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 Yet this unassuming ex-Green Beret and former CIA agent engineered the clandestine arming of the Afghan rebels who drove the Soviet Union out of their country nearly a quarter century ago in what was the largest covert action in the spy agency's history.
The critical role Vickers played gets only modest attention in an upcoming movie about former Democratic Rep. Charlie Wilson of Texas, a Scotch guzzling playboy whose backroom scheming plunged the United States into the risky venture against the world's other superpower.
Unlike Wilson, who retired from Congress in 1996, Vickers remains deeply involved in secret programs. Now the Pentagon's top special operations official, Vickers advises Defense Secretary Robert Gates on counterterrorism missions around the world, manages the budget for U.S. commando forces and mediates the inevitable disputes among the generals over the best way to track down the enemy.
In 1984, at age 31, Vickers was selected for the plum Afghan assignment despite his rookie status at the agency. His patron, a rogue CIA manager named Gust Avrakotos, recognized his talent for conducting guerrilla warfare.
"Just lucky breaks," Vickers said in a recent interview with The Associated Press.
Using his Green Beret training, Vickers transformed the Afghan resistance into a serious campaign that became the Soviet Union's Vietnam. As the war chest supplied by Wilson grew to hundreds of millions of dollars, Vickers delivered an increasingly more sophisticated arsenal to the Afghans: Russian AK-47 assault rifles with million of rounds of ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades and, eventually, U.S.-made Stinger missiles to down the deadly Soviet helicopters.
The Soviets spent a decade battling the determined and generously financed mujahedeen before pulling the battered Red Army from Afghanistan in 1989. Two years later, its economy in shambles, the Soviet Union collapsed and the Cold War was all but over.
"Nobody thought this was possible at all -- to drive the Soviets out of Afghanistan," Vickers said. "People thought we could bleed them some. It was a very improbable event, but sometimes the improbable happens."
Stealthy wars always have unintended consequences, however. Following the Soviet retreat, the United States turned a blind eye to Afghanistan. Civil wars erupted, the Taliban took hold, and the country, flush with weapons, became a safe haven for Osama bin Laden's terrorist network.
Following the Sept. 11 attacks, which were carried out by terrorists trained in Afghanistan, U.S. forces would invade the country they once helped liberate
-- a turnabout caused by what historian Chalmers Johnson rates as one of America's greatest foreign policy blunders.
The U.S. "certainly defeated the Soviet Union in Afghanistan, and probably defeated the Soviet Union period. But the costs were enormous," said Johnson, author of the book "Blowback: The Cost and Consequences of American Empire."
Vickers, 54, was born in Burbank, Calif., the son of a master carpenter who once built movie sets for 20th Century Fox. In 1973, he enlisted in the Army and passed the grueling Special Forces qualification test that pushes candidates to their mental and physical limits.
When he was not parachuting from airplanes in the middle of the night, he was training with the Navy SEALs to become a combat diver. A few years after enlisting, he earned distinction as the Special Forces Soldier of the Year.
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 As Vickers was earning his stripes, the U.S. military was preparing for the possibility of an atomic confrontation with the Soviets during the Cold War. Vickers did his part by volunteering to be on a secret "Green Light" team that
-- if needed -- would drop into enemy territory with a small nuclear device. Once the bomb was planted and the timer set, they would head out to sea to be picked up by submarine.
Along the way, he learned to speak Russian, Czech and Spanish, spent a year with the elite British Special Air Service in an exchange program, and eventually earned his commission through officer candidate school.
In 1983, after leading a classified counterterrorism unit operating in Honduras, Vickers left the Army for the CIA, a move he attributes to the "impulsiveness of youth." Vickers made his mark quickly, earning an award for valor during the invasion of Grenada and serving on an agency team sent to hunt down the radical group behind the bombing of the U.S. Embassy in Beirut, Lebanon.
Even years later, Vickers does not give too many details about these assignments. "I can't talk a lot about that," he said when asked about his tour in Honduras.
The Afghan program was running smoothly enough in 1986 for Vickers to think about the future. Avrakotos and other close colleagues were soon to shift assignments and Vickers realized he probably would be moved to a new post that would be dull by comparison.
"I was just turning 33, and I didn't want to slow down," he said.
Vickers left the agency, earned a master's degree in business from the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School and began a brief and not-so-brilliant entrepreneurial career. By the early 1990s, Vickers was working as a military affairs consultant. Eventually he joined the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington think tank.
The Pentagon often came to him for advice when he was at the center. Two years ago, then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld tapped Vickers and two retired Army generals to examine how U.S. Special Operations Command in Tampa, Fla., could improve the way it was handling the fight against terrorism.
In April, President Bush nominated Vickers to be the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict.
"His qualifications border on the singular; there is no one else like him," said Kalev Sepp, one of Vickers's top deputies at the Pentagon. "I've never seen him off his game."
Used to being in the shadows, the experience of being a character in the movie "Charlie Wilson's War" is an odd one for Vickers. With Wilson's colorful past and his CIA patron Avrakotos' fondness for four-letter words, Vickers had to assure his wife, Melana, the film's R-rating wasn't because of him.
"She told me that if there were any sex scenes in the movie with a character named Mike Vickers, I'd be dead meat," he said.
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On the Net:
Pentagon background on Vickers: http://tinyurl.com/2uv4km
[Associated
Press; By RICHARD LARDNER]
Copyright 2007 The Associated
Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
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