A L IFE I N I NTELLIGENCE
A S YMPOSIUM O N RICHARD H ELMS

Sponsors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2

Overview. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5

Eulogy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9

The Intelligence Professional Personified . . . . . . . . 13

In His Own Words . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 21

Helms Papers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31
A L IFE I N I NTELLIGENCE

The Historical Collections Division (HCD) of the Office of Information Management 

Services is responsible for executing the CIA’s Historical Review Program. This program 

seeks to identify, collect, and review for possible release to the public significant historical 

information. The mission of HCD is to: 

 • Provide an accurate, objective understanding of the information and 

 intelligence that has helped shape the foundation of major US policy decisions.

 • Improve access to lessons learned, presenting historical material to 

 emphasize the scope and context of past actions.

 • Improve current decision-making and analysis by facilitating reflection on 

 the impacts and effects arising from past decisions, 

 • Uphold Agency leadership commitments to openness, while protecting the 

 national security interests of the US,

 • Provide the American public with valuable insight into the workings of 

 their Government.

The History Staff in the CIA Center for the Study of Intelligence fosters understanding of 

the Agency’s history and its relationship to today’s intelligence challenges by communicating 

instructive historical insights to the CIA workforce, other US Government agencies, and 

the public. CIA historians research topics on all aspects of Agency activities and disseminate 

their knowledge through publications, courses, briefings, and Web-based products. They 

also work with other Intelligence Community historians on publication and education 

projects that highlight interagency approaches to intelligence issues. Lastly, the CIA 

History Staff conducts an ambitious program of oral history interviews that are invaluable 

for preserving institutional memories that are not captured in the documentary record.
A S YMPOSIUM O N RICHARD H ELMS

Georgetown University’s Center for Peace and Security Studies (CPASS) in the Edmund 

A. Walsh School of Foreign Service offers an expansive curriculum, in-depth research, 

and critical dialogue on security issues. The Center is a hub where the academic and 

policy communities meet; and experts and scholars from every discipline that studies 

international peace and security issues come together. The academic pillar of the CPASS, 

the Security Studies Program (SSP), is the nation’s preeminent professional Master of 

Arts program devoted to security; including intelligence, military analysis, terrorism, and 

technology and security. The faculty publishes regularly in leading scholarly and popular 

journals as well as serves as advisors or analysts to leading security organizations and 

government agencies.

The Georgetown University Library, consisting of the Lauinger Library, Blommer Science 

Library, Woodstock Theological Center Library, Riggs Library, and other additional 

collections, provides preeminent services, collections, and spaces to shape the creation 

of knowledge, conserve culture for posterity, and transform learning and research. The 

Lauinger Library, the principle library on the main campus, is located at the corner of 

37th and Prospect Streets, N.W. in Washington, DC. The Library supports research in 

the humanities, social sciences and business. The Special Collections Research Center, 

comprising archives, rare books, manuscripts and rare prints, includes a remarkable 

collection of books on the subjects of intelligence, espionage, covert activities, and related 

fields, one of the largest collections of its kind in the country. The Library’s collections 

and resources are open to visiting scholars and researchers.
A L IFE I N I NTELLIGENCE
A S YMPOSIUM O N RICHARD H ELMS
6

This collection of material by and about 

Richard Helms as Director of Central 

Intelligence (DCI) and Ambassador to Iran 

comprises the largest single release of Helms-related 

information to date. The documents, historical works, 

essays, interviews, photographs, and video offer an 

unprecedented wide-ranging look at the man and his 

career as the United States’ top intelligence offi cial and 

one of its most important diplomats during a crucial 

decade of the Cold War. From mid-1966, when he 

became DCI, to late 1976, when he left Iran, Helms 

dealt directly or indirectly with numerous events whose 

impact remains evident today and which are covered 

in the release. They include the Vietnam War, two 

military confl icts between Israel and the Arab states, 

the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia, an unsuccessful 

covert action in Chile, arms control negotiations 

with the Soviet Union, Watergate, disclosures of 

controversial CIA activities, the formation of OPEC, 

and the fi rst oil embargo. From his respective vantage 

points at CIA Headquarters in Langley, Va., and the 

US Embassy in Tehran, Helms participated in all of 

these developments—depending on the situation—

as intelligence manager, presidential adviser, or 

representative of US national security interests.

No comprehensive biography of Helms has been 

written, and for years the most widely consulted 

work on his intelligence career has been Thomas 

Powers’s The Man Who Kept the Secrets (1979). 

With the release of Richard Helms as Director 

of Central Intelligence, 1966-1973 by Robert M. 

Hathaway and Russell Jack Smith—one of a series 

of internal surveys of DCI tenures—we have a 

solidly researched, lucidly written account of the 

major issues Helms confronted as DCI, prepared 

by a respected historian and an Agency veteran of 

scholarly achievement. Based mostly on CIA records 

and interviews with Helms and Agency offi cers and 

originally published in 1993, it stands for now as the 

defi nitive account of Helms’s directorship. The study 

was previously declassifi ed in early 2007 but is being 

re-released with fewer redactions. When read with 

Helms’s posthumously published memoir, A Look 

Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence 

Agency (2003), Hathaway and Smith’s book gives 

a thorough look at how one of the Agency’s most 

infl uential directors handled a succession of 

complicated intelligence and political challenges.

An especially useful part of the release is the set of 

oral history interviews of Helms conducted for the 

Hathaway-Smith book; the articles from CIA’s 

in-house journal, Studies in Intelligence, including 

three by Helms; and the video of him speaking 

at a history symposium at CIA Headquarters in 

1994. Taken together, these materials capture 

the man himself—thoughtful, direct, precise, 

discrete, politically astute, keenly cognizant of 

the interconnectedness of intelligence and policy, 

impatient with pretense, wryly humorous, and always 

adamant about the need for CIA to remain objective 

and independent. “If we ever lose our reputation for 

honesty,” he wrote in one of the articles, “we lose all 

our usefulness along with it.” The newly released 

materials also portray a career intelligence offi cer who 

was ardent about his profession and the Agency he 

worked for. As he told an assembly of CIA employees 

in 1996, “An alert Intelligence Community is our fi rst, 

best line of defense. Service there is its own reward.” 

President Richard Nixon—dissatisfi ed with Helms’s 

management of the Intelligence Community and, 

most important, angry at him for refusing to involve 

CIA in the Watergate cover-up—decided as early 

as September 1972 that “Helms has got to go.” As 

Hathaway and Smith show, Nixon’s choice of him 

to be Ambassador to Iran was a spontaneous move 

by David S. Robarge

Chief Historian of The CIA

Overview
7

by the President to offer the soon-to-be-dismissed 

DCI a consolation posting. The Shah, though, saw 

the early replacement of a recent political appointee 

(Joseph Farland) with such an infl uential national 

security offi cial as a clear indication of his country’s 

signifi cance to the White House and US foreign 

policy. The US Embassy in Tehran reported that 

local media coverage and private conversations with 

Iranian offi cials highlighted Helms’s closeness to the 

President “and his prominence in American life as 

[an] important public servant . . . as indicating [the] 

heightened importance Washington attaches to its 

relations with Iran.” 

Iran was nearing the peak of its regional infl uence 

and its prominence as a US ally by the time Helms 

arrived there in February 1973. As DCI, Helms 

previously had noted that “During the past decade, 

and particularly during the past fi ve years, the Shah 

has sought to provide for the security of Iran through 

the rapid development of that country as a modern 

industrial state with a rapidly expanding military 

establishment. He likes to describe Iran as the only 

strong, stable and important nation between Japan 

and the European Community.” 

This situation had come about for geostrategic and 

economic reasons. Iran, with Saudi Arabia, had 

become one of the “twin pillars” the United States 

relied on to maintain stability in the Persian Gulf region 

after Great Britain withdrew its military forces in 1971. 

During the same time, the Nixon Doctrine, enunciated 

in June 1969, placed greater responsibility on regional 

powers to defend themselves. In May 1972, President 

Nixon agreed to let Iran buy essentially any kind of 

American conventional weaponry. In a speech at 

Iran’s National Defense University in February 1976, 

Helms said that the United States regarded Iran “as 

a stabilizing infl uence in the region” and that Iranians 

must be “able to defend themselves against outside 

threats and to play a role commensurate with their 

interests.” With oil wealth fi lling its coffers, Iran 

became the largest purchaser of US military wares 

(nearly $2 billion worth) by the time Helms left his post. 

Meanwhile, with US encouragement, the Shah took an 

increasingly hard line against radical Arab states and 

established a close but quiet relationship with Israel.

Until the Department of State’s Foreign Relations of 

the United States volume on US-Iran relations during 

1973-76 is published (it currently is undergoing 

declassifi cation review), this release presents the 

most extensive collection of diplomatic material on 

that subject now publicly available. Although they 

comprise only a tiny fraction of the massive amount 

of traffi c between Washington and Tehran during 

Helms’s ambassadorship, the more than 

800 documents offer a snapshot of the workaday 

world of a senior diplomat: regularly meeting 

with the head of state and his principal offi cials; 

preparing reports on local and international 

developments for consumers back home; 

discussing the implications of US policy toward 

Iran with American leaders; and offering advice 

on appointments to key US Government positions 

dealing with Iran. Some of the dispatches show 

Helms striking the delicate balance between 

advocating US policy to the Shah and empathizing 

with him to Washington—a task made more diffi cult 

because at times it was not clear whether the Shah 

was being deliberately cryptic or was just confused. 

(There is no mention in the traffi c that he seemed ill; 

in 1974 he was diagnosed with lymphatic cancer.) 

Several portions of Helms’s ambassadorial traffi c 

deserve special mention because of their policy 

signifi cance, because they show some of the 

recurrent annoyances diplomats everywhere face, 

or because they illumine some distinctive aspects 

of Helms’s tenure. For example, at the time Iraq 

was conducting a counteroffensive against US-and 

Iran-backed Kurdish rebels, so Helms had periodic 

discussions with Henry Kissinger and the Shah 

about providing military and humanitarian aid to 

the Kurds. Helms complained to the White House 

about the Department of Defense not coordinating 

comments on US-Iran relations with him and about 

questioning some arms sales. He was put in the 

embarrassing position of explaining to his hosts 

what a disparaging remark by a senior US offi cial 

meant—in this case, the Treasury Secretary calling 

the Shah a “nut” in a magazine interview. 

Writing to DCI George H.W. Bush from the unique 

position as a former DCI, Helms expressed concern 
8

that some pejorative words in a CIA analysis of 

Iranian leadership would severely damage bilateral 

relations if the paper were leaked. He pointed out to 

his former Deputy DCI that the Embassy was not in 

the business of arranging audiences with the Shah 

for US visitors (“For some strange reason, ‘seeing the 

Shah’ has become sort of a weird tourist attraction 

for Americans.”). Helms spent a remarkable amount 

of his time dealing with the fallout from Watergate 

and the “Family Jewels” disclosures, receiving 

notifi cations and answering queries from Agency 

offi cials, congressional investigators, journalists, 

and attorneys. Perhaps in exasperation, he wrote 

to DCI Bush that he was “increasingly bemused 

by the double standard practiced by the Congress 

and the press on this issue of the confi dentiality of 

sources . . . If ‘the public has a right to know’ about 

governmental actions, why does it not have ‘a right to 

know’ about where the information originated? If you 

are offered a glass of water . . . you should also have 

a right to know that it came from a poisoned well.” 

“Our intelligence system,” Helms wrote in one of 

the Studies in Intelligence articles, “is in truth an 

expression of our society, with all its vigor and 

ingenuity, with all its complexity and some of its 

contradictions, as that society gropes for answers 

to challenges its founding fathers could never have 

conceived.” Helms’s service as DCI and Ambassador 

to Iran exhibits those same complexities and 

contradictions. For most of those years he worked 

under two of the most complicated presidents the 

United States has ever had, Lyndon Johnson and 

Richard Nixon, and had to confront the welter of 

intelligence and policy conundrums that arose from 

US engagement with Southeast Asia, the Soviet 

Union, and the Middle East. Acting upon one of his 

guiding principles—“you only work for one president 

at a time”—he skillfully adapted to the changing 

atmospherics in Washington and to the break-up of 

the Cold War consensus in American politics. What 

Helms observed in one of the interviews about serving 

under Nixon could as easily be applied to the ten 

years covered in the material released today: “it seems 

to me that the fact I ended up with my head on my 

shoulders . . . is not the least achievement of my life.” 
9
1 0

As we marked the 50th anniversary of 

the Central Intelligence Agency in 1997, 

Richard Helms spoke of those who had 

gone before, those who had given so much of 

themselves to build and nourish a vital institution 

of government that itself has given so much to the 

treasured cause of freedom. 

“Each of us,” he said, “has his own heroes and 

heroines.” He was right. Here today, I join with you 

in this tribute to one of our greatest heroes. 

A life such as his, rich in years and richer still in 

honor and achievement, is not easily described. 

Over the many decades, in the decisions he made, 

in the actions he took, he infl uenced countless other 

lives—thousands, perhaps even millions—in ways 

both subtle and direct. 

At its best, that is what intelligence does in service to 

liberty. And, in Richard Helms, intelligence in service 

to liberty found an unsurpassed champion. 

As a young reporter for the United Press in the 

Germany of the 1930s, he saw at fi rst hand the 

menacing machinery of totalitarianism. In a few short 

years, though, he would go from the recording of 

history to the making of it. 

With his knowledge of Europe, his profi ciency in 

languages, and his gift for observation and analysis, 

he was a natural for the fl edgling intelligence service 

of a nation plunged suddenly into global war. 

And it was there that the military ultimately sent 

him, proving that the bureaucracy can get it right, 

sometimes anyway. 

Richard Helms did more than adjust to this new world 

of intelligence and espionage. He made it his own. 

In the ranks of the Offi ce of Strategic Services, a 

dazzling collection of talents thrown together for the 

country’s urgent defense, Richard Helms found the 

calling of his lifetime. 

In its Secret Intelligence Branch, he mastered the 

delicate, demanding craft of agent operations. He 

excelled at both the meticulous planning and the bold 

vision and action that were then—and remain today—

the heart of our work to obtain information critical to 

the security of the United States—information that 

can be gained only through stealth and courage. 

He came to know, as few others ever would, the 

value of a stolen secret, and the advantage that 

comes to our democracy from the fullest possible 

knowledge of those abroad determined to destroy it. 

In 1945, in the ruins of a fallen Berlin, amid the 

rubble of one confl ict just over, Richard Helms 

saw the stirrings of another just beginning: a Cold 

War, destined to be fought against a very different 

enemy in a very different way. Now, the open clash 

of arms would be replaced by a fi erce contest of 

wills and ideas. 

As a seasoned offi cer, he understood the key role 

that espionage would have to play in divining the 

strengths and weaknesses of the closed, predatory 

tyranny that was the Soviet Union. 

And so, he stayed with the profession in an 

America eager to enjoy the fruits of a hard-won 

peace. He stayed as our nation decided on the 

kind of intelligence service it would need as a new 

superpower in a new and dangerous atomic age. 

His faith, his patience, and his persistence were not 

in vain. 

by George Tenet

Former Director of The CIA

Eulogy
1 1

When our country found its answer in the Central 

Intelligence Agency, Richard Helms was ready. His 

career at CIA, now the stuff of legend, was a rise of 

profound skill and of strength of character to match. 

In an organization where risk and pressure are as 

common as a cup of coffee, he was unfl appable. 

In an organization where exceptional dedication and 

extraordinary hours are the norm, he was, in the 

words of an admiring colleague, “always there. 

When you had to get Mr. Helms, he was there.” 

In the Agency’s maze of rundown, temporary 

buildings down along the Refl ecting Pool, a place 

where, he fondly recalled, “we learned the difference 

between perspiration and sweat”—I can see him 

saying it—he was almost as famous for his disdain 

for the trappings of high offi ce as he was for his 

thorough success in it. 

His sound operational judgment, his complete 

command of the facts, his reputation as the best drafter 

of cables anywhere—and his modest black Plymouth, 

decrepit enough to be heard from a long way off—these 

are but a few images of Richard Helms. 

His focus—and his austerity—never left him. Nor, 

thankfully for all of us, did his sense of identifi cation 

with the mission he knew so well and with the men 

and women of CIA, whom he loved so much. 

In his nearly seven years as DCI, he set standards 

of leadership—and standards of excellence—that 

endure to this day. Though associated most closely 

with our Clandestine Service, which he had guided 

with tremendous insight, Richard Helms is for all of 

us the complete American intelligence offi cer. 

For he not only understood the complicated 

mechanics of his business, he understood both its 

possibilities and its limits. 

He saw intelligence for what it truly is: an essential 

service to the President of the United States. His 

goal, as he used to say, was to try to “keep the game 

honest”—to stick to the facts and their interpretation, 

to be an impartial voice, and to leave the policy 

decisions to others. 

He once remarked that “God did not give prescience 

to human beings.” And he recognized that perfection is 

impossible in a profession devoted to the complexities 

and unknowns of the world. In pursuit of the truth, he 

urged his offi cers to be bold and to take risks. He led 

from the front. 

He gave them the authority to do those things, while 

keeping for himself the one thing that no real leader 

can ever delegate: ultimate responsibility for the 

actions of the men and women he leads. 

These are some of the principles that Richard Helms 

stood for. And he stood for them not in times of quiet 

or ease, but in turbulent times—times of grueling war 

in Southeast Asia, of enormous tension and confl ict in 

the Middle East, and of Cold War everywhere. 

He was shaped by the 20th century, but he was 

not bound by it. For the values he embodied are 

timeless: love of country, dignity and discipline in its 

service, and a grace and elegance of style, paired 

with a restless desire not simply to know about the 

world, but to help change it for the better.

In his life of accomplishment, Richard Helms had a 

great advantage— the unfailing love and support of 

his wonderful wife, Cynthia. Her care, her affection 

added to his focus and his strength. 

Husband. Father. Patriot. Friend. Servant of liberty 

at the Central Intelligence Agency and far beyond. A 

lasting source of inspiration. A man who had reached 

the top of his fi eld, who had kept the company of 

presidents, kings, and prime ministers, but who—to 

the end of his life—made time to inspire young people 

establishing their own careers in intelligence. To them, 

and to so many others, he offered priceless counsel 

and encouragement. 

What others hoped to be, he was. 

He will be missed by many. But he will be 

remembered and revered by many more. Wherever 

American intelligence offi cers strive to defend and 

extend freedom, Richard Helms will be there. By 

word, by deed, by example, he taught them all. They 

are his legacy. They will be his memorial. 
1 2

I was fortunate and indeed privileged to have our 

paths cross. I could have had no fi ner mentor, no 

better teacher, no wiser friend. Whatever the problem, 

I knew he had faced it. Whatever the challenge, I knew 

he had met it. And I always knew he was in my corner. 

In the toughest of times, it was his voice on my 

answering machine, his notes in the mail, or the 

phone call where he would simply say keep your 

head up—get on with it—always get on with it, 

because there is so much at stake. 

His was the most valuable advice, the advice 

of experience. He was the voice of constant 

encouragement. 

I am going to miss the twinkle in his eyes, his 

signature smile, the great stories, knowing this giant 

of a man and talking to my friend. May God bless you 

always, Dick. May your memory be everlasting. 

George J. Tenet is a former Director of Central 

Intelligence. He delivered these remarks at the 

memorial service for former DCI Helms at the 

Fort Meyer Offi cers’ Club on 20 November 2002.
1 3
1 4

Richard Helms

Director of Central Intelligence, 

1966-1973

The Central Intelligence Agency, 

Allen Dulles once told Congress, 

“should be directed by a relatively 

small but elite corps of men with a passion 

for anonymity and a willingness to stick at 

that particular job.” Richard Helms, the eighth 

Director of Central Intelligence (1966-1973) 

who died in Washington on 23 October 2002 

at the age of 89, embodied those qualities. 

He was among the last of a dwindling group 

of trailblazers who dominated American 

intelligence for much of the Cold War. When 

Helms entered on duty with the new Agency 

55 years ago, he was one of a cohort of 

young veterans of clandestine warfare 

during World War II who chose to stay in 

the secret world to fi ght a new, and in many 

ways more formidable, enemy. Seemingly a 

natural at managing secret operations, Helms 

rose from desk offi cer to DCI and came to 

represent a newtype of government professional: 

the career intelligence offi cer, steeped in the culture 

of clandestinity and devoted to the Agency as an 

institution. Intelligence work, Helms would later say, 

was “not merely . . . a job, but rather . . . a calling.”

Formative Years

Born in 1913 into a family of means and international 

connections, Helms grew up in smart suburbs of 

Philadelphia and New York. One of his brothers 

described their youth as “conventional upper-middle 

class, well educated, well traveled, interested in good 

schools and sports, and with a social life centering 

around the country club.” Helms took part of his 

schooling at academies in Switzerland and Germany 

and became fl uent in French and German. In 1931 he 

entered Williams College and majored in literature and 

history. He became class president and head of the 

school paper, and was voted “most respected,” “best 

politician,” and “most likely to succeed.”

After graduating in 1935, Helms set out to be a 

journalist and newspaper owner, and by age 23 

was a European correspondent for United Press 

International. He advanced from writing obituaries 

of English celebrities to covering the 1936 Summer 

Olympics in Berlin—the so-called “Hitler Games”—

and interviewing the Führerjust after a chilling 

Nazi rally at Nuremberg. He returned to the United 

States the next year to learn the business side of 

newspapers, working up through the advertising ranks 

at the Indianapolis Times, a major Midwestern daily. 

Wartime with the OSS

In 1942, Helms joined the US Navy Reserve, received 

a commission as a lieutenant, and worked in the 

Eastern Sea Frontier headquarters in New York City, 

plotting the locations of German submarines in the 

by David S. Robarge

In Memory and Appreciation

The Intelligence Professional Personified

Editor’s Note: From 1997 to 2002, David 

Robarge worked as a research assistant for 

Richard Helms while the Ambassador was 

writing his memoirs, and also interviewed 

him extensively for other historical projects. 

In the course of those and many other 

professional and social contacts with the 

Ambassador and his family, the author came 

to regard Helms as a friend and counselor.
1 5

Atlantic Ocean. A former wire service colleague 

approached him about working for the new Offi ce of 

Strategic Services in its Morale Operations Branch, 

which produced “black” propaganda. In 1943, the 

Navy transferred Helms to OSS in Washington. He 

underwent the standard tradecraft training at a covert 

facility in suburban Maryland, which included hand-tohand combat instruction from the legendary English 

expert Col. William Fairbairn and an exercise in 

infi ltrating and “spying” on a local defense contractor. 

On fi nishing OSS “boot camp,” Helms began what 

he would spend most of his intelligence career doing: 

planning and directing espionage operations from 

an offi ce in Washington. In this case, the target was 

Germany, and the agents were run out of Central 

Europe and Scandinavia. Early in 1945, Helms got 

his fi rst overseas assignment, in the London offi ce of 

OSS’s espionage branch. Working under (and sharing 

a Grosvenor Street fl at with) William Casey, Helms 

organized infi ltrations of agents behind German lines 

to spy and set up resistance networks. Late in the 

war he was “forward deployed” to Paris. Then, after 

V-E Day, he moved on to Luxembourg and Germany, 

where he was made deputy chief of the espionage 

element in Wiesbaden. In August 1945, he was 

transferred to a similar job in Berlin under Allen Dulles. 

From there he tracked down Nazi sympathizers and 

war criminals, collected information on stolen goods, 

traced German scientists, and monitored Soviet 

military misdeeds.

A Life’s Work

After President Truman abolished OSS in late 

1945, Helms moved into the Berlin offi ce of the 

Strategic Services Unit, a carryover operational 

organization warehoused in the War Department. In 

December he came back to Washington (for good, 

as it turned out) to run the Central Europe branch 

of the short-lived Central Intelligence Group. In late 

1947, he took a similar position in the new CIA’s 

Offi ce of Special Operations. After the Directorate 

of Plans was created in 1952, Helms served as 

chief of operations (the number two job) for eight 

years, largely running the directorate as DDP Frank 

Wisner’s health deteriorated. Besides overseeing 

espionage operations during those years, Helms 

smoothed relations between competing factions in 

the directorate—the spy handlers and the covert 

operators represented different cultures and often 

worked at cross purposes—and helped protect the 

Agency from Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s efforts to seed 

it with informants.

Probably Helms’s greatest personal disappointment 

through this phase of his career was not being 

chosen to replace Wisner as DDP in 1958. If Helms 

had been selected, rather than Richard Bissell, he 

might have kept the Agency from committing its 

biggest blunder to date, the Bay of Pigs operation. 

Although the Eisenhower Administration almost 

certainly would have ordered the CIA to do 

something to remove Fidel Castro from power, 

Helms probably would not have approved a project 

anywhere near as large and unwieldy as the one 

Bissell backed. Without that covert action disaster 

on his record, Allen Dulles most likely would have 

fi nished his directorship quietly in a year or two and 

turned over a respected, even popular, Agency to 

his successor—assumed by many at the time to be 

Richard Helms.

As it turned out, Helms’s eventual selection as 

DDP in 1962 under John McCone—the DCI who 

had replaced Allen Dulles the year before—proved 

important symbolically and substantively. It quieted 

many of the rumblings from Clandestine Service 

careerists after Bissell’s and Dulles’s ouster, and 

allayed their fears that McCone, a shipping and 

construction tycoon, was bent on running the Agency 

like a big business. Helms’s promotion also signaled 

a shift in emphasis from covert action to espionage—

a reorientation with which he wholeheartedly agreed.

During the bitter peace of the Cold War, when nuclear 

superpowers and their proxies faced off in hot spots 

all over the globe, Helms and his CIA colleagues had 

to be, in columnist George Will’s words, “resourceful, 

tough-minded people” who “were not too squeamish 

to do hard things.” Wherever CIA operatives were—

behind the Iron Curtain, in Third World cities, or out in 

the jungle or desert—“[e]spionage is not played by the 

Marquess of Queensberry rules,” Helms noted, “and 

the only sin in espionage is getting caught.” Secret 

intelligence work demands a special character in its 

practitioners, who must be able to bear the bleak 

reality that they “have only each other on whom to 
1 6

to the fact that intelligence is inherently political in 

that it exists in a policy environment and sometimes 

tips the balance in favor of one decision or another. 

In that way, analysis can never be truly “objective” 

because the policymaking community will use it 

to justify or sidetrack initiatives. At the same time, 

Helms believed that fi nished intelligence should not 

be politicized—skewed to support a particular course 

of action or an ideological or departmental viewpoint. 

Instead, it should refl ect the honest appraisal of 

all available evidence, evaluated by fair-minded 

observers—in some ways like the journalism he once 

practiced. “Objectivity puts me on familiar ground as 

an old wire service hand,” Helms remarked to a group 

of newspaper editors in 1971, “but it is even more 

important to an intelligence organization serving the 

policymaker. Without objectivity, there is no credibility, 

and an intelligence organization without credibility is 

of little use to those it serves.” 

Never wear two hats. Perhaps the best way for 

a DCI to avoid the politicization mire, according 

to Helms, was to stick to the facts and stay out of 

policy debates. Unless explicitly requested, Helms 

avoided offering advice that would tie the CIA 

even indirectly to a policy outcome. Otherwise, the 

Agency’s most valuable commodity—its reputation 

as a source of independent, unbiased information 

and analysis—would be devalued, and the CIA 

would become just another voice in the chorus of 

policy advocates. According to Henry Kissinger, 

Helms “never volunteered policy advice beyond 

the questions that were asked him, though never 

hesitating to warn the White House of dangers even 

when his views ran counter to the preconceptions 

of the President or of his security adviser. He stood 

his ground where lesser men might have resorted to 

ambiguity.” Helms recalled that at meetings in the 

Johnson White House, “[t]he other people present 

had to be a little careful about the way they pushed 

their individual causes . . . because they knew very 

well that I probably had the facts fairly straight and 

wouldn’t hesitate to speak up.” To him, that was the 

best way a DCI could serve a president.

Stay at the table. Helms thought that CIA offi cers 

sometimes forget that they work for a “service 

organization”—that the product they provide must 

be relevant, timely, and cogent to be of value to their 

customers. If the Agency prepares analyses that are 

lean. Those on the outside either don’t know them or 

don’t like them. Those above them seek their loyalty, 

their competence, but hasten to distance themselves 

when something goes wrong.” 

After McCone resigned in 1965 and was replaced 

by Adm. William Raborn, President Lyndon Johnson 

appointed Helms DDCI to give him more Washington 

seasoning before elevating him to the top job. When 

that occurred a year later, LBJ handled it in his 

inimitable way by announcing it at a press conference 

without asking Helms fi rst; the DCI-designate heard 

about the fait accompli from an administration offi cial 

only a short time before the President told the media.

Helms’s Credo

Throughout his career, and especially as DCI, Helms 

hewed to several basic principles of intelligence 

activity. He expressed most of them in catch phrases, 

which he used often.

Focus on the core missions: collecting and 

analyzing foreign intelligence. Helms believed 

that the CIA is best at acquiring secrets and telling 

policymakers what they mean, but that covert 

action in peacetime can cause the Agency no end 

of trouble. Espionage and analysis inform policy, but 

CA programs too often become substitutes for it. 

Operations intended to be plausibly deniable usually 

end up as neither, and the Agency gets blamed for 

the unintended consequences. Having seen how 

covert action failures tarnished the CIA’s image 

during its supposed “golden age” under Dulles, 

Helms was determined to prevent similar fl aps when 

he was DCI. As far as collection methods were 

concerned, Helms duly appreciated the contribution 

of technical means, but he insisted that satellites and 

sensors would never replace spies as the best way 

to learn about an adversary’s intentions. Although a 

fan, he disliked the term HUMINT, remarking that “it 

sounds much too much like a type of fertilizer.” He 

was quoted as saying: “Classical espionage has been 

termed the second oldest profession, and I want to 

predict that it will no more go out of business in the 

future than the fi rst . . . ” 

Keep the game honest. Helms thought that the 

purpose of fi nished intelligence was to inform but 

not second-guess policy decisions. He was sensitive 
1 7

out of date by the time they are received, deal with 

topics that policymakers are not following, or are 

crafted in ways that do not resonate with consumers, 

the CIA will lose its audience. On the operations side, 

Helms acted from the presumption that presidents 

are going to get done what they want done, whether 

the DCI or the Agency likes the idea or not. A naysaying CIA will fi nd itself left out of discussions 

about activities that it may be able to do better than 

anyone else. The Agency, Helms said, “is part of 

the President’s bag of tools . . . and if he and proper 

authorities have decided that something has to be 

done, then the Agency is bound to try to do it.” The 

alternative is irrelevance.

Serve only one President at a time. Henry Kissinger 

has observed that Helms “never forgot . . . that his 

best weapon with Presidents was a reputation for 

reliability.” Any DCI, Helms believed, must adapt 

to the Chief Executive he works for and has to 

suppress political or other differences that may arise 

when a new occupant enters the Oval Offi ce. Living 

through the changes from John Kennedy (whom 

he often observed while DDP) to Lyndon Johnson 

to Richard Nixon, Helms saw that Presidents have 

their own appreciation of intelligence and their 

own way of dealing with the CIA. They may be 

fascinated with certain kinds of secret information 

or types of clandestineactivity, or they may not be 

interested in intelligence at all. A DCI who does not 

learn to live with those differences, or who tries to 

oversell the Agency or obstruct policy, will soon 

fi nd himself disinvited from the Oval Offi ce—which 

Helms watched happen with McCone and Johnson. 

“We would have a very strange government,” 

Helms remarked in retirement, “if everybody with an 

independent view of foreign policy decided he was 

free to take or not take the President’s instruction 

according to his own likes and beliefs.” 

Make intelligence a profession, not just an 

occupation. Helms had little time for offi cers who 

joined the CIA for any reason other than to serve 

their country by making intelligence their career. 

There was a big difference between that and being a 

careerist, however. With his characteristic bluntness, 

Helms warned a new class of trainees in 1960 that 

“[f]iguring out where you’ll be fi ve years from now is 

a feckless exercise.”

If you’re already concerned about promotions 

and perquisites, you are wasting your time and 

ours. You’re either getting a kick out of your 

organization, or not. If you are not . . . you 

would be better off outside . . . 

You are the agency, its future. It will be as good 

or as bad as you are. No genius in command will 

ever change that fact . . . But you are not God’s 

gift to the CIA and you have not been sent here to 

rearrange it . . . 

Committing one’s life to the profession of intelligence 

often exacted a high price, but as Helms told an 

assembly of Agency employees in 1996: “An alert 

Intelligence Community is our fi rst, best line of 

defense. Service there is its own reward.” 

Helms’s Style

Urbane, cool, shrewd, sure-footed, tight-lipped, 

controlled, discreet—such adjectives appear 

frequently in colleagues’ and friends’ recollections of 

Helms. On the job, he was serious and demanding. An 

effi cient worker and delegator, he left his desk clear at 

the end of the day (almost always before 7:00), feeling 

assured that the trustworthy subordinates he had 

carefully chosen could pick up the details and handle 

any problems. According to a colleague, “Helms 

was a fellow who by and large gave the people who 

worked with him his confi dence . . . his instinct was to 

trust them . . . .” 

Sometimes, however, Helms’s hands-off style and 

deference to deputies worked against him. In the 

area of covert action, for example, more “proactive” 

management on his part might have averted the nearcollapse of the CIA’s political action capabilities after 

the Agency’s network of international organizations, 

propaganda outlets, proprietaries, foundations, and 

trusts was exposed in Ramparts magazine in 1967. 

Similarly, in the area of counterintelligence, Helms 

accorded the chief of the CI Staff, James Angleton, 

much leeway in vetting assets, dealing with defectors 

and suspected double agents, and searching for 

“moles” inside the Agency—despite the costs of 

disrupting legitimate operations and tarnishing 

offi cers’ careers.
1 8

Helms’s offi ce-hours rapport with most associates 

was cordial and proper; he was not a feet-on-thedesk yarn spinner like Dulles. John Gannon, a friend 

and former chairman of the National Intelligence 

Council, described him as “a man you had to work to 

get to know. He had a certain reserve about him . . . 

[b]ut if you cut through that and got to know Dick[,] 

he was an extremely warm man with a really great 

capacity for friendship.” 

Also unlike Dulles, Helms did not cultivate a public 

persona. Reserved, unostentatious, and selfeffacing—in the term of the day, a “gray fl annel suit” 

executive (but much better dressed than that)—he 

gave only one speech to a nongovernmental audience 

as DCI. He nonetheless made himself known in quiet 

ways to those outsiders he judged needed to know 

him, such as certain members of Congress and the 

media, whom he met at briefi ngs and lunches.

In contrast to John McCone—the archetypical 

“Type A” executive—Helms did not come to the 

directorship with a “vision” or try to remake the 

Agency in his image. He did not have any ideas 

formed from outside experience about how the CIA 

ought to be run. As a career insider, he knew how 

it was run, and he was inclined, by temperament 

and judgment, to leave it alone. In Thomas Powers’s 

apt description, Helms’s “instinct was to soften 

differences, to fi nd a middle ground, to tone down 

operations that were getting out of hand, to give 

faltering projects one more chance rather than shut 

them down altogether, to settle for compromise in 

the interests of bureaucratic peace.” A colleague 

similarly recalled that “the question he would tend 

to ask himself on an issue was: ‘Is there something 

about this that is going to make it diffi cult for me? Is 

it going to trigger political reactions that are going 

to be unpleasant?’” Helms was a skilled infi ghter 

who knew when to step away from trouble, and he 

thought that most interdepartmental skirmishing over 

turf and prestige—particularly with the Pentagon—

was pointless and self-defeating. After all, he 

observed, the Secretary of Defense was the second 

most powerful offi cial in Washington, but “I am the 

easiest man in Washington to fi re. I have no political, 

military or industrial base.” 

Off the job, Helms was a charming conversationalist, a 

wry wit, a convivial partygoer, and a profi cient dancer. 

He always returned from social events at a reasonable 

hour, his wife Cynthia once remarked, because 

“[h]e’s got to be in a fi t state to make a decision; it’s 

always a crisis.” While at home, Helms relaxed by 

playing tennis, gardening, and reading. Although 

not a devotee of espionage fi ction like Dulles, he 

enjoyed the occasional spy novel—except for John 

le Carré’s. According to his son, he “detested” The 

Spy Who Came In From the Cold, with its portrayal of 

intelligence work as steeped in cynicism, defeatism, 

and betrayal, and its unconcealed suggestion that, at 

least in the espionage “game,” East and West were 

morally equivalent. To Helms, the differences between 

the Free World and the Communist World were stark 

and incontrovertible, and intelligence organizations 

could not attract worthy offi cers, let alone survive, 

unless they were founded on trust and loyalty.

A Tempestuous Tenure 

Helms spent much of his nearly seven years as 

DCI—the second longest tenure of any director—

trying to defend the Agency from political attack and 

preserve its infl uence as the Vietnam war fractured 

the Cold War consensus on foreign policy and a 

resurgent Congress asserted itself against “imperial 

presidents.” In that contentious environment, he 

served under two presidents—Lyndon Johnson and 

Richard Nixon—who neither trusted nor heeded 

the CIA. He secured a coveted seat at Johnson’s 

“Tuesday Lunches” after the Agency called the 1967 

Arab-Israeli war correctly, but he never was close to 

the Chief Executive who picked him as DCI. In the 

Nixon administration, besides the President’s political 

and social resentments toward the CIA, Helms also 

had to joust with an ambitious and secretive national 

security adviser, Henry Kissinger, who insisted on 

being the President’s senior intelligence offi cer. 

Throughout, Helms worked from the premise that the 

Agency’s survival depended on his ability to preserve 

its part in informing the policy process. “Dick Helms 

was a survivor and was in for the long haul,” a 

colleague remembered. “His aim was to protect the 

long-term interests of the Agency.” 

As DCI, Helms was generally successful at “keeping 

in the game” but often found that hard to balance 

with “keeping the game honest.” Some Agency 

colleagues thought that he compromised the 

objectivity he lauded to maintain access downtown. 
1 9

They accused him of politicizing estimates by 

removing judgments that the Pentagon disagreed 

with, as in the cases of assessments of the enemy 

order of battle in Vietnam and the Soviets’ SS9 missile. Helms responded that he was treating 

intelligence politically, demonstrating his concern for 

the policy implications of “objective” analysis. To him, 

the coordination process was unavoidably political; 

everyone involved had to engage in bureaucratic 

give and take. Moreover, all sides had to accept 

that they frequently would have reasonable and 

defensible differences of opinion over the meaning of 

ambiguous information, especially when forecasting 

likely outcomes—“God did not give man the gift 

of prescience,” he observed. When CIA analysts 

produced assessments on aspects of the Vietnam 

war that suggested that US policy was not working 

but that did not have to be coordinated with other 

agencies—for example, studies of the ineffectiveness 

of the Rolling Thunder bombing campaign against 

North Vietnam, the communists’ will to persist, and 

fl aws in the Domino Theory that posited the almost 

inevitable spread of communism—Helms did not try 

to alter their conclusions or limit their distribution.

In 1968, Helms weathered two major intelligence 

failures. Headquarters analysts played down fi eld 

reports about a major communist military operation in 

Vietnam and did not issue warnings about the longprepared wave of attacks that became the infamous 

Tet offensive until a few days before they began. That 

same year, the CIA gave no warning of the Soviet 

invasion of Czechoslovakia because it had next 

to no intelligence about the military buildup on the 

Czech border. Two years later, Helms felt the fallout 

from a dispute with the military over the size of North 

Vietnamese arms shipments into the Cambodian port 

of Sihanoukville. Information from a newly recruited 

source in the Cambodian port showed that the 

Agency’s estimates were wrong and the military’s 

were more accurate. Afterward, whenever the CIA 

disagreed with the Pentagon, the White House would 

ask Helms: “What about Sihanoukville?”

On at least two occasions, Helms was accused 

of being too subservient to the White House: fi rst, 

for allowing the CIA to spy on American antiwar 

protesters—whom Johnson and Nixon believed were 

receiving foreign support—and, second, for letting the 

Agency supply equipment to the “Plumbers” in their 

attempts to stop critics of Administration policy from 

“leaking” national security information to the media. 

Helms said that although some aspects of the fi rst 

operation “went too far,” he believed that refusing 

that presidential order was pointless; he would have 

been fi red and the assignment given to someone else 

to carry out, perhaps with unhealthy zeal. “I’ve known 

him not to want some of these things done,” a former 

operations colleague said, “but if they have to be 

done, he’d rather have them done within the CIA.” 

The Unraveling

During his later years at the CIA, Helms witnessed the 

Agency and the whole enterprise of intelligence fall 

into disrepute as Congress and the public subjected 

US foreign policy to unprecedented criticism. Helms 

took the occasion of his only public speech as DCI 

to affi rm that “the nation must to a degree take it 

on faith that we too are honorable men devoted 

to her service.” By the end of his directorship, 

however, years of political protest, social upheaval, 

and revelations of government incompetence and 

wrongdoing had depleted much of that faith. Helms 

became a (not entirely blameless) casualty of that 

rapid and sweeping change in the American people’s 

sense of what their government should and should 

not do. He had once said that Americans “want an 

effective, strong intelligence operation. They just 

don’t want to hear too much about it.” But now 

prominent voices demanded of the CIA far more 

accountability than Helms was used to or thought 

appropriate. As he wrote in this journal in 1967:

. . . it is sometimes difficult for us to understand 

the intensity of our public critics. Criticism 

of our efficiency is one thing, criticism of our 

responsibility quite another. I believe that we are 

. . . a legitimate object of public concern . . . I find 

it painful, however, when public debate lessens 

our usefulness to the nation by casting doubt 

on our integrity and objectivity. If we are not 

believed, we have no purpose . . . 

Helms declined a presidential request to submit his 

resignation after the 1972 elections, not wanting to 

set a precedent that he thought would politicize the 

position of DCI. After he was forced out in 1973— he 

believed that Nixon was mad at him for refusing 

to use the CIA in the Watergate cover up—Helms 
2 0

spent several years coping with controversies 

ensuing in part from some of his acts of omission 

and commission while at the Agency. He became a 

lightning rod for criticism of the CIA during its “time of 

troubles” in the mid-1970s. He was called back many 

times from his ambassadorial post in Tehran to testify 

before investigatory bodies about assassination plots, 

domestic operations, drug testing, the destruction of 

records, and other activities of dubious legality and 

ethicality known collectively as the “Family Jewels.” 

He responded to inquiries about them cautiously, 

sometimes testily, as he tried to walk the increasingly 

fuzzy line between discretion and disclosure.

Helms ran into legal troubles resulting from his 

judgment about when and when not to reveal secrets. 

Testifying before the Senate Foreign Relations 

Committee just after leaving the Agency, he denied 

that the CIA had tried to infl uence the outcome of 

the Chilean presidential election in 1970. Helms 

described his quandary this way: “If I was to live 

up to my oath and fulfi ll my statutory responsibility 

to protect intelligence sources and methods from 

unauthorized disclosure, I could not reveal covert 

operations to people unauthorized to learn about 

them.” He eventually pleaded no contest to charges 

of not testifying “fully, completely and accurately” to 

the committee. His statement to the federal judge 

who was about to sentence him, although addressed 

to the immediate situation, could also summarize 

nearly his whole experience as DCI: “I was simply 

trying to fi nd my way through a diffi cult situation in 

which I found myself.” 

Restoration

After resolving his legal affairs, Helms embarked 

on a second career as an international consultant 

on trade and other matters. He named his fi rm the 

Safeer Company (safeer means “ambassador” 

in Farsi) and once again became a fi xture on the 

Washington scene. In the late 1970s, Helms was 

one of the CIA’s staunchest public defenders. He 

complained that Congress was naively weakening 

the Agency and warned that “This is a time when our 

intelligence can’t possibly be too good and when we 

can’t have enough of it.” He also criticized the Carter 

Administration for emphasizing human rights instead 

of Cold War enemies—“We ought to keep quiet and 

go to work where it matters,” he said. In 1978, he lent 

his support to oft-maligned offi cers:

A professional intelligence service is essential 

to our survival, [b]ut too often [CIA officers] 

are reviled and cast as second-class citizens. If 

this is the way the public wants to deal with 

its intelligence professionals, then we ought to 

disband the Agency and go back to the way we 

were before World War II. Otherwise, it is up to 

the citizens of this country, the Congress and the 

President, to support these people . . . 

In the different atmospherics of the 1980s and 

1990s, political leaders and intelligence professionals 

regarded Helms as an éminence grise and sought 

his counsel on a range of foreign policy issues. He 

received the National Security Medal from President 

Reagan in 1983 and considered the award “an 

exoneration.” Early in his administration, President 

Bill Clinton asked Helms how the US government 

could best protect the country against terrorism 

and weapons of mass destruction. His advice was 

simple and direct: “Strengthen the CIA and the FBI 

and see to it that they stay on top of their jobs.” In 

recognition of his decades of contributions to the 

craft of espionage, DCI George Tenet recently named 

an Agency training center and an instructional chair 

after him. 

To the end, Richard Helms was “at the table.” He 

remained privately engaged in public affairs for so 

many years after leaving Langley that it is easy to 

forget how long ago he entered the secret world 

and how far he traveled within it. His forthcoming 

memoir, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the CIA, 

will enable us to accompany him on that fascinating 

journey. When it is over, we will better understand 

the man who declared, at the depths of the Agency’s 

travail in the mid-1970s, “I was and remain proud 

of my work there . . . I believed in the importance to 

the nation of the function that the Agency served. 

I still do: without regrets, without qualms, without 

apology.” If he could speak to us now, he would say 

the same—and probably add, “Let’s get on with it.”

Note: footnotes in copy on DVD
2 1
2 2

Congressional Relations

I don’t know Dick, I thought that you might try to begin by—just give you some 

structure to work around—you might talk about what the system was in your relation 

to the Congress as you understood it and how it worked, the frequency with which you 

met with these people, the membership of the groups you talked with. 

I certainly don’t, Jack; want to get into any statistics because I assume those are 

available from the records of the Congressional Liaison Offi ce. Besides whatever 

I said would be affected by the accuracy of my memory in any given situation. 

What I do want to discuss and to underline is the fact that despite the problems of 

Congressional relations for the Agency, the Agency had a record over the years of 

being very forthcoming with the Congressional Committees to which it was supposed 

to report. In the Senate, it was a sub-committee of the Armed Services Committee and 

Appropriations; in the House, it was a sub-committee of the House Armed Services 

Committee and, of course, the House Appropriations. Over time, in the Senate, this 

composition of the sub-committee, to which the Agency was to report, changed. 

In the days of Senator Richard Russell, he set-up a small sub-committee to which 

he brought Senator Hayden, who in those days was the chairman of Appropriations, 

‘ so that whether we had a hearing on policy or covert action or something of this 

kind, or whether it was a hearing on the budget, the same group of senators—and 

it was a small group—did the work with Russell in the chair and, in agreement with 

Hayde, Hayden present, and then the normally Margaret Chase-Smith, who was the 

senior Republican at the time, or Senator Saltonstall, who was the senior Republican 

at another time. In any event it was by-partisan, but small, discreet, and very secure. 

In the House, the chairman of the Hose Armed Services Committee inevitably or 

invariably chaired the sub-committee. Whether it was back in the days of Carl Vinson 

or whether it was later in the days of Mendel Rivers, they maintained a secure hold on 

Agency affairs and had a larger group than in the Senate but nevertheless a tidy group 

of secure Congressmen who took care of the Agency’s affairs. 

Now as far as the Appropriations sub-committee was concerned, by the time I really 

had a thorough knowledge of these matters, George Mahon, of Texas, had taken over 

as Chairman of Appropriations. He was most interested in keeping private the Agency’s 

affairs so he had a small sub-committee that met in a secure basement room of the 

Capitol, met secretly; he had on that the Senior Democrat on Appropriations, whoever 

it might have been at the time, and also the senior Republican on Appropriations, 

whoever that might have been at the time. So that usually it was a committee 

composed of fi ve people, three Democrats and two Republicans. In this fashion, the 

Agency, laid before the House Appropriations sub-committee in detail, dollar for dollar, 

its budget every year. There was nothing held back from the Mahon sub-committee. 

Since according to the Constitution, money bills all originate in the House, this is the 

Jack Smith

Richard Helms

by R. Jack Smith

Transcripts from, 3 June 1982, Interview

In His Own Words
2 3

place where, obviously one has to make one’s case. So that articles in newspapers 

and allegations to the contrary not withstanding, the Agency had an unexceptionable 

record of laying out every dollar of its expenditures, what it was for, where it went, 

whether it was covert action, secret intelligence, counter-intelligence, airplanes, 

satellites, whatever it was, that sub-committee got the material. 

Now let us get off to one of the problems the Agency ran into, certainly during my time, 

I don’t know if It was the case so much before but it still will be recalled that the fi rst 

sort of unzipping of covert operations that the Agency was involved in arose in 1967, I 

believe, with the revelation that the National Student Association had been fi nanced in 

its overseas operations by the CIA. .This caused, obviously, a good deal of checking 

into various other organizations that the CIA had been supporting. There were a certain 

number of revelations that took place at the time. Nevertheless, the fact that Senator 

Russell spoke up publicly and said that he had known about the Agency’s support of 

the National Student Association, followed by a public statement by Robert Kennedy 

that he had also known about this and had approved it, turned off the fi re storm which 

was about to begin over this. So things rather settled down again but never to be 

precisely the same. 

When Senator Russell passed on and Senator Stennis took over as Chairman of 

the Armed Services Committee, he did not want to appoint Senator Symington as 

Chairman of the Preparedness Sub-committee of Senate Armed Services. This was 

obviously a personal dislike, or distaste, or something between Senator Stennis and 

Senator Symington. They referred to each other in private in most unfl attering language 

and since Senator Stennis did not want to give Senator Symington this particular post, 

Senator Symington who was also on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, went 

to Senator Fulbright and got himself a kind-of investigative sub-committee so that 

he was .not able to do under the aegis of Armed Services. Also since Symington was 

quite senior, Stennis did not like to have hearings of the Agency sub-committee simply 

because of this squabble between these two men. The net result of it was that we had 

comparatively few hearings under Senator Stennis’ aegis. Despite pleadings and “can’t 

we have a hearing” and “we’d like to check some things out” and so forth, Senator 

Stennis was quite reluctant to do this. On two or three occasions Senator Jackson told 

me that he had attempted to get Senator Stennis to permit him to set-up a small 

sub-committee of Armed Services In an effort to have more regular hearings and give 

more guidance and help to the Agency, but Senator Stennis simply declined to do 

this. This obviously reacted unfavorably for the Agency because when the allegation 

was made that there had not been many briefi ngs the allegation in effect was true. 

Also despite all those who say, “Well, you shouldn’t talk about secret matters with 

Congressional committees” and all the pomposity that follows this, in our kind of 

democracy a Director of Central Intelligence does need guidance from time to time 

from the people in the Congress as to how far he may go in certain kinds of activity. 

At least he would like to have some advice. When this is not available through regular 

hearings it makes it slightly diffi cult for him. In fact, it makes it very lonely indeed. Not 

that I was unwilling to take on the onus of the responsibility or any of the rest of it. It 

was simply that I thought that a better system of relationships between the Agency and 

the Congress should have been arranged. I would hope that now. That there is a select 

committee in the Senate and a Select Committee in the House that this would all work 

much more satisfactorily, because it is obviously preferable, in my opinion, to have 

consultation between Congress and the Agency and not to have any law or legislation 

or statute which guides or hems in the Agency’s activities. 
2 4

One day, I believe it was in 1967; it might have been in 1968, President Johnson 

suddenly told me that he was not going to include the budget funds for Radio Free 

Europe and Radio Liberty. I was stunned by this decision and asked him why it was that 

he was not willing to support what we thought were very effective organizations. Who 

had got to him I never did fi nd out but he was quite adamant about this. So, a serious 

dispute erupted between us, the end of which was that he said, “All right, I’m just not 

going to support you on this. If you can go down to the Congress and get the money, 

you can have the money. But I’m not going to support you, and when you go down 

there to talk about this I want you to tell them that I’m not supporting you.” I was a bit 

wistful under these circumstances because after all money for the Executive Branch 

has the support and advocacy of the President. In any event, those were the days 

when the Congress still had powerful chairmen. By visiting the Chairman of the House 

Appropriations Committee, Mr. Mahon and the Senate Appropriations Committee 

chairman whose identity at the–moment I’ve forgotten, the senior Republican on 

Appropriations in the House and the senior Republican on Appropriations in the Senate 

I fi nally came back with the money to continue Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty for 

another year. I mention this because I don’t know what the record in the Agency shows, 

but I thought it was an interesting example of the support that one could get in the 

Congress from time to time for things in which they believed. 

You’ve underlined what I’ve always felt which was that you had a special relationship 

with Dick Russell. 

Well, I wouldn’t call it a special relationship. He felt responsible for the Agency. I was 

its Director. He was a very straight-forward individual, and therefore he wanted to be 

helpful. He was always available and I fi nd him an extraordinary fellow. . 

You could go to him anytime for guidance or counsel. 

That’s right. 

Dick, the system as you describe it, was exactly as I understand it, which is that the 

leadership of the Congress determined, in effect, for the Congress who was going to 

be privy to CLA briefi ngs. 

That’s correct. In fact, Jack, I remember on one occasion going to Senator Russell and 

suggesting that perhaps in order to get wider support in the Senate for the Agency and 

its affairs that I should maybe brief certain other Senators about what we were doing 

and so forth. Senator Russell was absolutely opposed to this. He looked me right in 

the eye and his eye got a little bit glinty. He said, “If you feel any necessity to go around 

and talk to other Senators about the Agency’s business I certainly can’t stop you Mr. 

Director. But I’ll tell you this; I will withdraw my hand and my support from your affairs.” 

No question about it, the system eventually broke down. Now did it start to show 

cracks during your regime? 

Yes, the cracks weren’t bad but Senator Stennis was no Senator Russell. He had 

no where near the swat and standing in the Senate that Senator Russell did. There 

were few Senators who wanted to attack Senator Russell. Whereas in 1975, you will 

recall, when this big push for hearings on the Agency took place, the other Senators 

stampeded Senator Stennis right into the ground. They just rode over him. Whereas 

they never would have been able to do that with Russell, he would have found some 

way out of this. That made all the difference. 

Jack Smith

Richard Helms

Jack Smith

Richard Helms

Jack Smith

Richard Helms

Jack Smith

Richard Helms
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Was Mahon his counterpart in the House—would you say? 

No, I think that Mahon was never a tiger when it came to defending the Agency. Be 

was just careful about its affairs and never allowed anything to leak. As a matter of fact, 

let me just say for the record, that my experiences with the Senators and Congressmen 

with whom I dealt in all the years I was with the Agency was a very good experience 

except for a couple of quixotic examples which are not important. There were no 

leaks from the Congress of which I was aware, and they were perfectly secure in their 

dealings on Agency affairs.

 I seem to have a recollection that one time some Congressmen wanted to be briefed in 

detail on some ‘program or other and you raised the question with Mahon, and Mahon 

said send him to me and I’ll talk to him. Does that jibe with your under- standing? 

Well I think that that story is somewhat accurate but not entirely. I believe that this 

has to do with a request from Senator Proxmire that I was to testify before the Joint 

Economic Committee of which he was the Chairman. I didn’t think that this was 

something that Senator Russell wanted me to do. So I went to see Senator Russell. 

He said, “No, I don’t want you to go up there for the Agency testifying about things like 

that. I want you to go back to Senator Proxmire. Just say you’ve discussed this with me 

and that I would prefer that you -didn’t do it and that if he has any continuing problems 

would he please give me a call.” That was the end of the matter. When I told Senator 

Proxmire this he just sort of waved his hands and that was the end of the discussion. 

Now that also had an event prior which was, as you will recall, that John McCone when 

he was Director asked Ray Cline to hold a press conference about a piece which had 

been written in the Agency about the Soviet Economy. It so happened that a day or two 

after that press conference I happened to accompany John McCone to a hearing at 

the Senate Armed Services Committee. Before the committee hearing began, Senator 

Russell came in and he really went to town on John McCone. He had John McCone 

fl ushed red. He said, “If you ever do this again, if you ever go public in this manner on 

things of this kind again, I simply am not going to support the Agency in its works or 

its budget or anything else. You leave those matters to the State Department or the 

Commerce Department, or the recognized agencies of Government that are supposed 

to testify before this body on matters of economics or politics or whatever the case 

may be. The Agency must stay in the back- ground. I just want to tell you this is my 

warning to you about this.” I’ve rarely seen John McCone so put down in my life. But 

the message rang loud and clear that as long as Russell was there this was not to be. 

Working for the President

By-and-large, my relationship with (President Johnson) was excellent. He didn’t 

badger me; I was well treated by him. My impression was that a button labeled 

“Covert Operations” was not on his organ. He was quite willing to be involved in 

them, he would approve suggestions brought to him, but usually they had to originate 

somewhere else in contradistinction to Presidents Kennedy and Nixon who really 

thought frequently in covert action terms. But the net of it all was that I felt very well 

treated by President Johnson. I had none of the complaints about him that some of the 

people did, that he was rough and unreasonable and so forth. I felt that he had a regard 

for the Agency, was respectful of its work, and the relationship had been a good one. 

Jack Smith

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Jack Smith

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Each President has to be dealt with by a Director according to his personality and 

according to his way of doing business. To have a board or a commission say that the 

Director’s relationship with the President should b X, Y, or Z, is absolutely worthless. 

It’s a waste of time. I have seen important men in the United States sit there and nod 

their heads and say the President should see this Director every hour on the hour or 

every other day or some dam thing like this. There is no way that these things can 

be legislated or controlled. Every President is going to do his business the way he 

wants to do it. You say, well, he should discipline himself but they never do. They do 

it exactly the way they want to do it. Even if you convince them that they ought to do 

it differently, they’ll never do it for more than twice differently, and then they go back 

to the way they wanted to do it before. Now President Johnson was much better at 

reading documents. The way to get his attention was to present a well-reasoned, wellwritten piece of paper. With President Nixon, it was very much the same. He took it in 

better through the eye. The question was getting the documents, the relevant ones, 

on Johnson’s desk and on Nixon’s desk. Talking to them about or briefi ng them was 

not the way to get their attention or the way to persuade them about anything. With 

President Johnson, when I would brief at National Security Council meetings from time 

to time, I fi nally came to the conclusion that what I had to say I should get into the 

fi rst 60 seconds, or at best 120 seconds, that I had on my feet, because after that he 

was pushing buttons for coffee or Fresca or talking to Rusk or talking to McNamara or 

whispering here or whispering there. I had lost my principal audience. 

With Nixon, it was very much the same way. He liked longer briefi ngs, he would sit 

there for longer briefi ngs, but after the fi rst fi ve minutes his mind too would start to 

wander unless something came up that he was particularly interested in, so one has 

to adjust to these things. The notion that a Director should constantly see and be 

in the presence of the President is not necessarily true. In other words, it does not 

necessarily make him more effective. As a matter of fact, he can become an irritant. 

It’s one of these things that fi nished John McCone with Lyndon Johnson. McCone 

started briefi ng him eve ay once he became President after President Kennedy’s 

assassination, and I know exactly what happened. Johnson fi nally got bored, closed 

the door and that was the end of that. He just didn’t want to do it any more. You 

couldn’t make him do it anymore. This one-on-me, that people hold to be so important 

who live in academia, does not necessarily achieve your objective. You either adjust 

your production to the man you have in the offi ce or you’re going to miss the train. 

As Director of CIA

Let’s talk now—in kind of a summing up—your thoughts on running the Agency from 

1966 to 1973. You must have had in your mind—you probably never articulated it—but 

you probably had somewhere a set of guiding principles or some ideas of how you 

wanted to run the Agency. Perhaps the best way to delineate them or at least one way 

might be for you to say how you wanted to run the Agency differently from the way 

John McCone ran it. 

Well, I don’t how whether that is the most useful way to discuss it or not. Let me just 

give what my philosophy was, and then you can see how that fi tted together. I am a 

believer that the ;Director of Central Intelligence, as the principal intelligence offi cer 

to the President, should not be involved in the foreign relationships policy except to 

the extent that the presentation of any intelligence material to a President is in itself 

a type of policy recommendation. This is inevitable. I don’t think that his position 

ought to be a partisan one. I don’t think it’s helpful to a President to have all of his 

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people surrounding him involved in policy issues. You may note that Kissinger in the 

fi rst volume of his book, when he’s discussing the various people with whom he has 

dealing as advisor on National Security Affairs, mentioned this point about policy and 

intelligence and so forth. John McCone believed that he could wear two hats. One 

hat was a Director of the Agency and the presenter of intelligence information which 

the Agency produced, the other that he could sit in meetings and help to formulate 

the policy which the Administration ought to follow. I did not agree with that. I felt, as 

I said to you earlier, that I played a more useful role for President Johnson by keeping 

the game honest, by seeing to it that the Secretary of State or Defense or whoever 

was advocating whatever they were advocating, stayed within the acceptable limits 

of the facts as we knew them, the parameters of events that had transpired, and that 

this was a useful function to perform for the President. Because every cabinet offi cer, 

in advocating policies, whether the President’s policy’s or not, is constantly tempted 

to overdrive and to oversell, to over persuade. Often the degree to which something 

is being done gets lost sight of. I fi gure that the intelligence Chief has a role to play in 

keeping all these things in perspective, keeping the perceptions as accurate and as 

objective as possible. 

As far as running the Agency was concerned, I had had it in my mind for a long time 

that intelligence is really not an end in itself. That intelligence people should not get the 

impression that because they’ve got an organization and a lot of people and do a lot of 

work and produce a lot of papers, that this is an entity which therefore should struggle 

for turf, for infl uence, for having a certain section of the budget for itself—a whole host 

of demands get tossed into these matters. It’s easy for the intelligence people to forget 

that they’re really a service organization, that they’re really there to assist in the policy 

making process through other people. If you stripped the Government down and left 

nothing but the intelligence organization, what would it do? 

It would have to consume its own smoke and that would obviously give the President, 

the Vice President, the Cabinet the impression that the Agency was there to be useful, 

to be of service, to be helpful. I did my damnedest, as a result of demands placed on 

the Agency in various fora, to see to it they were carried out and that the Agency put its 

best foot forward and the papers were produced in a timely fashion, and even when this 

meant sacrifi ce on the part of the analyst or the producers who had the work to do, that 

this is what we were in business for and we were going to do this as best we could. 

I suppose that there are things that happen in life that cause more anguish or irritation 

than others though I must say that the charge that the Agency was not objective, that 

it did not attempt to deal fairly with the facts and controversies and various estimative 

problems, I think has absolutely no basis in fact, I don’t know of any time when there 

wasn’t a sincere effort to accommodate all the varying pressures and still come out 

with what we thought was a proper answer. There may have been differences at times 

as to whether it was or nor—these things will always be debatable; I chose not to turn 

off debate, if I could possible help it. I did feel that this was one of the most important 

functions the Agency had to play, whether it was under President Johnson or 

President Nixon. 

Continuing along those same lines, I very much wanted to see the Agency continue, to 

be innovative in the technical fi eld, particularly in overhead reconnaissance. I supported 

as best I could all of those ideas which came up from DDS&T particularly, about new 

kinds of satellites whether they were photographic or electronic or what they might be, 

and to try and see that we’ve got these things funded and supported. We’ve already 
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discussed the KH-11 earlier. That was the kind of thing I wanted to see the Agency 

move forward on. It just seemed to me that we were more independent, that we were 

more innovative than anybody else in the Government, including the Department of 

Defense, and that break-through ideas were going to be born and they were going to 

be born in the Agency to some of these young scientists. 

On the estimative side I tried to expand somewhat, the interests of the Board of 

National Estimates rather than having so much focus on the military estimates. 

I wanted to try to get somebody in there on petroleum, which I thought was an 

on-coming and very important Item, and there were two or three that I attempted to 

add to the mix on the Board so that there would be a little wider sphere of interest 

and comprehension and experience. 

As far as the DDP was concerned, I, to the end, thought that the principal function of 

the DDP was to try and work on Soviet Union, Communist China and the satellites. 

That was the reason we’d been set up in the fi rst place, and that although some of 

these other things were interesting, like Vietnam and information of the sort that helped 

policy makers. For example, producing documents about what a certain negotiating 

position of the Japanese was going to be before the negotiations took part. That 

kind of thing, useful as it was, we really should continue to fi ght to penetrate the hard 

targets. We had some success; we had a lot of failures. It was probably as diffi cult a 

period in that respect as any, and I can’t say that I was necessarily charmed with the 

results that we actually achieved over all those years. But that wasn’t for want of trying, 

or my taking my eye off what I considered to be the ball, which was that.

Counter-Intelligence

That leads me to what was an on-going problem between the counter-espionage staff 

of the DDO, and what was then known as the Soviet-Russian Division. A constant fi ght 

over whether agents that were recruited who were Soviets, whether they were doubleagents or not. This was one of the most bitter controversies, and always seemed to 

end up in the Director’s offi ce as to which side was going to win out in these debates. 

It would have been very tempting to do what Colby later did, and that is fi re one of 

the fellows involved. But it never seemed to me that that made any sense at all. The 

tension here was the tension born of necessity and that if you didn’t have a counterespionage fellow who was constantly challenging all the agents that were recruited, 

you were going to end up with one of these situations in which you were going to be 

very seriously penetrated. It’s almost the same as if you prevented in a trial in court 

in this country, cross-examination, what the prosecution said was the case. In other 

words, you don’t have a chance to hammer at the witness which is after all part of our 

judicial system and the judicial balance. And it seemed to me the only way you could 

keep the balance was to keep this tension in the DDO or the DDP. Painful and diffi cult 

as this was, and made unnecessarily painful by circumstances and personnel, the fact 

remains that it seemed to me it had to be borne because otherwise you weren’t going 

to do the job very competently. 

The Intelligence Community

Now as far as the Community was concerned, there I realize—as one looks back at 

it—some differences developed, particularly during the Nixon Administration, because 

I think there was a desire to have the Director move out much more and control the 

Community. I never thought that would work. I did not pick up this invitation with a 

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fervor that was expected that I would because in my best judgment I thought we were 

going to get into a situation which was not only going to be very tenable. It simply 

goes to this: these other entities were largely controlled by the Department of Defense. 

The Department of Defense is the most powerful Department in the United States 

Government, both in terms of money and votes, and whatever else one would like to 

consider. The heads of these Departments, their effi ciency reports if you like, were 

made out by the Department of Defense. The money came from the Department of 

Defense. Therefore, when the Director of Central Intelligence, who was the jack-rabbit 

against the elephant in this, attempted to assert his authority over the funds that they 

could have and things of that kind, it seemed to me he was getting himself in an almost 

impossible position vis-à-vis, the Secretary of Defense. Therefore, through John Bross 

and Bronson Tweedy I attempted to carry out the President’s wishes, by suasion, by 

consultation, by talks, we could work together on targets, and on production and an all 

the rest of these things, and could gradually get ourselves, as a Community, all headed 

in a common direction. I think that to a certain extent this was achieved. The contrary 

approach, or the other approach, was obviously the one followed by Admiral Turner 

later. How people have thought it worked out, I don’t have any particular judgment on 

the matter because I don’t know; I did get the impression from Admiral Inman that it 

had been a failure. That Turner had over-reached himself and that he had run into the 

problem that was predicted that he would run into, and that was that the Secretary 

of Defense was not going to have all his turf taken away from him. This is why I use 

the term “turf” a few minutes ago. I think the struggles of the Intelligence Community 

for authority and who’s going to run whom, and who’s going to control what tend to 

stultify what I think is the Community’s real job. That is to use its best brains to work 

on the, Russians and oil problems and money problems, and all the rest of it, and stop 

squabbling among themselves over who’s going to control what. 

Accomplishments

Dick, looking back, what would you say was the greatest satisfaction you had in being 

Director of Central Intelligence? 

You mean an event? Any way you want to answer it. You must look back on your 

career and you must say to yourself, there are aspects of this of which I’m very, very 

proud and pleased. Well, as I said in that interview with Frost, of which I gave you 

a copy. The estimate on the Six Day War, I think, was the really intelligence bingo 

of my time because it was so apt, concentrated, you could see cause and effect. I 

mean the whole thing was put together in a tidy little bundle there is a short space of 

time. I still look back on that as being one of the neatest pieces of intelligence work 

that was done. I also look back on certain other things as having been really distinct 

achievements, some of them not when I was Director. I remember I thought the Berlin 

tunnel was a remarkable operation. I thought the Popov and Penkovsky cases were 

run as well as anything of that kind could possible have been run. I thought that a lot of 

the work that we did on the Vietnam War, even though the war came out so badly, was 

nevertheless extraordinarily good intelligence work of which I’m pleased. 

Jack Smith

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The Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) Office of Information Management Service’s 

Historic Collections Division reviewed, redacted, and released hundreds of documents 

covering the career of Mr. Helms as Director of CIA and while Ambassador to Iran. 

The accompanying DVD contains over 800 documents and 4,100 pages of formerly 

classified material. 

The material is organized into the following subject oriented categories. 

 • The Helms correspondence – over 775 documents, spanning critical events 

 in US foreign policy.

 • CIA publications on Helms – such as the internal biography on Director 

 Helms, George Tenet’s eulogy for Helms, and various Studies of 

 Intelligence articles on the late Director.

 • In his own words – oral interviews and speeches given by Helms.

 • A video of Helms addressing new CIA officers never before seen outside 

 the halls of CIA.

 • Photos of Helms as Director meeting with various Presidents.

 • As an added bonus, CIA is also releasing 21 historical studies examining 

 the organization of the Intelligence Community, and evaluations of 

 proposals for reorganization and reform.

This DVD will work on most computers and the documents are in .PDF format.
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