Bobby Ray Inman (born April 4, 1931) was a U.S. admiral who held several influential positions in the US Intelligence community.

He served as Director of Naval Intelligence from 1974 to 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 revealed 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 12 February 1981 to 10 June 1982.

He is known publicly as President Bill Clinton's first choice to succeed Dick Cheney 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. Among those he named were Senator (and future presidential candidate) Bob Dole, and neoconservative 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 also served as a professor at the University of Texas at Austin [2].

External links

• Biography of Bobby Ray Inman
• Within A Month! The Bringing Down Of Bobby Ray Inman (from an essay by Murray Rothbard)
• Bob Inman on Terrorism