Vanishing Act by a Popular Spook

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Inman's associates said, however, that the admiral chafed at playing second fiddle to Casey after running the NSA. When Casey came under fire last July for alleged business improprieties, Goldwater called for his resignation, hoping Inman would succeed him. But White House aides warned that if Casey were pushed out, Inman would not replace him and might be fired too—and the congressional pressure on Casey subsided. Inman contends that this fuss was "One of the most discomforting periods of my entire life. I found the invidious comparisons both unfair to Bill and embarrassing to me."

Inman often clashed with the staff of Reagan's National Security Council, particularly with former National Security Adviser Richard Allen. One quarrel was over an Executive order supported by the NSC that would have given the CIA broad authority to spy on U.S. citizens at home when they were linked to "significant foreign intelligence" operations. Inman did not publicly object to this domestic CIA role, but he did oppose giving the CIA a free hand in the types of activities it could probe and the methods it could use. Largely because of his efforts, the order was tightened to put clearer limits on what the CIA could do at home.

More recently, Inman was said to have been upset by White House leaks that sought to buttress Administration policies in Central America and especially by the contention that the Soviet Union and Cuba were behind the trouble in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Although Inman generally shared the Administration's thesis, he felt that its disclosures about U.S. surveillance of the region compromised CIA intelligence-gathering methods.

At the White House, some presidential aides suspect that Inman's friction with Allen, who quit in January after disclosure that he had accepted gifts from a Japanese magazine, spilled over into hostility between Inman and Casey, since Casey and Allen had long been allies. Inman concedes that the "air might have had a little strain in it" when Casey was being investigated and Inman was seen as a successor, but he insisted, "The personal working relationship has been very easy from the start."

Beyond that, said the admiral, "all the stories that are running around about major policy differences and personality disputes are just plain false." He contended that he was involved only in the routine kind of conflicts that always go on in Government and that they had nothing to do with his resignation. Unfortunately, Bobby Inman made that point in a telephone conversation. There was no way to determine whether he was hitching up his socks as he spoke.

—By Ed Magnuson. Reported by Christopher Redman and Evan Thomas/Washington