GOODBYE DR. STRANGELOVE: NO FIGHTING IN THE WAR ROOM FOR BOBBY RAY INMAN

From Crypt Newsletter 22, January 1994

Late in January Clinton Defense Sec'y nominee Bobby Ray Inman convinced everyone he'd been sniffing the developer on spy satellite photos far too long when he abruptly quit, withdrawing his name from the process.

"I sensed elements in the media and the political leadership of the country who would rather disparage or destroy reputations than work to effectively govern the country. I have had many calls from old friends telling me that I simply need thicker skin," wrote Inman in a letter to President Clinton explaining his intention to quit.

Under the klieg lights in Austin, Texas, during a downright weird press conference to explain his exit, the ex-NSA chief did a quite reasonable imitation of Captain Queeg's "stealing strawberries from the dessert can" soliloquy. It was a quirky, confabulated talk Inman kicked off by commenting on "the New McCarthyism" which confronted him. At that point he began discussing a conspiracy between Republican Senator Bob Dole and New York Times columnist William Safire against him before abruptly veering into a discussion of Israeli misuse of National Reconnaissance Office spy satellite photography.

Inman also said he was called a "tax cheat" by Safire, who, in turn, he dubbed "a plagiarist." "NannyGate . . . I got out my Ernst & Young Tax Guide . . . I have no problem with that . . . the Bohemia Club . . . I made three women the chief officers of [Evolutionary Technologies, Inc] . . . They will make a lot of money for me . . . the Bohemia Club affords me access to the arts that I might not otherwise have . . ." - all flowed from Inman during the remainder of the hour. Minds wandered.

Two days later pundits on C-SPAN mentioned Inman had also complained bitterly about reporters asking him if he was gay.

During years of government service, Inman racked up posts at the top of the intelligence community including director of the National Security Agency, deputy director of the CIA and vice director of the Defense Intelligence Agency.

He is of interest to Crypt Newsletter readers primarily due to well-documented, career-spanning efforts to control citizen-developed encryption and the free exchange of scientific information.

Just prior to his nomination by President Clinton, Inman was featured as one of the characters in "Alien Contacts," a book on UFOs recently published by William Morrow. In it, the very strange Inman was alleged as one of the heads of the Cold War intelligence apparatus tasked with keeping a lid on the urban myth crashed-UFO-in-hangar-18_ story.

In related news, the Los Angeles Times published a feature a week prior to Inman's exit showing links to a nation spanning consulting firm - Science Applications - which seems to exist as a shadow ruling-class within the Pentagon.

Science Applications International Corporation, of which Inman is a director, has many members in top spots within the Pentagon.

The Pentagon, in standard behavior-mode, refused to comment to the Times on anything concerning Science Applications. William J. Perry, the current second in command at the Pentagon and the man who has replaced Inman as nominee, was a director of Science Applications until he was elevated to his current position in 1993. Like Inman, Perry is a military-industrial complex insider, steeped in the Strangelovian traditions of Cold War secrecy and superweapons development.

Perry, given the fatuous title "godfather of stealth technology" by the Washington Post in 1989 when the truth about the disastrous B-2 bomber began to leak, was Jimmy Carter's undersecretary for research and engineering in the late Seventies when stealth projects, among other bizarre schemes for Doomsday weaponry, began disappearing into the nascent vortex of SAR (Special Access Required) - or "deep black" financing.

In addition, Perry was involved intimately with the application and strategy behind the use of the Global Positioning System (GPS), a space-based radio-navigating system meant to supply US forces with concise, accurate, three-dimensional locating information on land, sea and in the air. In the late Seventies, Perry argued strongly for corruption of any commercially available GPS real-time data so that no one could use the system for meaningful purpose, thereby ensuring no value to a potential enemy. The policy backfired during the Gulf War, when US military forces were faced with a shortage of hand-held GPS receivers capable of unscrambling encrypted military channel data. The Pentagon unscrambled GPS transmission so civilian receivers could also be used in the war effort. At the same time, according to The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Ashtech, a French-owned, California-based firm developed a GPS receiver capable of correcting Pentagon-corrupted GPS data, making it more accurate than receivers - made by Rockwell International - upon which the military was relying.

Perry was also an advocate of strong research into the effects of induction of electromagnetic pulses in satellite circuitry by proximal nuclear explosions, specifically concerning the GPS.

Others in the defense establishment at the time felt the study of near nuclear bursts on satellites unnecessary, simply because they carried the equal risk of damaging the instigator's space assets.

In 1980, Perry - then the number three man in the Pentagon - stood in the way of Congress when it tried to find out something of the procedures for going to nuclear war. All Perry volunteered was the assertion that everything would work, that the Soviets would indeed be bombed whether or not the President, the White House, Washington, D.C., or the rest of the country were pulverized.

During the same period, 1978-80, the Pentagon pushed another fantastic satellite program called STRATSAT. The STRATSAT, as equally Wagnerian as the Pentagon's current deux ex machina - MILSTAR - was supposed to orbit in outer space 111,000 miles up, half way to the moon, where it would surely be beyond the reach of Soviet thermonuclear-tipped missiles. The STRATSAT - for $3.5 billion - was to be a war-fighting system. But Congress blanched at the price and the generals went back to the drawing board, produced the MILSTAR, and subsequently buried its procurement under layers of impenetrable classification. To date, MILSTAR has been significantly more expensive than STRATSAT.

Other Science Applications directors - John Deutch and Anita Jones - currently serve as undersecretary for acquisition and technology and contracting deputy for defense, respectively.

All three former Science Applications directors are in position to influence awarding of Pentagon contracts, including bids from Science Applications, constituting a clear and rather glaring conflict of interest. In pro forma statements, officials at Science Applications denied to the Times that the presence of company directors in key positions at the Pentagon would have any influence - other than negative - on the company's bids.

During the Bush administration, Inman, Perry and Deutch - while directors of Science Applications, were also members of the National Foreign Intelligence Board (NFIB), an advisory group reporting to the President and the director of Central Intelligence, which deals with production, review and coordination of foreign intelligence.

In 1992 one of Scientific Applications government projects blew up in the firm's face when it was charged with fabricating environmental testing from toxic waste dumps. Science Applications eventually conceded to false claims and paid $1.3 million in penalties, a small sum compared to the estimated $1.5 billion the firm is expected to earn in 1994. The Los Angeles Times cites government officials declaring Science Applications guilty of the "largest environmental fraud . . . we've had here" and an example of "corporate greed."

Currently Scientific Applications devotes 51 percent of its effort, according to the Times, on Pentagon projects. One new project that isn't, if true, claims to be a program for turning air pollution into fertilizer which is somewhat reminiscent in scope to the Army's request that Nobel-laureate Richard Feynman devise a way to turn sand into fuel for tanks.

If this news is any indication, one might make the prediction that short of an act of God, the Pentagon will try to continue conducting business as it did during the Cold War: leadership by eccentric, anti-democratic aristocrats; competition and bidding by sweetheart deal.

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