A Bit More About Inman and Safire : A Navy feud with Israel and the Pollard affair underlie the stated reasons for withdrawing.

In withdrawing his nomination to be secretary of defense, Bobby Inman gave one of the most memorable press conference since Richard Nixon told reporters they wouldn’t have him to kick around any more back in 1962.

Inman is not the first man of military background to fret over his press clippings. Years of deference and snappy salutes are poor preparation for a hosing down by the Fourth Estate.

The press has used the deadly term rambling to describe Inman’s hour-long performance in Austin, Tex., on Tuesday. That is a bit unfair, in that Inman laid out his peeves in coherent fashion. But prominent citizens are not supposed to dwell in obsessive detail on their press coverage. Inman, however, also may have been sending up smoke screens, and the journalists at the press conference were too thunderstruck by his performance to ask even a few simple questions about other reasons why he might be withdrawing.

On the face of it, Inman’s business career since his retirement from the CIA in 1982 did raise questions about his judgment. Supposedly a man of laser-like intelligence, Inman sat for richly remunerated years on the “proxy board” of International Signal and Control, a firm engaged in fraudulent misrepresentation and whose founder, James Guerin--a man for whom Inman vouched in court--is now serving a 15-year prison term in Florida.

Inman could scarcely complain about “the new McCarthyism” in the press on this since, apart from articles in the British press and a column by this writer, the details of his relationship with ISC and Guerin were politely avoided in the press.

The meatiest portion of Inman’s remarks concerned columnist William Safire, whom Inman charged with nourishing a vendetta against him since the late 1970s. Inman attributed part of Safire’s animus to an action Inman took as William Casey’s deputy at the CIA. In the wake of the 1981 Israeli bombing raid on Iraq’s nuclear reactor at Tuwaitha, Inman reviewed the targeting data requested by Israel from the United States in preparation for the raid. Inman found that intelligence information far exceeding the requirements of the raid--for example, data about Pakistan and Libya--had been furnished by U.S. intelligence, and he forthwith decreed that a 250-mile limit be imposed on satellite and kindred information provided to Israel.

At his Tuesday press conference, Inman claimed that Israeli Gen. Ariel Sharon had complained to his American friends about Inman’s restriction. Safire’s admiring relationship with Sharon is a matter of record in his own columns.

There is a sequel that Inman did not explore. The Tuwaitha raid was led by Col. Avi Sella, who was later dispatched to the United States as controller of Jonathan Pollard, the spy who worked at the Naval Intelligence Service and provided Israel with precisely the satellite intelligence being withheld under Inman’s orders. In his Dec. 23 column in the New York Times, about which Inman made complaint and which seems to have contributed powerfully to his decision to stand down, Safire specifically accused Inman of contributing to the “excessive sentencing” of Pollard.

In other words, the tensions between Inman and Safire speak to a larger enduring tension nourished by U.S. Navy men against Israeli governments and their claque here for such episodes as the bombing of the U.S. ship Liberty during Israel’s Six-Day War and Pollard’s espionage.

Now for the miniseries that the admiral can rough out in his retirement: connivance in high places; the Dole-Safire deal; the battle between Safire and Washington Post editor Bob Woodward to control the Pentagon.

The Clinton crowd should never have picked a military man with a career background in spookery. At least the country has been spared a man who claimed in Austin with a straight face that he joined the elite Bohemian Club “because I love the exposure to people who are talented in the arts.”

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