The Smartest Spy

bobby ray inman is known around washington as the shadowy genius of cia--a spook so shrewd that no one's sure if he's sinister or sincere

Early One Morning not long ago, a group of the nation's defense and intelligence leaders rose from their beds, kissed their wives and families and, jaws set, went out to fight World War Three. In simulation, that is.

Out over the treacherous terrain of U. S. 95 they trekked, until at last, some distance from Washington, they attained their objective: the U. S. Naval War College. While the sun peeked over the trees and security men watched nervously, they manned their computer consoles and braced for action.

On the Blue Team, representing the United States, were arrayed some of the best brains in the strategic business. There were generals and admirals, CIA men and a Secretary of Defense, a veritable Who's Who of the military establishment. Their Red Team opponents, representing the nuclear might of the Soviet Union, were a less prepossessing lot. Especially their leader.

He was a tall, slender man, almost gawky. He wore horn-rimmed glasses and had a large, high forehead of the kind that freckles in summer. He did not appear dangerous. Indeed, were it not for the admiral's uniform he was wearing--an ill-fitting garb from which it seemed the hanger had not been removed--he might have been taken for a schoolteacher (which, in fact, he had been before he joined the Navy). Compared with the company around him, glittery in its gold braid and determination, he was an improbable figure, and his smile, which flashed frequently, was most improbable of all. It was big and toothy and there was a gap between the leading incisors. Altogether, it made him look not so much like a schoolteacher and even less than an admiral; standing there, amidst all that brass, he seemed like nothing so much as Huckleberry Finn. His name was Bobby Ray Inman.

The game commenced. Back and forth the simulated superpowers battled, sending their computerized scenarios this way and that. Missiles flew, bombers bombed, ships sailed, armies marched, whole countries disappeared. The tension in the room was electric. Hunched over one console, a member of the Joint Chiefs turned suddenly ashen. Out of nowhere, the nukes were on their way.

On it went, hour after harrowing hour, and when it was over, when the world lay in pseudo cinders, there was egg of the most highly classified nature on the face of the United States. Said one awed participant, a former Secretary of Defense, of the man who had put it there, the admiral with the Huck Finn grin: "I'm just glad that guy's on our side."

You hear that a lot in Washington about Bobby Inman. "The right man in the right job at the right time," Barry Goldwater, the chairman of the Senate intelligence committee, calls him. James Schlesinger, the former Secretary of Defense, terms him "a national asset." To Senator Joe Biden, the liberal Democrat from Delaware, he is "the most quality guy in the Federal government." Former CIA director Richard Helms commends him for his "brilliance"; a Helms successor, William Colby, for his "integrity." Major General George J. Keegan, Jr., the fire-breathing former chief of Air Force Intelligence, like him for his "guts"; Birch Bayh, for his "brains"; Walter Mondale, for his "wisdom." And then there are those, like a former deputy director of the National Security Council, who say, quite simply, "Bobby Inman is the smartest man in uniform." And who, after a thoughtful pause, add, "Maybe out of uniform, too."

All this about an improbable man few people outside Washington have ever heard of. In Inman's profession, the anonymity is welcome. Bobby Ray Inman, you see, is a spy.

•

His official title is deputy director, Central Intelligence. What he does is everything. It is Inman who runs the agency's day-to-day operations; Inman who coordinates the activities of the "intelligence community"; Inman who prepares the critical "national intelligence estimates"; Inman who evaluates the data flowing in from spy satellites; Inman who protects CIA from flak on Capitol Hill; Inman who has the next-to-last word on every CIA undertaking, from planting a blonde in the boudoir of a Hungarian vice-premier to shipping arms to the Afghan rebels. He is, in the very deepest sense, the man who keeps the secrets.

One of those secrets is who Inman is. The places he has worked--CIA, NSA, DIA, ONI, the whole alphabet soup that is American intelligence--will say nothing, and none with more eloquence than CIA. "The admiral is keeping a low profile," an agency spokesman says. "We aren't going to help you with anything." CIA, however, does provide an official biography. It consists of exactly one unrevealing paragraph. It states that he was born, 50 years ago, in Rhonesboro, Texas--a town that, according to South-western Bell, does not exist. The biography also says he attended the University of Texas, graduating in 1950 with a liberal-arts degree. A check with the university's alumni computer reveals no such person. Nor, unsurprisingly, is there any listing in any Washington, D.C., area telephone book for a Bobby Ray, or B., or B.R., or, for that matter, any Inman. James Jesus Angleton, the fabled former head of CIA counterintelligence, is listed. Yes, Angleton whispers, he knows Bobby Inman. Then the line goes dead.

Inman has no hobbies or outside interests. He does not go to baseball games or cocktail parties. He rarely, in fact, goes anywhere, except to the office. The principal exception is when he is called to Capitol Hill to testify before one or another of the intelligence-oversight committees, whose hearings are conducted in secret. Around Washington, he has few close associates ("If someone as lowly as a three-star admiral wants to see him," says one, himself a four-star, "it had better be damned important") and even fewer friends. "Bobby," as one spook puts it, "is not the kind of guy you talk over your bowling scores with." Of the handful of people who claim to know him well, most could not say whether he smokes or drinks (negative, in both instances), even whether he is married (he is, happily) or has children (he has, two; both boys). Indeed, out of 50 interviews with people who have worked with him over the years, ranging from former CIA directors to his superiors in the Navy, only one knew the name of his wife. It is Nancy, and, like her husband, she is said to be very quiet.

It has been anything but quiet, however, since Inman came to CIA. There have been behind-the-scenes battles, exposés in the press, questions about the agency's links to Libyan-backed assassins, continued conflicts with Congress and calls for director William Casey's resignation. One way or another, they have all involved Bobby Ray Inman. A prime--and, for Inman, revealing--case was the bitter struggle over CIA's new executive order, an engagement that, before it was through, would shake the agency, threaten the Bill of Rights and nearly cost Inman his job.

It all began in early 1981, a few weeks after Inman's confirmation hearings. The hearings themselves had been a love feast, with one Senator after another congratulating Inman on his extraordinary fitness for his new job. The only noteworthy moment came toward the end of the session, when Inman was asked to comment about reports that CIA and the White House would soon seek to undo restrictions the Carter Administration had placed on the agency with regard to domestic spying. Inman's answer was direct; he was against the Administration move. As Inman put it: "I would not elect to carelessly walk away from the safeguards we have so carefully crafted together. These rules are to protect U. S. citizens, not anyone else, and I believe that we need to continue to protect them."

But even as Inman was speaking, plans were afoot to undo those safeguards. They surfaced, finally, in March, with the leak of the draft of a proposed executive order, which, once Ronald Reagan signed it, would allow CIA not only to engage in domestic spying but to infiltrate domestic dissident organizations, carry out clandestine wire taps and conduct "warrantless searches" ("black bag jobs," in agency parlance)--in sum, all the Operation Chaos capers that had gotten CIA into trouble with Congress in the first place. Inman, who'd had a hand in drawing up the Carter protections before going to CIA, was livid. Almost immediately, he was back before Congress, denouncing the new plan as a "third-level working staff paper" and pledging anew that "CIA's job is abroad." Lest anyone miss his point, he then invited reporters to CIA's headquarters and, in a rare, on-the-record briefing, vowed to resign if alterations were made to CIA's charter that he found "personally repugnant." The draft was withdrawn and, shortly thereafter, its author, CIA general counsel Daniel Silver, left the agency.

But that wasn't the end of it. Three months later, another proposal, this one far more protective of civil liberties, was floated and just as quickly shot down, apparently because it was too protective. Then, last fall, a third and final draft made its appearance. Less Draconian than the first, more hard-line than the second, it still offered possibilities for domestic spying. Civil libertarians and not a few Senators were alarmed, and Inman shared their concern. At one point, during a secret Senate briefing with CIA counsel Stanley Sporkin, a Casey loyalist, Inman made his feelings deviously plain. According to a Senator who was present, when Sporkin discussed provisions of the order that would allow domestic spying, Inman flashed a "thumbs-down" sing; when the Senators bored in on Sporkin, Inman winked and beckoned with his hand, "More, more."

"Bobby is the conscience of the agency," one Senator said afterward. "Without him, the deluge."

General Keegan, was blunter: Bobby Inman, he said, with admiring relish, "knows how to keep the whores at bay."

•

It was an extraordinary performance, but then, nothing about Bobby Inman has ever been ordinary. He is an admiral who grew up on the plains of East Texas. He is a regular career officer who did not attend Annapolis. He is a technician who never studied engineering. He is an intelligence specialist in a Service where, by regulation, only "blue water admirals" can hold the most senior commands. He is, in fact, one of the very rare non-Annapolis, non-blue-water, full, four-star admirals in U. S. naval history, and undoubtedly the only one anywhere who can discuss the rhythms of Thackeray and Swinburne as knowledgeably as he can the exact disposition of the Soviet Baltic fleet.

The only thing about him that is ordinary is his name. It is not Robert but, in the manner of tailbacks for East Central Oklahoma State, plain Bobby, simple and folksy. He lives like a Bobby: strictly no frills. According to the financial statement filed with Congress at the time of his CIA appointment, his only income, apart from his Navy salary and interest from a credit union and a handful of U. S. Savings Bonds, derives from the rental of a modest four-bedroom house, on which the bank holds a mortgage of less than $100,000. Inman himself resides in typical military accommodations in suburban Virginia. The only thing that separates him from his middle-class neighbors is the presence of Navy-supplied stewards. The stewards, who are a perquisite of his rank, assist in the preparation of Inman's sole known passion: the ritual of elaborate, multicourse breakfasts.

He barely has time to eat them. Most mornings he is up at four to begin poring through the remains of the work he has lugged home the night before. By seven, he is at his functionally Spartan office at CIA's McLean, Virginia, head-quarters, having read the overnight cable traffic during the chauffeured ride to work. Unless there is a call to the Hill (where he is liked) or the White House (where he is not), he will remain there, without interruption, until well after dark. At which point he returns home to begin the process all over again. "Fun?" laughs an old friend. "Bobby Inman has no fun."

Upon first meeting, Inman can seem aloof, almost cold. He is much warmer with friends--likable, engaging, considerate of sensibilities--but even then, there is a distance, a sort of enforced remoteness, as if he's constantly calculating who around him can be told what. It can be unsettling. A man who has known him for years and, like so many others, still claims not to know him well, admits: "You know as much about Bobby Inman as Bobby Inman wants you to know, and that is damned little."

Intelligence accounts for some of the isolation. Inman has spent most of his adult lifetime keeping people from knowing things. But it is the other intelligence, the one spelled with a small I, that keeps him truly separate. His brain is an intimidating storehouse, crammed with every imaginable fact, and, according to every recollection, it always has been. Back in Texas, they still remember that Bobby Inman was one of the renowend radio "Quiz Kids," dazzling adults every week with intellectual pyrotechnics. Give him an impossible equation and, whir, he'd solve it. Ask after a fact and, zingo, he'd give it to you. The capital of Mongolia? The date of the Council of Trent? The coefficient of the square root of nine over pi? Bobby knew them all--and a lot more besides. He seemed to read everything in sight, which was not unusual for a bright boy in a small town where, after feeding the hogs after supper, there was not much else to do. What was unusual was that he never seemed to forget any of it. He could repeat, verbatim, whole passages of obscure tomes he had digested years before. It was as if his mind were an IBM 360 on which the terminals never closed, and watching it work, all clickety-clack, like some giant parlor trick run amuck, got to be a little frightening.

He must have had few playmates. While visions of playing football for A&M danced in the other boys' heads, young Bobby was off at the library. He was skinny and four-eyed and awkward and along the way, a lot of sand probably got kicked in his face. But it paid off. Because when he got to be an adult, the other boys weren't frightened, they were awed. "I'd tell you he has a photographic memory," says one of them, a senior White House aide, "but it's better than that. A photograph takes time to develop. Inman's like a Polaroid. Instant." They still wanted to test him, though, just as they had on the radio every week: Spell the name of the prime minister of Sri Lanka, Daniel Patrick Moynihan challenged during a Senate hearing. Inman didn't miss a beat. "Mr. P-R-E-M-A-D-A-S-A is the prime minister," he shot back, allowing himself a small, self-satisfied smile, "and Mr. J-A-Y-E-W-A-R-D-E-N-E is the president."

The Navy, fortunately, values such recall, and Inman's climb up the career ladder was m-e-t-e-o-r-i-c. After a war-time tour of sea duty aboard the air-craft carrier Valley Forge, Inman held a series of increasingly important assignments: assistant naval attaché, U. S. Embassy, Stockholm; executive assistant, Vice-Chief of Naval Operations; chief intelligence briefer, CINC-PAC; director, Naval Intelligence; vice-director, Defense Intelligence; director, National Security Agency. His superiors groomed and fussed over him like a prize pupil who, because of his oddity, threatened none of their careers. And so, almost invisibly, he continued to rise.

The turning point came in 1973, during the Yom Kippur war. The outbreak of the war, which initially sent the Israelis reeling back from the Suez Canal, caught U. S. intelligence flat-footed, and, as the battling continued, there was a mad scramble to come up with hard information. At issue was not only the disposition of the Arab armies but also the intentions of the Soviet Union. Inman, then intelligence briefer to the Vice-Chief of Naval Operations, supplied the critical piece of the puzzle. What the piece was remains, even now, secret, but a good guess is that it involved Soviet plans to dispatch two combat divisions to Syria at the height of the conflict. "Everyone else in the community was calling it one way," recalls one admiral. "Bobby was the only one calling it the other. Bobby was the one who was right."

The Soviets, after threats by Richard Nixon, abandoned their plans, and the correctness of Inman's analysis eventually helped win him appointment as director of Naval Intelligence. It was there that he encountered the redoubtable Edwin Wilson, CIA man, shipper of arms, recruiter of assassins.

•

Military intelligence, and Naval Intelligence in particular, is a formidable undertaking, involving the tracking not only of potential enemies but of actual allies as well. In the Navy, much of the latter task fell to a shadowy operation dubbed Task Force 157.

Created in the late Sixties, at the height of the antiwar movement, Task Force 157 was perhaps the most clandestine of all military intelligence's operations. Its members wore no uniforms and were outside the regular Navy chain of command. Their cover took various forms. Some operators ran dummy civilian companies. Others, such as a yeoman attached to the National Security staff of Henry Kissinger's, worked within the White House and, without Presidential knowledge, spied on the Government itself. Just who they were spying for was always difficult to say. For while the task force was a Navy operation, it was heavily infiltrated by CIA. The Navy yeoman, for instance, was a CIA man; like the other members of Task Force 157, he officially did not exist. So secret was the task force, so sensitive was its mission, that, until a group of its former agents brought suit against the Government demanding pension rights, the Navy refused to acknowledge that there had ever been such a thing.

The task force was real enough, though, and so was the now infamous CIA man Wilson, who was then running one of the task force's fronts, an equally real civilian corporation called Around World Shipping and Forwarding. Around World's legal business was freight handling, and among the items it shipped, quite illegally, were 20 tons of plastique explosive to Libya. But that wasn't Wilson's only enterprise; he boasted of holding controlling interest in more than 100 corporations. The companies laundered spy money for the Navy, secured sophisticated electronics gear, entertained Congressmen, monitored Soviet nuclear-bomb shipments and, according to published reports, helped destabilize the left-wing government of Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam. There was very little, in fact, that Task Force 157 did not do. According to subsequent investigations by The Washington Post and the Wilmington News Journal, Task Force 157 was involved in almost every major intelligence operation from 1968 until 1975, from overthrowing Salvador Allende in Chile to helping Kissinger fly secretly to Peking in 1971.

Inman put an end to it. The chain of events began in 1975, shortly after Inman's appointment as director of Naval Intelligence. Early that year, Inman appeared before Senator John McClellan's Defense Appropriations Subcommittee and, afterward, a senior committee staffer invited him to lunch. Inman accepted and at the restaurant they were joined by Wilson, who announced, "I work for you, Admiral." Inman was surprised, but not nearly so much as when Wilson went on to tell him that he would have an easier time securing money on the Hill if he steered contracts to Wilson's companies.

There were never any contracts. When he went back to his office that afternoon, Inman ordered an investigation of Wilson instead. It took a year to untangle all of Wilson's various connections and, even then, whom he was working for and precisely what he was doing were (continued on page 244) Smartest Spy (continued from page 102) far from clear. What was obvious was that Wilson was, in Inman's words, "a petty grafter . . . a 'five percenter."' With that pronouncement, Inman fired him. Inman disbanded Task Force 157 altogether when he discovered a few months later that Wilson had been using it to recruit assassins on behalf of Libya. "I closed it down," Inman said of the task force, "because it was out of control and because its continued operation was a drain on Navy resources."

"NSA is uniquely exempt from the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act."

The explanation was vintage Inman, a bit of idealism--"out of control"--laden with a heaping helping of pragmatism: "drain on Navy resources." It was the same combination he used to rationalize his opposition to CIA's domestic spying. He feared for civil liberties--"rules to protect Americans"--yes, and he was worried about efficiency, too. Keeping track of protesters was expensive. It took one's eye off the ball. Worst of all, the press invariably found out, and that, as Inman ruefully put it, "keeps us from doing the job we were meant to do."

You had to trim like that if you were a spook, or you wouldn't stay a spook for very long. It was all right to come off like an A.C.L.U. member in private, to silently signal Senators that what they were hearing from Reagan's boys was crazy. The important thing was not being too out-front publicly. You had to be a member of "the team," as the faceless men of the agency called themselves, and there were rules by which the team played. It was a dicey business sometimes, sorting out who you were from what you believed, and for Bobby Inman, going to NSA was the diciest business of all.

•

The National Security Agency is one of those agencies your Government would prefer that you not know about. The joke in Washington is that its initials stand for Never Say Anything, and, in practice, NSA doesn't say much. It is listed in no Government handbook. It is uniquely exempt from the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. What it does, how many people it employs, the amount of dollars it spends are all classified. Even the executive order Harry Truman signed 30 years ago bringing it into existence remains an official secret.

The agency is headquartered in a modern, three-story building 15 miles outside Washington on the grounds of Fort Meade, Maryland. To discourage the casually curious, two chain-link, TV-monitored fences, each topped by six strands of electrified barbed wire, surround it. The people who pass through its portals (some 20,000 men and women--a force larger than that of CIA--backed by another 100,000 military personnel at 2000 "listening posts" throughout the world) are a tight-lipped group. They are forbidden to discuss their work, even with their spouses. To ensure that they don't, they are subject to regular polygraph examinations that ask them to list the names and addresses of people with whom they have had sex, as well as whether or not they are acquainted with the meaning of the word fellatio.

What NSA does is snoop. "They've got a huge vacuum cleaner turned on," says one authority on the agency, "sucking in information around the world. Whatever goes out over the airwaves--from a Soviet radar pulse over Novosibirsk, to an Arab diplomat calling home to Riyadh about the price of oil, to a Panamanian infantry captain radioing his company to switch position--gets sucked up in the vacuum cleaner." And that, as it turned out, was the trouble. For among the billions of bits of information NSA routinely collected were the private conversations of ordinary Americans--and some not so ordinary ones, as well. For years, NSA was an unseen third party to all the phone calls made by Jane Fonda, Dr. Spock and 1678 other Americans on the agency's "watch list." NSA also read all overseas telegrams and thoughtfully distributed copies of the most interesting to other Government agencies. That particular program, code-named Operation Shamrock, went on for 18 years.

It all came to an end during the Watergate investigations. When the Nixon tapes were played, three initials kept popping up: NSA. From the way Nixon and his friends talked about it--twice as much, by one count, as CIA--NSA seemed capable of almost anything. The more the Congressmen listened, the closer that seemed to the truth. Around Capitol Hill and in the press, there was growing pressure to bring NSA to heel. Enter the fixer, Bobby Inman.

Inman's touch with Congress was already well known. The Navy thought so much of his skills it had already given him a medal--the Distinguished Service Medal, its highest noncombatant decoration--simply for the quality of his Congressional testimony. It was odd about that medal, and odd about the way Inman won it; by accepted standards, he did almost everything wrong.

The average military officer who went up to the Hill, you see, was a practiced politician. He played the angles. He backslapped. He drank bourbon and branch water with the bulls in their hideaway offices. When he testified, which was something to be avoided, a train of impedimenta trailed behind him. There were squadrons of junior colonels whispering off mike in his ear; briefcases bulging with every possible contingency; set-piece formulas for Just the Right Answer. To get it, a Congressman had to ask Just the Right Question, and even then, of course, he didn't get much. Whole careers were made on the fine art of evasion. That was the established norm.

But Inman wasn't normal. He didn't drink and he didn't backslap. He did go into the hideaway offices, but it wasn't to chat about what the Redskins had done the previous weekend. Instead, he'd stretch out his long legs, lean back, rub the bridge of his nose in weariness and talk geopolitics. He'd discuss where the world was going the next 20 years, and where it ought to be going. He'd talk about the Russians, dispassionately, analytically, trying to put himself in their shoes. And he'd talk about intelligence--NSA's and that of the other agencies. There wouldn't be James Bond stories, but the nuts and bolts of the craft: how more linguistics experts needed to be recruited; how CIA's "generation gap," as he called it, needed to be closed; how the "data product" could be improved. He could be startlingly honest--"That's pretty dumb," he said of one operation, "but we're going to do it anyway"--and, in his honesty, he'd recruit converts to his side.

If he had a political ideology, it was a mystery to the men who questioned him. Goldwater liked him, and so did John Tower, which was to be expected; Inman was, after all, a man of arms. What was not expected, what was truly astounding, was how the liberals, the Senators like Joe Biden and Daniel K. Inouye and Birch Bayh, who munched on CIA directors like cornflakes, not only liked him but adored him. Their regard for him was almost embarrassing, and in certain quarters in Washington, it was said that all the adulation actually hurt Inman. When Biden heard that, he offered to call Inman "a no-good, son-of-a-bitch horse's ass" if it would help his career, but Inman didn't seem worried. About Congress there was no reason to worry during those years he was running NSA, because Inman had a secret. A friend, a former CIA director, told what it was: "Bobby," he said, "understands information. He knows it is power. He knows how to use it."

It was hypnotic to watch. There he would be on a hearing day, utterly alone. No aides whispering conversations, no briefing books at his side, the green baize of the witness table stretching out before him like an empty ocean. The gavel would bang and the distinguished Senator from somewhere would ask a question. And then it would happen: A smile would come over Inman's face as if, cartoonlike, a light bulb had been turned on in his head. "Well, yes, sir," he would begin, and two tight paragraphs later, the Senator would have what he had been after, with maybe a lesson in Russian history or English literature in the bargain. If the question had been less than wise, as questions in Congress tended to be, the Senator would never know it. This was not Stans Turner, who belittled them, or Dick Helms, who condescended to them; this was good ol' Bobby Inman, who simply informed them. It seemed so effortless, no one ever guessed at the pressure; only his left leg, crossed casually over the right, gave him away. When he was bored, it had a habit of swinging from side to side.

The press was entranced. It was hard not to be when, as was his wont at NSA, he was lunching with them in their offices, taking them home to breakfast and, ever so nicely, asking them not to write this story or that. NSA directors had never done that before; no spook ever had. And they had suffered for it. Inman was different. When Inman talked, reporters listened. 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 coming. That was a capital game, and Inman played it with consummate skill. During his time at NSA, exposés of the agency all but disappeared.

Inman's ability to play the press was on display--along with his slashing wit--at the 1977 Gridiron Dinner. The annual black-tie, off-the-record soiree is an important event on the Washington social calendar, a once-a-year opportunity for pols and press to put aside the adversary relationship that supposedly exists between them. The topic of the 1977 dinner was intelligence, and Inman, then director of NSA, was in top form. Gazing out over the Washington Hilton ballroom, where were collected some of the senior powers of American journalism, he noted that, according to recent press reports, some of those in attendance had been picking up pin money as operatives for the CIA. That was a shame, Inman said, since CIA was such a ham-handed, stingy employer. Then, smile broadening, he continued: "We in the Pentagon want to make it up to you. Join us and you can be in the big money. We've got 120 billion dollars a year to spend. They skimped on expenses. With us, you'll have unvouchered funds, double-dipping and lots of fringe benefits. Duckhunting trips. PX privileges. Cheap booze at officers' clubs. Free alcohol treatment at VA hospitals. And your dishonorable discharge up-graded. If your editor won't pay for the assignment, we'll give you a free ride with Lockheed. If you have to get there fast, we have a few B-1 prototypes. Not to mention Trident submarine rides for the kiddies."

The reporters, who were to write few critical stories about NSA thereafter, lapped it up. CIA director Stansfield Turner, also in attendance, did not seem as amused.

Turner was not the only one who wasn't happy. In a town like Washington, where there are always wheels within wheels, there were those who thought that Inman's technique--his courting of the Congress, his petting of the press--was merely a ploy; there were those who believed that, in seeming so honest, Inman was actually being devious. As it happened, many of those people worked for the Central Intelligence Agency.

CIA had suffered at Inman's hands, both during his tenure at Naval Intelligence and later while he was at NSA, where he had become embroiled in a bureaucratic cat fight with Turner over the agency's independence. Turner, whose arrogance was exceeded only by his ambition, had wanted to bring NSA directly under his command, and Inman, after months of battling, had successfully thwarted him. The incident was notable, if only because it was one of the few times Inman had ever been seen to lose his temper. Whether by calculation or not, during his fight with Turner, he had done so several times. Tables were pounded, faces turned red, angry words were exchanged; and, as a result, Turner, an immensely proud man, had never forgiven Inman.

Matters were not improved when NSA intercepts later picked up word of Billy Carter's financial dealings with the Libyans. Rather than take the information to Turner, Inman, as provided by statute, went instead to Attorney General Benjamin Civiletti--then quietly briefed the press about what he had done. Turner was wounded again when, during the controversy over the presence of a Soviet combat brigade in Cuba, the Defense Department, fearful that CIA was using news of the brigade as a stratagem to undermine SALT, pointedly checked the agency's data with Inman. Enraged, Turner reportedly went to Jimmy Carter, his old friend and Annapolis classmate, looking for Inman's head. Instead, Carter awarded Inman the National Security Medal.

•

It was against this backdrop that word began to circulate in late 1980 that Inman was being pushed as the next director of Central Intelligence. Doing the pushing was Barry Goldwater, and the incoming Reaganites were not at all happy. They had their candidate--Reagan campaign director William Casey, a 68-year-old former OSS man who had headed the Securities and Exchange Commission under Nixon. And while Casey suffered from certain admitted defects--lapses in memory, inability to organize and, as time would demonstrate, a studied cavalierness with other people's money--he was at least not Inman. Inman they despised. He was a Carter appointee. He was popular with Congress and the press. He had even--and this raised hackles most of all--allowed a fag to stay at NSA.

This last charge was indisputably true. In mid-1980, as the Moral Majority was beginning its intimidation campaign, a routine security check had found a middle-level NSA employee to be a homosexual. Within the intelligence community, that had always been cause for instant dismissal, the rationale being that homosexuals were vulnerable to blackmail. That was the recommendation in this case, but Inman overrode it. After he informed the man's family, and thus removed the potential for compromise, the employee was allowed to stay on with no diminution of his security clearance. The CIA "old boys" were beside themselves, and, by the time he took office, so, reportedly, was Reagan's then national-security advisor, Richard V. Allen. Allen had big plans for the agency. In the word of the day, it was going to be "unleashed," and the loosening of its bonds and the attendant nasties therein would require tough-minded, hard-charging men. The worry was that Inman was soft.

There remained, though, the problem of Goldwater, who was lobbying fast and furiously for Inman's appointment. Also, someone had to backstop Casey, especially on the Hill. The sop solution was to offer Inman the number-two post, deputy director.

Inman was not sure he wanted it. He was content at NSA, he told friends, and, if he did leave, it would probably be for private industry, where, reportedly, offers in the $250,000 range were being dangled. His sons were approaching college age. With his military career at its apparent zenith, he was tempted to accept one of the lucrative offers. Friends, such as James Schlesinger, himself a former CIA director, urged him to turn the appointment down. Inman was on the verge of taking their advice when Reagan summoned him to the White House. After an application of the famous Reagan charm and the offer of a fourth star, Admiral Inman changed his mind.

Since then, he has not had an easy time of it. During the controversy over the financial dealings of Casey's deputy for covert operations, a California businessman named Max Hugel, Inman was suspected of leaking the information that eventually brought about Hugel's downfall. The stories about the source of the leaks were untrue, but that did not prevent further suspicions that Inman--"a sleeper agent," as one of his enemies called him--was behind Goldwater's call for Casey's resignation, when the CIA director landed in a financial briar patch of his own. At one point, when it appeared that Casey was on the verge of being ousted, security advisor Allen let it be known that if Casey went, Inman would go with him.

The Casey flap finally passed, but not before Inman was compelled to go on national television and, looking distinctly uncomfortable, commend his boss for doing "a great job." But that was not a sufficient show of good faith for the political right and, during the battle over CIA's proposed executive order, they went at Inman again. Human Events, the influential right-wing journal, warned ominously of unidentified "liberals" lurking within CIA's corridors, and The Wall Street Journal, in an editorial widely believed to have been generated by the White House, invited Inman to make good on his pledge about "personally repugnant" executive orders and resign. About that time, CIA spokesmen started talking about Inman's "keeping a low profile."

He has rarely been seen since. The few times he has ventured out, it has not been as the Bobby Inman of old. With Casey keeping cover, he has become the agency's point man, the anointed bearer of bad tidings. He was there when Reagan finally signed the agency's executive order; there again when the agency decided to crack down on civilian scientists, warning them of the legal trouble that awaited them for disclosing sensitive technology; and he was there yet again to defend the widespread use of Government polygraphing.

For his diminishing circle of friends, it has all been very unsettling. "It's bad," a Senator said recently, referring to the executive order that Reagan signed and Inman defended. He mentioned the White House ceremony, Inman standing there, looking rather blank, assuring everyone that the revised version was really going to be all right, that they could go to sleep at night and not worry, because he had kept the genie in the bottle. The Senator, an admirer of Inman's, recalled how, at that moment, those wheels within wheels spun again, and how this time he found himself wondering whether maybe they were right. "It's bad," he repeated. "But without Bobby, it would have been a hell of a lot worse."

Was it true? Had Bobby really become Horatius at the bridge? Or was he someone else entirely, someone darker and different?

It certainly seems that Inman's role now is to keep the bad things from getting worse, and it is a part he performs without much conviction. At the meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, where he called for voluntary censorship, his words seemed flat, their syntax tortured and stumbling. The gap-toothed smile was there, as always, but now it seemed more forced, the man behind it more fatalistic. When he told the assembled scientists of a storm that was coming, how their way of life would be washed away if they did not bend before it, he seemed to some of his listeners to be speaking as much of himself as he was of them. His audience looked back at him. A friend in attendance shook his head sadly.

No one in Washington can be certain now what will become of the agency or of Inman. People can only talk and speculate and wonder and worry. But they can be sure that, whatever comes to pass in the shadowy world he inhabits, Bobby Inman will be thinking . . . always thinking.