William Eldridge Odom (June 23, 1932 – May 30, 2008) was a United States Armylieutenant general who served as Director of the National Security Agency under President Ronald Reagan, which culminated a 31-year career in military intelligence, mainly specializing in matters relating to the Soviet Union. After his retirement from the military, he became a think tank policy expert and a university professor and became known for his outspoken criticism of the Iraq War and warrantless wiretapping of American citizens. He died of an apparent heart attack at his vacation home in Lincoln, Vermont.[1]
1970–1971, At this point a lieutenant colonel, served in Vietnam, being on the Staff of Plans, Policy, and Programs, and working on the Vietnamization phase of the war.
1971–1972, Odom was a visiting scholar at the Research Institute on Communist Affairs at Columbia.
Army Chief of Staff Gen. John A. Wickham Jr. and Mrs. Ann Odom each pin a third star on the shoulders of Lt. Gen. William E. Odom during his promotion ceremony at the Pentagon, June 21, 1984.
Early in his military career, he observed Soviet military activities while serving as a military liaison in Potsdam, East Germany. Later, he taught courses in Russian history at West Point, New York, and while serving at the United States embassy in Moscow in the early 1970s, he visited all of the republics of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Although constantly trailed by KGB, he nonetheless managed to smuggle out a large portion of Alexander Solzhenitsyn's archive, including the author's membership card for the Writers' Union and Second World War military citations; Solzhenitsyn subsequently paid tribute to Odom's role in his memoir "Invisible Allies" (1995).[2]
Upon returning to the United States, he resumed his career at West Point where he taught courses in Soviet politics. Odom regularly stressed the importance of education for military officers.
In 2003, he revealed how the question of the 1967 USS Liberty incident’s deliberateness “just wasn’t a disputed issue” within the NSA.[3] Along with NSA Deputy Director for Operations Oliver Kirby, U.S. Air Force Major General John E. Morrison (Kirby’s successor), and Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, he said he was unaware of any agency official at any time who dissented from the “deliberate” conclusion.
In 1977, he was appointed as the military assistant to Zbigniew Brzezinski, the hawkish assistant for national security affairs to President Jimmy Carter. Among the primary issues he focused on were American-Soviet relations, including the SALT nuclear weapons talks, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, the Iran hostage crisis, presidential directives on the situation in the Persian Gulf, terrorism and hijackings, and the executive order on telecommunications policy.
From 2 November 1981 to 12 May 1985, Odom served as the Army's Assistant Chief of Staff for Intelligence. From 1985 to 1988, he served as the director of the National Security Agency, the United States' largest intelligence agency, under president Ronald Reagan.
Odom was a Senior Fellow at the Hudson Institute, where he specialized in military issues, intelligence, and international relations. He was also an adjunct professor at Yale University and Georgetown University, where he taught seminar courses in U.S. National Security Policy and Russian Politics. He earned a national reputation as an expert on the Soviet military.
Since 2005, he had argued that U.S. interests would be best served by an immediate withdrawal from Iraq, having called the 2003 U.S. invasion the worst strategic blunder in the history of U.S. foreign policy. He had also been critical of the NSA's warrantless wiretapping of international calls, having said "it wouldn't have happened on my watch".[4] Odom was also openly critical of the neoconservative influence in the decision to go to war: "It's pretty hard to imagine us going into Iraq without the strong lobbying efforts from the AIPAC and the [neoconservatives], who think they know what's good for Israel more than Israel knows."[5]
"The president has let [the Iraq war] proceed on automatic pilot, making no corrections in the face of accumulating evidence that his strategy is failing and cannot be rescued. He lets the United States fly further and further into trouble, squandering its influence, money and blood, facilitating the gains of our enemies.[9]
"An attempt to extort Congress into providing funds by keeping U.S. forces in peril [...] surely would constitute the 'high crime' of squandering the lives of soldiers and Marines for his own personal interest.[10]
"As many critics have pointed out, terrorism is not an enemy. It is a tactic. Because the United States itself has a long record of supporting terrorists and using terrorist tactics, the slogans of today's war on terrorism merely makes [sic] the United States look hypocritical to the rest of the world."[11][12]
"The invasion of Iraq may well turn out to be the greatest strategic disaster in American history.[13]
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