The CIA rejected [Raborn] the way a human body rejects a transplant.
Thomas PowersFootnote 1William Raborn had a particularly testing start to his time as director of central intelligence (DCI). On 28 April 1965, as he was being sworn into office at the White House by President Lyndon Johnson, a crisis was beginning to simmer in the Caribbean. The President of the Dominican Republic, Donald Reid Cabral, had just been ousted by rebel supporters of the former centre–left President, Juan Bosch. In the ensuing imbroglio, Washington's policymakers feared that the civil war could lead to American citizens in Santo Domingo losing their lives or even the rise of a communist government with ties to Cuba's Fidel Castro. Just days later, from aircraft carriers and C-130 airplanes, tens of thousands of United States (US) marines and airborne troops poured onto the western half of Hispaniola. Raborn, who was said to have had tears of pride “trickling down his cheeks” as Johnson praised him during his swearing-in ceremony, had come to play an intriguing role in the decision to launch the intervention, all despite having been at the helm of the American intelligence community for a matter of hours.Footnote 2
The deteriorating situation in the Dominican Republic had meant that, by 28 April, it had become an emergency for the Johnson administration. When the President and his advisers began to discuss their options, Raborn made a crucial interjection, telling those gathered that the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had “positive identification of three ringleaders of the rebels as Castro-trained agents.”Footnote 3 Some in the room even remembered the new DCI labelling the coup “Moscow-financed.”Footnote 4 Johnson, declaring that “the last thing we want to have happen is a communist takeover,” moments later ordered an initial landing of Marines that quickly ballooned into a force of twenty-three thousand – around half the size of the American commitment then serving in South Vietnam.Footnote 5
Yet there was little hint of communist conspirators being actively involved in the outbreak of the civil war, and no evidence to suggest that a meddling Castro was seeking to create “another Cuba” in the Caribbean basin. The Dominican intervention, in retrospect, came to be regarded as unnecessary, unjustified, and damaging both to diplomatic relations with Latin America and to the Johnson administration's credibility; and it had been spurred on by the “amateurish enthusiasm” of the new DCI.Footnote 6
The responsibility for such a misstep in foreign policy does, of course, not deserve to be placed entirely on the shoulders of William Raborn. Deeper institutional issues in the CIA led him to reach exaggerated conclusions regarding communist involvement in the coup, and it is likely that the Johnson administration – fearful of a new Castro-inspired threat in the western hemisphere only a few years removed from the Cuban missile crisis and pushed on by a hyperbolic ambassador in Santo Domingo – would have deployed the US military regardless of any input from the new director.Footnote 7 Yet the Dominican intervention, and thus Raborn's first few days in charge at Langley, were indicative of how the rest of his tenure thereafter developed. The personal loyalty to Lyndon Johnson, the eagerness to play a role in policymaking, the lack of deep knowledge of foreign affairs – such attributes were all on display in late April 1965 – were prevalent throughout his fourteen-month directorship at the CIA, and contributed to his being regarded by many of his contemporaries as entirely unsuitable for the role of DCI.
The scholarly understanding of Raborn's tenure as director remains limited and is a comparatively overlooked period of agency history, having not received significant attention in many years. Unlike other Cold War DCIs, such as Allen Dulles, Richard Helms, and William Colby, Raborn never penned a memoir, and nor has there been any retrospective biography of his life or account of his brief foray into the world of intelligence.Footnote 8 Studies of American foreign relations in the mid-1960s era thus make only passing mentions of him.Footnote 9
What appears in the intelligence studies literature presents a scattered assortment of reasons for Raborn's struggles. Some scholars have pointed to Raborn's lack of experience in the intelligence community being the key factor; Whipple suggested that Raborn “didn't know” the agency,Footnote 10 while Andrew labelled him “the least qualified of all DCIs.”Footnote 11 Other historians, such as Ranelagh, Jeffreys-Jones, and Priess, argue that Raborn's key flaw was his “ignorance of intelligence” and his inability to “grapple with the intricacies” of espionage.Footnote 12 Some have also highlighted Raborn's lack of worldly knowledge, with Powers claiming that the DCI had “plain ignorance about foreign affairs,”Footnote 13 and Weiner finding that “he wouldn't know if you were talking about a country in Africa or South America.”Footnote 14 Yet much of this discussion comes, at most, in the form of sporadic anecdotes. Raborn's short tenure and his ineffectiveness as director make the reasons for this limited coverage obvious, but, as an advocate of applied history, the author posits that much can still be learnt from his mistaken appointment.
The previous scholarly analysis of Raborn's abilities undoubtedly holds merit, and has identified many of the different elements that contributed to his difficulties. Yet a crucial overarching factor – a factor that reveals a nuanced link between all of the previous histories – has hitherto been overlooked. Drawing upon multi-archive records, memoirs, and oral histories, this article proposes that this factor was Raborn's inability to assimilate to key aspects of the CIA's organizational culture.
“Culture” is a term notoriously difficult to define, and one that can be so broad as to cover everything a group of people think, do, or feel.Footnote 15 Nevertheless, the study of organizations and their own unique cultures has attained more scientific solidity in recent decades. From a sociological perspective, organizational culture can thus be seen to constitute a set of shared mental assumptions and values found within institutions that autonomously guide actors’ patterns of behaviour, furnish their beliefs and norms, and shape their responses to different situations with a certain degree of regularity and predictability.Footnote 16
Since its inception in 1947, the CIA had constructed its own distinctive organizational culture, which, in the “cloistered world” of secret intelligence, had come to have a powerful grip on those who worked at Langley.Footnote 17 As many historians of the agency have found, this culture was largely informed by senior staff who had come from “the ranks of the East-Coast, Ivy-League-educated ‘WASP’ social elite.”Footnote 18 During the Second World War, many had served in the CIA's precursor, the Office of Strategic Services (an agency who's acronym – OSS – also jokingly stood for “Oh So Social”), and had returned home obsessed with preserving its “ancestorship.”Footnote 19 Through the early years of the Cold War, Langley's men were found in “exclusive clubs” and were members of the so-called “Georgetown Set.”Footnote 20 Known to possess a firm grasp of a wide variety of geopolitical and intellectual topics, they mingled at cocktail parties with academics, artists, and diplomats, and fostered cozy relationships with the capital's leading journalists.Footnote 21 Although it underwent changes in its demography in the decades that followed, the “well-connected, well-educated, well-to-do” CIA was “dominated” by people who had the “cultural style of the Kennedys.”Footnote 22
Amidst such sophisticated and experienced company, Raborn was marked as a stark outsider. Despite being a successful career naval officer, he was an intelligence neophyte who did not have close relations with journalists, and was also someone who is said to have had “the ignorance of world affairs of a man who knows only what he reads in the papers.”Footnote 23 And to Raborn's detriment, the CIA, like many organizations, was suspicious of those it deemed to be on the outside of its culture. Even as he was taking a tour around Langley before he became director, agency officers sneered at his apparently uninformed suggestions and his childlike amazement at the communications centre.Footnote 24 This suspicion quickly led to resistance and open hostility from numerous officials. Raborn's want of worldliness, and the gaffes it apparently caused, made him a target for jokes at Georgetown cocktail parties and leaks to the Washington press, and frustrated many at Langley and the White House, as well as those on Capitol Hill.
Yet it was Raborn's failure to assimilate to another key element of the agency's organizational culture which perhaps most harmed his tenure and the effectiveness of the CIA in the mid-1960s. Influenced by the writing of the legendary analyst Sherman Kent, many in the agency believed in maintaining a certain operational distance from the White House, ensuring their analytical independence and their policy impartiality in the face of any presidential pressures. “Intelligence is not the formulator of objectives; it is not the drafter of policy; it is not the maker of plans,” Kent wrote; “its job is to see that the doers are generally well-informed.”Footnote 25 Such ideas were foundational in CIA practice and allowed it to remain impervious to criticism when foreign-policy failures occurred.
Raborn, with this willingness to supply Johnson with “intelligence to please,” his attempts to wade the CIA into the foreign-policy decision-making process, and his acquiescence to being neglected by the White House, greatly affronted these ideals. When he resigned from the agency in late June 1966, he left not only an intelligence service frustrated with his “policy-prescriptive” leadership and low on morale, but also one which was less capable of offering independent analysis to the executive branch. This led many to conclude that his time at Langley could be perceived as nothing other than a failure.
To comprehensively dissect Raborn's directorship, this article first provides context on Lyndon Johnson and the CIA before Raborn's arrival, with particular attention paid to the President's relationship with the preceding DCI, John McCone. The article then explores why Raborn was selected to replace McCone, and investigates the personal role he played in the Dominican intervention, before surveying the impact he had on both the CIA and US foreign policy during his fourteen months in charge at Langley. Throughout there will be discussion of why Raborn struggled to placate those at the CIA and why he quickly became shunned by many in the Johnson administration, with the differences in cultural style being prominent. To conclude, there will be an analysis of the impact Raborn left on the agency for the remaining years of the Johnson presidency and beyond.
LYNDON JOHNSON, THE CIA, AND JOHN MCCONE
While Raborn contributed to many of the issues the CIA encountered during the mid-1960s, most of the challenges were foreshadowed during the early days of the Johnson presidency. Even before Raborn entered the US intelligence community, Lyndon Johnson had one of the most dysfunctional relationships with the CIA of any President, with him appearing to have held a personal dislike for the agency, its intelligence products, and its officials. Yet the exact origin of this distaste remains ambiguous. Pessimistic reports regarding the Vietnam War, in particular on the size of the National Liberation Front's guerrilla forces and the efficacy of the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign, ensured that the agency incurred Johnson's ire in the later years of his presidency.Footnote 26 But his antipathy for the CIA appears to have been formed before the war in South East Asia had been escalated, and possibly even before he had entered the Oval Office as President in November 1963.
Some have suggested that Johnson believed, without any evidence, that the CIA had conspired against him at the 1960 Democratic National Convention, where agency officials had apparently manipulated the tabulation of votes to give John F. Kennedy the nomination, but he was only recorded as stating this belief once, and therefore it remains unlikely he truly believed it.Footnote 27 Others have pointed towards his disdain for the CIA's covert operations and assassination plots, particularly against Fidel Castro, which were described by Johnson as “murder incorporated.”Footnote 28 The President apparently believed that such programmes had led directly to revenge against Kennedy's own life, claiming that “Castro got to [Kennedy] first.”Footnote 29 Yet, when commander in chief, Johnson did not display any aversion to covert action, suggesting that his distaste for the agency did not result from squeamishness or a dislike for risky operations. He was said to hold infrequent calls with officers running the “secret war” in Laos, pressing them to take more funding.Footnote 30 He also oversaw the creation of the Phoenix programme in South Vietnam, which resulted in widespread torture and assassinations.Footnote 31
The more likely origin of Johnson's friction with the CIA, much akin to Raborn's, may have instead been his own clashes with different aspects of the agency's culture. Johnson – who had grown up poor in the Texas hill country, had to teach English at a “Mexican school” to finance his college studies, and who was known as a coarse-mannered creature of the Senate – had little in common with the intelligence officers of Langley.Footnote 32 Indeed, driven by what some believed was his “embarrassment and defensiveness” about not having been enrolled at “one of the prestigious institutions of higher learning in the East,” he had similar clashes of character with others considered to be members of the Ivy League Beltway intelligentsia, including Robert Kennedy and Arthur Schlesinger.Footnote 33 And Johnson was also driven by a need for consensus on policy that had been present since his days in the Senate, a need which saw him press the CIA to provide “intelligence to please” and frequently wrestle against Kent's ideas on impartial analysis.Footnote 34 This perhaps explains why, before any major disagreements about the effectiveness of his strategy in Vietnam, Johnson had such a troubled relationship with the CIA and its officials.
Whatever the cause, Johnson maintained poor relations with the agency for the duration of his presidency. In the early days, many of the disagreements focussed on the director he had inherited from the Kennedy administration, John McCone. McCone had been undersecretary for the air force and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission before being appointed DCI after the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the subsequent removal of long-time spy chief Allen Dulles. He had been known as an effective and well-regarded manager of the CIA, driving through technological progress and moulding the agency into a modern, advanced intelligence service.Footnote 35 Richard Helms, who had been deputy director for plans under McCone, remembered him to be “highly efficient” and someone whose judgement and knowledge he respected.Footnote 36 William Colby, a long-serving intelligence officer and himself a future DCI, later called him a “splendid Director” and someone who “used the Agency for what it could do very effectively.”Footnote 37 McCone's popularity amongst agency staff was assured, and Ranelagh claimed that his tenure was an era of “bliss” for Langley's analysts.Footnote 38
While McCone's relationship with Kennedy had been mostly harmonious, he found the succeeding President to be unreceptive to his advice and uninterested in the intelligence products the agency was able to provide unless they substantiated his own opinions.Footnote 39 Langley and the Johnson White House quickly began to drift apart, with McCone struggling to get the President to meet with him and becoming frustrated when he did not read his intelligence briefings.Footnote 40 The lack of coordination between Johnson and McCone became so apparent that national-security adviser McGeorge Bundy suggested that the President play golf with his intelligence chief, arguing that it was an “ideal method” of making McCone “happy about the level of his contact” with him.Footnote 41 Yet a round of golf did not appear to soothe any of the DCI's frustrations: “When I can't even get the President to read the summaries, it's time to go.”Footnote 42 He offered his resignation in the summer of 1964, but, keen to avoid even a hint of partisanship and the political issues this could bring with the approaching presidential election in November, he chose to leave the CIA well into 1965.Footnote 43
Johnson now needed a replacement. The search committee created to find the next DCI was led by Clark Clifford, a long-time policy adviser to Democratic Party Presidents, and John Macy, the chairman of the Civil Service Commission. The search, described as a “major effort which ranged widely and lasted many months,” considered names such as the former inspector general of the CIA, Lyman Kirkpatrick; the head of the Directorate of Intelligence, Ray Cline; the deputy secretary of defense, Roswell Gilpatric; and General Maxwell Taylor.Footnote 44 Yet it was Richard Helms who was the most seriously considered by many to be the heir apparent to McCone. Helms had been involved in American intelligence since the Second World War, operating in Europe with the OSS, and was highly regarded by many in the capital. Johnson even admitted that some within his own administration, including Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and McGeorge Bundy, wanted to see Helms head up Langley.Footnote 45 Yet, despite Deputy DCI Marshall Carter's warnings that hiring from the outside would be a “grave error” and a “disaster,” it was William Raborn, and not Helms or any other CIA official, who was Johnson's selection.Footnote 46
THE NEW MAN AT LANGLEY
William Francis Raborn – known to friends as “Red” due to the colour of his hair – had been a military man for the entirety of his adult life. Graduating from the US Naval Academy at Annapolis in 1928, the “barrel-chested and jovial sailor” worked his way through the ranks to reach vice admiral before eventual retirement in 1963.Footnote 47 During his thirty-five-year career he had seen action during the Second World War in the Pacific theatre, bravely managing fire and panic aboard the USS Hancock after a kamikaze Japanese pilot had blown a hole in her deck.Footnote 48 For his service during the war he had been awarded a Silver Star for gallantry and a Distinguished Service Medal, yet it was in the postwar era that Raborn's career really grew in stature.Footnote 49
Selected by chief of naval operations Admiral Arleigh Burke, Raborn oversaw the multibillion-dollar creation of the Polaris ballistic missile system, which allowed for nuclear weapons to be delivered from submarines for the first time. Though interservice rivalry with the air force had pushed through the completion of the system well ahead of schedule, Raborn had also been instrumental in its progress by holding his staff “strictly accountable” through every stage of development.Footnote 50 The Texan vice admiral garnered a reputation for possessing a work ethic close to “fanaticism,” inspiring subordinates to sacrifice their weekends in pursuit of finishing the project.Footnote 51 His perseverance and managerial ability subsequently left him held in high regard by many in Washington, yet Raborn's biography was notably incongruous with the rest of Langley. Indeed, he had not served in the OSS and nor was he an Ivy League graduate; he also did not have close ties to the journalists of the “Georgetown Set.”
Some have suggested that the selection of Raborn for DCI was solely the President's idea, with Raborn's previous political support for Lyndon Johnson and the Democratic Party during the 1964 election being key; he had even appeared in a television commercial endorsing Johnson's candidacy.Footnote 52 Yet John Macy later took credit for nominating the former naval officer to the Johnson administration, claiming that the President had been “very much interested” in his recommendation.Footnote 53 His evident prowess as a manager, as well as the respect he had obtained in Washington due to the success of Polaris, would have made Raborn a leading candidate to direct many federal institutions. But others have argued that his personal closeness to Johnson led the President to believe that he could control both the director and, by extension, the wider CIA, thereby eliminating the frustrations that McCone had caused him.Footnote 54
The exact reason for Raborn's selection may be disputed, yet a telephone conversation between Johnson and Raborn on 6 April 1965 – in which the President offered his fellow Texan the job of DCI – is perhaps most revealing. Johnson, full of flattery, said he had “looked the whole country over” and had considered people “from within and without” the CIA, with Raborn remaining as the best candidate. Johnson listed his “trust” in Raborn's judgement, Robert McNamara's “respect” for the former navy man, and his need for someone who “could deal pretty well” with Congress as the reasons for his selection.Footnote 55 This latter point appears to have been a particularly important component of the President's decision making. In what was a time of mounting Congressional inquiry into the agency and the decline of its “golden age” of unfettered operations, Johnson frequently mentioned the role Raborn could play up on Capitol Hill during what was a “touchy” time for the US intelligence community and American foreign policy more broadly.Footnote 56
Raborn, though “honoured” to be considered and eager to “support in any way” he could, initially expressed concern about his “continuing health problems” after a past heart attack.Footnote 57 At the time of the President's call he had been retired from public service for over two years, and had spent much of this time doing little more than playing golf in Palm Springs.Footnote 58 But Johnson continued to press, telling Raborn he needed him “awful bad and awful quick.”Footnote 59 Just minutes later, Raborn accepted his President's offer.
This particular telephone conversation is also of note for the discussion around who would be promoted to deputy DCI. Johnson said that while Richard Helms was someone who “in a year or two who would be real good to succeed McCone,” he first needed “some training and some seasoning” in the deputy role under Raborn. Helms was someone Johnson admitted he could “almost” make director at that moment, but at the “critical” juncture with the war in South East Asia beginning to escalate he needed his own man, someone on whom he could rely, and someone who could quell a political storm in Congress, even if only “for a few months.” Raborn said he could give the President his service for “six months to a year.”Footnote 60
Raborn's apparent skills for Congressional relations, even though they did not materialize during his directorship, appear to have been crucial for Johnson. Yet, in retrospect, there was little in Raborn's repertoire to suggest he was primed for a career as an intelligence leader. McCone held doubts about Raborn's ability to succeed him as the head of the CIA, later arguing that while Raborn was a “hard-driving, technical man,” the job of DCI required “a different kind of mentality” more akin to “the role of [a] college president” who could manage a broad range of intellectual challenges and personalities. While he was quick to praise Raborn's achievements with the Polaris missile system, McCone believed him to be “an unfortunate choice” and someone whom he would never have considered as being adept as a CIA director.Footnote 61 Johnson himself even privately admitted that Raborn did not know or understand the agency prior to his appointment as director.Footnote 62 Nevertheless, despite any doubts Johnson and others may have had, the President's man became the new head of the American intelligence community.
In one of the first meetings with his new DCI, Johnson is quoted as saying, “I'm sick and tired of John McCone's tugging at my shirttails. If I want to see you … I”ll telephone you!’Footnote 63 But the President did not show much flippancy towards the CIA or its director in the first few days of Raborn's tenure. As the Dominican crisis swelled, he was in frequent contact with Raborn, and the DCI immediately left an important mark on the direction of US foreign policy.
Historians and intelligence professionals have long highlighted the errors and exaggerations Raborn made during the decision to launch the 1965 intervention into the Caribbean. As William Colby later argued, Raborn did not understand the “subtleties of the Dominican Republic,” and this was an opinion shared by those in the Johnson administration.Footnote 64 George Reedy, White House press secretary during the crisis, claimed that Raborn – “not a very subtle man” – had been “constantly naming new communists they had found,” despite there being little evidence to suggest that any of the conspirators named had anything to do with the overthrow of the Reid Cabral government.Footnote 65 A former US ambassador to the Dominican Republic, John Bartlow Martin, had even been told by other CIA officials in the White House Situation Room that their intelligence suggested that the men leading the rebels were not communists.Footnote 66 Others came to the conclusion that the new DCI “was so anxious to prove he was a gung-ho anti-communist that he overinterpreted some very scrappy evidence,” which led him to be a clear driving force behind the intervention.Footnote 67
The archival record does indeed show that Raborn added excessive weight to the theory that a group of Castroist conspirators were playing an active role in the coup d’état. Cherry-picking reports in an act of confirmation bias, Raborn told the President on 29 April that “eight hard-core, Castro-trained guerrillas” were now leading the coup, adding that the United States needed to take “more positive action to clean these people out.”Footnote 68 This number kept rising until it reached the notorious list containing fifty-eight suspected communists believed to be actively involved in the civil war. Many of these names included people who were ill, incarcerated, or not in the Dominican Republic at that time; other names were duplicated, or belonged to people who had been dead for several years.Footnote 69 Johnson, supplied with this evidence from Raborn that erroneously convinced him about communist involvement, told advisers that “our CIA says this is a completely led, operated, dominated … Castro operation.”Footnote 70 McNamara had warned that he did not believe Raborn's reports, arguing that they could not be proved with hard evidence, but, with thousands of marines in Santo Domingo, it was already too late.Footnote 71 Johnson was later witnessed pacing up and down the White House dining room, “going over this story of how Admiral Raborn … had told him he thought they ought to get the troops in.”Footnote 72
The reason for Raborn's alarmism in April 1965 may be easy to locate. CIA officials in Santo Domingo had been tasked with little other than investigating communist infiltration, meaning that subtleties about Dominican political developments were overlooked and the chief of station was able to funnel back information about little other than Caribbean communism.Footnote 73 It is perhaps simple to see that Raborn – an intelligence novice with little knowledge of Dominican affairs and influenced by the Cold War atmosphere – was susceptible to the overestimated interpretation that pointed towards nothing other than a Castro-driven plot, no matter how few conspirators the agency were able to identify. This was, after all, only a few months after the culmination of the CIA's “Mongoose” programme, and anti-Castro paranoia was still running high around Langley and Washington.Footnote 74 Indeed, Raborn was not alone in his hawkishness.
Accredited by some with being another one of the main drivers behind Johnson's decision to deploy the US military, the American ambassador to the Dominican Republic, William Tapley Bennett, had also cast the situation on Hispaniola as particularly dire.Footnote 75 Sending cables back to Washington about the intense and present danger to American lives, Bennett falsely claimed that bullets were whizzing over his head as he hid in the embassy, and that mass assassinations had left bodies strewn across the streets of Santo Domingo. “We request … that [the] United States government lends us its unlimited and immediate military assistance so that such [a] grave situation may definitively be controlled,” he pleaded on 28 April.Footnote 76 Importantly, Bennett's inflation of the threat to American citizens was coupled with his accusation that communists were the main culprits. “All indications point to the fact that if present efforts of forces loyal to the government fail, power will be assumed by groups clearly identified with the Communist Party,” he reported.Footnote 77 “My own recommendation and that of [the] country team is that we should intervene to prevent another Cuba from arising out of the ashes of this uncontrollable situation.”Footnote 78
Bennett's pressing led others in Washington to begin planning for an intervention and the predicted political implications, simultaneously adding pressure on Raborn to produce more intelligence, regardless of its accuracy. Jack Valenti, a close confidant to Lyndon Johnson and later his chief of staff, penned a memorandum to the President, stating that Raborn and the CIA had to supply “pictures, names, and a full dossier” of suspected communists, and that the DCI needed to present his findings alongside McNamara and Rusk in a televised address. If Johnson was to launch an armed intervention, Valenti said that Raborn could “leave no doubt.”Footnote 79
With other actors adding their voices to the Castro case, it is unjust to accuse Raborn of being the lone source behind the intervention. Indeed, foreign-policy decisions are rarely, if ever, based on the recommendation of one single individual. Believing that Johnson relied solely on advice from Raborn and the CIA to inform his crisis decision making is also incongruent with the manner in which he behaved throughout the rest of his presidency.Footnote 80 In the case of the Dominican intervention, where a variety of other exaggerating advisers were close to the President, this was no different.
Yet while Raborn was not the only influence over White House policy, both he and the CIA suffered a noticeable loss in standing in the weeks after the Dominican crisis. The DCI was said to have quickly lost the confidence of the agency due to his eagerness to insert the CIA into a policymaking role, something he went on to repeat during his tenure. Those at Langley did not believe that Johnson had been requesting objective intelligence to help inform his administration's decision-making process, and that he instead had been seeking “proof that the deployment of the Marines he had already made was justified.”Footnote 81 To the frustration of many, Raborn had willingly assisted. Ray Cline apparently heard Raborn answering, “Aye aye, sir!” when Johnson had called him asking for evidence of communists, a phrase which became a source of much malign from agency officials.Footnote 82
And the CIA themselves had also suffered a knock to their reputation. As was discovered later, the agency had apparently not been surprised by the events on Hispaniola, and some in the White House believed they had not disseminated relevant intelligence quickly enough.Footnote 83 Frustrated with Langley's inability to produce information swiftly, the White House had turned to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and its long-time director, J. Edgar Hoover, to provide assessments of Dominican communists it deemed to be more accurate.Footnote 84 This led some to ponder the CIA's future operational role in Latin America, with journalists suggesting that it could see a curtailment of the agency's extensive Miami station and intelligence functions in the Caribbean transferred to the bureau.Footnote 85 Such rumours sparked enough worry for Helms to look into the matter, finding that it was mostly just unsubstantiated speculation.Footnote 86 Yet the FBI had played an active role in intelligence gathering during the Dominican crisis. Senate Foreign Relations Committee chief of staff Pat M. Holt claimed there had been a “great infusion of FBI agents” into the Caribbean, some of whom remained in the region for many years.Footnote 87
A few weeks after the intervention, Johnson drafted a letter to his new DCI, attempting to encourage him for the tasks that lay ahead. “Your approach to the job is what I expected,” he wrote, “and is a source of strength for me.” Further on down the same letter he continued in the same vein, writing, “I know you are not a man to rest on the laurels of the past,” before finally adding, “we really don't have many such laurels in the intelligence field.”Footnote 88 Johnson's dislike for the CIA was long-standing, but the recent discord during the Dominican intervention had only worsened the relationship.Footnote 89
FAILING TO FIT IN
For all of the trouble William Raborn encountered during his first few days in charge, there were few signs of improvement over the rest of his tenure, with him consistently struggling to fit in and excel at the CIA. Previous scholarship has highlighted the frustrations he caused many at Langley, driven, as is argued, by his being an intelligence novice and an outsider; prior to his arrival he is said to have never met, or apparently even heard of, many of the key officials he had to rely on throughout the course of his directorship.Footnote 90
Raborn's lack of experience in intelligence operations did hinder his efforts at the agency, yet it was not the sole source of all of his troubles. There have been numerous other DCIs, both before and after Raborn, who were not previously intelligence professionals at the CIA prior to becoming director and who did not upset Langley so noticeably. Raborn's immediate processor, John McCone, had entered the agency with just as little intelligence experience and was still described by some as being the “best” DCI they had served under.Footnote 91 This suggests that Raborn's lack of agency experience cannot be the sole reason behind his failings, and that the difficulties he faced with the CIA's organizational culture – in particular his lack of world knowledge, his inability to garner links to the media, and his compliance with the Johnson administration – were more central.
Some intelligence historians have argued that Richard Helms, newly promoted to deputy DCI, had to accompany Raborn to National Security Council (NSC) meetings to help the director understand the international intelligence affairs being discussed and thus avoid the apparently frequent gaffes.Footnote 92 Yet this appears to be a somewhat misguided interpretation of Helms's presence. Helms himself believed that his attendance at such meetings had little to do with Raborn's performance, and instead was a component of the “seasoning” that Lyndon Johnson was attempting to give him prior to his eventual succession to the directorship.Footnote 93 Helms stated that the White House had specifically asked him to attend NSC meetings to “get some exposure and some experience” amongst the upper echelons of the administration.Footnote 94 Ray Cline, who also attended the NSC with Raborn, later recalled that such practice was common at the CIA, with agency analysts having also routinely gone to the meetings with both McCone and Allen Dulles.Footnote 95 Yet, even with Helms shadowing his DCI, Raborn still made numerous blunders which quickly became a source of Langley gossip.
The historical record is rife with anecdotes. Raborn was accused of not knowing what the word “oligarchy” meant, and apparently did not know that Kuwait was a real Middle Eastern country.Footnote 96 He was said to have given a long-winded, rambling speech to CIA staff on management technique and his development of the Polaris system, much of which was confused and had nothing to do with intelligence; the audience walked out of the auditorium wondering aloud “if Polaris really works.”Footnote 97 Another anecdote described how he often got the intercom buttons in his office mixed up and called departments at random to ask about international issues, resulting in him having to apologize: “I've got so many buttons up here I never know which one to push.”Footnote 98 Raborn's “faux pas after faux pas” quickly became the hot topic at the “Georgetown cocktail circuit,”Footnote 99 with a future DCI describing him as a “laughingstock.”Footnote 100 Helms recollected that Raborn, “not trained or born to be a Director of Central Intelligence,” was “easy … to make fun of” and that it had been difficult to suppress the jokes people were frequently making about him.Footnote 101
The error which perhaps invited the most scathing insubordination from agency officials was Raborn's apparent “discovery” of the Sino-Soviet split, a geopolitical issue the CIA had been researching for close to a decade by 1965. Raborn, surprised at the fracture within the communist bloc, asked Ray Cline to bring him all the reports the CIA had ever produced on it. “Well, what do you want me to use,” Cline retorted, “a wheelbarrow?”Footnote 102 Raborn – someone who did not appreciate being “upstaged by an expert” – thereafter avoided “give-and-take on foreign policy problems” with Cline, the recipient of a Harvard doctorate. The deputy director for intelligence, who had previously enjoyed “an excellent relationship” with McCone, had since become Raborn's strongest and most vocal critic.Footnote 103 Apparently believing that the new DCI was little more than a “horse's ass,” Cline eventually sought a post in West Germany in protest.Footnote 104
William Colby's depiction of Raborn as someone deficient in the required knowledge – arguing he was “not in the right field” – was only shared by some on Capitol Hill with whom Raborn had been specifically hired to manage smooth relations with.Footnote 105 Despite having once had “a lot of friends in Congress,” he quickly frustrated them by fumbling over their simple questions and ending up “completely out in left field.”Footnote 106 While discussing the DCI in Senator Mike Mansfield's office, Senator George Aiken told those in the room that “Raborn isn't worth the powder [needed] to blow him up.” Aiken had apparently come to this conclusion because “except for Mao, Raborn didn't know the names of the other Chinese leaders and had to read from a note handed [to] him by one of his assistants.”Footnote 107 Another Senator, Richard Russell, located one of the DCI's main flaws: “he won't admit what he don't know.”Footnote 108
The strength of feeling against Raborn means that some of the anecdotes about him remain dubious. But there were other issues, such as his attempts to bring certain changes to the agency, which caused real frustrations at Langley. Raborn had hired numerous ex-navy personnel to be members of his staff, something which apparently created friction with some already at Langley.Footnote 109 There was also dismay when he was seen to be “routing CIA officials out of bed” with demands to be provided with updates on Soviet and Chinese intelligence operations before seven o'clock in the morning.Footnote 110 Yet even more vexing for the agency were Raborn's attempts to supply the Johnson administration with “intelligence to please” and his acquiescence to being entirely excluded from the White House.
As former DCI Stansfield Turner has argued, there exists an inherent tension at the centre of the American intelligence community. On the one hand, there is an “unquestioning service to the President”; on the other, there is the belief that the community must “serve up the truth as best it sees it, no matter how inconvenient that is to the President.”Footnote 111 Finding a balance between these two tensions is fundamental to managing a functional and effective intelligence–policy link, yet William Raborn placed too much emphasis upon the former. Perhaps influenced by his time in the navy, he believed in the chain of command, the importance of hierarchy, and the need for patriotic service to the President.Footnote 112 Such attributes had been on clear display during his first few days at the CIA, and were repeated again. During a meeting at the White House in which Johnson had been decrying the difficulties of extricating his troops from the Dominican Republic, Raborn again attempted to insert the agency into a policy creation role, saying, “Maybe Dr. Cline has a suggestion.”Footnote 113 This was another step across Kent's sacred boundary between policy and intelligence, and again angered Langley's analysts.
But Raborn's attempts to play an active part in foreign relations were often ignored, and he quickly became cut out of the decision-making process altogether, attending the important “Tuesday Lunch” policy meetings only “once or twice.”Footnote 114 Johnson had been embarrassed by the press's realization that the intelligence behind the Dominican intervention was flawed, with the infamous phrase “credibility gap” appearing in relation to the Dominican Republic only a few weeks after Raborn's arrival; the new DCI was quickly shunned thereafter.Footnote 115 Raborn played no role in a crucial 21 July 1965 meeting discussing the major escalation of Vietnam strategy; nor did he attend the February 1966 Honolulu conference.Footnote 116 Robert McNamara's retelling of the many meetings discussing Vietnam policy in those crucial days makes no mention of Raborn's presence or input.Footnote 117 Outside South East Asia, his suggestions on how to handle negotiations during the Indo-Pakistan War in Kashmir were similarly rebuffed.Footnote 118 “Poor old Raborn” was said to have sat in his Langley office day after day, waiting for White House calls that never came,Footnote 119 while many began to openly press for his dismissal.Footnote 120
And Raborn also faced further trouble in the shape of the media and public sentiment. The mid-1960s were an era of increasing scrutiny of the CIA and the Johnson administration, not only in the press but also in wider society. Letters sent to the White House from American citizens during Raborn's tenure lamented that the “United States has been embarrassed once too often by the CIA”;Footnote 121 some even called for it to be “abolished.”Footnote 122 And by November 1965, reporters at the Washington Post were calling Raborn a “mimetic” and “babbitt” intelligence leader.Footnote 123 Esquire similarly homed in on the disarray Raborn found himself in amongst CIA staff, with Cline being a notable leaker of character assassinations to the press.Footnote 124 The DCI was even the subject of a parody in the television programme Get Smart, which included its own “doddering old” admiral who believed that Herbert Hoover was still the President and who “spontaneously falls over or forgets his name.”Footnote 125 Just like the real version, the television admiral was “but a figurehead, detached from the everyday operations of the agency.”Footnote 126
The public-relations fiasco had become so acute by March 1966 that Johnson requested that Raborn provide a written rebuttal of the accusations of his failings in order to dispel the rumours circulating about him in the media.Footnote 127 Raborn's response was then forwarded to William White of the New York Times, a Johnson associate since his days in the Senate, to demonstrate that, “despite the Georgetown clatter,” Raborn was making “progress at CIA.”Footnote 128 But Raborn's image did not recover. Unlike his predecessors, he had not fashioned good links with reporters and even showed alarm at the level of discussion between agency officials and the press, demanding an account of the contacts between the two.Footnote 129 His failure to garner positive reports cost his image dearly. Some even believed that a series of exposé articles in the New York Times about various secret aspects of the agency's work was the reason for his resignation.Footnote 130 Against a backdrop of growing dissatisfaction, Raborn, who was apparently “totally oblivious” to the fact that he was not “highly regarded,” left Langley in June 1966 after fourteen months in charge.Footnote 131
THE RABORN LEGACY
Raborn's tenure had never been designed to last for an extended period of time, and he had actually exceeded the “six months to a year” he had originally promised Johnson.Footnote 132 Along the way, some improvements had been made at the CIA. Following the apparent issues with processing intelligence during the Dominican crisis, Raborn established a new operations center, which swiftly transferred incoming reports to those who needed it within the Washington foreign-policy bureaucracy; the center was apparently “enthusiastically endorsed” by those in the agency.Footnote 133 Under his watch the CIA created task forces for both Vietnam and China, with their political operations and intelligence collection efforts “doubling” and “tripling” in South East Asia.Footnote 134 Following on from McCone, Raborn had also continued to advance the agency's scientific abilities, with improvements with machine translation technology occurring during his tenure.Footnote 135 But none of these advances soothed the hostility he faced at the CIA, and the Church committee later found that his positive impact on agency had been “minimal.”Footnote 136
Interestingly, much of the resistance Raborn came up against was only replicated a few years later during the even briefer directorship of James Schlesinger. While differing in their personalities and previous experiences, Raborn's and Schlesinger's tenures do contain comparable aspects; both were viewed as “outsiders” with suspiciously close relationships with the White House, and faced issues with the organizational culture of the agency during their respective eras.Footnote 137
But for all the animosity Raborn encountered during his tenure, the postscript did not appear to contain any lasting resentment – at least not in public. Upon his resignation, numerous Congressmen, including future President Gerald Ford, stood to voice their admiration for Raborn on the floor of the House, describing his “high calibre of public service” and the “extraordinary management genius” he had shown at the CIA. “In very difficult circumstances,” Ford argued, Raborn had done a “vital job.”Footnote 138 And this sentiment was apparently shared by Lyndon Johnson. In the East Room of the White House, just a few weeks after Raborn had left an intelligence agency where Johnson had admitted that the director was not “highly regarded,” the President spoke of his “distinguished achievements” and his ability to “inspire subordinates” as he awarded him the National Security Medal.Footnote 139
Inexplicably, even those at Langley who for months had been unsatisfied with their director and had openly mocked him seemingly did not hold a grudge. When long-time CIA officer David Atlee Phillips took a poll of agency staff, asking which director they would most enjoy being trapped on a desert island with, Raborn scored as one of most frequently selected.Footnote 140 Much of the goodwill towards a man who had caused so much frustration likely resulted from those at the CIA being aware that he had been “thrust … into the wrong job.”Footnote 141 Indeed, some even spoke of the “sympathy” they felt for Raborn, whose personal loyalty to Lyndon Johnson and sense of patriotic duty had driven him into a profession he was unsuitable for.Footnote 142 Colby added that Raborn had been the victim of “a hatchet job … by some of the more intellectual types” amongst the hallways of Langley, an assessment which appears to be accurate.Footnote 143
Nevertheless, for all the kinder words Raborn received, the negative impact he had upon the CIA during his tenure continued to resonate after he left. Richard Helms, who replaced Raborn as DCI and was far more skilled and respected as the leader of the CIA, had little more access to, or influence with, Johnson during the remaining years of the Texan's term of office. Having witnessed Raborn being cut out of policy discussions after his misadventure in the Dominican Republic, Helms walked a careful line with the White House, never providing his thoughts on policies, even when he believed them to be flawed.Footnote 144 This only enforced Johnson's philosophy on intelligence–policy relations; Helms later stated, “On no occasion … did [Johnson] ever ask me to give my opinion about what policy ought to be pursued by the government.”Footnote 145 Personal relations between Helms and Johnson were more amicable, but the CIA's voice remained curtailed for the rest of the administration.Footnote 146
Ranelagh noted that Raborn's tenure was a turning point in CIA history, where thereafter, “Directors tended to be far more influenced by Presidents rather than the other way around.”Footnote 147 The agency faced greater trouble in the coming years, not least with the deepening quagmire of the Vietnam War, the arrival at the White House of President Richard Nixon, and increased Congressional interest in their covert operations. Yet the Raborn months – arguably the CIA's nadir of the Johnson years – largely foretold and initiated such struggles. Ray Cline suggested Raborn's tenure was the “beginning of a long downwards slide” for the CIA, and, with greater involvement in South East Asia, increasing presidential neglect, and damage to the agency's standing in Congress, this was perhaps an accurate indictment.Footnote 148 Raborn alone cannot be accused of triggering all of this turmoil, but the role he played was perhaps elemental in damaging the reputation and the efficacy of the agency in the mid-1960s. As a Washington quip held, “Raborn [captained] a sinking ship.”Footnote 149
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