Martin Hellman recalls his first meeting with Bobby Inman

[bananas]

http://nuclearrisk.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/ex-spymaster-on-iranian-nuclear-threat/

Ex-Spymaster on Iranian Nuclear Threat
Posted on November 20, 2011

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Inman’s emphasis on cooperation, instead of confrontation, came as no surprise to me. I had the privilege of experiencing this approach first hand in the 1970’s. Back then, NSA was used to having absolute control over all American cryptographic research, so they were rankled when I started publishing papers that they would have classified above Top Secret. I had developed my results without access to the classified literature, so I thought I should be free to publish my work – plus, there was a growing personal and commercial need for encryption that could not be met by classified algorithms. NSA saw things differently, and some elements within the Agency warned that I could be thrown in jail for publishing my work. This confrontation drew major media coverage, including coverage in Science, TIME magazine, and the New York Times.

That battle was in full swing when Inman took over as Director of NSA and, against the advice of all his advisors at the Agency, decided to pay me a visit to see if he could defuse the conflict. I’ll never forget his cutting through the initial tension by telling me, “It’s nice to see you don’t have horns,” which is how the career people at NSA had been portraying me. I repaid the compliment, since their threats had produced a similar picture of NSA in my mind. Inman went on to tell me that he couldn’t see the harm in talking, and talk we did. With that kind of “out of the box” thinking on Inman’s part, what had been an adversarial relationship eventually blossomed into a friendship with enough trust and understanding that Inman is one of the charter signers of my petition asking Congress to authorize a study of the risk inherent in our current nuclear posture.

Inman has a number of other intriguing observations on issues ranging from nuclear weapons to “enhanced interrogation” in his Electric Politics interview, and I highly recommend it to you.

Martin Hellman


WHAT YOU CAN DO TO HELP

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Among other things, Bobby Inman was also Bill Clintons first choice for Defense Secretary,
headed America's answer to Japan's Fifth Generation Computing Project in the 1980's,
and looking at his wikipedia entry I just learned:

In 2011 he became head of the board of directors of Xe Services, formerly Erik Prince's Blackwater.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bobby_Ray_Inman