(ADM Bobby Ray Inman, USN. Naval Intelligence legend, he was the first intelligence specialist to ever make four stars. His national career went from Director of Naval Intelligence, to Director of the National Security Agency, and retired as an Admiral as Deputy DCI on my birthday in 1982. Photo CIA).
OK- black ice out there this morning, the cherry blossoms delayed by the chill, and the Nats home opener in nine days.
I hope they have their thermal underwear. This has been the longest winter in my quarter century in DC. This is a crazy enough town on the best of days, but lay a good sheet of ice or a blizzard on it and it gets completely surreal.
I was pecking away, watching the snow blow by my window and toggling between taxes and email. There was a minor furor on one of the professional interest streams, and my pal JoeMaz rolled grenade into it.
He started one note out by saying that “late last year several people asked for a copy of all of the Inman Rules. I checked my files – both electronic and hard copy- but came up empty.” He said he checked the usual sources and no one else could come up with a copy. It occurred to him that “this important piece of Naval Intelligence “gouge” might be lost forever when the Admiral passes,” so he stayed on the hunt through the National Capital Region and all the way to Texas, where the Admiral lives now. Joe came up with Rules yesterday, and he blasted them out to the folks who remembered they existed, if not the actual words.
For example, the first rule, number 1, is “conservation of enemies.” Obviously everyone is potentially an ally or an enemy, so the Admiral considered it a prudent course of affairs to not make many of them. There was a corollary, too, which does not appear in this version. That went: “If you have to make an enemy, kill them.”
By which he didn’t mean literally, this being Washington. But of course it can also work that way.
The rules were on a .pdf file, created from an actual typed note. They really should be part of the indoctrination all intelligence professionals get upon joining the business.
I liked them enough to have recreated it as a Word document, so you don’t need to peer into the murky words behind someone’s highlighter. It is not radically dissimilar to Don Rumsfeld’s Rules on working in the White House, but Bobby Ray’s are better suited- and tailored to- the intelligence officer. The reason for the curious format- block, rather than list- brought back a lot of memories, since we grew up having to write in the machine-readable format of an official Naval Message. Ah, so near in time but so far away!
I recall when the Admiral was asked by President Clinton to serve as SECDEF after Les Aspin died, and the nomination lasted a week or so until someone dug up all the old grudges. Some of those include the issue of Jonathon Pollard, the former Naval Intelligence Analyst who sold out to the Israelis, and who our best allies in the Middle East are still trying to get sprung from his life sentence.
William Safire’s pen and the New York Times were the blunt instruments that got under the Admiral’s skin, mostly about his refusal to provide targeting material more than 250 miles away from Isreal unless they specifically asked. There are some long memories in this town, and the ultimate result of having made many violations of his own first rule, Bobby Ray held a press conference that made some dramatic assertions, but at that point, I think he realized he didn’t want to come back here at all and it didn’t matter.
I am certainly sympathetic to that view. While I agree with all the rules, it is a little depressing to have to keep them in mind all the time. I welcome not being in the middle of it all any more.
I last saw the Admiral at Willow, of all places, where he and his lovely wife Nancy joined the largest assembly ever of former Directors of Naval Intelligence to honor Mac Shower’s long life and career.
Here are his rules, provided for your information. With luck, you won’t need them:
1. Conservation of enemies.
2. When you are explaining you are losing.
3. Something too good to believe probably is just that, untrue.
4. Go to the Hill alone.
5. Wisdom in Washington is having much to say and knowing when not to say it.
6. Never sign for anything.
7. The only one looking out for you is you.
8. If you think your enemy is stupid, think again.
9. Never try to fool yourself.
10. Never go into a meeting without knowing what the outcome is going to be.
11. Don’t change what got you to where you are just to get to the next place.
12. Intelligence is knowing what the enemy doesn’t want you to know.
13. Nothing changes faster than yesterday’s vision of the future.
14. Intelligence users are looking for what is going to happen, not what has already occurred.
15. It is much harder to convince someone they are wrong than it is to convince them they are right.
16. For Intelligence Officers in particular there is no substitute for the truth.
17. By the time intelligence gets back to a user with the answer the question usually has changed.
18. Always know your blind spots, get help to cover them.
19. The first report is usually wrong, act but understand more is to come and it will be different.
20. You can never know too much about the enemy.
21. Tell what you know, tell what you don’t know, tell what it means.
22. Tell them what you are going to say, tell them, then tell them what you told them, they might remember something.
23. Never have more than three points.
24. Never follow lunch or an animal act.
25. Believe is correct, intelligence officers never feel.
26. The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.
27. Boredom is the enemy, not the time to any briefing.
28. If you can’t summarize it on one page, your can’t sell it to anyone.
29. Always allow time to consider what the enemy wants me to think, is he succeeding or am I?
30. If you can’t add value, get out of the way.
(ADM Inman upper left, Nancy and Mac Showers. Photo Socotra).
Copyright 2014 Vic Socotra (Rules by ADM Bobby Ray Inman)
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303