page_title: Richard Helms
section_title: Plea, aftermath
hierarchical_section_title: Richard Helms / Secrets: policy, politics / Plea, aftermath
caption_attribution_description: English: James Jesus Angleton.
context_page_description: Richard McGarrah Helms was an American government official and diplomat who served as Director of Central Intelligence from 1966 to 1973. Helms began intelligence work with the Office of Strategic Services during World War II. Following the 1947 creation of the Central Intelligence Agency he rose in its ranks during the presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. Helms then was DCI under Presidents Johnson and Nixon.
  As a professional, Helms highly valued information gathering and its analysis. He also prized counterintelligence. Although a participant at planning such activities, he remained a skeptic about covert and paramilitary operations. Helms understood the bounds of his agency role as being able to express strong opinions over a decision under review, yet working as a team player once a course was set by the administration. He saw it as his duty to keep official secrets from press scrutiny. While DCI, Helms managed the agency following the lead of his predecessor John McCone. In 1977, as a result of earlier covert operations in Chile, he became the only DCI convicted of misleading Congress. His last post in government service was Ambassador to Iran from 1973 to 1977.
context_section_description: An especially thorny issue concerned the interpretation of the secrecy which the CIA had previously enjoyed. According to its officers, the CIA's mandate included not only access to state secrets, but also the commission of covert action in furtherance of USG policy, as ordered from time to time by the President. Consequently, the CIA had a primary duty to protect such secrets and to refrain from public discussion of any covert or clandestine activity. An area of conflict arose when this CIA duty of confidentiality to the President came into direct conflict with the Agency's duty to respond honestly to legislative investigations of the executive branch authorized by the Constitution. Up until then, such potential conflict had been negotiated by quiet understandings between Congress and the CIA.
  For Helms, the potential conflict became manifest with regard to his 1973 testimony about secret CIA activity during 1970 in Chile, ordered by President Nixon. At some point, the recorded facts of Helms's testimony ostensibly moved to territory outside the perimeters of the previously prevailing quiet and confidential understandings with Congress, and entered an arena in which new and different rules applied: those of transparency.
  In late 1972, Nixon had appointed Helms as Ambassador to Iran. During his confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February, 1973, Helms was questioned concerning the CIA's earlier role in Chile. Because these past operations were then still effectively a state secret, and because the Senate hearings were public events, Helms, following past Congressional understandings with the CIA, in effect, denied that the CIA had, in 1970, aided the Chilean opponents of President-elect Allende.
  After Nixon's 1974 resignation, information uncovered in 1975 by the Church Committee hearings showed that Helms's February 1973 statements were clearly in error. He had misled Congress. Helms was prosecuted in 1977. Later that year, Helms was advised to plead nolo contendere to the lesser charge that, "he had not 'fully, completely and accurately' testified to Congress". Convicted of this misdemeanor charge, he received a two-year suspended sentence and a $2,000 fine.
  After the plea, at sentencing, Barrington D. Parker, the federal Judge, delivered a stern lecture. No citizen has "a license to operate freely outside the dictates of the law. ... Public officials must respect and honor the Constitution ..."
  You considered yourself bound to protect the Agency [and so] to dishonor your solemn oath to tell the truth...If public officials embark deliberately on a course to disobey and ignore the laws of our land because of some misguided and ill-conceived notion and belief that there are earlier commitments and considerations which they must observe, the future of our country is in jeopardy.
  Helms, nonetheless, continued to enjoy the support of many in the CIA, both active officers and retired veterans, including James Angleton. "He was sworn not to disclose the very things that he was being requested by the [Senate] Committee to disclose," Edward Bennett Williams, Helms's defense attorney, told the press. Williams added that Helms would "wear this conviction like a badge of honor, like a banner", a sentiment later seconded by James R. Schlesinger, who had followed Helms as DCI in 1973. After his court appearance and sentencing, Helms attended a large gathering of CIA officers in Bethesda, Maryland, where he received a standing ovation. A collection was taken, netting enough to pay his fine.
  Although Helms, at that time, might have appeared as an emblematic upholder of the Agency's work, for years, the "memory of his no-contest plea still stung. It was a stain in spite of the widespread support he had received." By 1983, however, "the end of the anti-CIA decade" had arrived. As Helms took the podium to speak, he was given a "returning war hero's welcome" by top USG officials and hundreds of guests at the Grand Ballroom of the Washington Hilton. "I am touched and honored. My reasons can be no mystery 
caption: James Angleton, former CIA official.
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