Michael Vickers
Subject: Killing bin Laden
Bio: Defense Department’s top civilian military intelligence officer under Obama
Reading: By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations, and Strategy is here
Transcript:
Larry Bernstein:
Welcome to What Happens Next. My name is Larry Bernstein. What Happens Next is a podcast which covers economics, politics, and culture.
Today’s topic is Killing bin Laden.
Our speaker is Michael Vickers who was the Defense Department’s top civilian military intelligence officer under Obama. He is also the author of the book By All Means Available: Memoirs of a Life in Intelligence, Special Operations and Strategy.
I want to learn about political decision making under uncertainty like when Obama had to make the call on whether to send in the special forces to attack bin Laden in Pakistan. I want to find out if Enhanced Interrogation techniques work effectively and whether it makes sense for the CIA to use it against terrorists. I also what to discuss why the enemies of the West support far right and far left candidates in our elections.
I recently held a conference in Washington DC with a bunch of my friends where we chatted with Michael. This podcast will be different from normal because some of the questions will be asked by my friends. This conversation was greatly assisted by my co-host Colin Teichholtz.
Michael, can you open with six minutes of opening remarks and begin with a brief synopsis of your book.
Michael Vickers:
For those of you who have not read the book, I am going to briefly summarize what it is about. I started in the Army Special Forces or Green Beret, both as a sojourn officer and then went to the CIA on the undercover side, particularly covert action. And then at the end of my career as a national security policy maker in the Department of Defense. First as an Assistant Secretary of Defense in charge of all our operational capabilities from nuclear weapons on down. What our strategy is. And then as Under Secretary for Intelligence, overseeing all our intelligence agencies except those outside the Department of Defense.
The book covers three major historical events that I was fortunate enough to play a central role in. The first was the most successful covert action program in CIA's history our effort to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan in the 1980s. Then two, our campaigns to defeat Al-Qaeda, mostly through drone strikes. And then third, the raid that brought justice to Osama bin Laden.
One of the questions I tried to answer was why in some cases we win when no one expects that you can win like driving the Soviets out of Afghanistan and yet then we stumble in other cases.
What accounts for that? Is it bad military or intelligence advice? Is it political where presidents make bad decisions? Why do you fail in this case and succeed in another?
Strategic patience and resilience are important, but success is never final. That is why we hand it off to the next generation and no matter what you accomplish, it has got a finite shelf life. If you look at Russia today, we thought they were left for dead and they are still causing us trouble. No matter how great you won the Cold War and defeated Al-Qaeda. They might be back in 30 years.
Larry Bernstein:
Can you give an example of a strategic decision that the US made that worked to undermine the Soviets?
Michael Vickers:
With the Soviets, we did well at the beginning of the Cold War and at the end. The last 15 years we adopted military strategies that did not lead to a war but upset the Soviet military. We started using our attack submarines, and we sent them into Soviet waters. They were worried about the security of their nuclear fleet, and rather than sending submarines out into the Atlantic that could sink our ships, they were husbanding them closer to the Soviet Union. If we went to war, it meant we could have convoys get across.
The Soviets outnumbered us 3:1 in the Cold War. When we started developing precision weapons and deep attack systems that changed the military balance in Europe. One of the reasons the conservative Soviet general staff embraced Mikhail Gorbachev was they thought this guy will fix this system. They thought we cannot build a personal computer, so in 20 years, we're going to be so far behind the United States, this guy will fix it for us. And then what contributes to that besides being on the strategic initiative, is leveraging a key asymmetry that you have. Drone attacks against Al-Qaeda, there was nothing they could do about it and undersea warfare against the Soviets, et cetera.
Trying to force your adversary to play your game rather than you play his game. I like to talk about escalation dominance. You're trying to seek some advantage. It's how we won World War 2, and it can come from your industrial or mobilization capacity, it can come from intelligence. It is how we did well in kicking the Taliban out of Afghanistan, but then not doing so well trying to make Afghanistan into some central Asian Valhalla, which was beyond our capabilities.
In the American way of war and covert operations, politics and allies are central. Just like Churchill had to worry about allies, that has been the experience of my life too. And some of them are real pains in the ass, but you got to work with them. Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, they are not technically allies, but they're important. Pakistan's a good case. I call them a frenemy in my book because they were supporting insurgencies to kill Americans in Afghanistan and helping us in other ways with Al-Qaeda in Pakistan.
You got to win the politics in Washington and your allied capitals, or you are not going to have a successful strategy. You may have this great plan, but if your politics are not aligned, you are going to end up failing.
Larry Bernstein:
What is America’s strength in intelligence?
Michael Vickers:
A lot of people believe that the heart of intelligence is analysis, and that is true that you are taking information to make sense of it for policy makers. But if you do not have secrets, particularly for a great power, you are not much better in the New York Times, and it is not worth $80 billion a year. Spies and technical intelligence that gives us insights into what an adversary's intentions are critical. If you do not have that, you do not have a global intelligence system.
On the analytical side, one of the great strengths of the United States and our Western allies is objectivity. That does not mean they are right, they get it wrong 30% of the time, but our system lets them call it as they see it. And then the generals can say, well, I do not agree with this. What do you mean we are losing the war? We are winning it. I am the general, but the president at least must hear what the analysts have to say about how they see things going.
The other challenge is understanding what decisions top leaders are making so that you are relevant to them. Are you solving a president's problem or are you telling them some obscure stuff he does not care about?
Covert action as in most things in life, nouns are more important than adjectives. It is the action part that counts. The covert part matters. You got to keep it secret to a degree. But our most successful programs are those that are the biggest where you get economies of scale. Our counter-terrorism efforts after 9/11, our defeat of the Soviets in Afghanistan and Cuban proxies in Africa and elsewhere were also our biggest programs.
Larry Bernstein:
How important is it having the right person in charge?
Michael Vickers:
My experience across 40 years of government is how much individuals matter. You have lots of smart people, different capabilities, when you get the right alignment of critical people, it can be a vertical chain of command. There were three people above me to the Director of the CIA, but we all had the same view. Any cog in that chain might have created different results.
We had this Congressman Charlie Wilson, and he was able to persuade others. It was a handful of people that changed US government policy. It was not some big staff study or lots of smart people working the problem for years. And so that alignment really matters.
I had commands where I had traditional leadership down an organization, but most of the big jobs I had in my life was working for someone else. I was working for the CIA Director and a couple of his subordinates on Afghanistan or the Secretary of Defense and the President later in life. But that means persuasion skills. I call it leading up, but I could not do it myself.
I want to warn you, we intelligence officers tend to be pessimists. We like to think of ourselves as realists, but we are pessimists. It has been said that when an intelligence officer sees flowers, he immediately looks around for the coffin. And that is the way we view the world.
Larry Bernstein:
Next topic is intelligence failure. The Israelis were caught with their pants down as they were not expecting to be attacked by Hamas from Gaza. What went wrong?
Michael Vickers:
They did not really have good intelligence on Gaza on Hamas. They withdrew from there in 2005 as they did against Hezbollah and Iran. The things they are worried about the most, they put their priorities against, and you see the results. They have done well against those others, not so much against Hamas.
One of the things you see with intelligence failures, they occur because the problem's just too complex. There is no answer like is the Soviet Union going to collapse or when is Arab Spring going to start and how far it is going to spread? No one really knows the answer to that. It is a crapshoot at best. There is no secret you can steal. We differentiate between secrets and mysteries.
But the flip side of it is there is just as many policy failures and the policy makers do not like to tell you that. At the end of the day, you still got to make policy. In Israel's case, they had good intelligence about Hamas' plans, but they dismissed it at higher levels because they said these guys are just dreaming. And if you thought there was even a small probability of it, you ought to know your fence can be breached or not. So that's not intelligence, that's engineering. There is a lot of failures to go around.
Larry Bernstein:
How do you incorporate uncertainty from government intelligence in decision making?
Michael Vickers:
You got to be properly skeptical of the intelligence. And you see that in the Bin Laden raid where we hoped for more intelligence, but we did not get it. President Obama had to decide based on what we had, which was incredible circumstantial evidence but not definitive. And part of the reasons we were successful against Al-Qaeda is we adopted signature strikes where I did not have to know exactly who that senior Al-Qaeda leader was on the ground. If I knew he was a senior leader and he was with his buddies, I could do the strike. Well, 60% of the top leaders we killed over four years were because of that policy change. I wish it were perfect, but it is not going to get there. It is a B+ rather than an A and you got to make do with it.
Larry Bernstein:
What was the quality of our intelligence about Russia’s invasion of Ukraine?
Michael Vickers:
We had superb intelligence about the Russian invasion of Ukraine. We tried to use that as a deterrent effect to say, we know everything you are going to do, and these did not deter the Russian squat. Now what it did do is help us shore up allies.
Michael Gorzynski:
How good are our capabilities for understanding our adversary's intentions? Understanding what Xi's intentions vis-a-vis Taiwan.
Michael Vickers:
The goal of intelligence is to have a spy right there with the leader of your adversary. But you seldom get that. You get lots of other stuff. You get close to that when your intelligence is good, you may know all their plans and it is still enough to act on, but you may not get the exact intention. But that did not seem to impact Putin’s decision which is based on how he perceives us over the last decade. Did we resist him previously? And the answer is we did not over a course of time.
Intelligence goes against both intentions and capabilities. We are good at getting the capabilities right because our spies can tell us about the next generation of Soviet fighters but not what Gorbachev's thinking.
Michael Gorzynksi:
Will the Chinese invade Taiwan?
Michael Vickers:
Xi has told them to be ready in a couple years. They still believe time is on their side and will win through coercion. The big risk for China is if they try and fail, because regime legitimacy depends on it.
David Wecker:
What is your perspective on what XI can do militarily over the next 3 years? Is it even feasible for him to do it? Does it depend on Taiwanese defenses? Could you talk about how the operational realities that exist there? It is not easy to do.
Michael Vickers:
The Chinese were the best students of our first Persian Gulf War Desert Storm. Foreign militaries looked at this rapid victory and said, “boy, the United States is formidable.” The Chinese looked at it and said what a dumb ass Saddam was to allow six months for the United States to move 500,000 troops right on their border and then beat their brains in. That was the origin of Chinese strategy over Taiwan is to deter the U.S. from intervening in the first place or making life tough for them if they do. They have invested very heavily in their missile force to first attack our air bases that are close in then our surface ships.
And for a couple decades, our Navy did not believe that that would be feasible, that we would have defenses or that China would not be able to target a moving surface ship till the 2030s. Well, they were able to shortly after 2010. Our military planners look at this and think, one, it is a hard problem if China really is a great power, the idea that you can stop them a hundred miles off the Chinese coast when they are throwing all their continental power into this, and their interest is higher. They are willing to escalate, tough problem for the United States and its allies. That is why you get the military view that they are getting better and better and more likely to use it.
The flip side is that they still think time is on their side, and so maybe there will be a little more risk averse in doing it when they might be able to, but just do not want to take the chance.
One of the few areas of bipartisanship in U.S. foreign policy was China. Thinking that if we help make them get rich that the middle class would demand a less crazy foreign policy. By 2018, people on both sides realized this had failed.
Back to intelligence and policy, we would have a warning of what the Chinese are doing. The question is whether we act on it? For instance, with the Russians in Ukraine, once they were bringing blood supplies to the front, this is not an exercise, they are planning on people bleeding. And there would be a few weeks of serious warning before the war started, and it is just what we did with the time.
David Wecker:
When it is not an exercise, how are we going to know?
Michael Vickers:
The Taiwan Strait between Taiwan and the mainland is very shallow. You cannot put a lot of submarines in there. One of the reasons the Chinese want Taiwan is the other side of the island toward the Pacific it gets to 10,000 feet very quickly. So good place to put submarines, and TSMC is not a bad prize either, but the challenge for us is we believe China cannot take Taiwan without invading twice the size of D-Day, putting large forces across a hundred miles of water, taking the capitol. A lot of it depends on Taiwanese will and other intangibles. They might win by just the blockade. It is an island, so you can cut it off by combination of cyberattacks and missiles. But naval blockade being the principal one, and to break that, you got to go to war.
Colin Teichholtz:
Enhanced interrogation techniques are they effective?
Michael Vickers:
Enhanced interrogation techniques are what some people call torture. Water boarding is close. It is the most extreme, but stress positions, screwing with your sleep that starts to get a little grayer. Our high-risk personnel, special forces, fighter pilots, anybody in danger of getting shot down behind enemy lines or operating behind enemy lines, and in the CIA, we all had to go through that. I had all that done on me in training. Now the advantage is I knew it was training so you could do whatever the hell you want. Make me miserable for three days. I did not really know where I was, but I knew I'd survive unless they're really incompetent, they're not going to kill me. The Al-Qaeda, people do not know that. It is a difference.
Do you get intelligence from it? There is a belief that you should never do this because you never get any intelligence and that is patently not true. Now, people will confess to all false things if you hurt them enough. But even with these lesser techniques that are still very unpleasant, people do give you intelligence. Only three Al-Qaeda leaders were waterboarded, and the 9/11 planner Khalid Sheikh Mohammed (KSM) gave us tons of information before and after, but the one thing he kept secret was his relationship with Osama bin Laden.
He was waterboarded a bunch of times, but he was counting. He learned how to figure it out. This is three minutes. I'm two minutes into this thing. I just got to a hold out a little while longer and then I am done with the waterboarding. He never gave up his biggest secrets, but he gave up lots of others. That is what makes it murkier. If it were a complete failure and they had legal sanction from the Department of Justice, nobody would do it.
Then you must step back, what are the strategic consequences? Even if I believe you that I am going to get intelligence out of this, is the reputational damage to the United States so high or the risk to my soldiers because others then will say, screw your Geneva Convention, I'm going to do this or worse to you. So, the military is very much against it trying to protect their soldiers.
What if it the guy has a nuclear weapon like a Jack Bauer show, and he is going to do it in New York City. Well, would you then throw it to the well, fortunately we have not been in that situation where someone is faced with that decision.
Bush started stopping the last two years of his presidency. And then Obama got rid of it completely. It was a two-year experiment right after 9/11. And then people realized this is causing problems.
Larry Bernstein:
Tell us about Obama’s decision-making process on the Osama Bin Laden raid.
Michael Vickers:
The Bin Laden raid was real gutsy decision.
He had half of his advisors saying do not do it, including our current President Biden, and you ought to take that seriously. And I remember Leon Panetta said, “if the American people knew what we knew right now, they would say, why the hell aren't you doing this?” And Obama asked us for all our opinions and probabilities about whether Bin Laden was there. I was in the 85% camp. The lowest were 60% or so. It was circumstantial. And Obama says, okay, call it 50/50. I still think this is the best we have had in 10 years. If we do not do this, something is wrong with us. And that is why your president, and I am not.
David Wecker:
I heard Secretary Gates speak about his first day as Secretary of Defense. He asked the general counsel what kind of cyberattack would constitute an act of war. And he said on the day he left; he still had not gotten an answer.
How vulnerable is our critical infrastructure, utilities, electric, to a cyberattack? What is your general analysis of our vulnerability there and what should we do?
Michael Vickers:
We are still trying to figure out deterrence. In the cyber world, it is hugely different from nuclear weapons. Deterrence is the name of the game with cyber. You do not like it, but it has destructive capabilities. You could shut down an electrical power system and have mass effects.
The Chinese built big weapons that can destroy U.S. cities. And they figured that is enough for deterrence. And the Russians have the same view of cyber that the easiest target, rather than trying to disarm the United States by getting into its highly protected command and control systems just make its population miserable if you need to escalate. So, attacking the electrical power grid or others.
To your question about critical infrastructure, financial services and the high-end defense industrial base is quite strong. Why? Because they got so much at stake, and they can afford to invest in this to protect their clients.
Once you get away from that to these other things, chemical plants, or utilities, it is just the cost. So, you got a cost center, you try to do as much as you think you need to do, but you do not overdo it. They tend to be vulnerable. And then because the United States is the most internet integrated society, we have got lots of attack surfaces. So, if I cannot get into your company but I can get into your supply chain because they make something critical for your firm.
Jay Greene:
After World War 2, the Soviet Union was relatively weak. They did what weak powers do, which is they infiltrated our relatively porous open society and government to see if they could undermine us from within.
Our rivals today are also relatively weak. Iran is weak and China may be in less powerful than it appears. And all of them are making very concerted efforts to infiltrate society and governmental institutions. And the only way we fended off the Soviet infiltration was with a red scare, and we look back on it with embarrassment, but maybe it was necessary to avoid that weakening internally so that we could prevail ultimately externally. Are we currently under threat from infiltration effort by our enemies? Do you think we can conjure up a new red scare so that we can counter it effectively?
Michael Vickers:
If you go back to the early Cold War, the Soviets benefited from communist fellow travelers and true believers. You could recruit spies in critical areas and undermine us, and I think we overreacted. But your point is right, that some of these people, it took us 30 years to find out until some records were declassified, but some were really traitors that were in dispute for three decades.
What makes the challenge worse today is the ability to manipulate information now with these deep fakes. What the Soviets used to have to do in the Cold War was place articles in friendly press agents. The United States causes AIDS in Africa or something, and you have an article written by a communist stooge in some African newspaper. Now you got scale, global reach, and more capabilities. It has become a real serious threat.
Now they are trying to manipulate us. So back in 2012, they were doing what we call distributed denial of service attacks against ATMs. And believe it or not, right before Christmas, Toys R US, what regime would screw with Santa. But the Chinese have recently got into the game in a big way. They are all trying to manipulate us and tell us stuff.
Russia's big goal right now is for us to abandon Ukraine. Maybe China's will be, do not intervene in Taiwan, but ultimately, it's don't let your stupid government drag you into wars or something else. Just trying to divide. The Russians right now is they will back the far left and the far right at the same time in multiple countries; they do not care. They used to back communist parties. Now it is just who can stir up a mess and I will back both of you.
Larry Bernstein:
Thanks to Michael for joining us.
If you missed our previous podcast the topic was No One Mourns the Wicked. Our speaker was Darren Schwartz who is the What Happens Next Movie Critic. Darren and I discussed all aspects of the blockbuster movie Wicked including the decision to split the movie into two parts, whether it was too damn long as well as the key casting decisions. We debated Wicked’s Oscar chances, compared it to other classic films, and generally caused mayhem.
I would now like to make a plug for next week’s show with Jim Zelter who is the co-President of Apollo. Jim will discuss the growing dominance of Private Credit lending. He will also describe how insurance companies are profiting from the booming annuity business.
You can find our previous episodes and transcripts on our website whathappensnextin6minutes.com. Please follow us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Thank you for joining us today, goodbye.
Check out our previous episode, No One Mourns the Wicked, here.
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