William E. Odom, 75; was chief of the National Security Agency for Reagan
WASHINGTON - William E. Odom, a director of the National Security Agency in the Reagan administration who became an early and outspoken opponent of the Iraq war, died May 30 at his vacation home in Lincoln, Vt.. He was 75.
The cause was a heart attack, his family said.
Mr. Odom, who also worked at the National Security Agency under President Jimmy Carter, was once described as a "blue-ribbon hawk" for his opposition to detente with the Soviet Union. His long military and national security career added gravitas to his warnings during the approach to the invasion of Iraq four years ago, when he became one of the first former top military officers to speak out against the war.
"The issue is not whether the Iraqi people will greet US soldiers as their liberators, but what will they do six months after that," Mr. Odom told The
"The administration has already assured us that the US will not stay there for very long," he added, "and, if that is the case, then the goal of establishing a constitutional system in Iraq is a joke."
The son of an agricultural researcher in Cookeville, Tenn., Mr. Odom traced his interest in foreign affairs to childhood debates about capitalism with his father and about socialism with his minister.
After graduating from the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1954, he spent the late 1950s in Army infantry and armor divisions in the United States and West Germany. In the mid-1960s, he was a liaison to the Soviet military in Potsdam, East Germany. In 1970-71, he served as a lieutenant colonel in Vietnam helping to oversee attempts to build up the South Vietnamese forces.
From 1972 through 1974, Mr. Odom was a military attaché at the US Embassy in Moscow. From 1981 to 1985, he was the Army's assistant chief of staff for intelligence.
Mr. Odom's military assignments were interspersed with scholarly work.
He returned several times for graduate study at Columbia University, where he earned a master's degree in Russian studies in 1962 and completed a doctorate in comparative politics eight years after that.
It was during his first stint at Columbia that Mr. Odom met Anne Weld Curtis, who would become his wife.
She is a curator emeritus at the Hillwood Estate Museum and Gardens in Washington, the couple's primary home.
And it was also at Columbia, to which he returned as a visiting scholar after his tour in Vietnam, that Mr. Odom formed a bond with his most important mentor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, a professor who later became a top adviser to Carter.
In an interview Sunday, Brzezinski said he first took notice of Mr. Odom when he made a seminar presentation about the Vietnam War.
Brzezinski expected Mr. Odom to make the customary soldier's argument that winning was just a matter of resources. Instead, Mr. Odom surprised him by arguing that this was " 'a war we cannot win in the conventional military sense,' " Brzezinski recalled. Mr. Odom argued that the war ultimately served Russian interests by containing the Chinese.
Brzezinski later named Mr. Odom as his military assistant in the Carter administration.
Mr. Odom was so opposed to the idea of peaceful coexistence with the Soviet Union that when its 1979 invasion of Afghanistan caused US-Soviet relations to freeze over, colleagues accused him of "doing some joyous ice skating" at his vindication, The
But Mr. Odom was dismissive of Iraq as a potential threat to the United States. Once the war was under way, he argued that the United States was in effect fighting only for the interests of Iraq's regional rivals, Israel, Iran and Al Qaeda.
"Cut and Run? You Bet!" was the headline of one article he wrote, in the May 2006 issue of Foreign Policy. "Victory Is Not an Option," was the headline on a February 2007 column in The Washington Post.
In addition to his wife, Mr. Odom leaves a son, Lieutenant Colonel Mark Odom, who served 12 months with the Army in Iraq and was wounded by a roadside bomb last August.
Mr. Odom insisted that his son's involvement played no role in his views and that he took no satisfaction that the war had bogged down as he predicted.
"Vindication is not pleasing," Mr. Odom told The Washington Post last year. "Even some of my friends have noted: The more vindicated I've been, the more irritable I've become."
