As well as briefing the President on his directorate’s assessment of the risk from Soviet missiles which had been secretly installed in the

As well as briefing the President on his directorate’s assessment of the risk from Soviet missiles which had been secretly installed in the island, Cline studied reports from American secret agents inside Cuba and personally debriefed Cuban refugees. In 1964 when the “Simba” rebels in Zaire were holding 1,000 prisoners, including Americans and Belgian nuns, Cline argued forcefully that the CIA should go in “like gangbusters”.In rapid succession he sugges-ted “sending in a team through the jungle, bombing the city, a helicopter raid and a parachute drop”. It was his opposite number Richard Helms, the Director for Plans and as such the covert action chief, who successfully counselled patience.Cline played an important role in the Cuban missile crisis of 1962. He went to Clark Clifford, the powerful Washington law-yer and former Truman Admin-istration official who was the head of the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board and to McGeorge Bundy, his National Security Adviser, and insisted that Raborn must go. President Johnson agreed and replaced Raborn after only one year in office.Although essentially an analyst, with great expertise on the Soviet Union, and committed to the importance of intelligence as opposed to covert action, Cline could take a robust line about the usefulness of action when he saw the need.

Cline, who had known this for years and whose department had produced more detailed analysis on this than on any other single subject, could not contain his irritation. When Raborn asked Cline to send over any studies he had on Sino-Soviet relations, Cline asked acidly, “In a wheelbarrow?”After several bruising confrontations with Raborn, Cline asked for a foreign posting and became the CIA’s bureau chief in Frankfurt But he had the last word. On one occasion the admiral suddenly discovered that the Chinese were not getting on well with the Russians. One high point came when a Hong Kong tailor, summoned to make suits for a supposedly anonymous American, bowed deeply and said, “Thank you, Mr Dulles, for your custom!”In 1965, when Dulles’s successor, the industrialist John McCone, retired as the head of the CIA, Cline who was Deputy Director for Intelligence (DDI), was one of several serious candidates to take over as DCI.Perhaps partly for this reason, partly because he felt that the head of the Agency ought to be an intelligence professional, but mostly because he thought he was an unintelligent and incompetent amateur, Cline tangled repeatedly with the man who got the top job, Admiral “Red” Raborn.Cline, his colleague Richard Helms recorded, “thought Raborn was a horse’s ass and he didn’t hesitate to say so”. Cline persuaded Allen Dulles that it would be wiser to make the speech public.Cline’s reward was to be chosen, along with James Billington, then a CIA official, now a distinguished historian and Librarian of Congress, to accompany him on an indiscreetly publicised world tour.

In 1956 Cline decided, correctly, that the text of Nikita Khrushchev’s famous “secret speech” to the Soviet Communist Party’s Twentieth Congress, which the agency had received from an Israeli source, was authentic and persuaded Allen Dulles, the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), to publish it in the face of opposition from several of the agency’s senior barons.
These men, among them James Jesus Angleton, head of Counter-Espionage, and Frank Wisner Snr, the Director for Plans, wanted to keep the secret speech secret, and leak out Khrushchev’s revelations about Stalin’s crimes a little at a time to encourage the anti-Soviet resistance in eastern Europe. Throughout his career he fought for the agency to concentrate more on “pure” intelligence and less on the covert operations run by its “Praetorian Guard”, the “Directorate for Plans”. Ray Cline was one of the Central Intelligence Agency’s top analysts of the Soviet Union. Poetry, for him, was not an evasion of the deeper responsibilities of life; for the poet, he believed, poetry is the deepest responsibility of life. His definition of death, from an essay of 1976, both shows this, and acquires particular poignancy at the end of a writing career of almost three score years and ten:Death is where words no longer have the power to generate, right from the start, the things that they name.Roderick BeatonOdysseus Alepoudelis (Odysseus Elytis), poet: born Heraklion, Crete 2 November 1911; Nobel Prize for Literature 1979; died Athens 18 March 1996.. He was reticent in public about such matters as political affiliation; he held administrative posts in organisations such as Greek National Radio, and the National Theatre, but not for long.

An account of his life, apart from his work, might well take the form of a list of his travels, both in Greece and in Europe, especially France. His family background (his father owned a prosperous soap factory; one reason, it is supposed, for the decision of the young Odysseus Alepoudelis to write under a pseudonym) gave him the opportunity for this, and so he was not obliged, like Seferis, to follow a career in parallel with his life as a poet.But Odysseus Elitis was no poet of the ivory tower. The Oxopetra Elegies, translated by David Connolly, is due to appear very soon.Ever since he decided, in 1936, to abandon his studies at the Athens Law School (the training-ground of so many 20th-century men of letters), Elytis’ life was dedicated to poetry. This is most finely exemplified in the collections The Light-Tree and The Monogram (both first published, outside Greece, in 1971). At the same time, during the Seventies, Elytis returned to the form of the long, complex poem that he had perfected with The Axion Esti. Neither Maria Nefeli (1978) nor The Little Sailor (1984, but written earlier) achieves quite the mastery of large-scale architecture combined with the stinging force of minute detail that characterise the earlier work, but both have earned their admirers.At an age when retirement is the norm in most professions, Elytis continued to write and publish prolifically through the 1980s.