John Marlan Poindexter (born August 12, 1936) is a retired United States naval officer and Department of Defense official.

As the commanding officer of USS England, he pioneered the shipboard use of computers to manage the ship's force portion of yard overhauls.

In the Iran–Contra affair, Poindexter and Oliver North sent aid to the Contras and money and weapons to Iran to secure the release of American hostages from Lebanon.

[7] Evidence revealed that Poindexter was a leader in the organization of the transfer of the weapons to Iran and oversaw other people involved in the affair, such as Oliver North.

Through this system, Poindexter and North were able to send messages called PROFS notes[8] back and forth without being intercepted by other NSC staff members.

[10][11][12] To protest his involvement in the Iran-Contra Affair, Bill Breeden, a local minister and political activist, stole a street sign bearing Poindexter's name in his home town of Odon, Indiana.

He designed and developed hardware and software for the prototype of a digital real-time imaging system to be used for physical security of high-value facilities.

From 1996 to 2002, Poindexter served as senior vice president for SYNTEK Technologies, a small high-technology firm with contracts in domestic and international defense and commercial business.

In 2000, he joined the board of Saffron Technology, where he played a role building a tool to run entity analysis on Iraqi insurgent networks that planted IEDs.

[16] After 2007, Poindexter worked to promote fraud-detecting Associative Memory Base technology to civilian government agencies such as the IRS.

This was portrayed in the media as allowing participants to profit from the assassination of heads of state and acts of terrorism due to such events being mentioned on illustrative sample screens showing the interface.