Special Forces to CIA in Afghanistan Fighting the Soviets | Mike Vickers (throwback)

**dee takos** (0:00)
So, Mr. Vickers, really appreciate your patience with us and your being gracious with your time. We'll jump right into it here. Could you tell us a little bit about your origin story, sort of about how you grew up and how that took you and led you towards governmental service?

**Michael Vickers** (0:16)
Sure. So I grew up in Southern California and went to Hollywood High School and had dreams of being a professional baseball player, a football player, a quarterback, and my passions were much greater than my abilities.
So as I completed high school, I started thinking about what else I wanted to do. As it turned out, a high school teacher gave me a copy of the New York Times or put it in front of my desk when I was in the school library and it had an article about CIA's big paramilitary operation during the Vietnam War in Laos supporting the Hamong tribesmen and said, you might be interested in this. And it was about secret armies. It's the first I had heard of it. And I thought, yeah, I think I might want to be a CIA officer. And so that kind of planted the seed. And then I thought the best path for doing that was to go into the special forces, which I did after a couple of years of college and then became an officer and then actually then became a CIA operations officer.

**dee takos** (1:21)
Tell us about landing in 10th Special Forces Group. And I mean, this is during the Cold War, of course. What was 10th Group like at that time? What was your initial roles and duty positions?

**Michael Vickers** (1:33)
Yeah, so I completed the special forces qualification course as a weapon sergeant in May 1974 And then was assigned to the 10th Group, which had two battalions at Fort Devens, Massachusetts at the time. And, you know, as you know, special forces groups are oriented toward different regions of the world.
And after Vietnam, the number of groups collapsed down to three. But the 10th Group had Europe and the Soviet Bloc. And basically the operational detachments were divided. Some of them would go hit their operational areas were Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. And that's the part I was in, so I had Russian and Czech. And then others had the stay-behind mission, if the Soviets overran Germany or Scandinavia or others. And so they learned Norwegian and German and French and Danish and that sort of thing. And the group was really a fantastic learning experience. You know, I was kind of the youngest guy on the team.
Most of my teammates were Vietnam veterans. Some had participated in very sensitive reconnaissance operations in Laos and North Vietnam with MACV SOG, or Studies and Observation Groups that were doing these dangerous special reconnaissance missions. And then we also had a number of Eastern European emigres who were born in Czechoslovakia or elsewhere. One of my group commanders was born in Georgia, and another battalion commander was born in Czechoslovakia. And so they were a great source of knowledge about, you know, if we actually had to deploy into our unconventional warfare operational areas, what it would be like to live there and everything else. So it was a tremendous learning experience for me. And, you know, they sent me to a lot of training then.
You know, in the post-Vietnam era, we didn't have a lot of operations. And so it was mostly a great deal of training till the 1980s. We did have one, you know, our job was mainly to prepare for World War III. And our job was either to do special reconnaissance behind enemy lines or direct action. And then if there was a resistance movement, unconventional warfare. And one special mission we had, a few of us in the group, was to train with very small nuclear weapons, man-portable nuclear weapons, to actually try to stop the Soviet advances, you know, by interdicting the second-echelon forces. Had one potential combat deployment to Angola during that period. Angola had gone into a civil war, but it was aborted at the last minute, and the president decided to go the covert action route, rather than overt military or special operations use.

**dee takos** (4:53)
Would you like to talk a little bit about, one thing I thought was unique and interesting about your book was you talked about getting sent to Berlin to do like some clandestine tradecraft training.

**Michael Vickers** (5:03)
Yeah, so the 10th group in those days, you know, I mentioned two battalions in the group headquarters at Fort Devens. There was a battalion forward at Bob Tolts in Bavaria.
I later served in that unit. And then there was essentially a company size force in civilian clothes that was in Berlin, called Detachment A, changed its name in the 1980s to something else. But they had a stay behind mission, you know, if the Soviets overran Berlin, and then also potentially to go out into East Germany, you know, given the location of Berlin in the event of war. And so one of the training episodes I had was to go serve with them and do essentially urban unconventional warfare, you know, how we would sabotage facilities and how we would clandestinely communicate so we couldn't be found out by the secret police. And so a lot of denied area trade crops.