US state: Richard Helms

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Richard Helms

Director of the CIA whose lies about the overthrow of Allende's Chilean
government led to his conviction

Harold Jackson
Thursday October 24, 2002
The Guardian

Richard Helms, who has died aged 89, is the only director of the Central
Intelligence Agency to have been convicted of lying to Congress about the
organisation's undercover activities. He was sentenced in 1977 to the
maximum fine and a suspended two-year prison sentence.

Helms maintained to the last that he had had no choice, that his overriding
responsibility was to US national security. His opponents argued that the
real reason for his reticence was his personal involvement in many of the
agency's darkest episodes.

Helms's original ambition had been to make his way in newspapers. He was
born in St Davids, a smart suburb of Philadelphia. Two of his high school
years were spent in Europe, where he learnt French and German.

In 1935, he graduated from Williams College, Massachusetts, and the next
year the United Press news agency sent him to help cover the Berlin Olympic
Games.

Interested in the management side of the business, he joined the advertising
department of the Indianapolis Times. Within two years he was national
advertising manager and had begun to explore the idea of eventually becoming
its owner.

On America's entry into the second world war, Helms joined the navy, and
plotted German submarine activity. Then he was approached by his former
bureau chief in Berlin to join the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the
covert action body being formed by William Donovan.

Helms rejected the approach, but then the Navy Department was asked for a
German-speaking officer with a journalistic background, and in August 1943
Helms was posted to the OSS.

The principal professional lesson he drew from the experience of organising
intelligence operations against Germany was to rate information-gathering
far higher than the often flashy sabotage raids to which "Wild Bill" Donovan
was drawn. It also inculcated his lifelong belief in the importance of
extreme secrecy in all intelligence work.

After the German surrender, he helped round up suspected Nazi war criminals.
At the end of that year he spent a month's leave in Indianapolis, where he
found he had very little chance of raising the money to buy the Times.

Then he became one of 600 field officers transferred to the newly formed
Office of Special Operations (OSO). At the age of 33 he was put in charge of
intelligence and counter-intelligence activities in Germany, Austria and
Switzerland.

The National Security Act of July 1947 created the CIA, of which OSO became
a division. One of the agency's first preoccupations was the prospect of a
Communist party victory in the impending Italian elections, and it mounted a
massive covert campaign against the party. A combination of disinformation,
forgery and financial support for the centrist parties proved successful,
and gave Washington a taste for further such campaigns. President Truman
established the Office of Policy Co-ordination (OPC), which was funded by
the CIA and instructed to conduct covert anti-Communist operations around
the world.

Helms was convinced that the new body's often naive entanglement with émigré
organisations threatened the life and work of the far more effective agents
employed by his OSO. The two arms of the service were eventually amalgamated
into the Directorate for Plans. Helms was made deputy director, working
under the man who had been running the despised OPC.

The new department was responsible for all the agency's "black" operations.
What started for Helms in disappointment became a blessing when the CIA's
1961 attempt to invade Cuba foundered in the Bay of Pigs and put his boss,
Richard Bissell, in the firing line.

The CIA's internal inquiry established that Bissell had made little if any
effort to determine whether the arrival of Cuban exile forces was likely to
trigger the supposed anti-Castro uprising. Such an intelligence assessment
would have been Helms's responsibility, but he had never been asked for it:
when Bissell eventually resigned, Helms was the natural choice to take over.

He immediately came under pressure from President Kennedy and his brother
Robert, the attorney general, to increase American efforts to get rid of the
Castro regime. Operation Mongoose had nearly 4,000 operators involved in
attacks on Cuban economic targets.

One of the murkier aspects of the period was the degree of Helms's
involvement in Mafia attempts to assassinate Castro. A Congressional inquiry
never got to the bottom of it, never finding anything on paper. In the end
the Mongoose venture was a total failure and soon eclipsed by in the far
greater issue of Soviet missiles on the island.

Perversely, the CIA lost ground with the Kennedy administration when the
dust had settled on that crisis, mainly because its evaluation of the
intelligence from Cuba had been more accurate than the White House's. With
this friction in the background, Helms was dispatched to Vietnam, where
President Ngo Dinh Diem's treatment of Buddhist unrest was creating a
problem. Washington favoured a coup to overthrow Diem, which was engineered
by the CIA. Diem and his brother were murdered by the officers who mounted
the operation and Helms was surprised at Kennedy's horrified reaction,
saying that the president did not seem to have understood what he had
authorised. Kennedy himself was murdered three weeks later, on November 22
1963.

President Lyndon Johnson appointed Admiral William Raborn, a fellow Texan,
head of the CIA. Helms was made Raborn's deputy but, when Raborn quickly
demonstrated that he was wholly out of his depth, Helms assumed effective
control.

He began to make some of the crucial decisions about Vietnam which were to
haunt America for a decade. One was to enlarge the area of conflict through
the secret creation in neighbouring Laos of a vast army of Meo tribesmen,
charged with attacking North Vietnamese supply columns moving down the Ho
Chi Minh trail. Another was the organisation of South Vietnamese
counter-terror teams, which soon acquired a fearsome reputation for
arbitrary brutality.

Within a year, Johnson put Helms into the top job at the CIA - the first
director to have worked his way up from the ranks. His standing improved
dramatically a year later with the threat of war in the Middle East. In
response to an urgent request from Johnson, the agency calculated that
Israel would win any conflict within 10 days, a judgment which critically
affected America's subsequent policy.

However, the quagmire of Vietnam continued to suck the agency and the
country into ever-deeper trouble, and Helms began to tell the president what
he wanted to hear. One of the worst examples concerned the size of North
Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces. The Pentagon, anxious to show it was
winning the war, said they had been reduced to 270,000. The CIA produced the
much less welcome figure of 500,000.

A ferocious bureaucratic battle erupted which only ended when Helms directly
ordered George Carver, the CIA's man in Saigon, to accept the Pentagon's
estimate. On November 13 1967, Helms formally signed the document containing
the supposed enemy order of battle, by now massaged even lower, to 248,000.
Two months later the North Vietnamese forces which had been argued out of
existence in Washington emerged across South Vietnam to attack Saigon and 48
provincial capitals in the Tet offensive.

The arrival of President Nixon brought hard times for Helms. Not only was
Nixon an awkward boss, but he brought in Henry Kissinger as national
security adviser. Helms got involved in an early fight about the
capabilities of the new Soviet SS-9 missile, which Kissinger and the White
House thought much more dangerous than it was. Helms turned out to be right,
but that removed the Russian threat the administration needed to justify its
anti-ballistic missile system.

Nixon's paranoia about the growing opposition to the Vietnam war brought out
Helms's tendency to act as the obedient bureaucrat. He agreed without an
apparent qualm to the so-called Huston plan, a proposal for all the
country'ssecurity services to combine in a massive internal surveillance
operation. It was politically horrific, but it was also illegal for the CIA
to operate within the US. Nixon eventually withdrew his consent, but
discussion of the scheme revealed that the CIA had been involved in domestic
intelligence since Helms took control.

Then came Watergate, with its revelation that a CIA man had been one of the
burglars and that some of the other intruders into the Democratic party
headquarters had long CIA connections. Two of the central figures, Howard
Hunt and Gordon Liddy, had received technical help from the agency.

Helms distanced his organisation as far as possible from the scandal. He was
immediately successful, but the freebooting days of the agency were drawing
to a close, and much tighter Congressional controls were introduced.

Nixon considered Helms disloyal, and sent him to become US ambassador in
Tehran. But much of his time in the post was spent commuting to Washington
to answer Congressional questions about the unwholesome revelations of CIA
misdemeanours.

The agency's subversion of Chilean democracy was Helms's undoing. For years
the CIA had poured money into the country to ensure that the Christian
Democrats held power. The 1970 elections, however, seemed likely to put
Salvador Allende's Socialist Workers' party into office. Various
multinationals, particularly International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT),
feared the loss of their assets, and backed the rightwing candidate. Without
the knowledge of the State Department, and in defiance of official policy,
Helms helped them channel their funds.

When Allende still won, Nixon directly ordered Helms to overturn the result
and, in the manoeuvring of the local CIA representative, a senior Chilean
general was killed by military plotters. When ITT's involvement was revealed
in press reports two years later, Helms was questioned by Senator Stuart
Symington at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Had the CIA tried to
overthrow the government of Chile? No. Did you have money passed to the
opponents of Allende? No.

Investigation by the agency's inspector general showed that both answers
were untrue, and he was prosecuted. The Senate Select Committee on
Intelligence found that he had not only been involved in illegal domestic
surveillance and the 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, but of
covering up his predecessors' misdemeanours, including secret drug-testing
experiments on unwitting victims.

However, Helms has gone to his grave with the sole knowledge of what
Congress did not manage to uncover. He is survived by his second wife.

· Richard McGarrah Helms, intelligence officer, born March 30 1913; died
October 22 2002




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