The Team House - Assistant Secretary of Special Ops and Low Intensity Conflict | Mike Vickers | Ep. 249

Episode Date: December 11, 2023

Part 2 with Mike we talk about the latter part of his career as the Assistant Sec Def for Special Ops and Low Intensity Conflict and as Under Sec Def for Intel.Mike Vickers was Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence (2011-2015) and Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations, Low Intensity Conflict and Interdependent Capabilities (2007-2011) – service that spanned the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations. Earlier in his career, he served as a CIA Operations Officer and Special Forces Officer and Non-Commissioned Officer. As the ASD SO/LIC&IC and USD(I), he had a central role in developing our strategy and overseeing our campaigns to disrupt, dismantle and defeat al-Qa’ida and in the operation to kill Usama Bin Ladin. As a CIA officer during the 1980s, he was the program officer and principal strategist for the largest and most successful covert action program in CIA’s history, enabling the Afghan resistance to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan. He is a recipient of the Presidential National Security Medal, our nation’s highest award in intelligence. He has a Ph.D. in International Relations/Strategic Studies from Johns Hopkins, an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, and a B.A. in International Relations from the University of Alabama.Get Mike's book here:⬇️https://www.amazon.com/All-Means-Available-Operations-Intelligence/dp/B0BJ61DV28/ref=sr_1_1?hvadid=676936599747&hvdev=c&hvlocphy=9004338&hvnetw=g&hvqmt=e&hvrand=778790048467117615&hvtargid=kwd-2092266601107&hydadcr=22191_13517538&keywords=mike+vickers+book&qid=1701279110&sr=8-1------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Today's Sponsor:FUM ⬇️ttps://TRYFUM.COM/TEAMHOUSEget rid of that nasty habit with FUMhttps://TRYFUM.COM/TEAMHOUSE------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------To help support the show and for all bonus content including:-AD FREE AUDIO-AD FREE VIDEO-Access to ALL bonus segments with our guestsSubscribe to our Patreon! ⬇️https://www.patreon.com/TheTeamHouseOr make a one time donation at: ⬇️https://ko-fi.com/theteamhouseTeam House merch: ⬇️https://teespring.com/stores/my-store-10474963Social Media: ⬇️The Team House Instagram:https://instagram.com/the.team.house?utm_medium=copy_linkThe Team House Twitter:https://twitter.com/TheTeamHousePodJack’s Instagram:https://instagram.com/jackmcmurph?utm_medium=copy_linkJack’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/jackmurphyrgr?s=21Dave’s Twitter: https://twitter.com/dave_parke?s=21Team House Discord: ⬇️https://discord.gg/wHFHYM6SubReddit: ⬇️https://www.reddit.com/r/TheTeamHouse/Jack Murphy's memoir "Murphy's Law" can be found here:⬇️ https://www.amazon.com/Murphys-Law-Journey-Investigative-Journalist/dp/1501191241The Team Room Reading Room (Amazon Affiliate links):⬇️ https://jackmurphywrites.com/the-team-room-reading-room/Intro music by https://www.youtube.com/user/RemixSampleWant to sponsor the show?Email: ⬇️[e-mail]#specialoperations #mikevickersBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-team-house--5960890/support.

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Hi, everyone. Welcome to episode 249 of the Team House. I'm Jack Murphy here with David Park. And joining us for part two of our interview is Mike Vickers. Mike served in the CIA in 10th Special Forces Group. And we talked about that on last Friday's episode. Tonight's episode we're going to talk about his time primarily at ASD Solic. He served as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict.

and then went on to work at USDA. So there's actually a lot to talk about in his book, by all means available. Actually, more than we're going to be able to talk about in this interview. But we'll try to get to some interesting parts. And Mike, thank you again for joining us. Oh, I'm sorry. Do you want to do the ad reads? Oh, yeah, real quick.

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If you're looking for something to do, you're lacking purpose. What's the website? It's Blades4brothers.com. Check them out. and also buy some of his new knives made with 9-11 steel and and steal from his mini guns from his 160 or from his little bird so mike thank you for joining us for part two um pit will pick up kind of where we left off uh you left the agency uh you went and pursued your phd got in a consulting um tell us a little bit about your your life after

service leading up to kind of getting called back in once again Sure. So, yeah, the first thing I did was get an MBA from the Wharton School and then decided to did a couple ventures, one an externally funded venture in the biotech instrumentation area, and then an internal venture in information services that did fairly well, and that financed the PhD program for me. And while I was completing my PhD, I co-founded a think tank, the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. I did the strategy part of it. And then I also started working for the legendary Andy Marshall, the director of net assessment for several decades in the Pentagon, working on a emerging revolution in military affairs, you know, big change in the way wars might be fought over the next several decades and the rise of China. And that took me up through 9-11, and then after 9-11, increasingly drawn into that world until President Bush asked me to come in to an expanded position as an Assistant Secretary of Defense.

So let's, I want to start off a little bit asking you what ASD Solic is, because unless you kind of exist in the national security or the special operations field, there are some folks out there who, We don't know what that office is or what its importance is or the role it plays. Sure. So after some of our challenges in the 1980s, the failed Iranian rescue attempt to rescue attempt to rescue our hostages held captive in Iran in 1980. And then the invasion of Grenada led to a series of reforms. Goldwater Nichols Act that changed a lot about. the senior ranks of the Pentagon, but also a year later in the Nunn-Cohen Amendment,

the creation of Special Operations Command and also a civilian official, essentially a service secretary light, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict in the Pentagon, in the policy organization. And that organization continues to exist today with the oversight,

over our special operations forces, capabilities, and operations. When I was offered the job, just during my tenure, they expanded the position and even more ungodly acronym called Assistant Secretary for Special Operations, low-intensity conflict, and interdependent capabilities, or Solicic, which doesn't sound like an acronym. But it gave me oversight, policy oversight, over all of the department's operational capabilities.

So the strategic capabilities that had previously been under another assistant secretary, so nuclear weapons, space, missile defense, cyber, and then what was the Office of Force Transformation, you know, how we needed to transform our military services, Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps over the next 20 years.

and then the traditional special operations counterterrorism portfolio. So it was a very big portfolio and a very, very good one. Were these extra responsibilities that you sought out or things that came to you? It sounds like maybe you were reaching for these things too. You had an interest in this. Well, when I started working on the rise of China, you know, and the Revolution and Military Affairs, it kind of naturally gave me the background for this.

but they kind of created the job or expanded the job to get me to come back into government to do it. So in 2006, President Bush or his senior staff asked me and two retired four-star special operations generals, Wayne Downing and, well, the other one, conventional force, Barry McCaffrey, a great, great combat leader, to come into the Oval Office to talk about a rock strategy when it wasn't going well. in 2006. And then coming out of that, President Bush called Secretary Don Rumsfeld and said, we should try to get Vickers back into government.

And so after that, they created this position and the Undersecretary for Policy, Eric Adelman called me in and said, hey, you wrote this book on the Revolution and War, and we've got a job for you that combines this with special ops. You know, it was flattery and stuff. but you're the only guy who can do this, so you have to say yes. So that's how it came about. So there's one thing I do want to ask you about or even, I don't want to say challenge,

but I do have something that interesting that I think it's even on the ASD Solic website, and you mentioned it too, I believe, that it provides oversight, but also advocacy for the special operations community, which on the surface of things to me almost sounds like a contract. contradiction in terms. And I was just wondering if you could explain a little bit more like, how does the office do these two, perform these two functions at the same time? And what does that entail? Yeah. So the idea, you know, coming out of these reforms was to make sure that special operations forces voice was adequately represented in the Pentagon and the military

services. And so, you know, part of it was done by the creation of this hybrid command. combatant command, you know, special operations command is a unique command, and then it is both sort of like a service and also an operational command with subordinate operational commands. But it does, you know, man, train and equip the things the military service would do for special operations forces, including procurement and career development and others. And it's had a very positive impact on the growth of soft, but also getting soft, leaders into key positions into the general and flag officer ranks and others. And then the ASD Solic and in my day Solic and I see is really designed to provide the same function in the Pentagon,

to integrate in all the Pentagon's processes. And, you know, some people equate oversight with a negative term, but it really, you know, at least from my point of view, advocacy and oversight come together in a sense of making sure that special operations are adequately funded, but also properly used and integrated more fully into the rest of the department. And the DASDs under ASD SOLIC also provide like the inspector general capabilities and things, if I understand correctly. Well, they provide policy oversight, but they're more, functionally aligned. So again, my day was different because I had people with

nuclear oversight of nuclear weapons and force transformation and others. But there's typically a DASD for special ops and counterterrorism and then maybe one for changes over the years. It can be peacekeeping or stability operations and counterinsurgency that also integrates with the conventional forces when we're in that kind of war, you know, broader policy. in that area. And then sometimes there's a budget dazdy that's, you know, working with Socom on the budget, etc. Mike, out of curiosity, you know, you went from special forces to the CIA and then into these

more leadership positions. And you had, you had a great understanding, knowledge and, you know, the breadth of knowledge for these types of operations. In that type of position, how important is that? Because a lot of times we see like civilians with no military experience and no no intelligent experience getting put in these roles. Is that a deficit or is it so more of an overwatch position where it really doesn't matter if they have that experience? Well, I think it's very helpful. One, you know, generally for policy advice at the higher levels of our government

to the Secretary of Defense, but if you're also representing the department and the White House and deputies, you know, it helps to have an operational grounding. Most senior government officials on the civilian side don't. And, you know, it just reflects the nature of our country and how, you know, 1% of the population serves in the military. So you're drawing from a smaller pool. And it's very different than the world we found ourselves in coming out of World War II where, you know, everybody was a veteran.

Right. Several decades, we had a different government in some respects in terms of people who had experienced war. and had some degree of operational expertise. Now, you know, to be most relevant, that expertise needs to be aligned to the problems of the day, just like our top military officials. You know, you pick a great officer,

but they might have spent their career preparing for air warfare against the Soviets, and then suddenly they find them overseeing a war against al-Qaeda. You know, they've got a lot of operational experience, not necessarily the right kind. Right. And so, you know, But effectiveness depends on that for, you know, to some extent.

But when particularly you're engaged in operations, it's just invaluable to have that kind of experience, at least in part of your team. Right. And then one more question that I wanted to ask you last week, but I think it's really good this week, is, you know, you were very involved with the Afghan war, you know, against the Russians and understood a large part of. what it took to bring them down. What were your initial impressions and then developing impressions with our, with our war in Afghanistan? Yeah, so it went in a couple of phases, you know, it lasted over two decades. And, you know, the initial takedown of the Taliban regime was really done brilliantly, you know, combining special operations forces with CIA and then with American air power and the Afghan resistance.

And it really allowed the Afghan resistance to, you know, do a lot of the big ground campaign by that combination of assets. And, you know, so you had, depending on how you count it, a few hundred if you just take the CIA and special operators, you know, maybe 400 plus with an Afghan resistance that started only 10,000 or so and then built up a bit over time, defeating a Taliban force. of 50,000. You know, so it really was leveraging American air power and assistance and other things. And then, you know, not to slight the Brigade of Marines that then-Brigalier General Jim Mattis led into southern Afghanistan, you'd still only get under 5,000 or so American boots on the ground.

So a really, really successful campaign that worked in a couple months. You know, the one unfortunate part about it is Al-Qaeda leaders, you know, largely got away, some to Iran and many to Pakistan, including Osama bin Laden, and we had to deal with them later. And then for the first few years of the war, you know, it was pretty modest. And we made some mistakes by trying to build a centralized military force in a very decentralized country. Afghanistan is made up of a lot of different ethnic groups, and it's been governed historically decentralized for most of its history and a small military.

And so as the Taliban started recovering and coming back in, the U.S. had to take up more and more of the burden and eventually leading to a big surge of forces that still couldn't win the war given the Pakistan sanctuary. And, you know, so we achieved our objective at the end of 20 years in terms of preventing another 9-11 attack out of there. We had successfully transitioned, although I think it took too long to building up Afghan forces and then supporting them. We did that by 2015. But then we just gave it away, you know, in 2021 and allowed the Taliban to come back in, and that's the great tragedy of it. So it's a war really in multiple parts with different roles. Special operations forces certainly acquitted themselves very well in raids and building

up Afghan forces and doing out in the rural areas with the Afghan local police and village stability ops. And so a lot of big contributions to the effort. But now sadly, Taliban are in power. So as you came in and took this huge portfolio in ASD Solic, I mean, the amount of things that you touched upon in the subsequent years is pretty dizzying. But I tried to pick out just a couple of them for the sake of the interview. And one of them that I wanted to talk to you about that you had some involvement in dealing with that doesn't get talked about as often as maybe it should be, especially considering it's sort of a success story in the long run, is the FARC insurgency in Columbia. Can you talk to us a little bit about when you first sort of put your hands on

that problem set and your perceptions of it, how that evolved during your time in office? Sure. So, you know, I had global responsibility for operations and the full breadth of the department's operational capabilities. And so the two things I really focused on in Latin America, since most of my attention was al-Qaeda and the wars in the Middle East and Iran's nuclear program and things like that. And then for the modernization parts of the portfolio, still the rise of China and then later dealing with a troublesome Russia. But in Latin America, it was really Colombia with the Marxist insurgency and then the drug is coming out of there. And then Mexican drug cartels.

You know, those were the two big areas for me there. And, you know, my engagement with Colombia goes back to my time as essentially a troop commander as in the third of the seventh special forces. when my two ODAs were tasked with collecting intelligence in case we needed to do hostage rescues of a taken over embassy, and Columbia was on that list, along with El Salvador and lots of others. And then the threat was a terrorist group called M19, although the FARC was still around, and, you know, M19 had done a bunch of takeovers.

But then, you know, the problem in Colombia morphed into, the drug problem with Pablo Escobar and others, and so Special Operations Forces played a pretty big role in beating back that threat in the late 80s and 90s. And then finally, the FARC insurgency, which had been around since the 1960s and another group called the ELN, really was at the gates of Bogota at the end of the Clinton administration.

You know, they had controlled a lot of the country and were intermixed with the drugies. And so that started Plan Colombia at the end of Clinton and then the beginning of the George W. Bush, a lot of military assistance and small numbers of special operations advisors and then others with the Colombian National Police, including some retired special forces people that I had served with them back in the day. and with the election of Ovaro Rubé as the president, I think it was 2003 or so,

and the expansion of Columbia's armed forces, they gradually started pushing the FARC back. And so my involvement really started as a senior policy official in 2008, about a year into the job as an assistant secretary, when we had the opportunity to resolve a hostage crisis. Three American Northrop Grumman employees were being held there for five years and by the far deep in Columbia's interior. And along with former presidential candidate, Ingrid Betancourt and 11 Colombian soldiers.

And the Colombian special forces devised a really brilliant plan to, trick the FARC into handing them over to what they thought was an NGO and actually rescued those 15 people. So my first trip to Columbia and must have been almost 30 years, 25 years at that point, was really to oversee the preparations of this operation. And then to talk about strategy for dealing with the FARC. And I should also mention the third leg of the stool was some of the FARC leaders were deep in Columbia's interior,

but some were in Venezuela and somewhere in Ecuador, and the Colombians with our assistance had just done a strike on a leader in Ecuador right in the border region, and there was volumes of intelligence gathered from that, that then I wanted to talk to the Colombians about their successful precision strike, and a campaign against the FARC leadership,

but also the big intelligence take that we had just gotten. And so over the next four years, every couple years I would meet with top Colombian officials, particularly a minister of defense, who remains a good friend to this day, Juan Carlos Pinson, to dismantle the FARC even more. So within a period of,

of 10, 12 years, the FARC went down from having 20,000 troops to, you know, a few thousand or so. And then started the peace negotiations that occurred over the last several years. How did that happen? Was it strictly like direct action? Were there civilian operations? Like how does that happen to take an organization like the FARC from 20,000 to 2000 or whatever those numbers were? Well, one, it was the expansion of the Colombian armed forces to push deeper into the Colombian hinterlands and the national police, which is very good in police intelligence. And I don't want to say his name, but the head of national police intelligence was a good friend of mine as well who really ran a great. great organization. And then there was a precision strike campaign against the FARC leaders that, you know, it's really a combination. It's sort of like our predator campaigns against al-Qaeda,

you know, a combination of great intelligence with precision weapons. And it took a number of them off the battlefield, even if they were in adjacent countries, but mostly deep in Columbia's interior. And then our special operations advisors, both with the police and with the military, and working with both conventional forces and the special operations forces, also helped push down the FARC. And then, you know, at the end of the day, it was also an amnesty program to reintegrate people who didn't, you know, want to live in the jungle forever and wanted their kids to go to school and whatever reason they joined this Marxist insurgency, you know, 20 years ago,

they didn't want that to be their whole life. And so a combination of those things really helped reduce the FARC's influence dramatically. Is it a pretty stark change from, you know, if you think back to, I guess, the late 90s or early 2000s, some people speculated that Colombia would become our next Vietnam. Yes. It turned out very differently. turned out very differently. And one of the big lessons of it is that one, we did that with assistance and with, you know, a hundred or so special operators at a time advising. So really highly

leveraged without, you know, a big war on our part. And then second, it took 45 years. Yes. And it had ups and downs. It wasn't something that was won overnight. Right. You know, the end game, the last decade, was decisive and all in the right direction. But, you know, before that, there had been all kinds of things. And, you know, being the drug capital of the world. And so, you know, it shows the value of strategic persistence. Yeah, the military-to-military relationship goes back to like the Korean War, I believe. Yes, they fought in Korea.

And after they had largely beaten back the FARC, they helped other guys. governments with trainers and other things, you know, exporting their now greater military capability. Do you think we would have been as interested if it was not a Marxist movement, if it was just a criminal movement? If it posed a real national security threat, I mean, because that's a really good question, because there were other places, you know, I spent a lot of time in Central America in the early 80s when that was a major foreign policy focus, you know, it was beset by criminal problems,

but I had too many other things on my plate to, even the nostalgia I felt for the region to spend much time there. So Mexico, because it was a big country and the drug problem became a national security threat, not only for the effects it was having on the United States, and today even worse with fentanyl, but the destabilizing effects it was having in Mexico that the government might actually fall and it might become a failed narco state. And so that in Columbia really, really got my attention.

Do you feel that at any point in time, because people on not just different sides of the aisles, but just people of different opinions will call out for different things. Do you see at any point in time where the cartels that are active in Mexico right now, will be deemed like a national security threat to the point of the same type of intervention? Well, in a sense of, you know, the relationship with Mexico has been a little more politically

dicey than ours with Colombia, to say the least. But we have provided assistance to them, both with training and intelligence to help them go after the cartels. You know, it's a big, big business. and the cartels are formidable military organizations, and there's plenty of them. And so this is not something that can be one in a day. One of the things I point out in the book is we took some of our counterterrorism lessons and applied it to the cartels and had success in enabling Mexican Special Operations Forces

to capture or kill cartel leaders, but it barely put a dent in the problem, Because other cartels move in and, you know, decapitation as a strategy in this area is just not very good. You actually have to, you know, own the territory at the end of the day and, you know, really reduce or eliminate as much as you can the organizations. And that's tough. You know, and it took us time in Colombia. Mexico is a tougher problem. And things like fentanyl make it still a tougher problem yet because you don't have to have these big growing areas or, you know, other things. Right, right.

The other thing I want to ask you about from this time period around 2009, you write in your book about playing a part in the approval process to have more predator orbits pushed to Pakistan. And I want to ask you a little bit about you had this previous experience launching covert operations into Afghanistan from Pakistan. Now it's sort of the other way around in Afghanistan, and you're in Afghanistan launching covert operations into Pakistan,

even if it's a quite public campaign. I was wondering if you could tell us a little bit more about that experience and about the Predator program around that time frame. Sure. So, you know, the Predator is developed in the late 90s as an earlier version of the aircraft is used in the Balkans. And then it makes its first flight over Afghanistan

in September 2000. And actually a predator then sees Osama bin Laden at a camp near Kandahar in southern Afghanistan, but it's not armed. And so then that starts the idea that, you know, we need these aircraft and we need them to not just have sensors on them, but weapons so that when you get an opportunity to strike, you can do it.

But then, you know, 9-11 happens, and we have the invasion of Afghanistan, and Predator plays a little role in that conflict. It helps take out al-Qaeda's number three, Muhammad Attef in Kabul, with a Marine fighter aircraft providing the final strike. And then between 2004 and 2008, there's some, or 2007, there's some Predator strikes in the Pakistan border. region, you know, as al-Qaeda had fled into Pakistan, first into the cities and then came back into the border region, what was more secure, predators started to be used a little bit there, as well as helping our special operators in Iraq against al-Qaeda in Iraq and in Afghanistan against the Taliban. And in 2006, we have a very worrisome development. The threat to the American homeland goes way up, but we have this transatlantic airliner plot where a number of

operatives in the United Kingdom plan to blow up 10 airliners en route to the United States and kill 3,000 plus people. And it's broken up by good intelligence in Pakistan. The leader of this is in Pakistan. He gets killed in a predator strike a couple years after that, 2008, Rashid Raouf. But that then triggers we have to start denying this sanctuary. And so President Bush tasked the Department of Defense, and Secretary Gates tasked me in particular, and then the Counterterrorism Center at CIA to come up with a joint strategy to go after this sanctuary

between 2007 and 2008. And Predator is very central to that, to do the surveillance of these al-Qaeda operatives and leaders in the region. But also we had developed a campaign to do special operations raids that would be cross-border, a couple of other things, and then joint capture operations with the Pakistanis to try to seal off the kill zone, if you will, you know, where they'd be vulnerable to these things. And the Pakistanis thought we did one raid in 2008. They thought it was a violation of their sovereignty.

The Pakistani people would question, how come a military is invading us, so to speak, when we've got a big army that we're paying for. But the predator was the capability they didn't have. And so they continued to support that. And so with some innovations that we really broadened our target list, we expanded the number of orbits dramatically, So we went from a couple of orbits.

An orbit is keeping one aircraft 24-7 over a target area. So you may need three to make one or two to make one, depending on the distances. And then we went up to eight first, and then eventually 14, and then more for Yemen and other parts of the world. So it became our really strategic counterterrorism war, instrument and it produced really great results. Suddenly, we're taking a lot of top al-Qaeda leaders off the battlefield from 2008 to 2012, about 50 plus overall in that border region. And then more in Yemen and elsewhere as well. I remember, you know, the program in Pakistan being pretty intensely

criticized at the time, concerns about collateral damage. But in time, it does. seem like it effectively hollowed out the al-Qaeda organization to the i mean to the point where i mean by the time we get to like 2011 they're trying to send their guys to syria um to start up something there because they're not effective in pakistan yeah it's exactly right i mean one of the things that keeps al-qaeda alive after this after 2012 is that they were able to create these franchises elsewhere in yemen and syria and somali and north africa gave them longer life but uh uh in Iraq for a while, as well with al-Qaeda in Iraq. And, you know, the civilian casualties bit is one that's subject to huge disagreement.

There are a number of private organizations, NGOs internationally and domestic, who claim that, you know, a few thousand civilians were killed or so. The U.S. government released numbers in 2016, and the number is somewhere between, you know, the low 60s to maybe 100 with 2,500 al-Qaeda operatives taken off the battlefield and 50 plus top leader. So it's about as precise as you can make an air campaign as you can get, you know, 98%, you know, something just taking out a combatant, you know. And sometimes we would wait for a couple of months to strike a.

an al-Qaeda leader when he got away from his family, you know, just waiting until the opportunity came, you know, in close proximity or something. So, you know, it's about as precise as you can make it. And by the time we get to 2010, you had this new offer to go over to USDA. Can you tell us a little bit about how that came about? Sure. So the first thing that happened is, you know, I, when I was asked to come into the Bush administration, I thought it would be for two years. You know, typically when you serve at a high level and I wasn't a political person, but when you serve at a high level and, you know, an administration, you're assumed that, you know, when the administration's done, you're done.

And then President Obama asked Secretary Gates to stay on. And then Jim Clapper, who was USDA at the time and later became our director of national intelligence and then me is the assistant secretary for so look and i see and and so then in 2010 so that was unusual to have you know people in very senior positions transition from republican to democrat or vice versa and and then in 2010 when clapper became d and i they asked me to become the undersecretary of defense for intelligence and uh and so then i was was actually for six weeks because the Congress wasn't confirming people and they said I would be confirmed unanimously. They had me do both jobs. And then I got just so as the Congress came back,

they confirmed me unanimously. And I was USDA from early 2011 on. So same question. I'm afraid. For people who are not in intelligence community, national security circles, what is USDA, what is the important role that they play? Yeah, so this was a post-9-11 innovation like the director of national intelligence, you know, didn't exist before. So Solek, you know, created in the late 1980s, USDA was created in 2002, 2003, and then the director of national intelligence, 2005. And the logic behind USDA, this is something that Secretary Rumsfeld wanted a lot, was he had, you know, 70% of the intelligence community, all of the big agencies except CIA and others who were part of other government departments, mostly staff organizations, except for justice where you had

FBI and drug enforcement administration. And no one really overseeing this in the Pentagon. You know, So everything concerning defense intelligence would have to come up to the deputy secretary of defense or secretary. And so he wanted, given we were in a big intelligence war, they wanted to create this organization, and they did. And I was the third Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. And the Undersecretary is also dual-had as the director of military intelligence. Defense intelligence under the Director of National Intelligence, too, because the relationship with the DNI is important. They're shared resources. The DNI directs the National Intelligence Program.

The USDA directs the military intelligence program. But all those defense agencies, the National Security Agency, the defense intelligence agencies, they work for both masters, both the Secretary of Defense through the USDA. and the DNA. And so that relationship with the DNA is very important. I think I confused myself earlier talking about oversight and AG capability. That's actually USDA that sends the IGs down to different places, correct? Well, there's a, no, I mean there's a separate intelligence oversight executive that really is just aimed at making sure compliance that's separate for USDA. Oh, really?

But it's very small. USDA's job is more, you know, the budget and capabilities and of these defense intelligence organizations. So not only the big four, NGA, NSA, NRO, and DIA, but all the intelligence organizations of the military services and combatant commands. So it's, you know, it's right. roughly an $80 billion budget, a couple hundred thousand employees,

you know, a mix of civilians and military, about half and half or so. And, you know, it's a big enterprise, the defense intelligence enterprise. And then given that I had been a policymaker had served on top White House committees, committees committees and others, they asked me to continue that role too.

So I continued kind of the counterterrorism portfolio for the bin Laden raid and our predator campaigns against al-Qaeda and all that, which was, you know, something that previous USDA's hadn't done. But, you know, I was asked to continue. Would, you know, you had been SF, you had been CIA. How familiar were you with DIA and the human side of the military up into that point? So from a special forces perspective, I was, and then a little bit from my CIA days, but, you know, I was a consumer of the NRO's products and NSA's products and stuff. And then now I had more responsibility to build their capabilities. What's the next generation of satellites going to look like? How do we stay ahead of so we can continue to break codes and collect,

different types of communications, you know, as you go to, you know, faster and faster and higher volume communication systems, fiber optics, you know, you go from 10G a second to 100G or whatever. You know, you got to keep up with that. What's the learning curve like that for somebody coming? Well, I'd already dealt with nuclear weapons and stealth bombers and lots of other stuff from my special forces in CIA days. So this was just another area, but there is a steep learning curve for those things. That's true.

And fortunately, again, you know, having the interdependent capabilities added on to the SOLIC made me as an assistant secretary, even though I didn't oversee intelligence, to deal with those organizations a lot as a customer. So that helped. I had four years of kind of understudy. Yeah. And I got to ask, of course, you're writing your book. that, you know, we're getting around this time frame that you were one of the very first people

under DOD that got read on, that we think we have something on high value target number one. And I was wondering if you could tell us like what that experience was like, what it was like going through all of that and kind of the lead up to the strike itself. Sure. So, you know, one of the main reasons I was brought back into government was to be deal with the growing al-Qaeda threat, which with our predators and other things, and in addition to a lot of other duties, but bin Laden was certainly on my mind a lot. And, you know, it took us nine years to find him after he escaped from the Torobora Mountains in

December 2001 and, you know, and sort of piece by piece to learn how he communicated with al-Qaeda through a courier, who that courier was, where he was located, and then finally to be able to geolocate him and follow him back to that compound. And so in 2007, when I became an assistant secretary, bin Laden was thought to be somewhere in northern Pakistan, but a big ellipse that could be all along the border region, north to south, then east to west a bit too.

And, you know, there were cells working or teams working on finding him, but, you know, we weren't super close. We first learned the nomadiguer, Kuna in Arabic of his courier, and then a few years later learned his ethnic identity and true name where he was from and then about him and his family. And then he was very operational security conscious. He wouldn't turn on his phone until he was 90 minutes away from bin Laden's house. And so there were a couple of glimpses of him, but not enough to fix him, as we say, to track him back to the compound. And so a year before we actually found him, we had one of those. And I thought, oh, my goodness, you know, we got him. and then we lost them, you know, and it was very high and then very low.

And then, sure enough, several months later, it was called into a special meeting with the vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs. The deputy CIA director was briefing the two of us that they think they had found bin Laden in late August 2010. And so this was a series of briefings of how they did it and all the habits, and then what we learned about the house, once we saw the house and even some glimpses of bin Laden walking around a courtyard. We ended up seeing him five times before the raid that actually killed him in early May 2011.

But all that was presented and I thought, now we're going to get him. So that was my first reaction that very likely he's there. It wasn't definitive, but it seemed very likely he was there. And at the same time, the vice chairman and I were being briefed, the Secretary of Defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, were being briefed by Leon Panetta, the CIA director. And so the four of us was it for the entire Department of Defense. So there were a handful of people in the White House with the, you know,

president, vice president and very top officials, people working on it at CIA, very, very small group and with support from NSA and NGA. and then the four of us in the Department of Defense. And that was it for the U.S. government for some months. Because they wanted a military option. No, they, well, more as policymakers, but there could be a military option. So from the time I was read in in the early fall of 2010, until the end of the 20,

we just focused on the intelligence case and trying to get more intelligence, which we did get some, not as much as we would have liked. And then right before Christmas, President Obama's National Security Advisor, Tom Donnell and on direction of the president, told Leon Panetta that he wanted to start looking at operational options. So I was called over to CIA with a small team to start developing these operations. Do we do it unilaterally or do we do it with the Pakistanis? Do we do a ground raid or do we do an airstrike and flushing the pros and cons and how we would do this? What kind of raid do we do?

How do we infiltrate to the target area, et cetera, and putting this together. And then progressively and so then, And at one point then for the raid option, Secretary Panetta says, we need now to look at a military option and we need to bring in Admiral Bill McCraven, the commander of the Joint Special Operations Command. So I called Bill up, who was in Afghanistan at the time, and say, please come to Washington. We got to brief you on something. And he and I go to CIA and they give him the briefing that I had done. gotten some months earlier.

And then he starts developing feasibility with a couple planners. And then at CIA, we build a mock-up of the facility so that if we do decide to start looking at a military option, we have that ready for the force. and then the force is assembled in second half of March to this facility and they get briefed on it for the first time. You know, the hand-picked force that's going to go do the ground operation, or possibly if the president approves it. And at the same time, we had gone to war with Libya.

And so when they were called in, they thought they were going to Libya for WM weapons of mass destruction or something else. And when the CIA briefer said, we believe we found bin Laden, and then Admiral McRaven tells them, and we're here to rehearse a plan to go get them. Let's get to work. You could have heard a pin drop.

But, and then we had five meetings with the president from mid-March till the end of April to brief him on both in detail on the intent. intelligence and then on the options. And so initially, some of the top leaders in our government, the president and secretary of defense and others, favor a B2 strike on the compound. And so I spend a couple weeks with planners with the B2 wing about,

you know, what we would need on that to hit that target. And it turned out because we didn't know what was underneath it or tunnels or hardened stuff. we needed 32, 2,000-pound bombs, 64,000 pounds of explosives. And so needless to say, when you looked at that, you know, every woman and child in that house would have been killed along with the four males, bin Laden and his son and the courier and his brother. And neighbors in the area would have been killed. And then others would have had their, you know, houses damaged and windows and other things.

And so that option was taken off the table while we continued to develop the raid option. A drone strike was substituted in case we could get Bin Laden in walking around that courtyard. And those are the two options that the president looked at at the end. And you mentioned in your book that you brought up or reminded Admiral McRaven about a special helicopter program that sounds like it was near and dear to your heart that you had supervised. Yeah. Yeah, so we had some specially configured helicopters that had a better chance of infiltrating a force to the target without going into detail. And, you know, we hadn't used them yet. And the test of that would be, you know, with the special configuration of them,

would they have the carrying capacity of a standard helicopter and go the distance because, you know, it was a 90-minute flight, you know, 150-plus miles to get to the target from Afghanistan. So it was a long helicopter flight. And so we started working through that. But it ended up being the right decision. And so as the plan is refined, you're going through rehearsals, you're getting closer and closer to, you know, D-Day, essentially, on this operation. And I think Obama wrote in his memoirs, as I recall, hearing all the information, getting all of the briefings and the president eventually getting to the point we're saying, guys, stop making up numbers in regards to percentages of likelihood that he's there. It kind of comes down to a flip of the coin and authorizing the operation.

I'd love to hear you have this great picture in the book of yourself in the situation room. as with the president and vice president as this operation's happening. Can you tell us what it was like to come into work that day and an absolute cloak of secrecy and to sit down in the room with all of these folks on the national security council and the president and actually witness this thing go down? Sure. So as I said, we had lots of meetings with the deputies and principals and lots of rehearsals with the the operational force and I had lots of separate meetings at CIA on things. But when the president finally made the decision first to deploy the force and then a few days before the raid,

heard from all his advisors and some were for the raid, others were for the drone strike, and others were for doing nothing, just waiting. So it was a very gutsy decision by the president. He didn't have unanimity among his team. The deputies were more not completely unanimous, but 90% unanimous that we ought to do the raid. And as you mentioned, there were different assessments, probability assessments about whether bin Laden was there from 50% to 95%. I was in. I was in. at 85 myself, but it's a made-up number. I mean, to be honest, but it just means, you know, you look at all the evidence and you think it's highly likely, or it's better than average,

it's likely. But as you mentioned, President Obama said, okay, 50-50, it's still way better than we've had the last 10 years. And Leon Panetta said, the American people knew what we knew, they would want us to go forward. And, you know, so 50 became 85 or 90. It really didn't matter. we were going to go. And so that last weekend, we had all-day meetings at the White House, first with the deputies and then the principals. And the raid was postponed today.

It was supposed to be a Saturday night and ended up shifting to Sunday because of bad weather. And so we all then had to go to this White House correspondence dinner. And that was excruciating to be at this comedy fest and stuff, which was very good comedy, black tie, you know, a tuxedo and everything. And all I could think about is get this over with so we can get on to the raid

and, you know, get some justice for the American people. And then the morning of the raid, we have another meeting at the White House to go over last minute things. And again, nobody on my staff knows the thing about this. There's a handful of people at the top of Pentagon. I have to brief the general counsel in at the last minute. So there's some legal things.

we had to do and and you know the very very just top officials the chairman the vice chairman the secretary defense and i had gotten the undersecretary for policy read in michel florin and uh and so you know i get in my car go to the pentagon get some papers and then decide to pause at the 9-11 memorial for a bit we have benches for each of the victims the 184 that lost their lives in the plane crash and just wanted to sit there and collect my thoughts before I went to the White House about, you know, why we were doing this raid. And it seemed like a good idea to me. And then went to the White House.

And then the operation was done under CIA authorities. So then went to CIA that afternoon, a handful of us, the director, the deputy director, director for operations and counterterrorism center. And then some of our other intelligence organizations, chiefs who were involved in the, directly in the operation or their, their, a few of their people were. And then Admiral Eric Olson from the head of special operations command. And so we monitored the operation in real time from CIA for some four hours or so

for the long flight in, the long flight out, the 38 minutes on target. And then when it was over, then went to the White House that night. And so that full, it's a long run to answer the question. But that photo was taken Sunday night after the raid was successfully done and at the White House and talking about it with the president and vice president and others, but also then getting the president ready for his address to the nation much later that night. And then the briefing on background to the press that we would do after that, which there was five of us. and, you know, from the political aspects of it to the intelligence to the military. And I was the Stucky as the briefer for the military part of the operation, which, you know, you couldn't say much. And so he just said, we'll win a helicopter.

We killed him. We flew back out. We don't have any casualties. He's dead. You know, that's not it. Can you, you know, you mentioned that it was done under CIA authorities. Can you tell our audience why that is, what the difference is between the CIA authorities and the military authority? Yeah, so there are different parts of the U.S. law. CIA is called Title 50 of the U.S. Code,

and the armed forces of the United States are Title 10. So people abbreviated as Title 10 or Title 50, which means the broad authorities given to the Secretary of Defense or the director of the CIA. And so if you were doing it under military authorities, the chain of command would go from the president to the Secretary of Defense to typically the combatant commander, the central command commander in this case, then to the operational commander, you know, who's executing the mission. If it's done under CIA authorities, it's the president to the director of the CIA directly. and then if he's using a military force, if any military capabilities are detailed over to CIA because CIA doesn't have that, for example. And so we have provisions to be able to do that sort of thing.

Then it's from the president to the CIA director to the operational commander, nothing in between. And the reason you choose the one, the natural one, the overwhelming one for military, force is, you know, through the defense chain of command. The reason you would choose CIA and the president with his advisors recommending did it in this case is if we went in and did a raid, because we didn't have proof that bin Laden was there. We had a really strong circumstantial case. So if we went in and did the raid and it turned out to be some crazy drug lord or, you know, who knows who was living

in this house, that and then we got out without making it. taking a big commotion, that it would, you know, given this was deep in the heart of Pakistan and kind of a resort town, that, you know, it would be a little more deniable than if we did it, you know, under Department of Defense Authority. So that was one of the reasons why we went to CIA route. So does that only matter, or in this case? Keep it quiet, I should say, rather than deniable, but just keep it quiet. So in this case, did it only matter?

if the mission was a bust, if, if, yeah, a clean bust. Yeah. And if it were a messy bus, you know, you'd have the same problem. Right, right, right. But we're a clean bust, you know, so as it turned out, you know, because we had the helicopter that had the hard landing and was damaged and couldn't fly out, we had to blow it up, you know, even though we didn't have casualties or anything, that made it messier. and that forced the president to then take, change it from a covert action to a military action after the fact, you know,

and say basically, I'm declassifying the fact that the United States did this, just that fact, you know, and then I can talk about it. You know, if I'm the president, I can give my speech to the nation then. So there are some authors out there that are very grateful that the helicopter went down. I have loads more questions, but if we have viewer questions for Mr. Vickers, we should probably try to get to some of those. Yeah, so we have a couple left over from the last show that we promised the folks would get to. And then, so let me get to these real quick. And then we have a couple more for tonight. And then, Dee, were there any on Patreon?

Yeah, there's a few. So I think, so from last week, from Tom Kay, thank you very much. What is your take on Iran? Its negative influence on the Middle East and potential actions to take. So Iran is definitely a malign influence in the Middle East and sometimes elsewhere. It wants to be the hegemon of its region and destabilize others. It also sees itself as the defender of Shiites around. And so it's built up substantial proxy forces in Hezbollah in Lebanon and now and Shiite militias and Katab Hezbollah and others in Iraq.

The Houthis in Yemen, it's allied with Syria. And then even non-Shiah groups like Hamas, it's supported. it as part of its revolutionary Islamic front. And so it's been a destabilizing force in the Middle East since the Iranian revolution. And, you know, our objectives with Iran are really severalfold. One, to prevent them from getting nuclear weapons, because if they did, all the trouble that they cause now would be magnified, they'd feel more emboldened to do it if they thought you couldn't invade them because of that you would risk nuclear retaliation. And then also to try to deal with this monolian influence

to get them to stop, which in some cases means shoring up our allies in the region, their defenses against missiles and other things. In other cases, it means working to undermine the Iranian regime or other things inside Iran. And, you know, the challenge with these things is that you're unlikely to solve this problem until there is a change of regime. American presidents really don't want to invade Iran and take on that burden of occupying it. And if you did do a strike against their nuclear weapons complex, you would set them back a few years, but you might even make them more likely than to want to have them eventually. And so it's a difficult problem and a work in progress.

You can't just let them run free because, you know, as we see right now, with allied with Hamas, their aim is to, destabilize the Middle East and, you know, get rid of Israel and lots of other things, and also take shot and get the U.S. out of the Middle East, you know, so taking shots at our soldiers who are deployed in the region and others. And so they're going to do that. And if you show weakness, they're just going to continue doing it. Right. You know. So it's a, it's a tricky issue with them to make sure we're doing enough to put them

their back foot without necessarily an all-out war do you feel that uh that the target strikes like against solomani that the other like targeted strikes when they're outside their area do you feel like those are a step forward in deterrence step backwards into turns yeah i mean solomani had a lot of american blood on his head supporting should groups that you know killed several hundred Americans and he was getting bolder and bolder and, you know, kind of getting a pass. You know, he traveled around the Middle East pretty freely. But it's a difficult decision, you know, in a way to do the strike because, you know, then what are you going to get back down the road? Right. But given the blood he had on his hands and his efforts to destabilize the

Middle East and that, you know, yes, he's replaced, but he won't necessarily be replaced. by an equally ambitious. Right. So I think it was a good decision. Yeah. Andrew Dunbar, thank you very much. Given the recent events in Ghana, right, Guyana, and Venezuela.

Guyana. What do you think the chances are that foreign influence is pushing it or Maduro is just going bonkers? Well, so, Iranians and Russians have pretty significant influence and Cubans in Venezuela and with, you know, with the old Chavez regime and then now Maduro and Chinese as well. But I think, I don't know, but I suspect this is internally. Venezuela is a resource rich country with talented population and they've managed to run it into the ground. And so, you know, trying to take some resources from a neighbor who doesn't have much of a military probably seems like a good idea to them. You know, one of the sad things is Guyana has been a poor country and then they discover this oil and gas and stuff off their coast and, you know, a chance to improve their prosperity.

And big Venezuela next door says, thank you very much. I think I'll want that. Yeah. We'll see what happened. but it's a, you know, it's clearly a case of a bully saying, you know, that's a nice lunch you have there. Right. You know, you mentioned we don't talk about Cuba that often. We've talked to like Mark Polymopoulos about, you know, the Havana syndrome.

And we don't really see Cuba, I think, in our national news as competitors. We see Russia, China and Iran. But, you know, we just had the big. A diplomat. A big diplomat, you know, indicted for, do you think that Cuba flies, do you think that they're a bigger threat than what the U.S. populace thinks they are? Or are they just getting successful on sort of one-off type things? So during the Cold War, they had a very formidable intelligence service when they recruited a number of these people, spy and DIA for many years, this ambassador for four decades, another senior State Department official that was caught, I think, a couple decades ago or something,

but it has been spying for several decades. And so they've done pretty well. And then, you know, they fomenting insurgency in Latin America, but particularly Central America in the 80s, sent 20,000 troops to Angola. We ended up defeating him there with the opposition. But, you know, they were punching. above their weight, like some other Soviet allies. And what really hurt Cuba was at the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union,

the Soviet Union cut off all its subsidies and stuff. And so that caused the regime to really retrench pretty dramatically, you know, in its ambitions, but it really didn't go away. And so over time, you know, the Russians have kind of expanded again there. the Chinese are interested in and as an intelligence platform, etc. So I wouldn't, you know, it's not to the level of threat that it was in the Cold War as a significant Soviet proxy for extending Soviet power. But it's more formidable, I think, today than it was 20, 25 years ago after the Cold War

when it was, you know, flat on its back for a while. So it bears attention to. And it's something that shouldn't just be ignored because they don't have our interests at heart. Yeah. Yeah, because we also had that DIA officer arrested in 2001. And Amontas. Yeah. Mohamed Savani, thank you very much for the Genestination.

As an investor, what can American companies do and what should foreign policy be regarding the plague 500 billion annual intellectual property and innovation theft by China because of the 50% plus equity requirement. Yeah, great question. So one, I think, you know, Chinese economy has been stumbling lately. Xi Jinping, you know, has been prioritizing political control over economic growth and innovation and, you know, and hurting the future and kind of going against Chinese strategy over the last four decades, which is, you know, hide your capabilities and buy your time,

you know, be pals with the West and get investment until you really are more powerful. You know, don't peak too soon. And he may be doing some of that. But China's done remarkably well with intellectual property theft. You know, during the Cold War, where we had really non-integrated economic systems between the East and the West. And the Soviets would try to steal technology and occasionally they'd be successful. And we'd frustrate them from time to times with things as, we learned about them.

And, you know, I looked at that and I thought, you know, one, communism produces a crappy economy, but, you know, you're not going to steal your way to economic prosperity. You know, you just can't compete in that world against people who are inventing stuff all the time and, you know, have the freedom and the capital to do it. China's made me rethink that, one, because of their integration with the West and access to capital. But two, it's so much easier to steal these days with cyber than Soviets. ever could have, you know, where you physically got to get the good and smuggle it someplace. And so they've done rather well. And, you know, something we have to harden our defenses

against and restrict new technologies from going there, much as we did during the Cold War. I also think that over the long haul, whether the United States remains the leading power in the international system, you know, 30 years from now, or whether it's China, will depend on our economic might and our technological innovation. And so that's where your callers comments, that really is the core of U.S. grand strategy. If we get that right and we create a prosperous, very healthy and unified and ambitious society, we on the national security side will do our parts in defense and intelligence to make sure we stay number one. If we fail in that economic and technological competition, we're going to have a much tougher time.

How, you know, and I know that counterintelligence isn't necessarily your focus, bailiwick, but how do you fight like the Chinese threat and not, you know, the threat in our institutions, the threat in our companies, things like that, and not be presented as a racist, like an anti-Chinese, but more an anti-CCP focused country? Yeah, so, you know, the FBI is maligned a lot these days, but it really has a tough mission. Its mission is expanded dramatically. So, one, you have all this cybercrime and intellectual property theft that, you know, is a new challenge to us. Two, you have a lot of spies.

You have Russian spies and Chinese and others. And so the counterintelligence problem has grown. And then you have domestic and foreign. extremists and and, you know, the foreign one is down a bit. The domestic one has risen, unfortunately. And so they've got a, they've got a challenge. They've got a much more diverse counterintelligence challenge than they had. And, you know, if I were king for a day, I would be trying to build up that agency and give them more resources, not less, because the domestic environment's gotten a lot tougher and part of it is counterintelligence. And, you know,

the Chinese target a lot, American-born Chinese because some of them have relatives. And also they're, you know, you know, if you look at our top companies, particularly our top tech companies, they're led by either recent or semi-recent immigrants here. You know, we're very fortunate as a country to have these people from India or China, Taiwan, wherever it is that have come here and built great company,

you know, got an education here, an engineering or science or whatever, and have built fantastic companies. But, you know, they're targeted and lower level employees are targeted, you know, by China, much as the Soviets a lot of times in the past would target Eastern European emigraise and others who, you know, still had family behind the Iron Curtain. Yeah. Joey Holt, thank you very much. You have to choose one. Who are you sending for the most difficult, dangerous hostage rescue mission? Cag or Dev Group? P.S., I know it's Cag. Starting to fight. Yeah. Oh, you know, as a former assistant secretary overseeing it all, I love all my children. And I have to climb. They are both fantastic. And, you know, our units have in some cases, you know, different specialties where for some missions,

one's the obvious choice and for others, the other, but for a lot of them, they're interchangeable and fantastic and the best in the world. Dee, do you want to hit the Patreon? Oh, you don't? Okay, hold on just a second. While I'm pulling up the Patreon, Mike, do you mind for you, somebody who's been around for a very long time. Are there threats that you see rising that Americans aren't aware of that maybe America isn't focused on that they should be? So I don't think it's necessarily a threat that comes out of the

blue. I think it's not more a case of not accurately characterizing the threat. So in one case, it might come from a combination of threats, that, you know, you see them all individually, but you don't think they might gang up on you and really make a much tougher problem where the whole is worse, greater than the sum of parts. So Iran, China, Russia, or two of them would pose challenges for us in a way that you haven't had to deal with in a long, long time, at least since World War II. We thought about it a lot, but we've planned for different contingencies, like that, but we haven't faced that really since that. And, you know, that would put a lot, a lot in play.

And then I think these emerging technologies that I believe really are going to change the world for good and bad, you know, artificial intelligence, maybe quantum computing, synthetic biology for sure. And, you know, a lot of this debate is goofy in a sense, particularly in the AI sense of it's either going to do nothing or Terminator machines are going to kill all humans and it's really going to be bad humans

having machines do very bad things for them that is more likely the bigger threat to us than machines by themselves going against all humans or something and you don't want to you know and so for instance while we're worried about bottling up AI

and putting all the safeguards around it and everything else so it can't kill all humanity, someone else might be thinking, how do I serve my foreign policy objectives and defeat your military with this or do something else? And the same is true for biology. And biology is an area where people don't like to talk about it too much because it's going to cure diseases. It's going to do what's going to feed lots of people. It's going to do wonderful, wonderful things for humans. But it can also be used for very bad purposes, and it's not going to escape certain

folks to think about that. And so it's really more the, like I said, the aspects of threats that people know something about, but not enough about that I think is where we could be caught. Right. David De Niedan, thank you very much. Question about the Angola Bush War. Last week, when you said, we beat the Cubans there. Are you referring to the American support for Unita, United or something like that. I had the impression that there was little CIA involvement, but it was mostly the South Africa who fought the Cubans in Angola. No, so the South Africans were engaged from time to time.

But supporting Unita from 1986 on, if I remember right, after a thing called the Clark Amendment was. repealed or something or other. But the last years of the Cold War was part of the Reagan doctrine. And the U.S. government had a pretty big, big role supporting Angolan's against the Cuban. I believe it was the second largest covert action program after Afghanistan. Yeah, it was pretty good-sized. Duncan Idaho, thank you very much. Love the book. And the book, if you guys have not read it, we highly recommend you do by all means available. Love the book. You talk a lot about government oversight near the end. I have several questions,

and I know you can't take them all. Feel free to pick and choose. So I'm going to ask the first two, Duncan. Do 127E operations undermine congressional oversight? I don't think so. I don't know enough about that particular issue since I left in 2015, and we had different titles. But Congress generally puts, you know, they pass the, they give you the authorities for these things and generally with their oversight. And so I don't, you know, you can, you can step beyond what's intended, you know, as occasionally a government will do and then get rained in after that. But, but generally the creators of the law try to make sure that you don't overstead. The, the interesting mechanism with 127E that differs from like the older 1208 or 1206 programs. 12.08 and 1206 is what I know.

Well, under under 127 what the the foreign partner actually op cons their military unit to our special ops advisors. That that's the big difference between the two. Um, that perhaps we use programs like that in places like Somalia. Yeah. But I mean, 1208 kind of lets you do you know that again it wouldn't be necessarily a forum you know 1206 was train them 1208 was

use a non-governmental entity essentially of some kind or another under our direction if I understand what you're saying correctly that it's a foreign partner that's doing it but you know you still could be subject to other constraints so I think the devil

details yeah and then do you think any changes are needed for the eminent FISA 702 reauthorization? And it's not just a reauthorization, I think it's an expansion, isn't it? I'm not sure. I don't know that it's an expansion. I think they're putting some more guardrails around it. But 702 is a very important program.

And, you know, the reason for 702 is it's just a feature of the design of the Internet, which most global traffic, it's been declining in the past decade or so, but 80, 90% of global traffic, no matter who the communicators are in the world, routes through the United States. So that posed a legal challenge for us in a sense, that, you know, you have two foreigners

in parts of the world talking to each other, two al-Qaeda terrorists. They're communications when, you know, Muhammad sends it to the Aymann or what, whatever it is, that communication is going to go through, the pipes go through the United States. So unless the pipes have some special privileges, U.S. privileges, because they transit the United States when two foreigners' communications is riding on it, you know, you don't want to deprive yourself of that intelligence. When you start using communications where an American is party to that,

then the pipes aren't the issue so much, but then, you know, you get into the FISA issue, the real FISA issue, right, supervision, the warrants, and that's all appropriate. Yeah. And if that had been violated in certain cases, you know, again, you have judges who review these things, the FISA court and stuff, but then, you know, that should be tightened up or the standards of evidence, but broadly because of the feature of global communications, 702 is essential. It's not an American program. It's a foreign intelligence program, principally.

Isaac, thank you. How can people achieve privacy, anonymity, and privacy in both online and IRL in real life? Also, how can they build and evolve their offset? So I think it's pretty tough. I mean, there's ways to do some, but generally, you know, just from an intelligence officer, a clandestine intelligence officer's perspective, you know, the challenge these days, and if you want to do normal business, is to hide in plain sight or hide temporarily for something, not to hide permanently, you know.

Yeah. We live in an age of surveillance capitalism. You make money by knowing a lot about people and data. and, you know, it's just the world we live in. You know, so there's, this is a problem like AI and other things that governments will have to wrestle with for a while. You don't want to over-regulate, but on the other hand,

you know, you do have basic privacy rights. And so whether things sunset at a certain period of time that, you know, you have a, you know, You know, you give up your privacy to be on social media or something, but it doesn't mean it should last forever. Right. Assuming you have a mechanism of enforcing that, you know, these are issues governments have to wrestle with.

Do you think that our government at some point in time should look at sort of the European model of having, you know, the right to forget, like if a consumer says? Yeah, maybe. I don't, I'm not an expert. Yeah, yeah. I do think it's important. But it's, but, you know, you, you know, and again, you have a right to your data and there's, there's tools and things that can help you restrict some of that as well.

I'm not, I'm not an expert, so I don't really feel qualified to talk about it. But, but on the other hand, you know, just a lot of it's out there. And it's, it's so integral to the economy and the way we do in life, just the way we do business. Yeah. So, Mike, since you've left governmental service, had a great, private sector career as well, received recipient of the Bill Donovan Award. Tell us, last question, I mean, what's next for Mike Vickers? Oh, I don't know.

I'm thinking about making me a follow-on book, and, you know, I've got seven grandchildren and maybe some more down the road, so I've got a full life right now. And, you know, my heart is in professionally and in national security and contributing where I can contribute best. It's not everywhere. But, you know, if I were given the right opportunity and the right world situation to come back into government one more time before I'm absolutely too old, I'd welcome the chance. That's for someone else to decide. Mike, we support you being the director of CIA or OD&I. Whatever you want, let us know.

And we'll start calling people. We'll start an email campaign. Well, I appreciate the saddle. I guess I have two votes. In the meantime, you wrote a terrific memoir. I hope folks will go and check it out by all means available. It's out now. Wherever books are sold, e-book.

Is there an audio book, Mike? There is. There's an audio book. I narrated it myself. Awesome. Yeah, people. people love that link is in the description yeah the link is down below in the description please check it out folks mike before we let you go any final thoughts anything you'd like to put out there

no you guys are great and it's a very comprehensive interview and subjects near and dear to my heart thank you for doing it really appreciate your time on a friday eve two friday evenings in a row and uh next week you're going to be here with mark palmeropolis right an old friend yeah yeah okay so yeah thank you we'll uh see you guys next friday take care out there have a nice weekend thanks everybody thank you mike we really appreciate it sure