A PERT Man for the CIA

The public-relations men at Aerojet-General Corp. in El Monte, Calif., were puzzled. A company vice president, William F. ("Red") Raborn, 59, had advised them: "You might want to have some biographical material on me available." Then he took off on a mysterious trip to Texas.

The mystery was soon explained: Raborn, a retired Navy vice admiral, had gone to Texas to see President Johnson -- and to hear himself named director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, replacing John A. McCone. At the same time, the President announced the appointment of Richard McGarrah Helms, 52, an experienced CIA cloak-and-dagger man, as Raborn's top deputy.

The search for a successor to Mc Cone had been going on ever since last June, when McCone let it be known that he wanted to leave his controversial job. The names of at least 40 men had been bandied about. But Raborn was on nobody's list of possibilities --nobody's, that is, except Lyndon Johnson's. The President remembered Raborn as an administrative genius who developed the Navy's Polaris missile system three years ahead of schedule. And what he wanted was an administrative genius as head of the CIA -- which can certainly use one.

The Treatment. A Texas-born Annapolis graduate (class of '28), Raborn started out in World War II as an aviator, later became executive officer of the flattop Hancock. When a kamikaze pilot plowed into the Hancock's flight deck off the coast of Japan in April 1945, Raborn got the deck patched up in four hours -- in time to permit the carrier's planes to land safely from a mission. He won a Silver Star for his effort.

In 1955, Chief of Naval Operations Arleigh Burke summoned Raborn to Washington, placed him in charge of a program aimed at developing a solid-fuel, nuclear-armed, 1,500-mile missile that could be fired from a submarine.

The project wound up involving more than 20,000 separate contracts and a budget of $3.5 billion. Raborn operated throughout with a bare-bones staff.

"I can get more out of one overworked man than out of two underworked men," he said. He kept his people on the job seven days a week, and when their enthusiasm flagged, he gave them what he called the "Raborn rededication treatment." This was a cross between a half-time pep talk and a Fourth of July speech. Said one dazed aide after getting the treatment: "I knew that I was ready to die for someone, but I didn't know whether it was the admiral, the President, my mother, the head of the Boy Scouts or who."

Drowned in Data. More than anything else, Raborn made use of a then-obscure management system known as PERT (for Program Evaluation Review Technique). Using PERT, Raborn set precise timetables for each phase of the enormously complicated program, thus assured that everything would mesh without time-wasting gaps or overlaps in the schedule. He papered the walls of his office with flow charts indicating the progress of every major phase of the Polaris program --the missile, the sub, the navigational and fire-control systems, training of the crew, securing of overseas bases, establishment of communications relays. Result: the first Polaris missile was successfully test-fired from a submerged sub in July 1960 instead of the scheduled target date in 1963.

Raborn seems made to order for the CIA. As the free-world's guiding intelligence agency, the CIA's operations are supersecret. When things go wrong, the agency is a perfect scapegoat because, as Dwight Eisenhower once said, "success cannot be advertised; failure cannot be explained."

Yet despite the fact that it is often blamed when it should not be, and almost never praised when it should be, there is little doubt that the CIA needs an expert administrative hand at its helm. "If the admiral doesn't apply his PERT to this outfit," one CIA official said last week, "we'll be drowned in data." The agency receives an average of 2,000 top-secret messages every 24 hours from all over the globe. It has a card-file index of more than 50 million documents. Such sophisticated devices as long-range cameras, sensitive radios and space-surveillance systems relentlessly pour in additional miles of film and tons of other data.

Seining the Ocean. This ocean of information must be seined, boiled down, turned into coherent estimates of enemy capabilities and intentions, and by 6 p.m. each day summarized in a five-page, top-secret intelligence paper sent to the White House for Lyndon Johnson to read. It all seems impossible; yet there is widespread agreement that Raborn can do it if anyone can. The only doubts expressed about his appointment stem from the fact that he has had no experience whatever in intelligence work per se. Yet even the doubters admit that the CIA needs an administrator more than it needs a sort of 007 master spy.

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