THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE DIRECTOR FOR NATIONAL ESTIMATES AND DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR INTELLIGENCE

• Document Type: FOIA
• Keywords: DIRECTOR
• Keywords: DEPUTY DIRECTOR
• Collection: FOIA Collection
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): 0005568800
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: U
• Document Page Count: 46
• Document Creation Date: June 24, 2015
• Document Release Date: September 29, 2010
• Case Number: F-2010-01486
• Publication Date: January 1, 1971

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DATE: 09-22-2010
Miscellaneous Studies
THE RELATIONSHIP
BETWEEN THE DIRECTOR FOR NATIONAL ESTIMATES
AND DEPUTY DIRECTOR FOR INTELLIGENCE
3'e-ret-
MS-5
January 1971
Copy No. 1 of 1
 This documen ntains information affe g the national
defense of the Unit States, within a meaning of Title
18, sections 793 and 7 . of th S Code, as amended.
Its transmission or revelat' of its contents to or re-
ceipt by an unauthori perso ' prohibited by law.
GROUP 1
Excluded from automatic
downpcading and dscbuificohon
C
 This document 'cVI information affectin
defense of the Unit States, within the
18, sections 793 and . of. the US
Its transmission or revela
ceipt by an unauthorized
Eacludad from automatic
downgrading and dwere large - in a later
day they were coalesced to permit one to consider
him the Director's principal intelligence officer.
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Yet the substance of estimates - popularly declared
final word on a great many of the critically important
intelligence problems was beyond him. If he had
felt that way he might have compared himself to the
darling daughter who was permitted to get ready to
swim but not approach the water. He had everything
except the most important component.
Neither Becker nor any of his successors ever
articulated this point to me. As you look at it, it
may have been so irksome a matter that they could
not in conscience even admit its`; existence let alone
complain about it out loud. My~-;guess is that within
their subconscious there was a continual battle be-
tween the forces which pressed for a riddance of the
thorn, and those which said
relax, the estimates are not all that
important in fact, they are unimportant
because their findings are coordinated to
death.
I do not think that the above is merely self-
serving apology. I have written it in the knowledge
that had the roles of the chairman of the Board and
the DD/I been reversed the new DD/I would have been
mad as hell.
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The story of Becker's successor, Robert Amory,
begins with the departure of Max Millikan as the AD/RR.
Max had held the job about a year (from early 1951 to
early 1952) and Becker's choice for his replacement
was Amory, whom he had known in the Harvard law school.
So it was that the CIA became blessed.
Without: proof positive, I have always felt sure
that part of the-job's allure to Amory was Becker's
intention to leave the Agency and his promise to
recommend Amory for the job of DD/I. Becker was
not the man to promise something he could not deliver,
but my guess is that the assurance of his-support -
assuming Amory did well in O/RR - was enough bait
to get Amory away from his job in a New York law
office.
So Amory entered the Life in 1952 as the AD/RR.
He was a man of great energy and power of'mind; he
was courageous to the point of being brash; few have
had his supply of self confidence, nay, self esteem.
He turned in a performance in O/RRwhich was well-
regarded and received from General Smith his appoint-
ment as DD/I a very very short time before General
Smith himself departed to become Under Secretary of
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State in about March of 1953. If Allen Dulles had
not liked Amory's style or had thought not sufficient
of his ability, he would have had an embarrassment on
his hands. That Amory knew of the delicacy of the
situation came out in clearest terms when one day
he quite gratuitously volunteered to me that Allen
had indeed ratified Smith's appointment in an oral
exchange.
I had met Mr. Dulles just before he took off
for Switzerland during the War. I had seen a good
bit of him after his return in 1945. As with at
least a-million others, I felt that I knew him well,
and from the warm and hospitable way he conducted
all his personal relations, along with that same
million I felt that Allen felt that he, on his part,
knew me and thought well of me. During the time he
served as DD/P and DDCI I had seen much of him and
regarded him as a gifted expert in the profession
and as the best chief that a man could ever hope to
serve -- a sentiment I treasure to this day.
When General Smith left I went to Allen and
asked him if he would like to have me continue in
.my post and received a heart-warming vote of
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confidence. Yes he wanted me to stay "as long as I
am in this job." I did not specifically bring up
the matter of the DD/I - which I probably should
have done - but then there was nothing in our ex-'
change which so much as acknowledged the existence
of the DD/I - neither from me as a pain in the neck,
nor from Allen as an institution which I should either
acknowledge or by-pass. I suppose to the extent that
I gave the matter any thought I considered that I had
a green light to conduct Board business as heretofore:
namely, that as spokesman for the Board on its sub-
stantive findings, I would address the DCI with.
3.or.without) a "drop copy" to the DD/I. Obviously
I never received any instructions to the contrary.
Less obviously, I never heard a word of Amory's
reaction if indeed he had one.
Amory, like Becker, was no professional bureau-
crat. He protested much, as all newcomers to govern-
ment, his impatience with routines, forms, channels,
and so on, and again, like the newborn, liked to
indicate that the important thing was getting the
job done irrespective of stifling bureaucratic pro-
cedures. This was of course the stance of a new boy
 just elected to class office and as time passed this
cavalier pose dissipated as he discovered the facts
of life and as he recalled the importance of the
chain of command in his military experience. He
became just as excited as the next chief who found
that his subordinates had taken his invitation to
by-pass him at face value or who came to a meeting
without a full grasp of what had been going on. At
the same time he was clearly aware of the seniority -
in age at least and in intelligence experience -
that existed in the Board. He also caught on to
the Director's special relationship with the O/NE
and his statutory responsibility for.the national
estimates. So whatever the cross-currents in Amory's
attitude towards us, there grew up - as with Becker -
a modus vivendi: in terms of administrative business,
we were a part of the DD/I empire; the DD/I had an
important role in our personnel and budget matters,
and our administrative chief went routinely through
the DD/I. office; but in terms of our substantive
work, we-gave him not the time of day. For example,
I do not think I addressed a single communication
involving substance to him directly. I did send
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him drop copies of most but not all our stuff. If he
did not like our findings, he either kept still or
did some private and unreported lobbying with the
Director.
Within a fairly short time, perhaps a year, both
he and the Director had occasion to voice the thought
that whereas the 0/NE was under the DD/I for adminis-
trative reasons, the Board of National Estimates was
the Director's board and the NIE's something which
the Board produced as the Director's executive agent.
Indeed, as Board chairman, I was.a regular attendee
at IAC meetings - where the NIE's were put to bed -
for years before Amory himself became a regular
communicant.
Knowing Amory, this probably griped hell out of
one part of him. He in turn very rapidly became the
greatest horse's ass I had ever known. I will not
try for a moment to conceal my deep personal animus,
which. in the nature of -things, was bound to grow the
better you knew him.
Granting the good qualities I have already
cited - and to which I should add a miraculous
talent for draftsmanship there were things about
him that I found simply intolerable - and in bounty.
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 to the party of the second part a situation where he
listened to Amory talk. And such talk. It was fast,
loud, overemphatic, overladen with colorful figures,
and full of flattering. references to his own powers,
clevernesses, triumphs. He was one of those talkers
whose second and third bright ideas had come before
he had finished the articulation of the first, and
so the first would be abandoned at the half-way mark
while he began on the next. You always felt his fear
of your anticipating him and his resolve that this
would - could - never be allowed to happen. If the
formulation of the idea had rocky going in his mind,
he would run through. any of the well-known gambits
to hold the floor. There might be a patter of non-
sense, sort of vamp till ready as in the old ragtime
music; there might be an aimless repetition of the
last, thought, or a series of "and ah, and ah, and ah"
which inhibited an interruption, or just plain word-
less noise which. made it impossible. If you had
patience, you listened and came away with the feeling
that you had contracted to talk into the exhaust flue
of.a wind tunnel; if you did not, you tried to
 disengage as promptly as possible with a resolve
never to go back for more.
There was his vanity which took many forms beyond
that of the oral hold-forths. He had a compulsion to
show off and show off in more subtle ways than telling
the audience what a great guy he was. He had to be
the brightest and best informed man in the room, the
bride at every wedding, the corpse at every wake.
No matter that he did not really know the score, he
would always be the man to answer the Director's
question. A good many times>it would be incorrect
and a loud-mouthed bluff, which those present either
did not want to correct (they would be analysts from
well down the line) or like myself were insufficiently
confident to make the correction without first checking
back.. Sometime. early in his life he had found that
nonsense uttered in authoritative tones got by so long
as less brassy adversaries were not given a chance to
look. things up. He found out that by the time they
did get things straight the whole matter was over the
dam so what.
A little incident with his vanity early on
poisoned my relationship with him for as long as I
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will live. It happened that Chet Cooper* had arranged
for the two senior NSC staffers, Jimmy Lay and Everett
Gleason, to come over to lunch with him and me and
talk about the NIE's and the Council's intelligence
requirements. Both Lay and Gleason were friends of
years' standing. Chet reserved the Director's small
dining room in the basement of the old Admin Building
for the four of us, and then thought to invite Amory.
Chet and I arrived early and Chet set the place cards
with me at the head of the table (I was supposed to
be the.host), Lay at my right, Gleason at my left,
and Chet and Amory down the table. Then Amory ar-
rived and then the guests. I went upstairs to meet
them and escort them down. In my absence Amory
switched the place cards, putting himself at the
head of the table. It wasn't through any inadvertent
lapse into bad manners; it was merely Amory's assump-
tion that his place was at the table's head.
* At that time Chief of the Estimates Staff in ONE.
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Maybe the above is all that is necessary to
indicate why the chairman of the Board of National
Estimates had personal as well as bureaucratic
 reasons to stay out of the DD/I's chain of command.
But the story does require notice, at least, of a
business which to me was highly uncongenial and
certain crude tries at being an operator which were
more so.
Thus through the Amory regime the O/NE-DD/I
relationship rocked along without a showdown one
way or,- the other. I did make at least two tries
to get Allen to take us wholly out of the chain of
command, but, while freely acknowledging the move
as reasonable, he never acted. He was a man who
appreciated the virtues of "systeme D" and he prob-
ably had a number of advisors who told him of the
considerable administrative problems which would
come with a de jure separation. At the end of his
time I had a final go at trying to get him to make
such. a recommendation to John McCone while the
latter was learning the ropes. He told me that he
had passed word to McCone, but McCone never mentioned
the matter to me. He did take the matter under ad-
visement as we shall see in a minute.
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When Mr. Dulles left, Amory was only a few steps
behind. At a farewell lunch which McCone gave for
him, he spoke of his decision to move on - to the
Bureau of the Budget - because after all he had had
almost ten years in the same job and thought best to
change. I was always ready to believe that this
explanation was about 60 percent of the full one.
The other and unvoiced 40 percent was that Amory
knew full well that he had no prospect for advance-
ment in the Agency. Pat Carter was the DDCI, Kirk-
patrick had become or was about to become number
three, and I think that even Amory's vanity could
not lead him to put any odds on his becoming the
DD/P. If on the other hand John McCone let on that
Amory should go, it was obviously not because of the
latter's implication in the Bay of Pigs. Amory was
no more in this than the Board of National Estimates.
Amory's supreme disfavor to the O/NE was his
swan song recommendation of-Cline as his successor.
McCone was, of course, well aware of presidential
displeasure about the Agency and its role in the Bay
of Pigs. I doubt that the President told John to
shake things up (that had been done in the Taylor
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Report), but knowing McCone, I know that he had po-
litical sense enough. to know that an investigation
followed by administrative changes was clearly in-
dicated. He appointed General Schuyler, a Jovian,
J. Patrick Coyne (secretary of the PFIAB), who was
not, with, Lyman Kirkpatrick in the chair to do a
top-to-'bottom review of the Agency. Among the sub-
jects on the agenda were the O/NE, the Board, and
the DD/I.
Allen Dulles may have recommended a look; if
not, the bad blood between those institutions and
the DD/I was of course well known, and as resent-
ments smouldered it would have been no more than
logical that'-those who opposed the 0/NE argued that
its staff should be removed from the Board and its
members distributed among the appropriate parts of
O/CI: and 0/RR. To have done so would have very
effectively killed the O/NE. There was little open
talk of this in my presence, but I sensed it as a
reality. I was not surprised therefore to learn
that we.-..-.,were up for an "evaluation" before the
Kirkpatrick. Committee. In so far as Cline could
have pressed for it, he would have, but I have no
sure evidence. .
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There was an argument against us and it began
with the allegation that the work of the 0/NE staff
was duplicative of that done elsewhere in the analyt-
ical offices. For example, the composition of, say,
an Iranian estimate, the argument would run, could
be done better by a Middle East analytical group -
50 men strong - which possessed great expertise on
Iran and its neighbors. Why was not a 5 man. Middle East
staff in 0/NE only one member of which was an Iranian
specialist a stupid duplication of staff? Why not
put all Middle East specialists together in one pot
and when an estimate had to be drafted on Iran; pick
the best man of several to do the job? In other
words, the proponents of the plan to liquidate the
O/NE Staff (which consisted of about 35 analysts for
all estimates work) liked to argue that their scheme
would result in a higher quality of work on the NIE's
and a considerable saving in wages. Since by this
time the NIE's were generally revered, any discussion
of the administration of their producing office had
to be couched in terms of making them still better.
As to the Board, it was almost the only thing
of its kind in the DC, if not among intelligence
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services the world around. Because of its uniqueness
and its distinguished roster, there could be no ser-
ious thought of junking it. The serious thought -
that of it opposed to the Board - aimed not to ob-
literate but rather to transmute the Board into some-
thing out of Gilbert and Sullivan. The best way to
do this was to liquidate the staff. In this case.
the activities of the Board, consigned to work over
drafts written-by men beyond its administrative con-
trol, would be reduced to an amiable rubber stamp,
or to a feckless sort of remonstrance against the
officers who commanded the analytical troops. The
plain fact of the matter, in my view, was that the
Board without the Staff was nothing, and that a
"nothing" Board could not possibly keep up the
quality of the NIE's.
On our side of the case there were good specific
arguments to support the general one above:
1. An estimate is a difficult and delicate art
form. Knowledge of a subject matter did not guarantee
an ability for this sort of analytical composition.
In fact, several of the Agency's best country experts
had been asked to do draft estimates with appalling
 11
results. Of the 1,600 people in my Branch of OSS,
there had been fewer than 20 who could do this sort-
of work, and I will wager that among the thousands
reporting to the DD/I there are right now probably
not more than 75. The O/NE by careful recruiting
and painful training had about 20 or more. If these
men were scattered, how could we ever be sure of
having their services on a top priority basis. Access
to thousands of others with equal but different talents
would do no good whatever.
2. Today's estimate on Iran ties to yesterday's,
as well as to yesterday's on Iraq, on Soviet interests
to the south, on Middle East oil, the Persian Gulf,
and so on. Today's estimate on Vietnam or Argentina
has a similar array of first and second cousins who
are well known to those who have lived the NIE life.
They are not necessarily known to other knowledgeable
intelligence analysts. Without this built-in famil-
iarity with what had gone before, an estimate drafter
would and did fall into errors of fact and judgment
that made the NIE at hand look silly. 'Continuity of
estimates work such as was characteristic of the O/NE
staffers life was essential.
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3. The easy working relationship between Board
members and staffers was something possible only with
continuing contact. This intellectual companionship
between seniors and juniors in the practice of a
subtle craft made for a high quality product. For
Board members could be freely critical and inquisi-
tive and unafraid of not knowing, staffers could be
frank. Both sides knew exactly where the authority
lay and neither abused nor flouted it. With staffers
being only intermittently assigned to estimates and
subject to some extra-O/NE command this whole remark-
able relationship would end to the great detriment
of the institution, the NIE.
There are other arguments, but I will rest my
case with these. These were the guts of my presen-
tation to Kirkpatrick, General Schuyler, and Pat
Coyne. With great good sense they were impressed,
and the O/NE -- better the NIE - survived.
With this investigation the dispute between
myself and the DD/I changed in dimension. With
Amory the issue had been one of his authority over
a unit nominally subordinate to him. What I feared
was having Amory take my best staffers for assignment
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elsewhere within his domain, or just as bad, use my
office as a dump for his personnel problems and neer-
do-wells with tenure. I had had samples of both.
What I feared more, however, was Amory's personal
intrusion into the substance of an estimate where
there was at least an even chance that his offering
would be some high-velocity nonsense, shot from the
hip. I. thought he might unwittingly damage us -
perhaps gravely, but I always considered that he
agreed that the NEE's were a vitally important insti-
tution and that he was much concerned to keep up
their quality. With Cline we had another problem.
Vastly more of a bureaucrat than Amory, he
found the O/NE and its special status an intolerable
qualification of his sovereignty. Furthermore, he
had a deep antipathy for the NIE and the collabora-
tive effort that produced it. Any draft of anything
which he personally had composed could in his view
only deteriorate as others touched it (and if you
doubt:me, see his article in an early issue of the
Studies in inteZZigencel. It followed that a fully
coordinated NEE was trash by definition and the
country would be better off if an end were put to
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all such twaddle. Keen to destroy the O/NE and wholly
indifferent to the fate of the NIE, he perceived at a
glance that the vulnerability of his target was not
myself nor the Board, but the O/NE staff itself. He
took aim accordingly.
Cline had been one of the first of the staff of
the old 0/RE to be recruited for work in the new
.O/NE staff back in the fall of 1950. Langer had
known him since his undergraduate and graduate
school days at Harvard and had hired him for work
with R&A of OSS. Cline's record as a student was
outstanding and his performance, in OSS as chief of
a small current intelligence staff whose function
was to brief General Donovan, was considered top
hole. Cline had gone from OSS to the Army's histor-
ical project and thence to O/RE of CIA, Where once
again he proved himself a knowledgeable man with a
fine ability to write. When the O/NE was founded
.with Langer as chief, Langer put together the new
staff from the best talentin O/RE. Cline, on the
basis of Langer's friendship, came up the hill from
M building to South with the earliest migratory wave.
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 Already by the time of my arrival which could
not have been more than a few days later, Cline was
clearly the leader among the young, as Montague was
among the seniors. It followed as night the day
that Cline began a somewhat obvious operation to
organize the staff and see that he himself became
its chief. This sort of self-serving operation was
and is Cline's hall mark and I regretfully acknow-
ledge he has had his considerable successes. Langer
is a smart man but a trusting one - and he did not
readily suspect off-color scheming on the part of
his friends. It was against Langer and the Board
of National Estimates that Cline tried his second
operation. It was clear from the beginning that he
considered the Board an ill-conceived joke, whose
members individually and collectively could only do
damage to nascent NIEs which he himself had drafted.
He tried flattery and disingenuous buttering-up in
an endeavor to get the Board to spend its time on
the Big Questions -? unspecified matters of unspecified
policy - which, had he succeeded would have left him
in command of the trifling things like making a draft
say that the Russians would probably or would probably
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 not do such and such.a thing (a thing which quite
literally might bear on the survival of the country).
He even conned Langer into letting him, Cline, try
running what he called preliminary coordination
sessions with the IAC representatives. The alleged
purpose was to clear away the inconsequential trivia
in a draft NI:E so that Langer and the Board could
meet the reps* on the big issues as a second go.
He may have fooled Langer, but he did not fool the
Board, and more importantly he did not fool the reps.
After meeting with Cline and going through the paper
once, they refused to accept the emergent text; they
behaved as if there had been no meetings and informed
Langer that they were impatient to get on with the
work ^ in short to begin all over again and from
scratch. And so Cline's second operation, this
time to try to unseat the man to whom he owed the
most, came to naught.
Meanwhile, in the way so characteristic of him,
he agreed out loud with almost any suggested change
* The usual slang for intelligence officers from
other intelligence components of the community sent
to represent those components in the coordination
of an estimate hence representatives or reps.
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that a Board member would make to one of his drafts
and then not alter a syllable of th.e original text.
particularly, and all the rest
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of us found this galling in the extreme, but Langer
stayed loyal to Cline. It was not until Cline had
left O/NE for a job in London that Langer remarked
to me on the extraordinary gap between Cline's
intellectual maturity on the one hand and his
emotional Cth.at was the word Langer used) immaturity
on the other.
But to jump back to 1953 again and_:.the matter
of Cline's turning up as John McCone's DD/I. When
the offer was firm and Cline had accepted it he
came in to see me to break the good news. I gave
it to him straight to the brisket. I told him that
the. Board was the Director's Board, that as chairman
E had no intention of having to address the Director
through. a DD/I:, that I would keep him informed, and
that was all. He did not like my tone or my message
and since I did not like any part of him it was a
cheery meeting.
In the conduct of my business, I did just as .I
had promised and he tried every bureaucratic dodge
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in the book to bring the Board and Office under his
control. He tried some operations on John but got
little nourishment. But neither did I get much
nourishment. McCone let things rock along until
the dreadful days that followed the NIE on Cuba,
dated 19 September 1962. That estimate had looked
hard at the possibility that the Soviets would in-
troduce strategic weapons into Cuba and concluded
that they probably would not. McCone himself
through. naked intuition or a good guess had made
the contrary estimate, but since he was in France
on his wedding trip, his leverage on the NIE was
restricted to'a few cables which we diligently
studied and rejected. When he returned and when
the MR's and IR's were discovered in U-2 photography,
there were bad times indeed. Bad for Pat Carter,
who had signed off on the NIE as acting DCI, bad
for the estimating business, the O/NE, the Board,
and very very bad for me personally. I could take
little solace in the fact that the key judgment in
the NEE had been agreed to by our peers and superiors.
But Cline in there too, for I did have an exchange
with him on the NIE in the hall one day and his only
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comment was addressed to the matter of the likelihood
of the Soviets putting a submarine facility into Cuba.
It so happened that this judgment was cast in the
same degree of improbability as was that of the
deployment of the big missiles. I personally was
in hearty agreement with. Cline that the odds favoring
the submarine base should be raised and I went on to
the meeting and got them boosted. I could, then as
now, only conclude that Cline went along with the
parts of the estimate which he did not comment upon.
It was a few months before I learned of his
attempt to dissociate himself from the NIE. It came
about because he had made out a fitness report on me
and asked that I sign it. I decided that if I signed
I acknowledged for the Board and myself Cline's su-
periority in the chain of command. If I did not sign
and made a fuss maybe this is just what Cline had
prepared McCone for. I brooded over the matter and
decided not to sign. I would brace McCone direct.
Never was I more. unnerved than when hesitatingly
I told John that I thought I was too old to have Cline
writing my fitness report. We were at
had just flown up with him to a meeting with our
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consultants. I readied myself for the blow, but
what I got was more and better than I could have
dreamed. He answered, in effect, that yes I was
too old, that there was only one man to write my
fitness report and that was himself. Furthermore
he went on to show some annoyance at what he saw
as Cline's persistence in trying to get control of
the O/NE and told me that he thought he had had it
all settled that the Board was his Board and reported
to him. He then said that which indicated Cline's
basic shoddiness as a piece of human stuff; I did
not need this evidence but it was one of those
confirmations one so relishes. He said that Cline
had tried to tell him that he, Cline, had always
been opposed to the estimate about the missiles in
Cuba, that he, John, had replied, "see here, Ray,
you gave me a much. harder time about those missiles
than Sherman ever did." In other words Cline tried
a welch. and was caught out. This matter put the
Board well beyond Cline's reach, and, from about
that time on, official Agency organization charts
began to show a dotted line which connected the
Board directly to the DCI. The fate of the Office
and staff was not so secure.
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was closed so long as John McCone remained as Di-
rector.. With the coming of Red Raborn in 1965, it
seems as if Cline's hopes revived. Obviously I
cannot know what all transpired between Cline and
the new Director, but in the autumn of the year,
traces of interesting developments began to show.
In the first place, Raborn was given some'savage
jabs by Washington newspapermen. It was not as if
Raborn were the best equipped man in the country
to take the job, but I at least greatly admired
him for the brave way he entered the lion's den
for no better reason than that his commander in
chief had asked him to. I am certain that he had
not sought the job and that if there were a feasible
and honorable way to resist LBJ he would have taken
For reasons which. Raborn considered incontro-
vertible he believed Cline to have been the source
of the nasty stories. He told me that he had live
witnesses to the fact. At the same time he:'.had
shown warmth towards the Board and obviously held
his old classmate of Naval War College days, Abbot
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Smith, in the very highest esteem. Hence when Cline
made a new drive at the whole concept of the Office
and Board, Raborn had at least two quite personal
reasons not to take it seriously, and he didn't.
Cline's plan, which I never saw but whose di-
mensi.ons?leak.ed from those who had, involved the
dismantling of the Office, the distribution of
the staff to O/C1 and elsewhere, Cline's assumption
of the chairmanship of the Board, and what about
Kent? Well, Kent is at retirement age and beyond.
The plan went far beyond the attack on the O/NE,
but from my point of view, the O/NE business may
have triggered all the rest. Raborn received the
plan and that was it. Never did he give its pro-
genitors the time of day. I suspect that they
never found out what had happened till they learned
a month after the fact that Raborn had asked me to
stay on another year at least and that he reserved
the right to ask me to continue after that.
So the Board and Office saw Cline out. Raborn
could not stand him and was advised to transfer him
out of the job, advice which Raborn took in January
of 1966. And so again I confronted the dismal
 prospect of another war against another DD/I; this
time my one-time colleague on the Board, R.J. Smith.
Looking back. at Amory and Cline in a mood to
make comparisons is troubling. I worry.a little at
my distaste for two men so different and I reflect
that maybe I have no case when it embraces'so wide
a contrast. I acknowledge freely that both men
were extremely intelligent and well-informed. Both
[. I
H
operation,
worked hard at their jobs. There the similarities
end. Amory was a man of highest integrity except
for a couple of lapses that grew out of a cunning
Cline on the other hand will not be remembered
for his integrity. Even his admirers are most likely
 IJ
to cite his intellectual powers, his skill as an
operator, and his dogged determination when they
tick off his good qualities. His detractors will
yield on all these points - they will grant the
quality of his mind and his many successes, but
they will harbor gravest reservations about his
character. They will remember him as one who was
always looking over his shoulder to see who was
about to attack from the rear, one whose offensive
defense was almost psychotic, and one about whose
devotion to the promotion of self was not only
first among his priorities, but all-engulfing. In
my own somewhat biased view I can think of nothing
that Cline would not do to improve his own condition
or prospects, nor anything that he would do to put
a friend or an institution ahead of himself.
Of course this basic drive had its manifold day
to day manifestations. For example, he avoided with
determination a confrontation of any sort with anyone
who could do him harm. He would equivocate first,
lie when necessary, and if cornered would fall back
on elephantine kidding in the hope of diverting the
thrust and substance of the matter at issue. This
 LI
evasiveness of the thing he feared was his second
nature maybe his first -? and the ease with which
he dealt in falsehood often about inconsequential
things - might have been an earnest of his literally
not knowing when he was or was not telling the truth.
All of us who bothered to keep book had plenty of
evidence to consider that the odds of his telling
a straight story were never better than 50 - 50 and
on any subject whatever.
He aimed never to get into a danger spot until
he had staked. out its get-away trail: his behavior
on the Cuban estimate-,'.is a clear case in point. He
was fundamentally cautious about pejoratives applied
to peers and superiors. If he had a grievance, his
attack was a disparagement uttered with humor and a.
smile, a savage something which could be disavowed
as a kidding. This is why I have difficulty with
Raborn's belief that Cline was his straight-forward
derogator. Not that Cline would not have tried to
destroy Raborn, but it would have been uncharacter-
istic of him to have attempted it and left a finger-
print behind.
S
 And so looking back on my dismal relationship
with these two DD/I's and thinking about them as I
do, I am inclined to excuse myself on grounds other
than my resolve to fight for the integrity of the
Office, the Board, and the staff and the chairman's
right to an unencumbered access to the DCI.
RJ took over as DD/I when Cline left. To me
the prospect of fighting it out with still a fourth
DD/I was not cheerful. I tried again to get the
O/NE pulled out from under and got the usual kind
of sympathetic hearing but no answer of yea or nay.
Helms, with whom I had talked often, knew the score
exactly and when in June of 1966 he succeeded Raborn
he bit the bullet. At a gathering in his office he
coped with my problem along with three or four others
of equal magnitude. When he wound up his range of
decisions. he asked if all was clear, did everyone
understand, OK, if he heard any more about these
things being reopened, he wound up with: "well" -
-and with a smile behind which one sensed the steel -
"I'll do something."
O/NE was out from under in an administrative
sense. The Board and Office would occupy a box at
directorial level and there would be no dotted line.
40
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A bit later RJ and I negotiated a treaty under Red
White's umpireship. I gave up my statutory right
to name the senior
I accepted. RJ's willingness to keep the O/NE staff
properly manned. I knew at the time that this offer
was not quite as generous as it sounded, but one
could not say no. He accepted the separation of
the 0/NE from his chain of command, but he retained
O/NE bodies within the Intelligence, or "I", career
service of which he was the ex-officio chairman.
In practical terms this meant that the O/NE T/O
and budget were a matter between the Director of
O/NE and the DCI Cactually Executive Director Red
Wh.itel but that promotions still went through the
"I:" career service with RJ in control.
At the moment of my departure, 31 December 1967,
it was clear that the years of hot war had simmered
down to a clandestine war of liberation and that RJ
would press - not to take back nominal control of
the 0/NE but to neutralize it. As I observed
earlier, you cannot blame a DD/I for resenting an
administrative decision which tells him: 1) you
are the DCI's own intelligence officer, and 2) you
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have nothing to say about the Agency's (indeed the
community's) most important intelligence utterance -
the NIE.
How the post-Cline DD/I's comported themselves
I will leave to writers with first-hand experience.
I. will sign off. with the observation that if one is
indeed concerned to maintain the standard of excel-
lence long associated with the NIE, he cannot hope
to do it if he yields to the understandable pique
of a sub-omnicompetent DD/I.