Personality Spotlight: Dennis Blair

WASHINGTON, Jan. 9 (UPI) -- Retired Adm. Dennis Blair worked the intelligence business from many perspectives; now he may use those viewpoints as U.S. national intelligence director.

President-elect Barack Obama introduced Blair Friday as his choice to manage 16 intelligence agencies.

Blair held staff posts with the White House National Security Council and the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and he spent a year as associate CIA director for military support, USA Today reported.

He has hands-on intelligence experience running the U.S. Pacific Command, where he led operations in which military and CIA personnel worked against regional terror groups.

In 2003, Blair became president of the Institute for Defense Analyses, a national security research group backed by the federal government. In 2006, the Pentagon inspector general reported Blair violated conflict-of-interest standards by failing to disqualify himself from F-22 fighters studies while on boards of two contractors with ties to the program. The report also found he had "no impact" on the studies' results, the newspaper said.

Blair's "a very logical choice," says John Lehman, former Navy secretary under President Reagan and a member of the commission that recommended creating the director of national intelligence job in its 2004 report on the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks.

Blair was born in Kittery, Maine, and was a sixth-generation naval officer and great-great-great grandson of Confederate chief engineer William Price Williamson of North Carolina, credited with first suggesting that the hull of the U.S.S. Merrimack be used to build the ironclad C.S.S. Virginia. He was a classmate Oliver North and James Webb when he graduated from the United States Naval Academy in 1968.