A Look Over My Shoulder Read online

  Copyright © 2003 by the Estate of Richard Helms

  Copyright © 2003 by William Hood

  Foreword copyright © 2003 by Henry A. Kissinger

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Ballantine

  Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously

  in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  RANDOM HOUSE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Helms, Richard.

  A look over my shoulder: a life in the Central Intelligence Agency / Richard Helms

  with William Hood.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-1-58836-309-1

  1. Helms, Richard. 2. United States. Central Intelligence Agency—Biography.

  3. Intelligence officers—United States—Biography. I. Hood, William. II. Title.

  UB271.U52 H454 2002 327.1273’0092—dc21

  [B] 2002035262

  Random House website address: www.atrandom.com

  v3.1

  To my beloved Cynthia

  PREFACE

  This is a memoir that I never expected to write.

  On February 2, 1973, I was driven home for the last time in the official car of the director of Central Intelligence (DCI). This followed what for me had been an emotional farewell to hundreds of colleagues in the atrium of the Agency headquarters. They had gathered there on short notice after the unexpected swearing-in of new Nixon appointees earlier that day. James Schlesinger, my successor at CIA, was among those sworn in. So, in a matter of minutes it was over. I was no longer in charge. The velvet curtain had slipped into place. I was on the outside. My life in intelligence was behind me.

  When I left government after serving four years as ambassador to Iran, I had no thought of writing about my thirty years in intelligence. I believed in the ban against revelation of intelligence secrets, and while in CIA had enforced it. I had every intention of keeping my mouth shut and my pen in the desk drawer. Although I had been circumspect when interviewed by Thomas Powers, and had limited my answers to correcting personal data he had assembled, when his book was published I realized that some of my former colleagues had been more forthcoming. In the event, the book’s title, The Man Who Kept the Secrets,* seemed to bear out my intentions in speaking to Powers.

  In 1975 a volcano in the form of the Church and Pike Committees’ hearings in Congress erupted. Between the committees’ demands for files and Director William Colby’s eagerness to volunteer additional data, the hearings turned into a wanton breach of the secrecy understandings which had existed between the Congress and the Agency until that time. The published findings of the Senate and House committees weighed some twenty pounds. My impression was that these hundreds of thousands of words were more useful to the KGB and some of our other adversaries than to the American taxpayers who footed the bill.

  After leaving Iran and returning to Washington, I decided to catch my breath for a bit while offering myself as a consultant. Although a friend had poked fun at me by saying that “a consultant is a man who borrows your watch to tell you what time it is,” I soon found myself once again engaged in an absorbing line of work.

  In 1983 when President Ronald Reagan awarded me the National Security medal, probably at the instigation of Vice President George H. W. Bush, the thought of writing my memoirs might well have come to mind. It did not.

  A few days later, I opened a congratulatory letter from President Richard Nixon. His note read in part: “The attempt to castrate the CIA in the mid-seventies was a national tragedy.” President Nixon and I had not always agreed on everything, but I did concur with this belated judgment. I was amused to find that the former president had taken the occasion of this well-after-the-fact presentation of the highest security service award to write to me. It had been ten years since President Nixon had ended my intelligence career with a handshake at Camp David.

  The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Berlin wall, and the several post-Gorbachev governments in Moscow are at the root of my decision to put some of my impressions of the secret world on paper. It is not my intention to write a history of CIA. Taken as a whole, the existing histories are adequate. But as dated as my experience may be now, I think this memoir might yet serve as background to intelligence as it exists today, and give a glimpse of what happened during my service.

  I am not so naive as to expect that anything I say will cause those who would not allow a government any secrecy in the area of foreign policy to change their views. This may be a bit of professional deformation, but to me it has always seemed absurd to question the government’s right to secrecy in some aspects of foreign and defense policy while in our national games we accept without a frown the catcher’s right to signal the pitcher from behind the batter’s back, or the secret council of the quarterback and his team to plan their next offensive move at a safe remove from the opposing defense. Journalists’ sources are protected by custom if not by law, yet a secret agent whose reports are of national importance and whose life and the well-being of his family may be at stake is considered fair game for the media. Perhaps this is but another expression of the Agency’s alleged “secret culture.” Whether it is or not, the events which took place on September 11, 2001, changed all that in the United States.

  Past references to CIA’s “culture” and one former DCI’s expressed determination to destroy it caught me quite by surprise. The notion of a culture had not occurred to me, but, of course, there is a CIA culture. Any circumscribed group of people engaged in a demanding, isolated, and occasionally dangerous activity is likely in time to develop a culture. This is also true of a family whose members have only one another to lean upon, and in consequence must create its own support system. Those on the outside may not know them, may not like them, or even give a damn. In government, those above the group will seek their loyalty but at times may step aside when something goes wrong.

  I see no reason to believe that those who followed my contemporaries will have an easier time of it. As in the past, the intelligence consumers will demand results that in many instances may be a long time coming. When goals are achieved and policy is a success, there will be others in a position to claim the victory. For security reasons, praise—should there be any—is likely to be kept in-house. Few statesmen have ever thought to admit that a sound decision was made on anything less than their own good judgment, and no political administration is likely to share its reputation for prescience and wisdom with a few faceless men and women and an obscure culture tucked away a few miles out of town.

  Secret intelligence has never been for the fainthearted. This is one aspect of the culture that will never change. Exposures and real or alleged scandals will always be with us. This makes it all the more important that the American people understand why secret intelligence is an essential element in our national defense. These days, terrorists are a more tangible threat and a much more difficult intelligence target than a hostile state armed with nuclear weapons.

  I am quite aware that numbers of Americans will never believe that secrecy is essential. To them there is nothing to be said. To others, I hope this book will enlighten and perhaps put to rest some of the bugaboos which spy novels and lurid journalism have created.

  There remains a problem. I had first thought to include the names of colleagues at all levels who were involved with me in those years. I soon realized that to mention a score meant that fifty had been left out, and that behind these were another hundred who should be named. Unless the memoir
was to read like a telephone directory, there was no alternative but to restrict personal references to an absolute minimum. I can only console myself by saying that you know who you are, and you know I know you all, and that I treasure our work together.

  *(New York: Knopf, 1979).

  FOREWORD

  Henry A. Kissinger

  America’s relationship to its intelligence activities has always been ambivalent. Because America was secure behind two vast oceans for most of its history, its margin of survival was so great that it felt liberated from the need for precise information required by less fortunate nations. Thus America’s attitude toward intelligence was aloof, if not reluctant, leaving it in embryonic form to the military services. “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail” was Secretary of State Henry Stimson’s verdict in 1929 when he disapproved funding for the department’s code-breaking unit.

  World War II and the Cold War changed these attitudes. Long-range nuclear weapons shrank the American margin of safety and created the danger of surprise attack; communist ideology merged foreign and domestic threats. Terrorism added a new dimension of privatized danger. Groups heretofore considered private or at least nongovernmental—such as political parties and, more recently, terrorist cells—were in a position to pose threats to national security and to the global balance of power. Precise information became a condition of survival. And covert operations were needed to deal with threats in the gray area between diplomacy and military strategy—a type of intelligence in which the American government had no expertise and the American public no experience.

  Richard Helms was a key figure in the building of America’s intelligence capability for this new world. He gives a gripping account of the thirty-five years during which he rose through the ranks at the Central Intelligence Agency, mostly in the Directorate for Plans, which recruits and trains foreign agents and conducts covert operations. Appointed director of Central Intelligence by President Lyndon Johnson in 1965, Helms continued in office under President Richard Nixon until relieved of his position in February 1973 in a move of surpassing pettiness six weeks before he would have reached the automatic retirement age of sixty.

  After his death in October 2002, some obituaries snidely described Richard Helms as the holder of secrets, as if this inevitable aspect of intelligence work reflected his character or his predisposition. Those of us who observed Dick over the decades and who admired his patriotism, his dedication, and his character regretted that his sense of duty prevented the nation from sharing his accomplishments. This Helms has now remedied in this thoughtful book.

  As national security advisor and later secretary of state under President Nixon, I consulted with Dick on a daily basis as DCI and regularly, under President Ford, in his subsequent post as ambassador to Iran. There was no public servant I trusted more or who contributed more to the understanding of the challenges facing our nation.

  No department head has a more difficult assignment than the director of Central Intelligence. He wears two partly incompatible hats: he heads the Agency, which is responsible for the collection of intelligence on foreign countries and the conduct of covert operations; at the same time, he is director of Central Intelligence for the entire United States government. In the latter capacity, he has to coordinate the actions of his own department with the separate—and occasionally competitive—intelligence activities of the State and Defense Departments and other agencies charged with intelligence gathering by technical means.

  All department heads are technically under the authority of the President. But the director of Central Intelligence, unlike his colleagues, is not to have a stake in the political fortunes of the administration in office; he represents “objective” truth on matters where objectivity is itself often at issue. The DCI must be prepared to challenge the favorite theses of powerful political personalities.

  Dick Helms navigated these shoals with remarkable skill and extraordinary integrity. Each administration presents a unique challenge to the intelligence community, reflecting differences in personality and political outlook. Helms’s account is fascinating, acute, and subtle about the various administrations in which he served: the increasing reliance on covert operations in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations; Richard Nixon’s ambiguous attitude toward the Central Intelligence Agency and its director.

  President Nixon’s view of Helms reflected his characteristic ambivalence. On the one hand, he considered the position of DCI nonpolitical, and when he assumed the presidency, he emphasized continuity by reappointing Helms. At the same time, he regarded Helms as a member of the “Georgetown social set,” which Nixon believed—not incorrectly—to be more sympathetic to Democratic administrations than to his own. He therefore coupled Helms’s reappointment with an attempt to insulate him from the policy process: the DCI was to attend National Security Council meetings only to give a briefing; once discussion turned to policy, he was to leave the Cabinet Room. Helms accepted this directive, which it fell to me to convey, with characteristic discipline, albeit with slightly raised eyebrows. In the event, Nixon was so impressed by Helms’s briefings that he wanted to hear his views on policy—or at least the CIA’s assessment of the consequences of various policy options, which is what policy discussions, in the end, are all about. Nixon solved the problem after an early NSC meeting by inviting Helms after a briefing to join the group for lunch.

  From that point on, Dick Helms was an integral member of the NSC team. The Agency under his leadership was indispensable in supplying analyses and—even when I thought they stuck too closely to conventional wisdom—beyond criticism as to its motives. As time went on, Helms was given many opportunities for private meetings at the White House, most frequently with me, to make sure that all the implications of his department’s recommendations were available to the President. It was also Helms’s responsibility to report which, if any, American agents abroad might cause foreign policy difficulties if exposed. (For reasons of security and deniability, we preferred not to know their names unless they fell into this category.) Helms’s conduct with respect to this sensitive issue was impeccable.

  The CIA’s role in covert operations became controversial at the end of Helms’s tenure. Traditional diplomacy seeks to affect the conduct of states; military force exists to sustain the balance of power. But during the Cold War—and now again in today’s war against terrorism—the threat often comes from nonstate actors, such as political parties or terrorist groups, financed from abroad.

  The CIA did not deserve the opprobrium various investigations heaped on it. Most of its operations were designed to prevent radical forces from taking over countries considered important to American security and interests and where our adversaries had instruments of action not available to us. Not all were well designed, but all were approved—and, in the most controversial cases, ordered—by presidents of every Cold War administration, even when the paperwork was conducted to provide deniability.

  After Helms left office, he and some of his colleagues came under attack for having been assigned to defend these new and intangible frontiers—which their superiors had defined for them—on behalf of a society accustomed to more conventional enemies. The men and women who undertook these thankless tasks, veiled in a secrecy imposed on them by their superiors, were deprived of credit and, as it turned out, the protection to which they were entitled. Their actions were often challenged well after the event when the necessities that had given rise to them could be recalled only with difficulty by a new generation.

  Dick Helms became one of the most prominent victims. He was charged with having committed perjury while testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during confirmation proceedings for his appointment as ambassador to Iran. Following established procedures, Helms had denied covert operations before a committee not authorized to receive such information. But in classified hearings, he had already briefed the members of the House and Senate designated by the congressional leadership for that
purpose—including the SFRC member who had posed the incriminating questions. It was a grievous injustice, rectified to some extent when President Ronald Reagan awarded Helms the National Security Medal in 1983 and later came to dinner at his house.

  Helms discusses this episode that was to blight his life for many years without self-pity. He was proud of all aspects of his service, as he had every right to be. His lodestar was a sense of duty, his motivating force public service. There was no public servant I respected more. It was an honor to be Richard Helms’s colleague; it enhanced my life to be his friend.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many thanks to these and the others who have plundered their memories in helping with this memoir:

  Thomas Ahern, Cicely Angleton, Michael Beschloss, James Critchfield, Mia Cunningham, Agnes Gavin, Sam Halpern, Cynthia Helms, Richard Holm, Walter Jessel, Richard Kerr, Vinton Lawrence, Charles McCarry, Scott Miler, Sam Papich, Hayden Peake, James Potts, David Robarge, R. Jack Smith, Hugh Tovar, Bronson Tweedy, John Waller, and Albert “Bud” Wheelon.

  And for Robert D. Loomis, whose guiding hand and advice were with us throughout, a special thank you.

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Foreword by Henry A. Kissinger

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1. A Smoking Gun

  Chapter 2. Lunch with Adolf

  Chapter 3. Signing On

  Chapter 4. London

  Chapter 5. Wieder Berlin

  Chapter 6. Getting In

  Chapter 7. Getting Under Way

  Chapter 8. The Gehlen Organization

  Chapter 9. Fabrication Factories

  Chapter 10. Mr. Dulles Takes Over

  Chapter 11. The Noisy Side of the Street

  Chapter 12. Breaking the Ice