battery of tests and training programs and is hired by the CIA.

58ff Discussion of another false start/non-deployment, this time to Suriname for a mission to extract a CIA employee who was imprisoned there; he beings working up a plan but the guy was freed before anything could be put into action.

61ff He participates in early operations for the Grenada invasion in 1983; interesting that Grenada had a communist takeover under Maurice Bishop who took power in bloodless coup, but then Bishop was then placed under her house arrest and later executed by an even more extreme left extreme communist faction under Bernard Coard. Also interesting comments here on the Grenada invasion as an effort to "deal Cuba a blow"; advising and sending military people there as well as helping upgrade gun emplacements and landing fields etc. He is sent there with $15,000 in local currency to work on acquiring "assets."

67 Lots of head fakes in this memoir so far: first he keeps telling us all these details about "the deployments that didn't happen"; here's another weird example where the author tells the reader something that lacks sufficient context to make any sense to the reader, and (as we'll see in a moment) once you're done reading it you wonder why the author states any of it in the first place: "The night before the [Grenada] invasion Dick B. was supposed to go in with an asset of ours who owned property in Grenada on a specially-equipped CIA helicopter with a forward-looking infrared radar. The plan was to occupy an overwatch position located on the asset's property that overlooked the airfield. The asset, however, got cold feet at the last minute, and Dick's mission had to be aborted. It was frustrating, to say the least, but it wasn't central to our plan." [Hooo boy, where do I start? The reader doesn't know who the (lamentably codenamed) Dick B. is, the author drops him into the story without any explanation. Then the author goes into a full paragraph of ultimately meaningless detail--even describing minor features on the CIA helicopter--on a sub-mission ends up not even happening. And then the author tells us that this never mattered in the first place ("it wasn't central to our plan"). It's just weird and borderline aspergery to include, repeatedly, this kind of irrelevant detail in a memoir, only to surprise the reader with its total irrelevance after the fact. At the very least the author should contextualize things for the reader by writing something like "I'll share as a minor tangent a good example of the types of peripheral missions that never get off the ground as part of a larger central mission..." Then the reader actually knows what the heck you're talking about, he has proper context for it, and you as the author have situated us appropriately in the story so we readers understand where we are. Otherwise cut these useless details out: give the reader those two minutes of his life that he just wasted learning something that "wasn't central to our plan." This has happened already more than a few times in this memoir and we are only 60-some pages in.]

67ff The rest of the Grenada mission reads like a not well-written army battle history; also stepping back from it you kind of get the feeling that this was not that well an executed mission; and we lost quite a few guys that we should never have lost against opponents that weren't all that competent.

69 Another extensive and odd paragraph here on what he wore during this mission, including loafers and linen pants.

70 He goes to inspect a major arms storage facility and he comes under fire; the author then tells this story: "The major who accompanied us, his face down in the dirt, looked at me and said, 'This is it, the big C, combat.' I said, 'Yep.'"

71 Interesting blurb here about Gail Reed, an American who the author believes was radicalized in Cuba, who then married a Cuban diplomat, and then was posted to Grenada; American soldiers had trashed the Cuban ambassador's residence in disgust at her. Also interesting that at this point--several days after the operation began--the military and the Americans learn that there is yet another med school in a different location with an additional 233 students. [How could they not already know this? Grenada is only 21 miles long and 12 miles wide!]

73 Hilarious passive voice sentence here: "Significant intelligence was obtained about Cuban operations, and opportunities to collect more down the road were fully exploited."

74 Note also here how the "regime media" concept has been in place for a long time, look at this passage: "The press had been excluded from the operation for the first three days. When they were finally let in, a few foreign opinion leaders who work over influence assets of ours were among them. Bill asked me to meet with them to go over the press themes we wanted them to emphasize in their countries..." Once again the author fills the reader in on all the clothes he wore, how he changed in a men's room at the airport, and then now he bought an airline ticket home with his American Express card. He receives an award for heroism, etc. He's only been with the CIA for four months and yet they put him into a hot zone right away; on how he made much of the mission up as we went along, etc.

Chapter 4: Counterterrorism Operations, Operational Certification

77ff On the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut; note also at the same time a French military barracks was bombed [I didn't know this]; also note that a similar explosion happened at the American embassy in Beirut six months earlier, killing 63 people including eight CIA officers and Bob Ames, the Chief of Station for the CIA in Beirut. [It's disturbing to know that the Marines guarding the barracks weren't allowed to carry loaded weapons--even after this other event had happened just six months before. Disturbing.] The author writes: "A new era of mass casualty terrorism had been born." He is sent into a new counterterrorism task force to respond to the Beirut bombings. The author takes self-congratulatory pains to ensure the reader knows "I had been requested by name to serve on it."

79ff The author says here the CIA believed that the Islamic Jihad Organization was a cover for an Iranian Shiite party which had wanted to respond to Israel's invasion of Lebanon (which was Israel's effort to eject the PLO from Lebanon); the Americans ended up absorbing an attack meant for a totally different enemy. The Islamic Jihad Organization would eventually become the known as Hezbollah. The idea here was that Iran and its proxies were waging a war in Lebanon against both the Israelis and the United States using suicide bombings and kidnappings.

80ff Discussion of a meta-debate about whether to strike at various targets; it's interesting to think of the amount of hardware and the sheer cost here: see for example a 28-plane strike against Syrian air defenses near a certain facility that only damaged a radar and a couple of gun positions, while the USA lost two planes that were shot down and a third plane was damaged, a pilot was killed and another pilot was captured. (!!!) [This would be an unbelievably huge cost in training and equipment for next to no military gain. And then compare this to today's drone-based warfare where you could do equivalent damage with a few $1,000 drones. War has changed radically and a lot of the military's big hardware appears now to be useless, or worse, expensive targets.]

81ff The author then tells the reader that he came up with a plan to use the Special Forces to target Syrian forces in Lebanon, but after the disastrous air strike against Syrian air defenses the plan was canned; then within another month or two Reagan pulled all US military presence out of Lebanon. The author then learns that his chief of station in Beirut, Bill Buckley, was actually kidnapped in 1984 by Hezbollah, he was tortured and died in captivity. "He is an American hero." [How can the CIA just lose a guy, a senior CIA guy, like this?] "We learned, or should have learned, that it's critical to fully think through what you're getting into before you go in, especially in the Middle East, and not cede the advantage to our enemies or pick unnecessary fights." [You can say that again.]

83 He does the CIA Special Operations training course at "the farm," the clandestine training facility of the CIA. [I guess if you're a CIA insider you get to say "CIA" without the definite article.] "...the training was honestly more than a bit anticlimactic after the operational experiences I'd already had."

83ff "What makes a foreigner want to spy for CIA? Money, ideology, compromise, and ego, or 'MICE.'" Discussions of various things like surveillance detection, how to deal with "rough surveillance," how to do car tosses and dead drops, disguises, covert communications, clandestine photography, etc. The author also casually mentions how he was singled out for praise by other senior CIA people.

88 The chapter concludes with him receiving his stationing: "I wanted to follow the sound of guns... And within a few weeks, I would be running the biggest secret war of all."

Part II: War Within the Red Army

Chapter 5: The Great Commission

91ff September 1984: Vickers learns he'll be sent to Afghanistan; at this point the Soviet-Afghan war had been going on for nearly five years; he is interviewed for the position and wants to show that he has much more than just Soviet weapons expertise--which was what the CIA's Afghanistan program actually needed--and he starts voicing strategic thoughts on the conflict, saying that he though the mujahideen could win,  which went against the consensus among CIA analysts who thought for sure that the resistance could not win. "By disagreeing with the analysts, I had gone out on a limb in my answer, but I felt it in my gut."

93 "I felt as though I had been handed a great commission to wage a secret war against the Red Army in Afghanistan and to directly confront Soviet power. As a young Special Forces soldier, I had dreamed of waging unconventional warfare against the Soviets to liberate Eastern Europe or to defeat a Soviet invasion of China, but I never imagined that my great war of liberation might occur in Afghanistan instead." [The reader really does get stronger and stronger "Boomer obsession with the Soviet Union" vibes with comments like these, it's like they forgot or never realized that the Soviet Union isn't even a thing, and that today's world is far, far different from the world they grew up in. This paradigm isn't just obsessive and nostalgic, it's geopolitically naive and dangerous. And yet these guys can't seem to put down this mental model.]

95ff It turns him out he knows almost nothing about Afghanistan; he has to learn from Louis Dupree's 800 page book Afghanistan. He learns how the Afghan Communist party came to power and how it struggled to impose its will on the Afghan people overall. [One thing that's striking to me about the increasingly centralized United States government is that it never seems to see the same centralization in itself that it fought in the Soviets.] The reader now is subjected to learning every single thing that the author reads in order to learn about Afghanistan. [This reminds me of the excruciating detail in James T. Costa's biography of Alfred Russell Wallace, where we not only learned about every bug Wallace found, we also learned about all the bugs he didn't find too!]

96 "I felt as if I had been possessed. With increasing intensity, I thought about how we could shift the balance decisively in favor of the Afghan resistance, and by the end of 1984, I had formed the core ideas of how we might actually win." [This guy is barely out of his CIA training programs, he's barely been positioned in his first real overseas job in a real theater, and he frames it as if he's already running the whole show, conceiving strategy, etc. This strikes the reader as implausible. I think also even if he did dictate all this play himself, he would be very careful to express in clear terms that he was part of a much larger team with whom he would share credit.]

97ff Backgrounder here on the history of the Soviet invasion and why it happened, the Communist coup in 1978, by a political party that was organized by the KGB in Afghanistan back in 1965; the KGB had penetrated many layers of the country's government: ministries, the secret police, universities, the military, various businesses, etc. When the 1978 coup happened, within 24 hours the prime Minister and most of his family were executed; Russia then asserted "precedent doctrine" [this doctrine asserted the Soviet Union's right to intervene in any socialist country where a communist regime was seen as under threat] and started shipping Soviet advisors into the country; then the new government began implementing collectivization and all sorts of other things that alienated every segment of Afghan society--including gender equality, pulling out chapters on religion in school textbooks and replacing them with texts on Lennon and Stalin. The regime started executing senior military and political enemies, and then within two months armed uprisings broke out all around the country.

100ff Note also here comments on the actual Soviet invasion, which was driven by Yuri Andropov and communicated to the then-ailing Brezhnev in only vague terms. [Interesting: so there was a power struggle between factions in Russia all along probably over this conflict.] Note also that Andropov thought the CIA was trying to create a new Ottoman Empire in Central Asia, the author here says this was "not even remotely true"--the reader can't help but doubt the author here honestly. The author further says that Marxist ideology forced their hand because they had a doctrine that once a state went communist it would have to remain that way--see Hungary and Czechoslovakia--so the Soviets felt compelled to intervene. Also on the Carter Administration being surprised by this, they (as well as the CIA) never thought the Soviets actually would invade, they thought it would be foolish to do so! [And of course we went on to repeat this mistake ourselves decades later with our foolish and failed invasion of our own.]

103ff On the Red Army's transition to depopulation: destroying crops, having free fire zones all over the country, destroying villages, and then creating a gigantic secret police and intelligence organization to imprison and torture people.

105 [A sobering, telling quote here that shows the US government learned nothing from the Soviet experience] "After completing my review of Soviet strategy and operations, I was reassured. After nearly five years of conflict, the war was a stalemate. [Sound familiar?] The Soviets suffered from poor strategy and tactics, insufficient forces, and a lack of intelligence. They had thoroughly penetrated the Afghan government, they knew little about the resistance, and certainly not enough about it to take effective action. Ironically, the longer the Soviets stayed in Afghanistan, the less they seemed to know." [Yes, this sounds very familiar. As a matter of fact the United States would repeat these errors and remain stuck (and ignorant) in Afghanistan for even longer than the Soviets. And they would leave under even greater ignominy.] "The Soviets were in a worse predicament in Afghanistan than the United States had been in Vietnam. I looked forward to making it far worse for them."

106ff Discussion here of the various groups involved in the Afghan insurgency, and then a multi-page discussion of the various resistance commanders involved. Note this strange quote, where the author says there were six that he paid special attention to, "four of the six were still in their twenties and thirties." But then he says, strangely, "I personally met with several of them while visiting mujahideen training camps in Pakistan." Then, stranger still, there is a series of one-paragraph bios of each of these six leaders, with details on which of these guys he met: the first leader he never met, the second one there's no comment whether he met him, the third one he met, the fourth he met, the fifth one he met, the sixth one he "never got to meet him." [Forgive me for getting all poindextery here, but he didn't meet "several," he met three--by his own words! Sometimes minor little misrepresentations/exaggerations like this say a lot.]

110ff In 1979, three days after the Soviet invasion, President Carter signs a "covert action finding" authorizing the CIA to provide lethal support to the Afghan resistance; Carter also makes the strategic decision to arm the mujahideen and use Pakistan as a base for covert action, and also to enlist Saudi Arabia's help in funding it. Note also relations between the US and Pakistan were under severe strain after a coup had put a new government in power in 1977, which executed the predecessor leader; also Pakistan pursued having nuclear weapons with Chinese assistance. Note also a severe attack on the American embassy in Islamabad in Pakistan after a mob was whipped up under a false rumor that the US was behind the seizure of Mecca's Grand Mosque.

111 I'm no expert in Pakistani history but I think the author makes a mistake here about the 1977 coup which brought General Muhammad Zia ul-Haq to power: Vickers claims that Zia ordered the execution of his "predecessor," but it was actually Bhutto Zia had executed, not his predecessor, who was president Chaudry.

113 Note Pakistan's position here: Zia wanted to "keep the pot boiling in an Afghanistan, but not have it boil over." [Pakistan is interesting in that they need to choose suzerainty/vassalage arrangements strategically just like any other smaller country: they would want to play the Soviet Union, the US and China all off each other; they are also navigating often-strained relations with their neighbor/peer states India, Iran and Afghanistan. It's also interesting to note here that the author has never made any mention of vassalage or suzerainty arrangements: he's never made any reference to antiquity and, say, the era of Rome and Persia's conflicts where the same vassalage/suzerainty dynamics existed with various buffer states between these empires; you would think he would know about these historical analogs and draw from them.]

113 Strange paragraph here where he talks about the Saudis who had agreed to wire matching funds to support the CIA's efforts in Afghanistan; how the US had to "arm twist" in order to get these payments; the reader wonders: why throw the Saudis under the bus on two levels here? First of all that they were involved in the first place, and second of all that they only paid their share under arm twisting? What is the author trying to say, by saying this?

114 Discussion here of the "Charlie Wilson's War" phenomenon where "Good Time Charlie" escalated funding and escalated the activity in Afghanistan against even the wishes of the program's leadership at the time; also on the pros and cons of escalating things in Afghanistan; keeping it low-profile had been successful: it kept the program covered and deniable; escalating it might provoke a massive response from the Soviets, it could also result in a terrible slaughter of the Afghan resistance. The author here is in total favor of escalating things dramatically, "I was one of those most bent on doing it."

Chapter 6: Developing a War-Winning Strategy

116-7 [Occasionally it's very strange to read this memoir and see so many internal inconsistencies in the author's story: on one page he says "In less than a year, I had gone from participating in operations to directing a secret war on an unimaginable scale." But then on the next page he writes about being barely able to get the Saudis to pay their fair share to fund the conflict, and then writes about weapons being obtained from the Egyptian military that are substandard, and then he writes about trying to wrest strategic control of the entire program which had been given over to the Pakistani government. So which is it? Is he really"directing" this thing or isn't he? And why bloviate about it?]

117 Also an interesting mention of the various concerns about expanding the conflict, in part that it would mean "fighting the war to the last Afghan" as the author puts it. [To this a reader today can't help but think about Ukraine "being fought to the last Ukrainian" thanks to the US and NATO's puppet government-run proxy war there. This is really gross geopolitical behavior, but unfortunately the optimal kind of conflict is one in which you're dictating someone else's exposure to it. Sadly these kinds of conflicts have been engineered throughout history.]

118 Now the reader learns that the transformation of the conflict will take up this and the next chapter, and then yet another two chapters will describe driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan. So we get four full chapters on this conflict.

118ff On getting man-portable air defense weapons that actually worked to the Afghanis; also helping them develop the ability to do indirect fire and also getting them sniper rifles, "The use of snipers is a key tactic in guerrilla warfare. They harass the enemy, achieve psychological effects disproportionate to the battlefield losses they inflict, and enable precision kills of key enemy personnel." And then on a higher level: unifying the various and fractious Afghani peoples, moving tremendous amounts of additional ammunition, driving improvements to logistics, offering specialized training and more complex operations, all of which meant greater collaboration among the different insurgent groups. Also interesting comments here about the Soviet assets the CIA had reporting to them, thanks to high level Soviet defections in 1985, which was the so-called "year of the spy"; note also that Aldrich Ames then began selling secrets to the Soviets which resulted in the execution of several of these assets.

123ff The author learns that there were no models for how to equip a large insurgent force in any of the US military manuals or CIA manuals; he thought maybe he could learn something from the CIA's experience in Laos but there was nothing he could benefit from there either [Our military interestingly has no clue how to fight an insurgency? One thing Vickers could do here would be to study the Confederacy during the US Civil War; or examine the various Colonial Wars; this guy does not seem to have much of a grasp of his history.]

124 Comments here on engaging Pakistan ordnance factories to make ammunition; interesting that they would outsource this to Pakistan; perhaps the US didn't have much of an ammunition and weaponry infrastructure even as early as the 1980s?

128ff Cute story here about how they're sourcing weapons from Egypt as well, and one of the air defense weapons the Egyptians were trying to sell the CIA was completely unmovable; Vickers, Charlie Wilson and Gust Avrakotos watched a team try to get mules to pull one of these anti-aircraft guns up a hill, it was a flop [I'm sure this made it into the movie Charlie Wilson's War]. The author then, strangely, takes care to tell the reader about an elaborate dinner the Egyptians held for them afterwards, with belly dancers and sword swallowers. "What a way to fight a secret war, I thought."

130ff They also built training camps in Pakistan with a throughput of up to 20,000 recruits per year! I'm sure that came back to bite the United States decades later.

131ff We are introduced to the black-hearted Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the mujahideen leader "most favored by the ISI, but also the problem child of the resistance." The author foreshadows here that Hekmatyar was up to his own plans that weren't just to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. Also we meet with Colonel Iman ("true name Sultan Tarar") and Colonel Khalid Khawaja, "two serious and dangerous men, whose interests and actions would diverge substantially from America's after the Cold War had ended." "...we were able to forge an effective partnership--at least for the time being."

133ff Interesting blurb here about communications radios with "burst transmission" capabilities, where a lengthy message could be sent hundreds or thousands of miles with a time-compressed broadcast of just a few seconds; this greatly reduces the probability of interception and geolocation of the sender. Interesting.

135ff Fascinating and seemingly ignorant comments here from the author as there's an internal debate in the CIA about whether to support the Nicaraguan resistance to Communism rather than the Afghanistan regime; the author argues "Nicaragua was a sideshow in our struggle with the Soviet Empire." [Perhaps, but Nicaragua is directly in the United States' sphere of influence!] Either way Reagan settles the debate by giving a directive to escalate the war in Afghanistan. Also an interesting turf battle here where the US military tries to get the author to transfer the CIA's leadership of the Afghan resistance to US Central Command, but only if the Soviet Union invaded Iran--something that seems impossible. There's a debate over this and the author says it was a non-starter for the CIA. Note also that the Defense Department wanted a larger role in conducting the Afghanistan program, wanting US Special Forces to directly train the mujahideen, something you couldn't do in a covert program.

Chapter 7: Critical Decisions: March 1985 to January 1986

139ff On "escalation dominance" as a key concept in strategy: in World War II the US had superior mobilization capacity; with the Korean War the US threatened nuclear weapon use. "Escalation dominance shows your adversary that he can't win because you can escalate the conflict to levels he can't match. If he persists anyway, his defeat is inevitable... Between March 1985 and January 1986, four critical decisions gave us escalation dominance over the Soviets and enabled my strategy to become a war-winning one." ["...enabled my strategy" is an unfortunate way to phrase it: again, the reader is left wondering why the author so frequently claims so much credit. Does it mean he feels he doesn't get enough credit? Is the author tone-deaf? Is it a "doth protest too much" kind of thing? What?] Note here that Reagan was the one who gave the approval to escalate everything; second the partners here--Pakistan, China, Saudi Arabia and the UK--had to support/not interfere in this escalation; then the CIA and Congress doubled funding for the program to a billion dollars per year; and then Reagan in deployed Stinger surface to air missiles to Afghanistan. [The reader can't help but crack a wry smile at the money here: yes it was a billion dollars in 1980s dollars, but this still looks like nothing compared to today when the USA's legislators will routinely launder $80 billion of taxpayer money through the Ukraine conflict (a self-evidently a losing conflict from the get-go), leaving US citizens with nothing to show for it afterwards but more inflation] "By the end of that year, [1985] Soviet leaders would start looking for the exit."

141 Anecdote here on how the CIA loves to kill trees too: the National Security Council wants a review of the Afghanistan program, Vickers writes a response that he claims is more than one inch thick. Imagine doing this part of the job: bury your legislative auditors under a 1-inch thick stack of papers, likely knowing that no one will read it.

142 Some more "doth protest too much" over credit, this time he at least claims credit for the CIA, not for himself: as the Department of Defense wanted credit for various policy changes; the author claims that directives from the National security council and the White House were also overblown; he claims that the CIA controlled everything--except for the decision by Reagan to introduce Stinger missiles into the conflict. According to the author, "It was all CIA."

143 Note that a few pages ago he talked about doubling the budget to a billion dollars, now he talks about increasing it another two and a half times. These things sure do grow.

145-6 Wild, weird anecdote here about how his team entertains a major Pakistani military figure in DC by taking him out to see Godspell. [!!!]

149 Interesting example of a "budget flush" here, where a submarine program got cancelled with a week still left in the fiscal year, and that money was reallocated to "Charlie Wilson's War" some 300m! Vickers says next that he gets the Saudis to match it, and now he's talking about a 9x increase in his "base budget" year over year. [With government budgets, it's "use it or lose it" and next year's budget uses this year's as a starting point... you absolutely have to spend the money you get: nobody will ever send the money back.]

149 Now Vickers talks extensively here about preparing color-coded graphics for ordnance deliveries: I never knew making pitch decks was such a big part of covert war fighting! Next he has to put together another inch-thick stack of documents to complete a "memorandum of notification" as required by the CIA's lawyers, because they were ramping spending in a way that was changing the scale or scope of the Afghani conflict such that the administration or Congress needed to be notified.

153ff Three paragraphs of minutiae here on the British "Blowpipe" man-launched surface-to-air missile; the author goes into excruciating detail on all of its specs; its advantages to the existing SA7 launcher being used in Afghanistan at the time... and then we learn that the Blowpipe only had a 10% kill rate when it was used in the Falklands War. Worse, since this weapon was clearly British it would signal to the Soviets that the conflict was significantly escalated, indicating clear involvement of multiple new combatants. Still worse, these things didn't even work: most of them had to be sent back for repair; the "Pakistanis" didn't even want to use them in the first place [I think the author even misspeaks here, he likely means "Afghanis" but perhaps this just gives away the fact that most of these weapons probably ended up in Pakistani hands anyway?] Finally all this stuff was replaced as the CIA starting bringing in Stingers instead, but of course there's the problem that this likewise would ruin any kind of deniability about the US involvement in the conflict. Note also that initially the Pakistanis refused the Stingers because it would signal an expansion of the conflict and direct American involvement, then Pakistani president Zia wanted his own Stingers just for Pakistan's border defense. [The author's threads here are getting confused and muddled here at least from the reader's standpoint]. More minutiae here on the controversies up and down the bureaucratic chain to decide whether and how to ship them, then how to train everybody to use them, how to train the trainers how to train soldiers how to use them, how to keep inventories from getting too low, etc., all the while they are still waiting for president Zia in Pakistan to give his approval.

Chapter 8: Driving the Soviets Out

159ff The author starts this chapter off talking about a CIA report written in May of 1985 assessing the Afghani War; [this is again kind of weird and inconsistent, since this report disagrees with the author's own assessment that he shares (just a few paragraphs later) where he talks about where the report was wrong--and yet it was his own division of the CIA (the Near East division) that wrote the report! You'd think that the Near East division would take into account any and all feedback from the very guy who is supposedly running the entire covert operation! The reader can only conclude from this inconsistency that either 1) the CIA is a tremendously incompetent bureaucracy where the left hand and the right hand don't communicate, or 2) the author is dramatically over-representing the command and control responsibilities he had in his own organization. Or, 3) possibly both. More disturbing: you'd think the author himself might see this inconsistency and realize what it implies about all of his claims for credit.]

160ff On Gorbachev's strategy for victory. "Needless to say, we monitored every aspect of the new Soviet leader's strategy for its impact on the war and to make sure our strategy could still counter his." Russia escalated its deployment by another 26,000 troops, bringing the total to 125,000. [This at first sounds like a lot, but it actually isn't: see for example peak troop deployment in Vietnam for the United States was more than half a million men. This appears to be a moderate scale conflict: it was even smaller than the United States invasions of Iraq--either the first or the second. Note also for context: during the US's recent failed Afghanistan invasion, US troop levels were 110,000 at peak.]

163 One of the Soviet attack operations ends up resulting in the capture of the CIA's Swiss anti-aircraft guns, the Swiss-made Oerlikons. "The loss of our Oerlikons so soon after they had been deployed sent a few shockwaves through CIA." [The reader see this and can't help noticing that the Swiss started pissing away their "neutrality" far earlier anyone realized: their recent alignment against Russia in the current NATO/Ukraine proxy war is apparently only the finishing touches on the destruction of traditional Swiss neutrality]. [Also worth noting the author's comments earlier in the book about how these specific Swiss anti-aircraft guns were so big and heavy that no one could move them up and down the rugged terrain of Afghanistan. And then of course these weapons were lost anyway. What a waste.]

164ff On Soviet efforts to intimidate Pakistan because they knew Pakistani support was behind the resistance; they were going to encourage and support a separatist movement founded by the oldest son of president Ali Bhutto [Ali Bhutto had been executed by current president Zia; recall the confusion on page 111 above about who exactly Zia executed; here the author is more clear on which president it was]; also the Soviets sent fighters and fighter bombers across the Pakistani border, occasionally engaging in dogfights with the Pakistani Air Force; also they raided across the border, engaging a sabotage, etc. All of this "caused considerable concern at CIA." However I think everyone at this point knew the Soviet Union could never do anything major like invade Pakistan.

167ff Discussion here of a major "highway of death"-type engagement: a column of Soviet heavy equipment destroyed by combined arms operation of Afghani forces; then also some impressive sabotage, where Afghanis destroyed 21 Russian fighters and fighter bombers using CIA-provided demolition kits. These two operations destroyed hundreds of millions of dollars of Soviet combat equipment. Then in June of that year [I guess this is 1985 still? The author neglects to tell us] there was a large-scale raid on a collaborationist Afghan army garrison. [Note also another odd experience the reader has here, as the author writes about how he shows CIA director Casey satellite photos of this operation, pointing out the burn marks left where there used to be planes: the reader gets the mental image of a junior guy jumping out of his cubicle and running up to the big boss's office to show him his latest surveillance photos, and then the reader realizes that Vickers is clearly at CIA headquarters hearing about things second- or third-hand himself, while all along he's taking about my operation, my strategy, etc. It's a bit painful.]

170 [As the author talks about the accelerating "combat intensity and operational tempo" here, the reader can't help but think what was to happen 40 years later to a new set of invaders, Americans this time, who couldn't pre-emptively imagine what it would be like to be in the Soviet's shoes, and thus couldn't learn to stay out a conflict that ended as ignominiously for us as it did for the Soviets.]

173ff [Another unfortunate turn of phrase here: the author describes an ill-thought-out and ill-executed Afghani raid on a small city, and then writes "I hated watching it" as if he were actually there, and not in his cubicle at CIA headquarters! Better to write "I hated watching it from my office at Langley" as you would sound less like that kid everybody knew in middle school who pathologically exaggerated everything all the time] Note also here there are more examples of the insurgency trying to engage in conventional operations when they didn't have the equipment or skills in place to do so. And note another comment here about the infamous British Blowpipe missiles and how they went 0 for 13, a perfect record of 100% misses.

175 Comments here on Yousaf, an Afghani leader we met earlier in the book; the author blames him as one of the people making some of these dumb operational decisions, writing that this was the beginning of a set of decisions "that would sabotage the program and undermine our alliance with Pakistan."

175-6 On 1986 as the bloodiest year of the war, the Soviet Union starts to "Afghanize" the conflict, transferring responsibility to the puppet Afghan government as they begin their withdrawal.

Chapter 9: "We Won"

177ff Now the author shifts to discussing someone named Milt Bearden, who took over as CIA chief in the region, Vickers makes a weird comment about "two events within his first six weeks showed him the power of our new strategy and the good fortune it would bring him." First a successful rocket attack by the mujahideen, then a lucky break where the mujahideen were able to blow up a huge Soviet ammunition warehouse.

179 [Extremely strange here: the author suddenly leaves the CIA for Wharton Business School right before the big climax of the Soviet Union's collapse there, why leave at this point? The author doesn't say at all here; he addresses it in slightly more depth in the next chapter but this story still makes no sense at all. The reader perhaps can hypothesize that the Iran-Contra affair was about to blow up into the headlines, as it had been brewing for a number of years at this point, I wonder if this is related to why he left, or is his own explanation (which we don't learn until Chapter 10) actually true?]

180 Once again the author cites the CIA's own analysts analyzing the Afghan conflict incorrectly. You think he would at least explain why there were these discrepancies inside his own organization now that we've seen two separate examples of this happening.

181ff Now the author has shifted to talking about "my former colleagues" who were now putting in place "my" strategy; the reader is left to understand that he has now left the agency and they're keeping him "abreast" of what's going on.

183 Intriguing, but also discouraging and depressing comments here about the relative cost of the war as the Soviets had to spend some $75 billion dollars (in today's dollars) versus the US spending $10 billion [although note Vickers doesn't specify "today's dollars" for that $10 billion... since the reader is now aware of the author's penchant for exaggeration we probably should gross that number up to about $25 billion in today's dollars]; in any case the point here is to show that you could cost-effectively impose very high costs on your opponent using covert war. This is the exactly the insight that the US totally forgot as we lit a tremendous amount of money on fire in Iraq and Afghanistan when we went back there after 9/11: thus we repeated exactly the failure we extracted out of the Soviet Union in the 80s. Incredible.]

184ff The author then draws a direct line from the collapse of the Russian military presence in Afghanistan to the collapse of the entire Soviet Union itself: this certainly didn't help the Soviet Union but this claim is a bit of a stretch.

186ff Now a postmortem on what we did that won it, why we won it and what we got wrong; some of the quotes here again are kind of sad when we look in retrospect at the US's recent failed military involvement  in Afghanistan. See for example this quote: "A second critical factor contributing to the Soviets' failure in Afghanistan was their wildly unrealistic political goal. Afghanistan, with its strong religious makeup, overwhelmingly rural character, tradition of decentralized rule, ethnic tensions and factionalism, and strong hostility to foreign invaders, was not the world's best candidate for subjugation and transformation into a foreign-dominated, centrally directed, secular, cohesive, socialist state." [You don't say! And yet the foreign, centrally directed, secular, now near-socialist United States thought that they could do with the Soviets couldn't, 40 years later. Absolutely tragic and foolish.] Other things that the author admits that the US got wrong: a lot of the CIA's analysis was wrong; also the CIA failed to understand Osama bin Laden until the 1990s as a counter-terrorism focus and did not understand that al-Qaida would have the motivation to attack the remaining superpower; then the withdrawal of everyone--including the United States--from Afghanistan after the Geneva Accords paved the way for the Pakistani-supported Taliban conquest of Afghanistan some four years later, and this enabled al-Qaida's transformation into a global threat. And of course that the author doesn't say this but the US foolishly went back into Afghanistan and simply repeat all of Russia's errors!

Chapter 10: Building New Intellectual Capital

190ff After weirdly dropping a bomb on the reader last chapter that he suddenly left the CIA right before the climactic victory in Afghanistan, he now writes: "With my strategy now fully in place, I had started thinking about what I might do after the Afghanistan Covert Action Program." [The reader once again is in a state of disbelief here on a few levels: first to what extent he is exaggerating his import in the Afghan program, and second, what the real reasons are for why he left the CIA, not the rehearsed, "let me play my tape recorder" narrative that he tells now.] He's mortified that a bureaucrat from the career management staff in the CIA told him that he needs to start over and do some traditional officer tours in the field to prove that he could recruit and handle assets, he didn't get any credit for serving in a job "three grades above my current one" as the author says. The author also says in the next paragraph that he'd already been offered a command position two grades above his current rank but he turned it down, it wasn't good enough, and that clearly turned out to be a bad decision now that he's sitting in front of this bureaucrat back home. [Back in my business school days, I remember a few different guys who were upsdet that the companies they worked for "didn't make them CEO fast enough."] Vickers spends the next few paragraphs explaining all the different things that he could do that he didn't want to do. "I had risen too fast and, more to the point, too unconventionally. It was my first career setback, and it was an odd one I was being penalized for too much success." [Sounds like the same kind of response you'd hear to the "what is your biggest weakness?" interview question: you're supposed to say, "I work too hard."] Vickers fancies himself another Bill Casey, so he decides "I have to leave the CIA in order to come back and one day run it just like Bill Casey did." So he goes to Wharton to get an MBA, drawn by the potential money that he would make; he does the executive MBA program, then he tries his hand at a couple of high-tech startups, then he goes to Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, decides to pursue a PhD. [Note here that for the first time he now talks about gaining a deep knowledge of military history since the Renaissance: this is stuff that he really should have already known but was likely too young to know that he needed to know it.]

196ff On Andy Marshall in the Pentagon's Office of Net Assessment where Vickers worked while finishing his PhD; this guy was nicknamed "Yoda"; on his groundbreaking work on nuclear weapons strategy as well as on organizational theory, both of which helped the US understand Soviet decision-making. Vickers wrote a paper on revolutionary change in warfare (this was also the subject of his PhD) he got a copy of this paper sent to Andy Marshall via Andy Krepinevich who he was taking a course with at Johns Hopkins; Yoda read it, liked it, and offered Vickers a job. "He would become one of the most important mentors in my life." The author then talks about how he thought the next big challenges for the US [here, once again, he frames his opinion as "agreeing with Marshall" which means it isn't his opinion, but rather Marshall's opinion] were the rise of China and prospective military revolution that could alter global power balances; Vickers tells the reader here he thought he could serve and make an important contribution if he could help the US prepare for those two challenges. [It's also interesting to think through how predictive (or not) Vickers really was here on "military revolution," it seems clear that he didn't really see the impact of drone warfare for example, certainly not to the extent that low-cost drones are being used so effectively against armor and "big iron"-type militaries in theaters like Ukraine or the Red Sea theater vs the Houthis, etc.]

197 "I also thought Russia had become a fairly benign and severely crippled power that would no longer pose a threat to the United States and might even become a future U.S. ally. I would be right on China and the revolution in military affairs and wrong on everything else." [Note here that for the next few pages he talks about all the things that he was right on, none of which sound right at all, honestly, as we see the nature of the Ukraine-Russia conflict and what's happened with this latest generational transition of warfare. Also, as Vickers talks about high-expense military items like missiles and submarines it makes the reader cringe, thinking about how the US spends enormous amounts on defense, and then if the reader is paying attention to the US debt/GDP ratio, he cringes even more to think about the fact that the US government interest expense on our own debt exceeds our defense spending, and then (cringing more still) to find our spending on Social Security and Medicare massively exceeds our defense spending... Clearly, we have to come up with a less expensive solution than building all this big iron, which amounts to offering floating and flying targets all over the world for cheap drones. The US Empire is already far into its decline: perhaps we should just retreat behind our oceans and feel grateful, while we make appropriate study of Roman military strategy in the first through the third centuries AD to get a sense of what we are capable of doing and what we are not capable of doing.]

Part 3: War with Al Qa'ida

Chapter 11: 9/11

203ff On the 9/11 attacks: our author "knew" Al Qaeda was almost certainly behind the attacks. [What? The reader first wants to know how he could know this, and then the reader wonders why he doesn't say how he knew it. This kind of writing sacrifices credibility.] He then gives a background about Osama bin Laden and the Afghan Arabs that he attracted to his base in Pakistan; the author dismissed these Afghan Arabs, as did the CIA at the time; note also how the author is very quick to say "the CIA had no role in creating this foreign fighter network." They dismiss this group, but then they're told by an Al Qaeda informant that Bin Laden was the head of a worldwide terrorist organization. The author wants to have his cake and eat it to here: he's framing it as if the CIA knew all about this threat, he claims the CIA was given limited covert action to mount a capture operation during Clinton's second term, but claims the agency lacked the capability to conduct it; so what is it and which is it? Did you "dismiss" these guys, have no role in creating them, or have enough knowledge about them to (not) mount capture operation Another weird quote here claiming that on September 28th, 2000, a man in robes was observed by a Predator drone flight over Afghanistan, that per the author this was certainly Bin Laden, but the drone was not armed "so all [the] CIA could do was watch." And then the CIA issued another warning August 6th 2001 according to the author. [Once again, this just sounds misleading and CYA as the author tries to have it both ways: as if they knew all about the threat, they knew all about Bin Laden, they knew all about his whereabouts, but they didn't have the resources or the permission to do anything about it. Note that this is exactly how you protect a government organization from criticism--and more importantly, how you protect it from budget cuts! Plus you have guys like this from your organization write hagiographical memoirs about the CIA too. This guy is really, genuinely, relentless.]

208ff Discussion of how the [second] conflict in Afghanistan began; how the CIA allegedly led the operation; comments here on how various leaders of the mujahideen were executed or assassinated by Al-Qaeda [the author phrases it as "my former mujahideen commanders" here: once again as if he weren't sitting in a cubicle in Langley during most of conflict with the Soviets]; these assassinations by Al Qaeda were meant to be a decapitation strike of the mujahideen, but the author is quick to remind the reader that of course the CIA had the whole situation set up to be "robust enough" to withstand the loss of these leaders. [The reader can't help noticing here that the author had nothing to do with the government and less to do with the CIA at all at this point--he wasn't working in government at all when 9/11 happened! But the way he frames it here makes it sound once again like he's right in the thick of things.]

210 Another "I was in the thick of things" claim here: Vickers claims he spoke to a high level DOD friend of his who asked Vickers what he thought about the Paul Wolfowitz plan to attack Iraq first; Vickers says it would be "insanity"... and then practically takes credit for the Iraq invasion not coming first, as if he somehow influenced it.

211ff Discussion of the attacks on the Taliban and the various attempts the US had to form alliances with anti-Taliban groups in Afghanistan [the reader can't help but notice here how smoothly and mendaciously we've transitioned from "trying to get Osama Bin Laden" to "attacking the Taliban" when these enemies are not the same]; Once again the author--although this time he at least writes "as I watched from the sidelines" to qualify things--acts as if he's right in there, as if he knows all the guys on the ground; then he tells the reader about some punditry he did on the Chris Matthews show: Matthews asks Vickers when he thought that the Afghanistan war would be over, and Vickers replies "before Christmas"--and then he has the temerity to claim he was right even after adjusting this claim to mean "at least where the opening campaign against al Qaeda was concerned" [which means he was not right, and of course we were "in" Afghanistan ultimately for nearly 20 years, which is about the opposite of "before Christmas"]. Finally, note this highly tone-deaf credit hog quote here: "The rapid defeat of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda was like watching all my children--special forces, the CIA, and long-range precision air power--perform spectacularly." [Once again, the reader can't help but ask why the author continues to do this--does he not see the doth protest too much aspect of it, that the more he makes comments like these, the more doubt the reader has about the author's credibility?]

215 The chapter ends with George W. Bush furious at the Special Forces for losing Osama Bin Laden, and the author writes: "Little did I know at the time that UBL's ["Usama Bin Ladin" per the author's spelling] fate and mine would become intertwined a decade later." [At this point the reader wonders what the credit hoggery will be when this subject comes up (we'll see an extended discussion of Bin Laden's assassination in Chapter 14 and 15).]

Chapter 12: Disrupt, Dismantle, Defeat

216ff The author articulates another "win both ways" situation here: in the prior chapter he complimented his "all my children" (as he phrases it) as an example of how a very small force was so effective in Afghanistan; but then here he is arguing that the cost of "small footprint warfare" meant not having the intelligence assets or forces in theater to capture Osama Bin Laden; but then he argues even if there was a much larger force on the ground they still would not have caught Bin Laden. [Another thought here: the author squirts a lot of ink to show that his actions and predictions were right, but these actions and predictions are all subcomponents of a much larger creation: the generalized American policy in the Middle East and the Neareast, and that creation has been an absolute disaster for a very long time. Thus one takeaway here is does it really matter how many many decisions you got right if the sum total of your creation is a shitshow? No matter how much credit you might take for the components, the greater creation is still a turd.]

217 Our author is still on the sidelines as he discusses the CIA's secret detention and interrogation program with captured Al-Qaeda representatives in the wake of the first five years of this war; on how they found the mastermind of 9/11, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed; a comment here on waterboarding and the claim that three Al-Qaeda people "were the only detainees in CIA custody that were subjected to it." [At this point the reader has to be pretty credulous to believe this.] Also he addresses the "enhanced interrogation techniques" and claims that the Department of Justice, President Bush and Congressional leadership all knew about it and approved it; also according to the author, the incredibly useful information they obtained by using it was probably not obtainable without these techniques; note also these techniques are a violation of the Geneva Convention; note also that the Bush administration killed the CIA secret detention program in 2006, sending everyone to Guantanamo Bay to a military detention facility there.

220ff There's more on the one hand/on the other hand stuff here: supposedly the operations against Al-Qaeda and Afghanistan were highly effective, but suddenly we learn by 2006 Al-Qaeda had grown strong enough to pull off additional 9/11-scale attacks. By 2007 "we had to get a lot more aggressive." Comments here on the author's meetings with President Bush on Iraq war strategy in 2006 [but wait: I thought he recommended not having anything to do with Iraq a few chapters ago?] "The war was going badly, and the President wanted some outside advice as he searched for a better strategy." The author recommends that we go "indirect" in Iraq and transfer security to Iraqi forces because the USA being in Iraq in a large scale presence was inflaming the insurgency. The author here is quick also to tell the reader that everyone in the meeting "agreed with my recommendations." And then "The President had called Donald Rumsfeld a couple of times already and told him that he needed to find a senior position for me in DOD." The Undersecretary of Defense for Policy calls in the author, pulls his book off the shelf [had the author mentioned anything about a co-authored book on the revolution in war before? I must have missed it?]; the Undersecretary tells Vickers "I was the only person he knew who had the background and experience for this job." "I had declined several positions in DOD over the previous several years, but this one really grabbed my interest." [Again these offhand retroactive mentions are kind of strange, the reader never knew that DOD loved him so much] he spends four years in this position, mostly on the war with Al-Qaeda but also on the Iraq war, counterproliferation operations against Iran, counterinsurgency operations in Columbia and counter-narcotics operations in Mexico; he doesn't give a date for this stuff but it's 2007 or thereabouts. [Also worth noting that not one of these operations remained to be in good shape by several years later, I'd be curious to whether today this guy takes credit for the success and then blames his successors on the fact that things went off the rails.]

228ff Vickers then gets asked again for input on the growing threat from Al Qaeda: "it was the second time in my career I have been asked to develop a strategy to change the direction of a war." Basically the idea here was to run far more intense and unilateral Predator strikes and cross-border special operation raids to deny Al Qaeda safe haven. The author then talks about how much of this is classified and can't be discussed; cute.

229 Very interesting blurb here about leadership at the CIA; the author talks about Mike Hayden, who replaced Porter Goss "whose difficult tenure had left CIA with a serious morale problem." [He doesn't seem to want to criticize anyone, ever, in his agency; he hasn't done so at all in this book except for the unnamed bureaucrat who denied him a promotion a few chapters ago; here he criticizes Porter Goss but does so only indirectly, and Vickers just drops this breezily on the reader, who never knew before that the CIA had a leader creating serious morale problems--why was something so relevant and serious not been mentioned at all before? But the author just breezes on--this enables him to continue to not criticize any aspect of the CIA despite clear evidence here that there is a lot to criticize. Good bureaucrat behavior!]

230 Vickers is now getting ready to present a new counterterrorism strategy to Bush in 2008; Pakistan experiences a political crisis as president Musharraf now faces opposition from his own military, and his forced from power and into exile.

231ff Discussion of the various versions of the Predator drones and their ability to loiter over a target for up to 20 hours; on policy changes to make it easier to do some of these drone strikes; and on how amazingly effective they were per the author; supplementing them with special operations raids; these would be done both in Afghanistan as well as Pakistan.

235 Interesting quote here about Nancy Pelosi when Vickers briefed the house leadership right in the middle of financial crisis negotiations. "I was surprised at the attention they gave us. I was even more surprised by Speaker Nancy Pelosi's reaction when we briefed her on the plan, 'What took you so long?' she asked us. Bipartisanship is always stronger behind closed doors. In my experience, that's where our leaders are at their most impressive." [The reader sees this and rightfully concludes that the only things the two factions in our bifactional monoparty consistently agree on is 1) warmongering and 2) deficit spending.]

238ff Talk here of President Obama's Counter-Terrorism and Homeland Security advisor John Brennan wanting to develop an accelerated defeat plan against Al-Qaeda on the Afghanistan/Pakistan border region. [Once again, thinking of how long this conflict dragged, how it never ended, and how it was literally the exact opposite of "an accelerated defeat plan" makes for very sobering reading.]

240ff The author continues to defend the predator airstrike campaign as "the most precise air campaign in the history of warfare," with "extremely low" collateral damage. [The reader continues to have a sinking feeling by now that the author is not being consistently truthful in this book, it's hard to know for sure and I don't want it to be so, but you do get this feeling.]

241 "By the time I retired from federal service in 2015, core Al Qaeda had largely been operationally defeated." Then a strange tail reference here to certain CIA women who "made particularly important contributions" and then the author follows up with I wish I could say more about who there [sic] are and what they've done to keep America safe." [This is a strangely attached verbal appendage stuck onto the back half of this paragraph; it doesn't really make sense why the author would stick this in here in a completely forgettable and missable place, but then say, "oh, but I can't say anything more about it."]

242 And then, after complimenting the CIA on its operational defeat of al-Qaeda and bringing the group "to the precipice" from 2016-19, Vickers then warns that the Biden Administration, by limiting drone strikes, has now put the us at risk by withdrawing from Afghanistan and giving al-Qaeda the ability to reconstitute itself. [Fascinating: so did you defeat them or not? You put this thing in place, you claim victory (and take quite a bit of credit for it), and yet this group can "reconstitute itself" that easily? This does not sound in any way like operational defeat.]

Chapter 13: The War Beyond the Core

243ff Claims here on how Al-Qaeda formed affiliates in Iraq, Yemen, North Africa, etc. Note this unintentionally hilarious chart of "Number of terrorists, estimated" including "Russia: 100."

At least they didn't take these numbers to decimal places

243ff Also an odd mention here about the shootings at Fort Hood, Texas and Pensacola National Air station in Florida, both the author calls Al-Qaeda activity; see also the so-called Lackawanna 6, connections between senior Al-Qaeda leaders and the Buffalo region of New York. [Once again, how can you call this "operational defeat" if they've infiltrated us far better than we've infiltrated them?] The author offers some bloviating resume-speak here, writing: "I helped design and oversaw several campaigns and operations to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat Al-Qaeda's other affiliates" [Note the keywords "helped" "oversaw" and "several"--all classic resume weasel words to make it sound like the author did a lot when--after quite a few examples of credit-hogging by this point in the book--the reader can't help but conclude he likely didn't.]

245ff Backtracking now to 2002 and Predator strikes against people who organized the attack on the USS Cole.

246 Comment here--a striking one--about a meeting with Yemen's president Saleh in 2008: "Saleh had had a meeting with a US journalist just before I met with him in which he had revealed some sensitive matters that he shouldn't have. When we met, Saleh was clearly agitated and asked me if the United States could do something to muzzle the journalist. I told him that we didn't do things like that in the United States." [We don't, do we?]

247ff Discussion here of various Yemen-based terrorist activities that the author basically uses to convince the Obama administration to have greater military engagement in Yemen; they managed to expand the endless wars to here too.

247 On Nidal Malik Hasan, a US Army Major who in 2009 began shooting at his colleagues in Fort Hood; it does make you wonder how this guy managed to get promoted to a major; he was allegedly in email contact with a senior leader of Al Qaeda in Yemen. Also on the so-called "underwear bomber" in 2009.

249 Another a good example of credit hoggery here as the author says "I persuaded [Defense Secretary] Gates" in his final months as Secretary of Defense to transfer additional Predator orbits to be used in Yemen" and then "Soon after Leon Panetta replaced Gates, I asked him to approve the transfer of two additional [Predator] orbits, which he promptly did. In four years, I had increased the number of Predator orbits dedicated to the strategic counterterrorism mission against al Qaeda more than sevenfold, from three to twenty-two." [Very, very strange writing here: asking for permission and letting someone else decide to do something means "I had increased?" Very strange.] 

252ff Comments here on Obama and the White House increasingly limiting drone strikes [the reader wonders how this could be possible if the author takes so much credit for the drone strikes "I had increased" just a few pages ago]; how Syria became a new front for Al-Qaeda [wait, several pages ago the author claimed Al-Qaeda was on the precipice and operationally defeated, but now it seems to be spreading everywhere.] "I paid a lot of attention to the global jihadist threat in an emanating out of Syria."

255ff Now on to Somali pirates, and guess what: they also had ties to Al-Qaeda. "I did oversee several raids and other operations" against Somali pirates too. [Objectively, this book is getting a bit ridiculous: this guy "does," or "oversees," or "helps," or "pays attention to" anything and everything!]

257ff The reader has been subjected to dozens and dozens of pages of "one damn thing after another" here, and now we get a long list of every single Al-Qaeda assassination the United States government committed.

259ff Now comments on North Africa--where of course there are still more Al Qaeda operatives. "From 2012 onward, I started paying more attention" to this region as well. Note that the French military intervened here [and note also that several of the French neo-colonial protectorates in this region have recently had coups and are beginning throwing off French interference and control, perhaps once and for all]. 

260 The French operation "saved Mali from falling into the hands of al-Qaeda and its allies." [Cynical readers might also suspect that "Al Qaeda and its allies" is a sort of catch-all term for anybody the US wants to harass or assassinate.]

261ff Now the reader learns that Al Qaeda apparently operates throughout the Indian subcontinent as well. [Once again author appears to be non-self aware here as he discusses how Al Qaeda operates in all of these countries an theaters after his grandiose claims about the organization being operationally defeated/on the precipice. One wonders what his point is, if any, in making these two sets of claims that cannot both be true. Honestly, this chapter was somewhat ridiculous to read because of this.]

Chapter 14:  HVT 1

263ff "We think we have found Usama Bin Laden." "High Value Target number one"; this chapter starts with all the ways the CIA failed to find him, and then discusses the enhanced interrogation techniques used on his various compadres; the author actually names names here about who betrayed Bin Laden under torture [which is interesting, I wonder why he chose to do that. Possibly in an attempt to sow dissension in the movement.]

265 Finally the CIA finds Bin Laden's courier, "the specific sources and methods we used remain highly classified, so I can provide only a general description here." They trace the courier to a large compound that was a million dollar compound; Bin Laden was supposedly living with his wives and children in small guest house on the compound, and there was no visible sources of income for those living there. There was also surveillance video of a tall man pacing around inside the compound, and Osama Bin laden was 6'4".

269 "...the UBL operation became nearly all consuming for me." [Again our author acts like he's in charge of the operation.] "The operation to bring Justice to Usama Bin Ladin would consume nearly all of my time for the next three months. It was a period unlike any other in my life."

Chapter 15: Neptune's Spear

273ff On the first of five meetings with Obama, who wants to do the operation. "It was electrifying." The author can't believe that they were actually going to do it, that the president wanted to go ahead with things so aggressively.

274ff The author is getting insufferable here: "I persuaded SOCOM's leadership not to kill the experimental helicopter program" that we would use; "my ability to explain the operational concepts" was critical in obtaining the president's approval, "my skill at explaining the intelligence case to DOD's leaders" had also been vital, "I was straddling both the intelligence and the special operations worlds," etc.

282ff A lot of back and forth here from the author on the various decisions about whether to use a drone, whether to use an in-person raid, various analysts' "percentage confidence" that Bin Laden was actually at the place, whether to have a backup force. The author makes a point here of saying how Vice President Biden was against the raid, and the author didn't understand why; then he writes that he will have more to say about Vice President/President Biden and his views on Afghanistan in the next chapter.

288ff Description here of the raid itself, in which the author descends into indecipherable acronym-speak: "Trailing thirty minutes behind due to their much higher radar signature were the two MH-47s carrying the QRF and the fuel bladder that would be needed at the FARP."

292 Also note this weirdly quantified "certainty" that they had actually killed Bin Laden: "Early that evening, CIA's technical experts reported that based on facial recognition measurements and analysis, they were 95 percent certain it was UBL."

292 Note also this disturbing mention of how quickly the news leaked out to the media as soon as key members of Congress were notified: the author says that the chyrons on CNN and other networks were speculating that Qaddafi had been killed but "Literally seconds after the notifications were made to key members of Congress, the chyrons changed, and they were now reporting that it was Bin Ladin who had been killed." [This is passive-aggressive but the author is telling the reader, convincingly, that Congresspeople are an instant sieve to the media.]

Chapter 16: AF-PAK

296ff This chapter's title describes Afghanistan and Pakistan as a combined theater, the author describes how Pakistan was intransigently uncooperative with the United States, offering sanctuary to Al-Qaeda as well as interfering in American operations in their border area. The author backs up to 2007, when he was assuming his duties as Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, at a time when the situation in Iraq "was dire" during Bush's surge orders; also the situation in Afghanistan "was getting worse with each passing year." "Our 'good war' was about to turn bad." Discussion here of all the things that the Taliban was doing to improve its strength, numbers and fighting capacity in 2003 and thereafter, this further accelerated in 2006; [I have to check back through the dense blizzard of factoids the author has buried readers in here, but just a couple of chapters ago he sure made it seem like global Al Qaeda was on the ropes by this point.] A long list of various terrorist activities, different tribes, different fighting/guerrilla techniques, etc.; on how the US intelligence community wanted more troops deployed to Afghanistan; on the USA's dependence on Pakistan to execute operations while Pakistan was at the same time offering Al-Qaeda sanctuary in the border region. Repetitive writing here as the author repeats the incoming Obama administration's goal of "disrupt, dismantle, and defeat" Al-Qaeda; also there's interesting comments here about how vice President Biden seem to be against scaling up troops while Obama approved it. [Despite his claims to non-partisanship, the author does not think much of Biden and doesn't hide it.]

305ff The author makes it sound here like he was one of the driving forces in replacing general McKiernan in Afghanistan with Stan McCrystal; the new general McChrystal does a 60-day review and ask for 40,000 more troops in addition to the 20,000 Obama already grudgingly had allocated to Afghanistan; long-winded discussion here on "winning": what winning meant in Afghanistan actually wasn't even clear; there's discussion here about narrowing the parameters of what they're trying to do there: see how the CIA's leader Gates said "we need to keep our objectives realistic and limited, or we will set ourselves up for failure." [If there were forward-thinking strategists running this theater rather than rabid warmongers, they would already have their (extremely limited) objectives established and clearly laid out, they wouldn't be cluelessly rethinking and re-narrating them on the fly.] It's not clear whether the enemy here is Al Qaeda, the Taliban, or the people providing shelter to Al-Qaeda on the Pakistan frontier.

309ff The CIA's Gates asks Vickers to write a strategy paper, and [of course!] everybody liked it; "it implicitly became the basis for our operational strategy in Afghanistan until our drawdown of forces."

312ff More discussion of the difficulties with Pakistan and the Pakistani government, the author calls them "a bunch of duplicitous shits" here. [There's also a disturbing example of strategic blindness here at the end of the chapter as the author talks about a sort of insurmountable problem with working with Pakistan: Pakistan's military leaders saw India as their primary existential threat, thus they wanted both strategic depth and "friends" in Afghanistan--which meant they would always side with the Taliban in Afghanistan against the United States because they had a much more pressing strategic need in the event of war with India. The author seems to know this but doesn't seem to know it: there is a fundamental and structural problem with working with Pakistan and it is not safe to assume they will cooperate with the USA--you have to know this going in! All the cajoling of the Pakistani leadership won't do anything to change this, and it's as if the author is completely deaf to this major, major strategic notion: even though he literally writes about it this problem, neither Vickers nor the USA's intelligence apparatus never seem to pre-emptively take it into account. They keep stumbling into misunderstandings and mismatches with Pakistan in spite of themselves.]

Chapter 17: Surge, Drawdown, Transition, Defeat

317ff The US government thinks it's going to do an "18 month surge" in Afghanistan just like it did in Iraq, but then somebody on Stan McChrystal's staff said something disparaging about Obama in a Rolling Stone article and Obama sacked McChrystal, putting David Petraeus in his place. Then a discussion of the Afghan "local police program" to stabilize villages against Taliban incursion, with page after page of minutia on how great this program worked, measured by all sorts of metrics and commentary; supposedly it "paid huge dividends" and "was our most cost-effective counterinsurgency instrument in the war"...and yet the US was still driven to defeat in this theater anyway. [The reader wonders if the author is even thinking about what he writes: why the page after page of defense of this minor program when the entire theater was lost? Why even talk about it at such length?]

330ff Discussion here of the reduction in force under Obama to around 8,000 troops at the end of his term, and then the Trump peace deal to end the war and withdraw by May of 2021, which the author calls "a surrender agreement." "Some assert that the war was lost long ago and that all presidents Trump and Biden did was recognize reality. But the war hadn't been lost. Presidents Trump and Biden lost the war." [I think it could be equally well argued that the strategically blind US intelligence apparatus lost the war by getting us into it in the first place. The author continues to pathologically fascinate the reader as he constantly describes all the things "we" did there that worked so well, but yet he hangs blame on not one, but two successive administrations. How about setting clear objectives and "winning" before those two administrations both came and went? It also makes the reader think about why do have all these forever wars: it's because there's never a timeline for them to be ended and the military always asks for more, more and more, and there always seem to be reasons to expand and extend the engagement. It would be nice if this author would step back and understand that the American people hate--absolutely hate--forever wars. Having them over and over again is not the will of the people.]

331 See also this quote, a perfectly gross example of justification for endless wars. "The strategic paradox of the Afghan war is that while we couldn't win with 150,000 U.S and coalition troops in country, we couldn't lose with only seven to eight thousand as long as we have the escalation dominance that U.S. air power provided." And of course Vickers makes still more the predictable excuses for continuance: our withdrawal put us at risk, it gives the terrorists more power, it strengthens Al-Qaeda, it makes Pakistan's nuclear weapons potentially at risk of getting into terrorists' hands, and worst of all "it shows Putin that we're weak" [What? That's your reason for overextending yourself in multiple simultaneous theaters? Note also this is perhaps one of the most duplicitous things ever written as everyone knows that the CIA installed a puppet government in Ukraine specifically to foment conflict with Russia in the first place. Now we get to justify endless wars everywhere else because ending them somehow "shows Putin we're weak." Finally, it is astounding to read how this Afghanistan conflict was everyone's fault but the author's and the CIA's, everything they did there was effective and successful!]

Chapter 18: Iraq: Hidden Surge to ISIS

332ff More possibly unintentional mendacity here as the author openly describes how the invasion of Iraq was based on poor intelligence and that the sources that said that there was weapons of mass destruction in Iraq had lied, but then in a footnote he says that "CIA also got it right in assessing that there was no credible information linking Saddam's regime to Al Qaeda and the 9/11 attacks." [Once again his CIA gets it right? If the CIA was actually right about this--and said so at the time--this invasion wouldn't have happened, this is a weird form of deny-deny-deny, and this guy seems to use it throughout the book showing where others were all wrong but he and his CIA were never wrong.]

333ff Worth noting here that the author, by his own words, only went to Iraq once and had hardly any involvement in this conflict; he was much more engaged with Afghanistan. But he also takes time to blame the engagement in Iraq as another reason why the Afghanistan situation was such a failure. [Once again failure is an orphan!]

334ff Worse, despite the fact that this guy was hardly involved in the Iraq operation at all, we still have to learn about all the people he knew there, all the people he met there, all the people he had connections to there, all the people he was "friends" with, all the places he saw when he made his first visit in October 2007. [Again the reader wonders if the author is even thinking about what he writes: if this is really a memoir of the author's career this chapter should not be in the book at all. The only purpose it seems to have is to braggingly show the reader how well-like and wonderfully well-connected the author is, and by now the author has already repeatedly exhausted the reader with plenty of other brags about well-connectedness to need still more here.]

341 Brief mention here of the Sons of Iraq: former insurgents who threw in their lot with the Americans and the Iraqi government to fight Al Qaeda; the author says that eventually 100,000 SOI were put on the US payroll at $300 a month. [Do the math and you'll arrive at $360 million a year in spending, just for this program!]

342 More discussion here of how al-Qaeda in Iraq had lost 90% of its fighting strength and had radically declined in effectiveness, but then the US withdraws him Iraq at the end of 2011 and this, according to the author, gave rise to ISIS/the Islamic State [it would be nice if the author explained how this happened, he just says so and moves on]; on a discussion of how al-Qaeda now had a rival for the leadership of the global jihadist movement, and up to 40,000 foreign fighters flowed into Syria to join ISIS. Then Iraq completely flips the other way as Iraq leader Nouri al-Maliki attempts to dominate Iraq and get rid of his Sunni rivals, but then he ends up snatching defeat from the jaws of victory after various blunders, including firing on civilian protesters in Northern Iraq. There was no appetite to return to Iraq in the US under Obama's administration. [Note here the author once again acts like he's involved in a theater he wasn't at all involved in by saying "I tried to get more predator overflights" for Iraq but he says most of them were allocated to Afghanistan. But wait: I thought in prior chapters he was proudly saying how he took credit for asking for more allocations of overflights to Afghanistan! Once again nothing seems to be his responsibility, as he says "There were no predators left to spare."]

346ff On the shock in Washington when ISIS invaded Iraq, making it halfway to Baghdad as the Iraq security forces collapsed--even though the US had invested $25 billion dollars in them between 2003 and 2011. This galvanize the Obama administration and the US deployed military trainers back into Iraq to rebuild. Again the author acts as if he is "involved" here when he barely was: "I had participated in numerous Deputies Committee meetings" on the thread in Syria "and was pleased that we had taken the strike. I only wished that we had followed it up with more."

347 Here the author offers some lessons from Iraq and Afghanistan, both of which I really wish he and my government had thought about before getting involved in these situations in the first place. First: "Invading a country is generally a lot easier than pacifying it afterwards." Second: "Keeping the main thing the main thing is a core principle of strategy" and after 9/11 we should have focused on preventing another large-scale attack on the American homeland. Third: "Having good intelligence" (perhaps one of the most obvious bromides possible). And then another one: "Short wars are better than long wars."

Part 4: Fighting on Multiple Fronts

Chapter 19: Counter Proliferation, Counter Narco-Insurgency

351ff On delaying Iran from getting the bomb [this appears like paranoia, probably springing from Israel, I don't think a country like Iran would struggle with mastering 1940s-era technology by now. But the USA sure do use "counter-proliferation" to justify saber rattling and various controls that we place on various countries throughout the world.] "Our war with Al Qaeda and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq occupied a lot of my time between 2007 and 2015, but by no means all of it. We were engaged on multiple fronts against a wide range of adversaries, and I was engaged in all of them one way or the other. I worked with our Colombian and Mexican partners in their campaigns against Marxist insurgents and drug cartels, I participate in an operations to delay North Korea's development of ballistic missiles, I helped oversee our program to support the moderate opposition in Syria, and I assisted the Ukrainians in their efforts to counter Russian aggression in eastern Ukraine. But of all these operations on multiple fronts, stopping or at least delaying the Iranians from getting the bomb was the most important." [This paragraph is insufferable on many levels: why exactly? Is it because he claims he was doing everything? Is it because he's sounds like a mindless warmongering neocon? Is it because he's fighting all the wrong wars, yet acting like they're all going great when none of them is? Is it because he never questions the inherent stupidity of all these endless conflicts all the time? It works out perfectly if you love war and can't wait to have more of it: all the wars you're fighting just create more adversaries to have more wars with!]

352 More on Iran getting the bomb: discussion of various options including regime change there [this was during George W. Bush's presidency, and the idea of overthrowing the Iranian government at that time seems utterly insane today given all the other conflicts we were fomenting at the same time]. Discussion of joint operations and joint intelligence work with Israel to try to combat Iran's progress; a long list of all the people/groups that he worked with, from Mossad, the Israeli government, other Israeli intelligence organizations, etc. Somewhat disturbing when he says how impressive it was how the Israel ISMU (which is their version of our NSA) was able to collect incredible information because they had universal military service and got Israel's "best and brightest into its ranks before they went off to college and started high-tech companies. Part of me wished that we could find a way to do something like that in the United States." [This statement is bizarre, the author I don't think has thought through what he really means to say here.] 

357ff Comments on how Israel was always asking the US for special equipment to facilitate airstrikes or special operations on Iran and nuclear sites there, but the Bush and Obama administrations always deflected these requests; the author says "A second core objective of our counter-proliferation strategy was to prevent an Israeli attack on Iran." Also a weird comment here: "...someone was killing scientists associated with Iran's nuclear program. Someone was also using a cyber weapon to cause Iran's centrifuges to crash." [First of all, the reader already suspects who, but the author plays dumb here acting like he doesn't know.]

358 "I will have a lot more to say about Iran's malign activities in the next chapter."

359ff On North Korea, our next highest counterproliferation priority behind Iran; note that they already had nuclear capability with a range of 7-16 kilotons of TNT (Hiroshima was 15 kilotons), they'd done multiple tests, etc.; in 2017 they tested what appear to be a thermonuclear weapon with a yield of up to 250 kilotons. Once again the author talks as if he's directly involved in these things, he's not involved in any way at all--and also appears to be only slightly involved in anything with Iran. He had already left government permanently by the time the issues in North Korea came to a head. Also Note the comments at the end of this section, which are very telling, very typical of someone who spends other people's money. "The [counter-proliferation] mission is too important to not give it our best shot." [What is it about the United States that we are the one who's forced to be the police officer of the world? You don't see Switzerland or Canada trying to work on nuclear non-proliferation, nor do you see Argentina, Mexico or Germany spending billions of dollars trying to impact internal affairs in countries all over the world, why do we have to do it and why do we even think we can do it?]

361ff On operations in Colombia and Mexico: the author frames this as "helping Colombia defeat its Marxist insurgency" [another cheat code for US government officials: you can just call something a Marxist insurgency and then you can go and invade] he claims assistance to Colombia was very successful and Mexico was tactically successful but made much less of a different strategically; in 2012 the author was asked by Columbia's Vice Minister of Defense Juan Carlos Pinzón ("we also became good friends.") to help him develop a strategy to finish off the FARC, they met in Miami for 3 days to develop a plan.

364ff On his various involvement in anti-cartel activity in Mexico; meeting regularly with the secretaries of the Army and Navy and heads of the intelligence service and then, in a cringe-inducing Tim Ferriss moment he writes: "I was also treated to a lavish banquet, with music by a mariachi band."

Chapter 20: The Battle for the Middle East

367ff This is the chapter on "Iran's malign influence" where the author talks about the Arab Spring and how Iranians were engaged in a covert war and battle for hegemony in the Middle East: today these things sound like paranoid projection from American policymakers to justify all of our saber rattling all over the Middle East; The author, in what also sounds like projection, calls the Iranians "Masters at asymmetric and proxy war" claiming they supported a long list of extremist groups.

369 Discussion here of an alleged bombing plot in the United States of an Italian restaurant in Georgetown in order to kill the Saudi ambassador to the United States, the author is quick to tell us that the ambassador is "a friend of mine" and that he "followed all of this intelligence closely." 

370 Discussion here with the Arab Spring, as if the CIA wasn't involved; then it turned that the Arab Spring turned out to be an "al-Qaeda spring" because it led to a stronger al-Qaeda presence in several of the countries experiencing unrest again; the narrative here frames it as if the CIA weren't involved at all, although I am sure they were; and the fact that CIA involvement in these countries ultimately led to strengthening al-Qaeda is just something that happened, we had nothing to do with it.

372 Comments here on Assad: it sounds like our government simply doesn't know who we support or why in places like Syria. Also note this fascinating quote here, fascinating on a few levels: "We could defeat 125,000 Soviet troops in Afghanistan in the 1980s but were intimidated by the introduction of 2,500 Russian troops in Syria thirty years later. It was heartbreaking to watch as Russia, supported by Iran, shifted the balance in Assad's favor." [It's interesting to interpret this from the lens of a warmongering Boomer who doesn't know his country has declined dramatically; when we don't know whose side we should even defend; Note also the shock that the US had recently when Assad's regime collapsed and basically Turkey and Israel began taking over Syrian territory; and then of course the paranoia about Russia--blaming Russia for everything; it's like there's two layers of Boomer delusion: about Russia still being the Soviets, and of the US's might still existing as if it were the 1980s, followed by the standard Boomer cluelessness about the true geopolitics in any complex and culturally different region of the world.] Next the author talks about how Obama was (incorrectly) too lukewarm about getting involved in Syria; but the author confidently claims Syria had "the factors required for success" thus we should have helped the insurgency and the fact that things didn't go the way we wanted to was because we didn't get involved. [This is again the "heads I win tails you lose"/I'm always right no matter what the outcome is type of rhetoric this author uses so skillfully. As usual the author never sees a situation that he doesn't want our country to get embroiled in.]  Finally Obama authorizes lethal support as the situation grew worse; the author goes over there meeting with all the commanders and fighters, thinking back to his special forces training four decades earlier, but arguing again that we should have gotten involved earlier and we didn't provide the support that we should have. Next he writes about meetings he had with Jordan's chief of intelligence [by the way he also "became a good friend"]; then he meets with Saudi Arabia's National Security Advisor, "my old friend"; finally he wraps up this section in Syria, arguing that "We weren't in it to win it"; he goes over various "should haves": we should have sent more weapons, we should have had a military strike on Syria after the poison gas attacks, we should have had a combined military-CIA campaign like we did in Afghanistan. [The irony is that had we gotten involved we probably would have (again) strengthened our adversaries in the region; note also the author also put this book out a matter of months before the Assad regime actually fully collapsed--without any US involvement at all! Sometimes things should be left alone, but again this guy never says no to any chance to embroil the US anywhere and everywhere.]

381 Yet another example where he thinks we should have gotten involved: this time Yemen as the Houthis took over; the author diagnoses it that this all could have been avoided had we more forcefully backed the Hadi government (who was the successor to the former president who fell during the Arab Spring) but according to the author previous leader, Saleh, treacherously allied himself with the Houthis afterwards. [One gets the idea that this author doesn't really understand that conflict either, but of course he's absolutely certain we should have forcefully gotten involved.]

383ff On Libya and the overthrow of Gaddafi; we hardly had any involvement at all according to the author, but then he writes, inexplicably, just a few paragraphs later "We had successfully, if too gradually, deposed Qaddafi with a light-footprint approach." This is again standard bureaucrat mendacity: take credit for stuff whenever you can, and deny and disavow any kind of catastrophic chaos left in your wake. Note that the chaos that followed was the attack on the CIA facilities in Benghazi where several Americans were killed; the author, predictably, blames the attacks on al-Qaeda.

Chapter 21: Crisis and Change in Defense Intelligence

390ff 2010: Obama nominates him to be Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, keeping him on after the Bush administration, his job was to oversee the vast defense intelligence enterprise created at Donald Rumsfeld's urging in 2003 as part of a post 9/11 reform, now this guy oversees the NSA, the Defense Intelligence Agency as well as  the intelligence components of all the branches of the military. Also a strange mention here that Leon Panetta had considered the author for the CIA Deputy Director, but then chose Michael Morell instead, and--here it comes! "We would become and remain close friends."

392-3 Conspicuous mention here of the phrase "revanchist Russia" used on two consecutive pages.

394ff Discussion on the Edward Snowden leaks, the author describes a news article exposing the NSA for collecting phone records of millions of Verizon customers; also the Washington Post exposing that the US was intercepting email from people overseas as it passed through the United States; the author justifies this as it was authorized by Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act; and the NSA telephone metadata collections was justified because its part of the Patriot Act; the author is quick to say that he already knew who the leaker was; also alleges that Snowden provided US secrets to the Chinese and Russians. Also it's disturbing to the reader that we don't even know what he took or how much data he captured. "I participated in several NSC [National Security Council] Deputies and Principals Committee meetings on the damage Snowden had done to U.S. national security and the steps we would take to mitigate that damage." Also with some other meeting that was "delegated to me" where he made an obscure-sounding recommendation that the president agreed with, "surprisingly" going against "the vast majority of a senior advisors"; then in the next section he writes how "Jim Clapper and I made a number of changes in the leadership of our defense intelligence agencies..." [What's weird here is if you really have this kind of managerial power, why would it be so important for you to brag in your memoirs about how Obama went against his senior advisors and agreed with you about some obscure recommendation?]

397ff Extended session section here on General Mike Flynn and the author's problems with him; his direct insubordination in going against his recommendations; "These were serious issues, but not enough yet to force me to remove Mike as DIA's director. From there, unfortunately, Mike's mismanagement and insubordination only got worse." [This is also odd and unusual: in a book where he's "friends" with everyone, why is he throwing this guy under the bus when we've hardly heard of him at all throughout the entire book? Later the reader finds out that Mike Flynn wrote a book and this is the author's response to his allegations, and it also appears that Flynn apparently "rebelled" from the Deep State, became a Trumper, and was even shouting "lock her up" to Hillary Clinton. Clearly he was breaking some kind of Deep State "omerta" here. This chapter ends on a very very strange, irrational note with the Flynn discussion. But you can tell the author, by his tone, couldn't wait to throw this guy under the bus.]

Chapter 22: The Return of Great Power Competition

400ff Once again we see the curious phrase "revanchist Russia" here; comments on actions of China and Russia that the author describes as provocative, China destroying one of its (own) satellites with an anti-satellite weapon. "The debris from the Chinese ASAT test will remain in low earth orbit for decades, and perhaps centuries, posing a risk to other satellites and space vehicles operating in that orbital regime," the author complains. And then comments on "renewed Russian belligerence" [note that there's a rich irony here as the author talks about when Putin spoke about at a security conference in Munich, talking about how US dominance had made the world more destabilized, as the world was seeing more wars and regional conflicts. Putin is not wrong here! The United States will do belligerent things and then when the other person says you're doing belligerent things, they turn it around and DARVO you, saying that you're being belligerent!] Secretary Gates responded with "One cold war was quite enough" and the author writes, "As an old cold warrior myself, I was proud of my boss." [Again DARVO: they're blaming the other side for what they're doing, running proxy wars all over the world, believing that Russia is their enemy... and therefore making it so.] Then there was a supposedly a botnet attack in Estonia, supposedly by Russia after Estonia removed a 6-ft statue of a Soviet soldier from the capital; supposedly this botnet attack threatened the national security of an entire nation, and this is used to show Russia's belligerence; the author writes "It was clear we were entering a new cold war."

402ff The reader is shocked to learn that here the author is making his very first trip to Moscow in his life, he's forced to fly commercial and he was held at the airport for two and a half hours because of another arriving prime minister, he's interpreting all of this as being sent a message. The reader gets the impression that the author is deeply out of his depth here among Russian bureaucrats and officials.

405 "Both men [Xi and Putin] brought with them visions of an illiberal world order in which China and Russia would have a much greater share of world power." Now the author frames himself in the middle of things as he writes about devoting more time to intelligence about China and Russia between 2012 and 2015 and "having analysts in several times for deep dives." See also this tease: "In one instance, I arranged a meeting with a senior US military officer for a CIA asset who had been exfiltrated from Russia and resettled in the United States. The asset had provided volumes of unique intelligence, so I was pleased to help CIA with its request. Unfortunately, I can't say more about it."

406ff A long list here of China's activity with satellite and space capabilities as well as ballistic and cruise missiles to have strategic deterrence on US activity by targeting US population centers; also constructing bases in the South China Sea; comments on their intellectual property theft which the author creatively calls "economic espionage."

408ff Comments on Russia modernizing its military: what's fascinating here is how the author is wrapped around the axle about their advances in undersea warfare and submarines, when in reality the United States has zero capacity to manufacture even the simplest mortars or shells, and of course conflict in general is completely changed and now it's all about low-cost drones; this guy is trapped in his Cold War paradigm.

409ff Comments here on Ukraine and his visit there with the chief of Ukraine security service, it's interesting there's absolutely no mention of Zelenskyy anywhere in this book, even though it came out in 2023, he came to power [or maybe I should say the United States put him into power as their puppet] back in 2019; comments about Malaysia airlines Flight 17 which the author claims Russia shot down. And then this claim which shows the author has zero idea of what is happening in that theater based on what's been happening since: "I realize that Putin might have the upper hand for now, but he had done something no Ukrainian politician had been able to do: he united Ukrainian nationalism. Ukraine was now a vastly different and vehemently anti-Russian country." Then a discussion of the demonstrations in the Donbas region; calling the separatists there "mostly a bunch of street thugs." [Notable here that author can't seem to decide whether it's Russia sending "mostly irregular forces" or if it's "a well-planned and organized military operation" as he has conflicting quotes here within two pages of each other.]

413ff It's also interesting to see here how he advocates for a position that looked correct at the time his book came out, but now--two and a half years later--looks absolutely incorrect: he argued strenuously for the Javelin and other lethal support but then blames Obama for showing too much restraint and weakness, blaming this for giving Putin a green light for further aggressive behavior. Now of course we know that the United States had little ability and less military capacity to influence things given the large scale of the conflict there now; and so this advice looked correct when the book came out but now looks absolutely completely wrong. He also makes the allegation that Russia intervened in the presidential election to elect Donald Trump, and then disapprovingly quotes Obama saying that no matter what we did in Ukraine, the Russians would win in the end. The author says "That may have been true, but we would certainly have been much better off if we had made Putin pay a much higher price." All this sounds vaguely insane now. [Note the risks of writing a memoir where you try re-narrate everything where you're right all the time: the predictions you make in your book can't be re-narrated after your book is already in print!]

414ff He makes his first trip to Beijing in nearly three decades, he's surprised to see cars and trucks rather than bicycles. He tries to get the Chinese to talk about undersea warfare, but all they would agree to is "agree to agree" that Korea should be nuclear-free; also an interesting comment from the Chinese official here: "he responded by saying that if we pushed China to war, China would fight, even though the Chinese knew they would lose. He repeated it a few times and said he wanted to make sure that I understood. I bent forward closer to him, looked him in the eye, and told him that I understood. I added that he was right that China would lose, but more important, a war between us would serve neither sides' interests." [This is a very interesting quote because the Chinese guy is playing to the arrogance of this sclerotic cold warrior who still thinks America is dominant. He wants to make sure that the situation will be very grave if the US pushes too far, but he also appeals to his ego, making him think that the USA is stronger than it is; this is some interesting rhetoric and pretty savvy.] Finally this section concludes with sort of a tone-deaf thing the author did: he invited a Chines admiral's delegation to Morton's in downtown Washington, thinking a steakhouse would be a special treat for them, but he writes that some of the Chinese delegation complained about the oversized steaks they were served.

Chapter 23: Winning the new Cold War

417ff [This chapter reads like a bad thinktank paper: unreadable, uninsightful, buries you in detail. It's also paranoid, and literally imagines non-existent fears into existence. Is this the sort of thinkpiece that this guy wrote throughout his career? Another possible way to read this chapter is as one massive act of projection.]

418ff Examples of the cloying pablum in this chapter:

* "America will need an effective Grand strategy if it is to prevail in the New Cold War."  

* "...getting the big ideas right" 

* "It is in some sense 1947 all over again" 

* "...rebuilding national ambition and unity" 

* "...we will need to get serious about lifetime learning and retraining" 

* "we must significantly increase government spending on R&D to stimulate innovation in, and American leadership of, critical emerging technologies while protecting our technological secrets." 

* "We must not lose a space war." 

* "We were the arsenal of democracy and World War II, and we can become so again."

* "...we should leverage our strategic alliances and partnerships with Europe, Japan, India, and others"

There's 27 pages of this!

437 "As 2022 drew to a close, the Russian army in Ukraine appeared to be on the verge of collapse." [This sounds just like the "Russia will run out of bullets in six weeks" propaganda we were relentlessly subjected to around this time in the media. And really there's only a couple of ways to interpret the fact that this author wrote this "on the verge of collapse" sentence in this book--and neither of them reflect well on him. One: he doesn't actually know or have any idea what the actual battlefield situation was and what was likely to happen. Two: he's simply propagating the government propaganda of the moment. Either way, this does not reflect well on the supposed strategic capabilities of this author. Clearly he is not "strategic" in his propaganda use (or he wouldn't use propaganda that aged so poorly), nor was he competent in his observations of what's happening on this actual real-world battlefield (or he wouldn't make a prediction that turned out to be so wildly off-base). Either way, not good--and not a good way to wrap up a chapter on long-term strategy!]

Part 5: Reflections

Chapter 24: Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

447 "A memoir wouldn't be complete without reflecting a bit at the end. As I conclude, I want to offer a few thoughts on the practice of intelligence, special operations, and strategy--what we got right, what we got wrong, how things changed over the course of my career, what mattered most in the end, what I learned along the way, and what I had to relearn, sometimes painfully. I also want to offer a few thoughts on strategic leadership, why and how I made the decisions I did, and what enabled me to succeed."

447ff The author uses quotes from Secretary Gates to say that the greatest success of the CIA was our secret war in Afghanistan; here he obviously means against the Soviets in the 1980s and is not at all referring to the idiotic interference in Afghanistan that came afterwards. [Note that the author has an annoying tendency to quote others when they say things he wants to say: it gives an artificial objectivity and an artificial authority to things that don't really have the authority that they appear to have. It's sort of like the Wikipedia effect, once something appears in some approved major media, it becomes self-referentially repeated and then becomes "the truth." A genuine, honest thinker articulates his own thoughts without using a third-party mouthpiece to state them, and then he defends them effectively.]

449 [Interesting quote where he's even wrong about the CIA's wrongness] "And while the CIA did correctly predict Russia's 2022 invasion of Ukraine, it missed the mark in its overestimation of Russian military capabilities and its underestimation of Ukraine's military prowess." [Once again, to write this in a book published in 2023 is extremely disturbing: either 1) the author is a propaganda hack mouthing propaganda messages about Russia and its alleged weakness and impending collapse, or 2) he's genuinely clueless about the actual real-world battlefield conditions in that theater. Either way this is disturbing if you are supposed to be a major strategic thinker in your government.]

450ff On justifying covert action because it carries less risk of escalating into a major military conflict; again Vickers refers to the Afghanistan program in the 1980s where "we were able to defeat the Red Army in Afghanistan without triggering a big escalation by the Soviets." [I wonder if the irony here is that, although there are no gigantic world wars, by triggering little wars everywhere the USA makes enemies everywhere, and that's why a lot of the world hates us.] Note also two paragraphs later he makes a weird contradiction. "Some of our most successful covert actions have actually been the least covert. It's the action part, after all, that really matters. Programs that have a likelihood of resulting in a major foreign policy success are usually scaled up significantly, with secrecy traded off for increased strategic effectiveness. The Afghanistan program in the 1980s is the best but by no means the only example of this." [What? I thought you said that that was the best example of covert action?]

452 On the debate that intelligence chiefs should never offer policy advice; the author predictably disagrees he thinks that intelligence chiefs should do everything, include make policy recommendations because they are the "experts" and Presidents will want to know what they think; in fact he even thinks that the CIA should offer policy choices on things that do not involve covert action!

452ff On Special Operations: he gives a history of their origins in the 1950s; on various things that went wrong during the Vietnam era, also on how the Special Ops lost proficiency in important languages because so many Special Forces were making deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan; he ends this nearly unreadable section by talking about an organizational reform for the Special Forces "that Admiral [Eric] Olson and I briefly considered but ran out of time before we can seriously think about implementing" [Once again, this reminds me of the biography of Alfred Russell Wallace, where the author wrote about the all bugs that Wallace didn't find. Here the author writes about an organizational reform he didn't implement!]

457 Congratulatory section here on counterterrorism strategy; about how Al-Qaeda was disrupted, dismantled and defeated over a two decade period; discussions here on proactive versus reactive strategy; limiting things that we can bring on planes; hardening embassies globally; "persistent surveillance" activity, etc. [A cynical reader might wonder here if there's an not-so-accidental parallel goal between global terrorism and global authoritarian pseudo-democratic governments. The more terrorism, the more justified you can be in permanent surveillance, which lets you control your people all the more, allegedly for "their own safety."]

459ff He makes a justification for why the war against al-Qaeda will continue for the foreseeable future: in part because there are too many uncovered areas in the Middle East. Also comments on cost asymmetries the 9/11 attacks cost only $500,000 to execute for example. [Ironically if you think about cost asymmetries, the Houthis are the ones really distinguishing themselves: with some low quality thousand dollar drones they managed to cost the United States two fighter jets and may have substantially damaged an aircraft carrier.]

460ff On changes in warfare and strategy; on the new US approach to conventional warfare which easily defeated Iraq and Serbia, the author readily acknowledges this power but warns of its "coming obsolescence"; on the author's struggles to get our government to develop capabilities for cyber deterrence "I hope we're getting on with it."

465ff Comments on strategy: on the unrealistic goals that the US had in the Middle East which caused a big overreach; on being the puncher rather than the punching bag; "success is never final" [if ever there was a quote that justified infinite budgets, endless meddling everywhere on the planet and endless wars, "success is never final" is it.]

467 Again another disturbing quote about the Ukraine-Russia conflict. "President Obama thought we couldn't win in Ukraine, and therefore decided not to provide the Ukrainians with lethal military assistance. What we got in return was even more aggression by Putin." [Again either oblivious or mendacious]

469ff Now some comments on what drove Vickers' success: he only took jobs that he really liked as well as jobs in which he thought could make a real difference; and then once in those jobs he took bold action; on his concept of "expert power" and "reference power": having the skills to lead but also having one's ability to lead recognized by others; his third principle is to engage in "job enlargement," a phrase that he heard much later from Goldman Sachs CEO Hank Paulson about taking on more and more responsibilities. His fourth idea is the importance of mentors, bosses who believe in you; a fifth principle is having deep expertise in an important area and then broadening into other important areas; a sixth principle is building and rebuilding intellectual capital; seventh: deep operational expertise; eighth:  recognizing when you need to modify your long-held views and adapt your thinking to new realities [How about rethinking being a warmongering Boomer who ropes your country into endless wars?]; his 9th principle: strategic vision and leadership; his 10th principle "leave things better than you found them and to make a difference. I hope I did."

Chapter 25: The Long Goodbye

473ff A painfully self-congratulatory chapter here, as the author talks about his retirement ceremony on his last day in office: who was there, who made gracious remarks, the reception afterwards, and a letter from President Obama read out loud at the ceremony that the author quotes in full. "A flag was also flown over the U.S. Capitol in my honor." And then, the CIA hosted yet another retirement ceremony for him: "There was a big reception waiting for me in the atrium..." "I was really touched and didn't want to leave."

To Read:

Tom Davis: The Most Fun I Ever Had with My Clothes On: A March from Private to Colonel: A Memoir

Bill Colby: Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA

Theodore G. Shackley: Third Option: An American View of Counterinsurgency Operations

Douglas Blaufarb: Counterinsurgency Era

David Atlee Phillip: The Night Watch: 25 Years of Peculiar Service

William Hood: Mole

Louis Dupree: Afghanistan

Rudyard Kipling: The Man Who Would Be King and Other Stories 

George Crile: Charlie Wilson's War ["mostly accurate" per the author]

Andrew Krepinevich and Barry Watts: The Last Warrior: Andrew Marshall and the Shaping of Modern American Defense Strategy

John le Carré: The Secret Pilgrim