At the Helm
NOVAK, ROBERT D.
At the Helm Richard Helms, a man of honor in an unlikely trade. BY ROBERT D. NOVAK In March 1997, when George J. Tenet became the fifth of Bill Clinton's choices to head the Central Intelligence...
...canceled the essential air cover"—doom-ing the operation...
...Not until he fired Helms did Nixon learn he was a civil servant...
...George Tenet is correct that Dick Helms was a heroic figure, and his unexpected testimony from the grave is a cautionary tale for current and future occupants of the White House and the Capitol...
...The White House twice demanded that the CIA provide money out of its unvouchered funds to bail out the Watergate burglars...
...Helms also gives the CIA much credit for handling the Cuban missile crisis...
...Although covert operations undermined his reputation, he makes clear he always emphasized intelligence gathering as the agency's principal mission...
...He unfairly suspected Helms of being partial to the Democrats and became convinced of it when Helms refused to participate in the Watergate coverup...
...Helms refused, sealing his doom once Nixon was reelected in November...
...Helms asked whether his departure might be postponed until March 30, 1973, his sixtieth birthday when he would be required to retire from the CIA after thirty years of service...
...Indeed, Nixon summoned the director to Camp David soon after the 1972 election and fired him...
...Helms seems, in fact, the last person likely to have written a memoir of his days in the intelligence business...
...The always-shaky relationship with Nixon became untenable with the Watergate burglary in 1972...
...the president asked...
...Helms writes that Nixon agreed—and, then, impulsively sought to ease the pain by asking whether Helms would like to be an ambassador...
...In contrast to forty years of Kennedy hagiography, he reports "it was President Kennedy who...
...Senator Frank Church's description of the CIA as a "rogue elephant," damaging to the nation's long-term intelligence capabilities, was unfair and inaccurate...
...He apparently wrote it because "some of my former colleagues had been more forthcoming" than he in talking to Powers thirty years ago, and he belatedly wanted to correct the record...
...With "his patience exhausted," McCone resigned in April 1965...
...Helms, the first CIA career professional to become director, was a hero to the Robert D. Novak is a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Sun-Times and a CNN commentator...
...He endured federal prosecution and risked a jail sentence to protect those secrets...
...The indiscreet use of the agency by presidents and the witch hunt in Congress inflicted grave damage on the nation's security that has yet to be fully repaired...
...On June 23, Helms was summoned to the White House and instructed by Nixon aide H.R...
...Indeed, Nixon may never have realized that Helms, despite his upper-class background, was not a man of wealth and lived on his modest government salary...
...Eager to avoid an embarrassing trial, Carter's Justice Department offered a plea bargain, reducing the charge to a misdemeanor to be punished by a $2,000 fine and a suspended two-year sentence...
...Helms accepted, but Judge Barrington Parker thought it necessary to declaim in open court that the former CIA director stood "before this court in disgrace and shame...
...The CIA took the fall, with Allen Dulles among the casualties, but Helms was not involved in Bay of Pigs planning...
...Renowned as the developer of the Polaris missile system, Raborn knew nothing about intelligence and relied heavily on newly named deputy director Helms...
...Commenting that the Russians might not welcome an American spymaster in the Kremlin, Helms suggested Iran...
...The man who kept secrets was trapped...
...This blatant attempt to obstruct justice was the smoking gun that doomed the Nixon presidency...
...To gain credibility within the CIA, Tenet turned to Richard Helms...
...He implies some distaste even for the celebrated CIA-induced "revolution" ousting Guatemala's elected leftist government in 1954...
...Tall and elegant, he was an accomplished dancer and a fixture at Washington dinner parties...
...What about Moscow...
...Helms reveals a McCone memorandum, hand-carried to President Johnson, warning, "we will find ourselves mired in combat in the jungle in a military effort we cannot win, and from which we will have extreme difficulty in extracting ourselves...
...This criticism is ironic coming from Helms, who always insisted that the director of the CIA was the servant of whoever happened to be the president...
...As director, Tenet conferred regularly with Helms...
...BY ROBERT D. NOVAK In March 1997, when George J. Tenet became the fifth of Bill Clinton's choices to head the Central Intelligence Agency, morale at the agency was poor after the nineteen-month tenure of Tenet's predecessor, former MIT chemistry professor John Deutch, who broke the law by taking home highly classified material in his laptop computer...
...He was a frequent luncheon companion of such columnists as Joe Alsop (which aroused President Johnson's ire, Helms reports) and Rowland Evans...
...That was not the news Johnson wanted, and he proceeded to ignore the CIA director he had inherited from Kennedy...
...Helms himself even appears surprised...
...As a Naval officer, he was assigned to the OSS (predecessor of the CIA) and began three decades in intelligence...
...Helms discloses that Nixon, while telling hardly anyone else in the government, "ordered me to instigate a military coup" in Chile—an order that led to the eventual criminal prosecution of Helms...
...The Bay of Pigs hasn't got a damned thing to do with this,' I said," Helms recalls...
...Clear that President Johnson had thrust him into the wrong job," Raborn resigned after fourteen months, and Helms replaced him...
...Vietnam moved toward a Communist victory, a far left Castroite president was elected in Chile, and the table was set for congressional degradation of the CIA...
...Helms later told reporters: "I don't feel at all disgraced...
...What followed was "relentless pressure" on the CIA from Attorney General Robert Kennedy to get rid of Castro...
...Fulbright, pursuing long-frustrated ambitions to wrest intelligence oversight from the Armed Services Committee, turned the confirmation hearing on Helms's appointment as ambassador to Iran into an inquisition of the CIA...
...Had I done anything else, I would then have been disgraced...
...The CIA's old boys agreed...
...Viciousness soon replaced pettiness...
...Beginning in 1966, Helms served seven years as director (second only to the legendary Allen Dulles's eight years), but his time was not marked by spectacular intelligence triumphs...
...President Nixon retained Helms at the CIA for the sake of stability, while intending to reduce his role sharply...
...agency's faceless and nameless work-ers—and to Tenet as well...
...The man who kept secrets actually began his career as a journalist, a United Press correspondent in Berlin (who, with other reporters, lunched with Adolf Hitler in 1936...
...Why then is Helms an intelligence hero...
...Nixon never appeared to have shaken his early impression that the agency was exclusively staffed by uppity Ivy Leaguers, most of whom lived in Georgetown and spent every evening gossiping about him in cocktail parties," Helms writes...
...Helms was not a vindictive or even a combative man, and the only character in this book for whom he has not one kind word is the CIA director named by Gerald Ford while Helms was in Tehran: William Colby, a fellow agency careerist...
...Haldeman to tell the FBI to call off its Watergate investigation because it would unravel Bay of Pigs secrets...
...So, upon becoming director, Tenet made a symbolic gesture, taking the portrait of Helms out of a hallway at the CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, and putting it in his private office...
...Helms's testimony was the thin edge of the wedge, beginning a cumulative process that ravished the CIA...
...With the revelation of covert operations denied under oath by Helms, Colby also passed along the helpful suggestion that his predecessor should be indicted, and both the Ford and Carter administrations adamantly pursued his prosecution...
...He makes clear he did nothing as director that was not ordered by either of the two presidents he served under, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon...
...Journalist Thomas Powers aptly entitled his 1979 biography of Helms, The Man Who Kept the Secrets...
...His goal of owning his own newspaper was interrupted by World War II—which changed his life forever...
...Helms, however, was not warned when his successor was unveiled February 2. He asked Haldeman what happened to their agreement for delay, and the White House chief of staff replied, "Oh, I guess we forgot," speaking, Helms said, "with the faint trace of a smile...
...This is a memoir that I never expected to write" are the opening words of A Look over My Shoulder...
...Nixon was not finished...
...Helms was a calming element among turbulent and erratic personalities at Langley...
...Senator Stuart Symington, who had been thoroughly briefed on covert activities in Chile undertaken by the CIA by orders of three presidents, asked Helms questions that required him either to lie or break the vows of secrecy...
...After Helms died in his sleep at age eighty-nine last October, Tenet eulogized him at the funeral as "the complete American intelligence officer...
...Helms speculates that Johnson "never forgot that McCone was a conservative Republican," and the president picked as his replacement retired Admiral William (Red) Raborn, a fellow Texan who had supported Johnson's 1964 presidential candidacy...
...Senate Foreign Relations chairman J.W...
...McCone was also right about Vietnam...
...But Johnson was a joy for Helms, compared with his successor...
...Because, unlike a notorious successor, he did not surrender the agency's "family jewels...
...Colby released to congressional investigators a flow of CIA secrets—which Helms compares to the Bolshevik publication of Tsarist secret police files, asserting that Colby "effectively smashed the existing system of checks and balances protecting the national intelligence service...
...Many of the old, nearly forgotten battles related in A Look over My Shoulder are relevant to today's concern about CIA capabilities in the war on terrorism...
...John McCone, a conservative Republican industrialist who had replaced Dulles as the agency's director, was the administration's "one dissenting voice" from the view that the Cuban missiles were "defensive...
...Furthermore, Helms says, the missile threat would not have been identified in time without CIA secret agent Oleg Penkovsky in Moscow...
...Yet this posthumous memoir contains important and fascinating revelations, as in the portrayal of presidents who did not understand the CIA's mission and tried to exploit it for their political interests...
...This was, Henry Kissinger writes in the foreword to Helms's book, "a move of surpassing pettiness...
...Contrary to Haldeman's memoir, "I did not shout in the White House and cannot even remember ever having shouted in my own office...
...The youngest director of the agency ever at age forty-four, Tenet had spent most of his career as a congressional staffer and went on the CIA payroll for the first time in 1995 when Clinton named him deputy director...
...Helms is revealing about the most famous failed covert operation of all time: the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba ("a foreign policy disaster and a humiliating experience for the country...
...But Nixon was the worst...
...Vietnam was my nightmare," Helms writes, and Johnson would still not accept the CIA's projections of defeat...
...As president, Kennedy and Johnson appear out of control about their obsessions (Cuba for Kennedy, Vietnam for Johnson...
...Helms and his collaborator, a former CIA colleague turned novelist named William Hood, were intelligence professionals even in writing the book, and they are careful not to tell too much...
Vol. 8 • May 2003 • No. 34
