From Green Beret to CIA covert operations: A fascinating career
When Michael G Vickers was 17, he decided he might like a career in the CIA.
“I imagined myself doing things that only a James Bond could do,” he writes in “By All Means Available – Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Specials Operations, and Strategy” (Alfred A. Knopf).
“Diving headfirst through a window and coming up shooting.”
Fast forward half a century, and Vickers can look back at a remarkable career in the intelligence services, where he served under six Presidents, including two years working directly for George W. Bush and six with Barack Obama as Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence.
From his time as a Green Beret to taking charge of the CIA’s covert operations against the Soviets in Afghanistan, the book recounts his extraordinary life and career, including the operation to find and eliminate the al-Qa’ida leader Osama Bin Laden.
Certainly, his Special Forces training wasn’t just tough — occasionally, it verged on the insane.
Once, Vickers was given instructions on Special Atomic Demolition Munitions (SADM), or what Vickers calls a “backpack nuke.”
The SADM was a small, low-yield nuclear device that could be strapped to a parachutist’s back and used quickly if to blow up a bridge, a dam or a mountain pass.
The issue, however, was that once deployed and the timer set, a team had to remain in close visual range.
“We hoped it wouldn’t result in the team’s vaporization,” writes Vickers.
Later, the weapon’s inventors admitted to Vickers that they “never really got that timer to work properly.”
While the public perception of intelligence work may seem glamorous, the reality, says Vickers, is very different, especially when life-or-death decisions have to be made.
“I have been involved, in one way or the other, in lethal intelligence and military operations for a large portion of my career,” he tells The Post.
“It is never easy to take a human life, but it is sometimes necessary to save a lot more lives and to defend against aggression.”
Today, Vickers foresees greater challenges ahead for the intelligence community as technology moves on apace.
“In the next decade or two, advances in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and synthetic biology will transform not just the intelligence world, but warfare, economies, societies, and even what it means to be human,” he says.
“And, unfortunately, the impact of these revolutionary technologies will very likely be bad as well as good.”
When Vickers retired in 2015, he was invited to the White House by President Obama to be presented with the National Security Medal — the nation’s highest award in the field of intelligence.
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