Bobby Ray Inman (born April 4, 1931 in Rhonesboro, Texas) is a retired U.S. admiral who held several influential positions in the U.S. Intelligence community.
He served as Director of Naval Intelligence from September 1974 to July 1976, then moved to the Defense Intelligence Agency where he served as Vice Director until 1977. He next became the Director of the National Security Agency, during which time he claimed that the United States had developed public key cryptography a decade before Diffie and Hellman [1]. Inman held this post until 1981. His last major position was as the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency, a post he held from February 12, 1981 to June 10, 1982.
He is known publicly as President Bill Clinton's first choice to succeed Les Aspin as Secretary of Defense in 1993. He withdrew from consideration in a televised conference in which he complained about a "conspiracy" to attack his character.In 1994, after Bobby Ray Inman requested to be withdrawn from consideration as Bill Clinton's first Defense Secretary, his critics speculated that the decision was motivated by a desire to conceal his links to International Signal and Control (ISC). Inman was a member of the so-called "shadow board" of the company which was allegedly either negligent or approved the exports. Among those he named were Senator (and future presidential candidate) Bob Dole and conservative pundit William Safire.
He has also been influential in various advisory roles. Notably, he chaired a commission on improving security at U.S. foreign installations after the Marine barracks bombing and the April 1983 US Embassy bombing in Beirut, Lebanon. The commission's report has been influential in setting security design standards for U.S. Embassies.
Since 1987, Inman has been the LBJ Centennial Chair in National Policy at The University of Texas at Austin Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs, and in 2005 was the school's interim dean [2]. Inman graduated from Texas with a bachelor's in history in 1950.
Inman has also served on the Board of Directors of the prestigious Council on Foreign Relations and on the Board of Directors of Dell [3]. Inman has links to International Signal and Control, which was acquired by Ferranti in 1987. Ferranti collapsed in 1993 due to the debts of its new subsidiary.
In 2006, Inman criticized the Bush administration's use of warrantless domestic wiretaps, making him one of the highest-ranking former intelligence officials to criticize the program in public [4][5].
External links
Notes
- ^ http://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb/nsam-160/
- ^ http://www.utexas.edu/lbj/faculty/inman.html
- ^ http://www.statesman.com/business/content/business/stories/archive/0502dell.html
- ^ http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,70855-0.html?tw=rss.index
- ^ http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=06/05/17/159213