Slate interviews Admiral Bobby Inman

Slate has a great interview with Bob Inman posted today. Admiral Inman's background:

Adm. Bob Inman, born Bobby Ray Inman in East Texas in 1931, may know more about U.S. intelligence matters than anyone. In the course of his 31-year career, he has served as director of the National Security Agency, vice director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, director of Naval Intelligence, and deputy director of Central Intelligence Agency—under both Republican and Democratic presidents. In the 1990s, he was asked by Bill Clinton to run the CIA as director and also offered the job of secretary of defense. He declined both offers to enter the private sector. He is now chairman of a venture capital company and holds the Lyndon B. Johnson centennial chair in national policy at the LBJ School at the University of Texas in Austin. A.L. Bardach interviewed Inman on two separate occasions, Oct. 14, 2004, and Dec. 9, 2004.


I'll hit on a couple of the highlights (at least in my mind...) from the interview as well:


Slate: Is new CIA Director Porter Goss too partisan, as his critics say?

Inman: Goss is turning the [agency] upside down in a fairly short time. He became increasingly persuaded that the clandestine service was badly led and that it [needed] fundamental change. … I think what he's already done discredits the [partisan] argument. Whether he will have broad enough vision of all of the needs of the government, we'll just have to wait and see.

But you know, it's phenomenal that a guy serving [in the agency] is permitted to publish a book [Michael Scheuer's Imperial Hubris ] critical of policy. You want to keep intelligence separate from policy. It was said to be by "Anonymous" initially, and now he's out there with his name. This never has occurred before. It clearly went through a review process at Langley and they approved it.


I think Goss, like Rumsfeld with the armor issue, takes a lot of heat more because he's considered tight with Bush than because of his actions. The CIA is a mess and Goss wants to clean house. He's willing to ruffle feathers and toss some furniture around to get it done. It'll be interesting to see if he's able to make any sort of meaningful change. Our federal bureaucracies are wonderfully adept at avoiding change. It'd be nice if there were other thngs they were good at as well.



Slate: There's a great scene in one of Bob Woodward's books, Veil,where Casey is dying of a brain tumor, and Casey has a deathbed conversation with Woodward.

Inman: The scene is at the end of Veil, in which Woodward reports that he got into Casey's room and asked him a number of questions and got responses. I absolutely believe Bob Woodward that he was able to get into the hospital room and the rest of it. I do not believe there's any possibility that Casey actually understood what [Woodward] was saying [or] that he actually responded to detailed questions.

… And let me tell you why I say that. Don Regan, as chief of staff, called Bob Gates at CIA and said, "We need to get on with replacing Bill Casey, we need a resignation from him to get the process in place." Bob Gates called Sophia Casey and the two of them went to the hospital together with a prepared resignation letter and it took 25 minutes to get Casey to understand what he was being asked to sign. And they were, all three, in tears. Now, it took that long to get him to understand a simple, three, four line letter, resigning.

Slate: So, in other words, Woodward got into the hospital room of Bill Casey and is giving questions and interpreting his utterances.

Inman: And interpreting the answers, yes. He was probably wearing hospital orderly clothes. And that's fair game to do it. And I would say that Woodward believed he was getting answers in the process.


Woodward's interview with Casey is one of the more provocative items he's ever written. I was intrigued by Inman's dismissal of its relevance.

There's also an interesting section (that I've omitted in the name of saving space here) on Casey's connection to the Iran-Contra issue.

Lastly, Inman relates his views on the military leadership's relationship with and view of Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz:



Inman: If Rumsfeld were to be there for the next four years there will be a lot of my military colleagues who will be very unenthusiastic about it. But as much as they dislike Rumsfeld, they would not want to see a change in this immediate period. With the run-up to the Jan. 30 election in Iraq, you don't want to disrupt the chain of command.

Slate: After the elections, your military colleagues might welcome a change at the top?

Inman: They would not be greatly disappointed if he did not turn out to [serve] a full four years.

Slate: One assumes they feel the same about Paul Wolfowitz; we saw a lot of him and the neocons in the Iraq war run-up. They have virtually disappeared. Why is that?

Inman: They don't want to take the blame. … [T]hey were willing to take credit for things earlier; they don't want to take blame.


You'll notice we haven't seen too many well-publicized trips to Iraq for Mr. Wolfowitz since his hotel got rocketed and the insurgency started throwing grenades as opposed to the flowers he and Cheney had promised...