

Remember that nerdy-yet-lethal kid from the Tom Hanks biopic about the U.S.'s proxy fight in 80s-era Afghanistan, Charlie Wilson's War? That's Michael Vickers, a longtime Special Forces and CIA guy. Last night, President Obama quietly nominated him to one of the Pentagon's highest offices. Call it a trend: in the last few months, architects and advocates of stealth wars against terrorists have risen to the highest levels of the intelligence community.

Pending Senate confirmation, Vickers will be the next Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence. It's a powerful job, responsible for all Pentagon intelligence assets, which represent nearly 90 percent of the $75 billion intelligence budget. For the last three years, it's been two jobs in one, doubled up as the Director of National Intelligence's top man in the Pentagon. And history suggests that wherever Mike Vickers goes, aggressive counterterrorist activity goes with him.

"He enjoys the trust and confidence of the secretary and deserves this big promotion, pending Senate confirmation, of course," says Geoff Morrell, Defense Secretary Robert Gates' spokesman. "He's obviously someone Secretary Gates has known for years and years, going back to their days at the CIA, and they've worked very closely together."

Hanks's movie (based on George Crile's book) might have taken some liberties with Vickers' character. But his background in covert action is unparalleled for a public figure. He served over a decade in Special Forces in the 1970s before joining the CIA. In the 1980s, Vickers hunted terrorists in Lebanon with a CIA "operational task force" and played a leading role for the agency in the 1983 invasion of Grenada. That was all before he became the "principal strategist" for what he later described to Congress (PDF) as "the largest and most successful covert action program in the CIA’s history": the U.S.-supported Afghan insurgency against the Soviets. During that time, he became tight with a certain senior CIA official named Robert Gates.

When Gates took over the Pentagon in December 2006, it wasn't long before he roped Vickers in. Since mid-2007, Vickers has been Gates' deputy for overseeing the Special Operations community, a behind-the-scenes job that's become central to counterterrorism and, in Morrell's words, "an increasingly important portfolio of this department." One of Vickers' first tasks was to draw up a strategy for hunting al Qaeda's affiliates beyond Iraq and Afghanistan, something aides jokingly called the "take-over-the-world plan." Next, he prevailed upon Gates to elevate irregular warfare to a core military function. As Vickers told Congress in 2007, "We are in a long irregular war that requires U.S. Armed Forces to increasingly adopt indirect, unconventional and clandestine approaches."

He meant what he said. An August expose in the New York Times about the U.S.' undeclared wars in Pakistan, Yemen and Somalia named Vickers as an architect and noted, "the Pentagon is becoming more like the C.I.A."

And Vickers is in good company. In August, James Clapper, the previous Pentagon undersecretary, became the new Director of National Intelligence, nominally the leader of the intelligence community. Unlike his predecessor, Dennis Blair, Clapper is, as CBS News described him, "a big supporter of increased use of drones." A few weeks before, over at the CIA, John D. Bennett, the former head of CIA quasi-military operations – with some secret dabbling in drone activities – took charge of all CIA spying operations.

These three appointments reflect an unannounced shift that the Obama administration quietly made at the end of 2009. As a backstop to the counterinsurgency war in Afghanistan, Special Operations leaders pushed for a leading role in going after extremist and insurgent enclaves on the Afghanistan-Pakistan border. "Every single night they are banging on these guys with a pace and fury that is pretty impressive," an anonymous administration official told Bob Woodward for Obama's Wars. (Even General David Petraeus, previously not a fan of body counts, has bragged about the intensity and lethality of the Special Forces raids.) And they're a supplement to the CIA's cross-border Pashtun proxy force and intensified drone campaign.

As Woodward reports, President Obama decided that the public doesn't need to know that he ordered cross-border operations into Pakistan, reasoning that "all hell would break loose" if he came clean about the U.S. war in Afghanistan's neighbor and the U.S.' "Major Non-NATO Ally." But if intense, undeclared war against terrorists is what you want, it makes a lot of sense to promote Vickers – and Clapper, and Bennett.

Morrell says there isn't yet a pick to succeed Vickers as the assistant secretary of defense for (deep breath) special operations, low-intensity conflict and interdependent capabilities. And while Clapper and Gates have yet to determine if the Pentagon undersecretary for intel will remain the Director's chief of defense intelligence, Morrell adds, "from our perspective, there is no need for that arrangement to change." Representatives from Clapper's office didn't respond to requests for comment.

Photo: "Charlie Wilson's War"

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