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Retired admiral tapped for top intel position

President-elect Barack Obama has chosen retired Adm. Dennis Blair, a former head of Pacific Command, to be his director of national intelligence, according to reports Friday.

A surface warfare officer, Blair retired in 2002 after a 34-year career capped off by his post as the commander of all the military forces in the Asia-Pacific region, the largest of the operational areas into which the Pentagon slices the globe.

If confirmed by the Senate, Blair would be the third director of national intelligence since the post was created in the aftermath of the intelligence errors that presaged the 2003 invasion of Iraq. And he would be the second retired admiral to take the post, after its current occupant, retired Adm. Mike McConnell.

Blair graduated from the Naval Academy in 1968 — the same year as Virginia Democratic Sen. Jim Webb and retired Marine Lt. Col. Oliver North — and spent much of his career in the fleet as a surface warfare officer, eventually commanding the destroyer Cochrane and the Kitty Hawk Carrier Battle Group. Blair is esteemed within the Navy for having tried to water-ski in the Cochrane’s wake when it was forward-deployed in Japan in the 1980s.

In 1999, when Blair was commander of PaCom, critics in the Indonesian state of East Timor faulted him for working too closely with the Indonesian military even as it was trying to put down the Timorese bid for independence. Those critics have followed him back to the U.S.: A New York-based advocacy group, East Timor and Indonesia Action Network, already has begun circulating a petition that urges Obama not to appoint Blair to the intelligence post.

During his career Blair also studied Russian at Oxford; worked as a White House Fellow during the administration of President Gerald Ford; and served in intelligence positions in the Pentagon, with the CIA and the National Security Council.

After he retired, Blair served as president of the Washington-funded Institute for Defense Analyses. He also had a seat on the board of defense contractor EDO Corp.

In 2006 he was criticized by the Project On Government Oversight after an IDA report recommended the Air Force would save money by signing a multi-year deal to buy F-22 Raptor fighters, which POGO said would benefit Blair as an EDO board member. He rejected the criticism, saying he wasn’t involved with the preparation of the F-22 report, although he resigned from his EDO position, he said, to avoid the appearance of a conflict of interest. Later, he also stepped down as the president of IDA.

He later became the John M. Shalikashvili Chair in National Security Studies at the National Bureau of Asian Research and the General of the Army Omar N. Bradley Chair of Strategic Leadership at Dickinson College and the U.S. Army War College.

As director of national intelligence, Blair would oversee a hodgepodge of 16 intelligence agencies across the government — including federal and military spying operations — and be tasked with coordinating and consolidating their output.