Ray S. Cline (1919-96) served in the Office of Strategic Services in China during World War II and then in the CIA. He was the key CIA analyst on Korea from 1949 to 1952 and is believed to have authored an infamous CIA report that failed to predict the North Korean invasion, which occurred just a few days later. He then served as a liaison agent between the American and British services and finally became CIA station chief in Taiwan (1958-62).

The authors of an expose titled Inside the League assert that covert U.S. funding played a role in the establishment of the World Anti-Communist League and that Cline may have participated in this effort when preparatory meetings were held in Taiwan in 1958.

When newly-appointed CIA Director John McCone reorganized the agency in 1962, Cline became deputy director for intelligence and played a major role in the Cuban missile crisis that fall.

Cline is said to have become disillusioned with Lyndon B. Johnson, and at his own request he left Washington in 1966 and became a special coordinator and advisor to the US ambassador to Germany. He returned to DC during the Nixon administration and served as director of the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the State Department from 1969 to 1973, when he retired.

According to an article which appeared in the Village Voice in 1988, when George H.W. Bush was seeking the Republican presidential nomination in 1980, Cline boasted during the primaries that he intended to “organize something like one of my old CIA staffs” to help Bush win. The New York Times reported that Bush, who had been CIA director from January 1976 to January 1977, received offers of campaign assistance from many former CIA officials and that even some active CIA agents may have worked for his campaign. Cline then became a top adviser to the Reagan-Bush campaign.

Cline attended World Anti-Communist League conferences in 1980, 1983, and 1984.

Cline spent his later years writing studies on geopolitics in which he advised that the United States must counter the superior size and resources of Eurasia with overseas bases, air power, and a three-ocean navy. He also focused on terrorism in works such as “Terrorism: Seedbed for Soviet Influence,” Terrorism as State-Sponsored Covert Welfare and Terrorism: The Soviet Connection.