"Deeply insightful...A sweeping and breathtaking journey that gives the reader unprecedented access to the courage, sacrifice, and bravado of our nation’s finest warriors, in their finest hours." —Admiral William H. McRaven, author of Wisdom of the Bullfrog and #1 New York Times bestseller, Make Your Bed
In 1984, Michael Vickers took charge of the CIA’s secret war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. After inheriting a strategy aimed at imposing costs on the Soviets for their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, Vickers transformed the covert campaign into an all-out effort to help the Afghan resistance win their war. More than any other American, he was responsible for the outcome in Afghanistan that led to the end of the Cold War.
In By All Means Available, Vickers recounts his remarkable career, from his days as a Green Beret to his vision for victory in Afghanistan to his role in waging America’s war with al-Qa’ida at the highest levels of government. In captivating detail, he depicts his years in the Special Forces—including his training to parachute behind enemy lines with a backpack nuclear weapon in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe—and reveals how those experiences directly influenced his approach to shaping policy. Vickers has played a significant role in most of the military and intelligence operations of the past four decades, and he offers a deeply informed analysis of the greatest challenges facing America today, and in the decades ahead.
Riveting and illuminating, this is a rare and important insider’s account of the modern military and intelligence worlds at every level.
"Deeply insightful...A sweeping and breathtaking journey that gives the reader unprecedented access to the courage, sacrifice, and bravado of our nation’s finest warriors, in their finest hours." —Admiral William H. McRaven, author of Wisdom of the Bullfrog and #1 New York Times bestseller, Make Your Bed
In 1984, Michael Vickers took charge of the CIA’s secret war against the Soviets in Afghanistan. After inheriting a strategy aimed at imposing costs on the Soviets for their invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, Vickers transformed the covert campaign into an all-out effort to help the Afghan resistance win their war. More than any other American, he was responsible for the outcome in Afghanistan that led to the end of the Cold War.
In By All Means Available, Vickers recounts his remarkable career, from his days as a Green Beret to his vision for victory in Afghanistan to his role in waging America’s war with al-Qa’ida at the highest levels of government. In captivating detail, he depicts his years in the Special Forces—including his training to parachute behind enemy lines with a backpack nuclear weapon in the event of a Soviet invasion of Western Europe—and reveals how those experiences directly influenced his approach to shaping policy. Vickers has played a significant role in most of the military and intelligence operations of the past four decades, and he offers a deeply informed analysis of the greatest challenges facing America today, and in the decades ahead.
Riveting and illuminating, this is a rare and important insider’s account of the modern military and intelligence worlds at every level.
Critiques-
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January 1, 2023
Award-winning Vanderbilt historian Blackbourn rethinks Germany in the World, arguing that it was a persuasive force even before unification in the 19th century. Joint Chief Curator of Historic Royal Palaces and a prolific historian, Borman (Crown & Sceptre) limns the historic significance ofAnne Boleyn & Elizabeth I. In Revolutionary Spring, Wolfson Prize--winning Clark refreshes our view of the revolutions that rocked Europe in 1848. In Homelands, Oxford historian Garton Ash draws on both scholarship and personal experience to portray Europe post-World War II. In Soldiers Don't Go Mad, distinguished journalist Glass uses the friendship and literary output of outstanding war poets Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen--both gay and both ultimately opposed to fighting--to show how an understanding of post-traumatic stress disorder and its treatment first emerged during the industrialized slaughter of World War I. Journalist Hartman's Battle of Ink and Ice shows that the contention between explorers Robert Peary and Frederick Cook, both claiming to have discovered the North Pole, also sparked a newspaper war with all the earmarks of fake news. The long-anticipated My Friend Anne Frank recounts Holocaust survivor Pick-Goslar's friendship with Frank (she's called Lies Goosens in The Diary of a Young Girl), having been together with her at the Westerbork transit camp and eventually Bergen-Belsen. Also known as the Graveyard of the Pacific, the Columbia River Bar forms where the river pours into the ocean off Oregon's coast and creates fearsome currents that have claimed numerous lives; like his abusive father, Sullivan risked crossing it, and he makes his book at once history, memoir, and meditation on male behavior at its extreme. Former undersecretary of defense for intelligence in the Obama administration, Vickers recalls a life in intelligence and special operations that arcs from his Green Beret days to his involvement in the CIA's secret war against the Soviets in Afghanistan to the war on terror. In Road to Surrender, the New York Times best-selling Thomas (First: Sandra Day O'Connor) relies on fresh material to convey the decision to drop the atomic bomb from the perspectives of Secretary of War Henry Stimson, Japanese Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo, and Gen. Carl "Tooey" Spaatz, head of strategic bombing in the Pacific. In National Dish, three-time James Beard award-winning food journalist von Bremzen investigates the relationship between food and place by examining the history of six major food cultures--France, Italy, Japan, Spain, Mexico, and Turkey. In Beyond the Shores, the Harriet Tubman Prize--winning Walker (Exquisite Slaves) considers why Black Americans leave the United States and what they encounter when they do, moving from early 1900s performer Florence Mills to 1930s scientists to the author's own grandfather. An historian at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, Walton assays the century-long intelligence war between the West and the Soviet Union/Russia, considering lessons that can be gleaned today in Spies.
Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.
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April 10, 2023
In this provocative and eye-opening debut memoir, Vickers, a former national security and intelligence official, shares lessons gleaned from the Cold War, the war on terror, and other global conflicts. He offers an encyclopedic account of the operations he helped plan, including the strategy of supplying Afghanistan’s mujahedin with weapons and tactics to force a Soviet withdrawal in the 1980s. Then came the shock of 9/11 and the onslaught of global terrorism. America’s immediate response, which Vickers helped to devise, involved counterterrorism operations to “disrupt, dismantle, and defeat” al-Qaeda and eliminate its sanctuary in the Afghanistan-Pakistan border region. Among other lessons, Vickers notes that invading is easier than pacifying, that good intelligence is crucial, and that drone strikes and special operations raids are an effective means of disrupting jihadist networks. As Russia and China increasingly seek to intimidate their neighbors, Vickers advocates for “invest heavily” in America’s “air, missile, undersea, space, and cyber force.” Though he downplays the risks of military intervention and doesn’t fully reckon with the damage inflicted by the U.S. on Iraq and Afghanistan, he makes a vigorous argument for the use of “all means available” to defeat America’s foes. Comprehensive and combative, it’s a case to be reckoned with. -
Starred review from May 1, 2023
The former undersecretary of defense for intelligence under Barack Obama reflects on key military campaigns and the lessons and insights he garnered during his many years of service. From his early training in the Special Forces to the many high-ranking positions he held within the CIA and the Department of Defense, Vickers had a long, distinguished career that often placed him at the center of some of the most significant military and intelligence operations of the past several decades. In this engrossing, densely packed memoir, the author recounts in vivid detail how these events unfolded and the particular role he played in each instance. He chronicles the U.S invasion of Grenada in 1983, the CIA's secret assistance to Afghan forces fighting the Soviets in the mid-1980s, the capturing of Osama bin Laden in 2011, and counterterrorist efforts to impede al-Qaida and the Islamic State group. Vickers is successful in his plan to write "an analytical memoir" in order "to provide sufficient historical context for the events in which I participated, show how intelligence, special operations, strategy, and warfare evolved during my more than four decades of service, and how policy battles in Washington often decided the outcome of our operations and wars as much as our action in the field did." Regarding policy battles, the author candidly scrutinizes how and why decisions were occasionally misguided, when he felt the U.S may not have responded quickly enough or accordingly. Like other recent policy analysts, he contends that the U.S. is enmeshed in a new Cold War, which includes China and Russia, with possibly graver consequences at stake. "Competing successfully in this new era will require far more than military strength," writes the author. "Our military and intelligence power, moreover, must be transformed to reflect new realities, as must our alliances and national security institutions." A masterful, fully compelling assessment of key intelligence and special operations missions over recent decades.COPYRIGHT(2023) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
