Inman’s Past in ‘Black Ops’ Raises Red Flag : An expert in ‘off-the-books’ operations will be an expert at military-budget chicanery.

The response to President Bill Clinton’s nomination of former Admiral Bobby Ray Inman to succeed Defense Secretary Les Aspin has been almost uniformly cordial, across the political spectrum.

The press has been kind, too. From Bob Woodward of the Washington Post came praise from his sources for Inman’s “piercing intellect, honesty, unusual memory for details and prodigious capacity for work.”

Woodward did add that Inman has “a kind of genius, as well, for ingratiation.” It is not petty to mention Woodward. The integration of the opinion-forming elites (of which he is a conspicuous member) into the ruling political order is now very far advanced. A nod in the Post from Woodward is a significant staging post on the path to Inman’s confirmation.

Inman started on this path in the office of Naval Intelligence, was picked by President Jimmy Carter to run the National Security Agency, which performs electronics spying, and then served at the Central Intelligence Agency as second in command to William Casey at the start of the Reagan years. Inman resigned in 1982.

As one former longtime Pentagon official remarked to me, a man with a career in “black ops” is the worst sort to have running the Defense Department. Such a person knows where to hide funding for more clandestine operations in every cranny of the $300-billion military budget.

Inman is of course intimately acquainted with the so-called “black” or off-the-books section of the military budget, both from his service career and his later role in Sematech, the government-sponsored consortium of computer and semiconductor companies. According to the same former Pentagon official, at least a portion of Sematech’s actual role was to funnel government funds into these private corporations to underwrite “black” R&D; for computer hardware, which helps to explain Inman’s role.

Such a person is not therefore likely, by instinct and disposition, to ask fundamental, abrasive questions about the role of the U.S. military and of the intelligence function in the post-Cold War world.

Nor, for those who remember the electronic snooping abuses of the Watergate era, is it necessarily of comfort to know that this former NSA chief with “a kind of genius for ingratiation” is now serving at Clinton’s pleasure as boss of all the military intelligence agencies.

Inman has cited his civilian years in business since 1983 as having given him an appreciation of how the American taxpayers want value for money from their government.

The admiral’s own business dealings have included a relationship with James Guerin, a U.S. arms dealer convicted last year of smuggling weapons to South Africa and of defrauding a British electronics company, Ferranti, of $1.14 billion. For these and other crimes, Guerin is serving a 15-year sentence in a Florida prison.

The British press has been taking a keen interest in Inman’s association with Guerin, because the admiral appears to have lent Guerin credibility in the latter’s sale of his company, International Signal and Control, to Ferranti in 1987. It later turned out that Guerin had mightily faked ISC’s assets and value. Ferranti never recovered, and went into receivership at the start of this month.

As director of the NSA, Inman recruited Guerin in 1975 to provide intelligence about the South African military, and in 1976 picked Guerin’s company to provide South Africa with a $200-million jamming system, a deal canceled in 1978 as part of President Carter’s sanctions policy.

But Guerin’s ISC continued to have extensive dealings with South Africa, the British Independent newspaper reported, smuggling $50 million worth of South African anti-tank weapons into the U.S. in the early 1980s for testing and for possible use on helicopters bound for China.

In this period, Inman served on ISC’s “proxy board” and later on Ferranti’s proxy board, getting $50,000 a year for his efforts. As the Independent recently put it, the big names on this non-executive proxy board “enabled the company to perform classified U.S. defense contracts from which ISC, as a foreign-listed company, would otherwise have been excluded.”

In a 1992 court character reference for Guerin, Inman called Guerin’s work of “substantial value” to the United States and attested to his “patriotism.”

Here’s a saga that should receive close scrutiny in Inman’s confirmation hearings. As things stand, it is reminiscent of the sort of dubious intertwining of government and private functions (with the usual obeisance to “national security”) that befouled the Reagan-Bush years.