Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency (62 page)

When Inman
arrived, the agency was still recovering from the trauma of dual Senate and
House investigations into the intelligence community. Determined to rebuild
congressional confidence in NSA, Inman worked, as he had in high school, to
turn his adversaries into allies. Instead of tutoring his bullies, he would
tutor the powerful chairmen and members of the Senate and House Intelligence
Committees. The committee members had long been accustomed to absolute secrecy
and a "Don't worry, we'll tell you what you need to know" attitude;
Inman would win their praises with heavy doses of uncharacteristic candor and
gushing flattery. "Few could understand this but you," he would
privately tell members, beaming boyishly. Such remarks, said former
intelligence committee staffer Angelo Codevilla, "were enough to convince most
of Inman's contacts, liberal and conservative, that they were fellow
geniuses."

Inman's
plan worked as well as it had back at Mineola High. To Congress he was the
wonder boy, the spook who could do no wrong; hearings became love-ins.
"You have my vote even before I hear your testimony," said the Senate
Intelligence Committee chairman, Barry M. Goldwater, adding, "I don't know
of a man in the business that is more highly regarded than you."
Delaware's senator Joseph Biden dubbed him the "single most competent man
in the government."

At the
same time Inman neutralized much of the elite Washington press corps by
currying their favor, becoming their leaker-in-chief. No one in the press, he
correctly calculated, would risk eliminating one of their best—or only—"senior
intelligence sources" by criticizing him or his agency. He also developed
as allies the senior editors and executives of the most powerful newspapers and
networks, installing them as honorary members of his club so that they would keep
in check any rogue reporter who might contemplate breaching his fortress.

In a city
where someone can be transformed from a hero to a Hitler between commercial
breaks, Inman became a near divinity.
Omni
magazine, in an article
entitled "The Smartest Spy," called him "simply one of the
smartest people ever to come out of Washington or anywhere," while
Newsweek
referred to him as "a superstar in the intelligence community."
The
Washington Post,
in an editorial, once said, "Inman's reviews
are extraordinary, almost hyperbolic." Inman's philosophy boiled down to a
few understated words: "I have over the years practiced a general theory
of conservation of enemies."

"He
certainly knew how to play the game," said John Walcott, a former reporter
for
Newsweek,
the
Wall Street Journal,
and
Time,
who often
dealt with Inman. Another reporter later described him as "the single
biggest leaker of intelligence information in the last 10 to 15 years."
The
New York Times,
years later, also acknowledged that Inman, indeed,
"was a valued source of news for the paper's Washington bureau."

Some saw
Inman's approach to both Congress and the press as more sinister than cynical.
As the head of the NSA, said Suzanne Garment of the American Enterprise
Institute, "Inman was in control of unequaled information—and, say his
critics, disinformation—that put him in a dominant position in these
exchanges." Given the NSA's "ability to listen in on all overseas
phone calls," she said, "he could protect people and give the
impression of including them in the inner circles of power. Some were happy to
pay for these privileges with sympathetic writing and legislative action. Some
did not know they were paying."

Another
writer put it more bluntly: "There were certain rules, of course: You
never named him; you never attributed the tidbits he gave you; you never, in
fact, did anything he didn't want you to do, or the invitations to breakfast
stopped. . . . During his time at NSA, exposes of the agency all but
disappeared."

When Inman
wasn't whispering his own leaks to the media, he was trying to get others
plugged. A few months after he arrived at NSA, a
New York Times
article
that crossed his desk enraged him. Republican Illinois Congressman Edward J.
Derwinski, the paper alleged, was under investigation for tipping off top South
Korean officials that their country's New York intelligence chief was about to
defect. What burned Inman was a reference to the fact that the way the FBI got
on to the alleged leak was through NSA intercepts of calls between Derwinski,
who was never charged with any wrongdoing, and the South Korean officials.

Inman flew
to New York to complain in person to publisher A. O. (Punch) Sulzberger. During
the lunch at the
Times
Manhattan offices, Inman made his pitch that he
be called prior to any future stories involving NSA. On his flight back he
believed he had a secret agreement in his pocket, but Sulzberger apparently had
a different opinion. He never passed any formal instructions on to his editors.
Nevertheless, in the course of normal journalistic reporting, editors
frequently ran NSA-related stories past Inman. "The truth is there was
nothing nearly as formal as [Inman] suggested," said Nicholas Horrock, who
headed the
Times
investigative unit at the time, "but lots of
reporters, at the
Times
and elsewhere, called Inman to check out
stories."

Also among
those with Inman's phone number close at hand was the
Washington Post's
Bob
Woodward. But Woodward occasionally proposed a story Inman didn't like, and in
that case the admiral would go over his head, to Ben Bradlee or Howard Simons,
then the
Post's
managing editor, seeking to get the offending material
removed.

Despite
his boy-wonder reputation, Inman suffered from a deep sense of insecurity. His
self-image never reached much higher than the tops of his spit-polished Navy
shoes. Rhonesboro had followed him to Fort Meade and would never leave him.
Embarrassed by his gapping teeth, he was almost never photographed with his
lips open. He would also drop the "Bobby Ray" from his official
correspondence, preferring simply "B. R. Inman." "My name is
really Bobby Ray, much as I hate it," he once said, "but that is my
real name."

At work,
he saw himself as the consummate outsider, always seeking but never quite reaching
the inner circle. After a day of lavish praise, he would wake up in the middle
of the night, unable to sleep because of a single word of criticism. Once,
following a whispering campaign about whether he was a closet homosexual,
because he hadn't fired a gay NSA employee, he felt it necessary to deny
publicly that he was gay. For "proof," he pointed to a lie detector
exam in which he had denied any homosexuality. The polygraph examiner, said
Inman, had found his answer "not deceptive." Nearly obsessed with the
issue, he went out of his way to tell others that the reason he had gay friends
was that he "deliberately [sought them out] to try to understand
them."

While most
saw only the confident, super-smart admiral, beneath his membrane-thin shell
was a boiling caldron of anger and arrogance, a man "wound tighter than a
hummingbird in Saran Wrap," according to one observer. Another was
reminded of Captain Queeg of
The Caine Mutiny.
Still others saw a man
who had lived so long in the hidden world of spies that he now saw plots
everywhere.

Among the
first to get a peek of the other Inman was
New York Times
columnist
William L. Safire. Unaware of the secret "deal" Inman had supposedly
made with the publisher of his newspaper, Safire telephoned Inman a few weeks
later seeking information for a column. Inman refused to provide any help or
information to Safire, a former Nixon speechwriter who felt he deserved a leak
as much as anyone. As a result, according to Inman, the columnist "was
very direct that if I didn't become a source, I would regret it in subsequent
coverage." Safire denied having made any such threat.

A few
years later, in 1980, Safire wrote another column, this one devoted to
"Billygate," the scandal involving allegations that President Jimmy
Carter's brother, Billy, was working as a business agent on behalf of the
Libyan government. The tip-off came as a result of NSA's secret monitoring of
all communications into and out of Libya. In his column Safire congratulated
Inman for his "considerable courage" in reporting to the attorney
general about the president's brother.

Inman was
livid at Safire for bypassing his secret standing order that any mention of NSA's
operations first be sent to him for "guidance." He believed that
Safire's article had caused the loss of "critical access that gave us a
lot of information on terrorists." Sitting at his oversize wooden desk,
Inman picked up the "red" telephone used for unclassified outside
calls and dialed Safire's number. According to the columnist, the admiral
"denounced [me] for doing . . . irreparable harm . . . by revealing our
sources and methods." But Safire would have none of it, instead asking
Inman how a "grown man could go through life calling himself Bobby."
At that point, said Safire, Inman, "slammed down the phone."

Safire,
however, would have the last word. In a column published shortly after the
phone-slamming incident, he raked Inman over the coals for appearing as a guest
on ABC's
Nightline,
a strange decision for the director of the nation's
most secret spy agency. "The nation's chief eavesdropper," Safire
wrote, was "blabbing about sources and methods on late-night TV."

Much of
Inman's tenure was divided between trying to ensure an NSA monopoly in the
field of cryptography and working out protective legislation for NSA's Sigint
operations with the Senate and House Intelligence Committees. To eliminate
outside competition in the cryptographic field, Inman took the unprecedented
step of going public in a number of lectures and interviews. Most of these,
however, were low-key affairs, intended to attract little attention and to
produce even less substance.

With
regard to his unusual decision to make public appearances, Inman told one
group, "I try to do it out of any glare of publicity, because of my
conviction that the heads of the intelligence agencies should not be public
figures. ... If they are, if the work force sees their profiles day after day
on the front page of the paper, on television, on the weekly magazine cover,
and sees them getting all the credit for what they're doing, it's a little hard
for them to enforce the discipline of protecting secrecy."

In 1981,
with the election of Ronald Reagan as president, Inman left NSA to become the
deputy director of the CIA under William J. Casey. But the two never hit it
off. Casey saw Inman as "a brittle golden boy, worried about his
image." The following year he resigned and entered private industry, where
he accepted a paid position on his old friend James Guerin's "proxy
board," required to guard against the transfer of sensitive defense
information to foreign governments. But within a few years, while Inman was on
the board, Guerin had reopened his illegal pipeline to South Africa, this time
sending highly sensitive military equipment, such as photo-imaging systems and
advanced radar-controlled antiaircraft parts, to the apartheid government.
Casey's CIA, which knew of the operation, had turned a blind eye.

About the
same time, Guerin also became a major arms dealer, specializing in deadly
cluster bombs. In 1984 it was discovered that sensitive bomb-making design
information had been illegally transferred to a company in Chile that was
manufacturing cluster bombs for the armed forces of Iraq. Although a long
federal investigation followed, the Justice Department was never able to make
any arrests. Also, there is no evidence that Inman was aware of the deals.

But by the
end of the decade, Guerin's greed had finally gotten the best of him. He was
convicted of masterminding a $1.4 billion fraud, which one federal judge
described as "the largest . . . ever perpetrated in North America."
He was also convicted of money laundering and of smuggling $50 million in weapons
to South Africa. Other allegations had Guerin improperly selling missile
technology to Iraq. Sentenced to fifteen years in prison, Guerin still had
Bobby Inman's support. At Guerin's sentencing, Inman wrote a letter praising
his "patriotism."

Once NSA
was the unwanted stepchild of powerful spymasters such as Allen Dulles, who
refused its director a seat on the Intelligence Advisory Committee. But by the
late 1970s the agency had grown so secret and powerful that the head of the CIA
was complaining that it was almost beyond control. By then NSA had become a
well-oiled spying machine, with its own army, navy, and air force; hundreds of
secret listening posts throughout the world; and massive bugs deep in space.
Its printing plant worked twenty-four hours a day turning out its own reports,
analyses, high-level transcripts, and projections. Powerful congressmen were
treating Bobby Inman as the dark prince of intelligence, an infallible
all-knowing wizard. Suddenly NSA had gone from a 98-pound weakling, rubbing the
CIA's sand from its eyes, to a superstar.

With
billions of dollars at stake, there followed a war of the admirals—Inman at NSA
and Stansfield Turner at CIA—over gargantuan satellite programs. Inman pushed
to fill the skies with more and bigger ears, and Turner argued instead to seed
the heavens with electronic eyes. Little wonder that palace intrigue abounded.
For Inman, it was Mineola High, only for bigger stakes. Now instead of currying
favor with a class officer, he was quietly passing highly secret reports to a
powerful congressman to win support for his projects.