Michael G. Vickers > Quotes

“Zhawar had been built using explosives and bulldozers (the latter provided by Usama Bin Ladin) to dig eleven five-hundred-meter-long tunnels into the southeast-facing side of the Sodyaki Ghar Mountain.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“I also met with two of ISI’s top special operations advisers, Colonels “Iman” (true name Sultan Tarar) and Khalid Khawaja. They were serious and dangerous men, whose interests and actions would diverge substantially from America’s after the Cold War had ended. But at that moment, we were on the same side.[8] We”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“Throughout his long career, Dagan was known for not being reluctant to take lethal action against Israel’s enemies, but he thought that bombing Iran to set back its nuclear program would be strategic folly.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“In April 2009, I gained Secretary Gates’s approval for and oversaw the rescue of Richard Phillips, the captain of the U.S.-flagged merchant ship the Maersk Alabama, which had been hijacked by Somali pirates.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“In October 2000, al-Qa’ida struck again, blowing a gaping hole in the USS Cole, in port at Aden, Yemen, killing seventeen sailors and wounding thirty-seven.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“The Taliban also executed Abdul Haq, another of my former mujahedin commanders, on October 26.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“To make matters worse, the Trump administration also agreed to the release of five thousand Taliban and al-Qa’ida prisoners, who quickly returned to the battlefield.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“A successful grand strategy, in my mind, must contain five essential elements: rebuilding our national ambition, unity, and resilience; posturing ourselves to prevail in the race for economic and technological supremacy; winning the intelligence and covert action wars; strengthening regional and global deterrence and, if required, defeating aggression; and transforming our alliances and national security institutions for our new era of great power competition.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“As the former secretary of state Condoleezza Rice would later put it, “Al-Qa’ida was at war with us, but we weren’t yet at war with them.” We would address all these shortcomings after 9/11.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“What the Soviet military most likely would have done is what the Russian Federation’s military would later do itself—rely even more on nuclear weapons to make up for a growing weakness in conventional warfare.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“By the time we were ready to present our new strategy to President Bush, Admiral Mullen was fully on board. From then on, he and I would be on the same side on most issues.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“The only NSC principal who didn’t initially agree with our new CT strategy was Admiral Mike Mullen, our new JCS chairman. Mullen was working very hard to build a relationship of trust with General Kayani, Pakistan’s chief of Army Staff, and wanted that to be our priority in dealing with Pakistan.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“President Trump reluctantly agreed to a doubling of the U.S. presence in Afghanistan early in his administration but soon grew tired of the war and sought to end it. In February 2020, as part of a “peace” deal with the Taliban to end the war, the Trump administration agreed to withdraw all U.S. forces by May 2021.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“The impact on Soviet air operations was immediate. Fixed-wing aircraft flew above the Stinger’s engagement ceiling (fifteen thousand feet), significantly reducing their combat effectiveness.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“President Trump’s personal diplomacy with Kim Jong Un to denuclearize the Korean Peninsula also ended in failure.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“Bill apologized for destroying a $60 million helicopter. The president said, “Put it on my tab.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“Between the beginning of 1985 and the end of 1988, the Chinese would provide nearly $1.5 billion in arms and ammunition to the Afghan resistance. They would also provide nearly two thousand improved SA-7 missiles. We could not have won our secret war without the Chinese.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

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

“Success, unfortunately, is never final—a painful lesson I learned after we won a historic victory with our secret war in Afghanistan, only to have al-Qa’ida plan its 9/11 attacks from its sanctuary in Afghanistan a decade later.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“As it turned out, we briefed the House leadership right in the middle of their tense and critical negotiations on the 2008 financial crisis.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“That evening, the president and a number of senior Obama administration officials, me included, were scheduled to attend the annual White House Correspondents’ Dinner.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“After filling me in on DOD planning, Jim asked me what I thought. There were concerns, including at a very high level within DOD, that we were being lured into a trap in Afghanistan and that we should strike Iraq first.[14] I told Jim that this would be the height of strategic insanity.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“The United States by this time had come to accept Pakistan as a nuclear power and was mainly concerned with the security of Pakistan’s arsenal, fearing a nuclear warhead could fall into terrorists’ hands.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“Finally, while the program enjoyed strong bipartisan support in Congress, it also had its critics. Many of them, surprisingly, given that Ronald Reagan was president, were Republicans.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“In May 2018, President Trump pulled the United States out of the JCPOA and intensified sanctions on Iran. Iran responded by enriching uranium to 60 percent, and has indicated it may start enriching to 90 percent, bringing it within days or a few weeks of having enough weapons-grade material for a nuclear weapon.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“an important lesson we would learn about counterterrorism strategy after 9/11 is that action begets intelligence. Counterterrorism action disrupts terrorists’ plans and operations, and disruption creates more opportunities to collect intelligence.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“Russia had extraordinary success with its covert influence operations during the 2016 U.S. presidential election cycle.[”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“Presidents Trump and Biden turned a stalemate that protected U.S. interests into a defeat that has placed our interests in jeopardy. It was, in my view, a major and completely unnecessary strategic blunder.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“We had a number of Soviet assets reporting to us on a range of issues, including on Afghanistan, and several high-level Soviet defections in 1985—the so-called year of the spy—provided additional valuable intelligence.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy

“Ironically, Admiral Olson and I had visited the Pakistan Army’s military academy at Abbottabad in October 2008 to observe a graduation ceremony for Pakistan’s Frontier Corps, a force our Special Forces had just started training. We were less than a mile and a half from AC1. I later joked with Eric that had we known that UBL was so close by, we could have captured him ourselves.”
― Michael G. Vickers, By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy