Richard Helms, early career

Richard McGarrah Helms (March 30, 1913 – October 23, 2002) was an American government official and diplomat who served as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) 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 (CIA), he rose in its ranks during the presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. Helms then was DCI under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, yielding to James R. Schlesinger in early 1973.

As a professional, Helms highly valued information gathering (favoring the interpersonal, but including the technical, obtained by espionage or from published media) and its analysis while prizing counterintelligence. Although a participant in planning such activities, Helms remained a skeptic about covert and paramilitary operations. Helms understood the bounds of the 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. It was the duty of the DCI to keep official secrets from press scrutiny. While working as the DCI, Helms managed the agency following the lead of his predecessor John McCone. In 1977, as a result of earlier covert operations in Chile, Helms became the only DCI convicted of misleading Congress. Helms's last post in government service was Ambassador to Iran from April 1973 to December 1976. Besides this Helms was a key witness before the Senate during its investigation of the CIA by the Church Committee in the mid-1970s, 1975 being called the "Year of Intelligence". This investigation was hampered severely by Helms having ordered the destruction of all files related to the CIA's mind control program in 1973.

Early career

Helms began his career in intelligence by serving in the war-time Office of Strategic Services (OSS). Following the allied victory, Helms was stationed in Germany serving under Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner. In late 1945, President Truman terminated the OSS. Back in Washington, Helms continued similar intelligence work as part of the Strategic Services Unit (SSU), later called the ''Office of Special Operations'' (OSO). During this period, Helms focused on espionage in central Europe at the start of the Cold War, and took part in the vetting of the German Gehlen spy organization. The OSO was incorporated into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) when it was founded in 1947.

In 1950 Truman appointed General Walter Bedell Smith as the fourth director of Central Intelligence (DCI). The CIA became established institutionally within the United States Intelligence Community. DCI Smith merged the OSO (being mainly espionage, and newly led by Helms) and the rapidly expanding Office of Policy Coordination under Wisner (covert operations) to form a new unit to be managed by the deputy director for plans (DDP). Wisner led the Directorate for Plans from 1952 to 1958, with Helms as his ''Chief of Operations''.

In 1953 Dulles became the fifth DCI under President Eisenhower. John Foster Dulles, Dulles' brother, was Eisenhower's Secretary of State. Under the DDP Helms was specifically tasked in the defense of the agency against the threatened attack by Senator Joseph McCarthy, and also in the development of "truth serum" and other "mind control" drugs per the CIA's controversial Project MKUltra. From Washington, Helms oversaw the Berlin Tunnel, the 1953–1954 espionage operation which later made newspaper headlines. Regarding CIA activity, Helms considered information obtained by espionage to be more beneficial in the long run than the more strategically risky work involved in covert operations, which could backfire politically. Under his superior and mentor the DDP Wisner, the CIA marshaled such covert operations, which resulted in regime change in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954 and interference in the Congo in 1960. During the crises in Suez and Hungary in 1956 the DDP Wisner became distraught by the disloyalty of allies and the loss of a precious cold-war opportunity. Wisner left in 1958. Passing over Helms, DCI Dulles appointed Richard Bissell as the new DDP, who had managed the U-2 spy plane.

During the Kennedy presidency, Dulles selected Helms to testify before Congress on Soviet-made forgeries. Following the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, President Kennedy appointed John McCone as the new DCI, and Helms then became the DDP. Helms was assigned to manage the CIA's role in Kennedy's multi-agency effort to dislodge Castro. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, while McCone sat with the president and his cabinet at the White House, Helms in the background supported McCone's significant contributions to the strategic discussions. After the 1963 coup in South Vietnam, Helms was privy to Kennedy's anguish over the killing of President Diem. A month later Kennedy was assassinated. Helms eventually worked to manage the CIA's complicated response during its subsequent investigation by the Warren Commission.

Johnson presidency

In June 1966, Helms was appointed director of Central Intelligence. At the White House later that month, Helm was sworn in during a ceremony arranged by President Lyndon Baines Johnson. In April of the prior year, John McCone resigned as DCI. Johnson then had appointed Admiral William Raborn, well regarded for his work on the submarine-launched Polaris missile, as the new DCI (1965–1966). Johnson chose Helms to serve as deputy director of Central Intelligence (DDCI). Raborn and Helms soon journeyed to the LBJ Ranch in Texas. Raborn did not fit well into the institutional complexities at CIA, with its specialized intellectual culture. He resigned in 1966.

As DCI, Helms served under President Johnson during the second half of his administration, then continued in this post until 1973, through President Nixon's first term. At CIA Helms was its first Director to 'rise through the ranks'.

The Vietnam War became the key issue during the Johnson years. The CIA was fully engaged in political-military affairs in Southeast Asia, both getting intelligence information and for overt and covert field operations. The CIA, for example, organized an armed force of minority Hmong in Laos, and in Vietnam of rural counterinsurgency forces, and of minority Montagnards in the highlands. Further, the CIA became actively involved in South Vietnamese politics, especially after Diem. "One of the CIA's jobs was to coax a genuine South Vietnamese government into being." Helms traveled to Vietnam twice, and with President Johnson to Guam.

Vietnam: Estimates

In 1966, Helms as the new DCI inherited a CIA "fully engaged in the policy debates surrounding Vietnam." The CIA had formed "a view on policy but asexpected to contribute impartially to the debate all the same." American intelligence agents had a relatively long history in Vietnam, dating back to OSS contacts with the communist-led resistance to Japanese occupation forces during World War II. In 1953 the CIA's first annual National Intelligence Estimate on Vietnam reported that French prospects may "deteriorate very rapidly". After French withdrawal in 1954, CIA officers including Lt. Col. Edward Lansdale assisted the new President Ngo Dinh Diem in his efforts to reconstitute an independent government in the south: the Republic of Viet Nam.

Nonetheless, CIA reports did not present an optimistic appraisal of Diem's future. Many of its analysts reluctantly understood that, in the anti-colonialist and nationalist context then prevailing, a favorable outcome was more likely for the new communist regime in the north under its long-term party leader Ho Chi Minh, who was widely admired as a Vietnamese patriot. A 1954 report by the CIA qualifiedly stated that if nationwide elections scheduled for 1956 by the recent Geneva Accords were held, Ho's party "the Viet Minh will almost certainly win." Yet that election was avoided and, in the cold war context, the 1959 CIA reports evidently saw Diem as "the best anticommunist bet" if he undertook reforms, but reporting also that Diem consistently avoided reform.

As the political situation progressed during the 1960s and American involvement grew, subsequent CIA reports crafted by its analysts continued to trend pessimistic regarding the prospects for South Vietnam. "Vietnam may have been a policy failure. It was not an intelligence failure." Yet the Agency itself eventually became sharply divided over the issue. Those active in CIA operations in Vietnam, e.g., Lucien Conein, and William Colby, adopted a robust optimism regarding the outcome of their contentious projects. Teamwork in dangerous circumstances, and social cohesion among such operatives in the field, worked to reinforce and intensify their positive views.

"At no time was the institutional dichotomy between the operational and analytic components more stark." Helms later described the predicament at CIA as follows.

From the outset, the intelligence directorate and the Office of National Estimates held a pessimistic view of the military developments. The operations personnel—going full blast ... in South Vietnam—remained convinced the war could be won. Without this conviction, the operators could not have continued their difficult face-to-face work with the South Vietnamese, whose lives were often at risk. In Washington, I felt like a circus rider standing astride two horses, each for the best of reasons going its own way.

Negative news would prove to be highly unwelcome at the Johnson White House. "After each setback the CIA would gain little by saying 'I told you so' or by continuing to emphasize the futility of the war," author Ranelagh writes about the CIA predicament. In part it was DCI McCone's worrisome reports and unwelcome views about Vietnam that led to the exclusion from the President Johnson's inner circle; consequently McCone resigned in 1965. Helms remembered that McCone left the CIA because "he was dissatisfied with his relation with President Johnson. He didn't get to see him enough, and he didn't feel that he had any impact."

Helms' institutional memory probably contested for influence over his own decisions as DCI when he later served under Johnson. According to CIA intelligence officer Ray Cline, "Up to about 1965/66, estimates were not seriously biased in any direction." As American political commitment to Vietnam surged under Johnson, however, "the pressure to give the right answer came along," stated Cline. "I felt increasing pressure to say the war was winnable."

Laos: "secret war"

The "second Geneva Convention" of 1962 settled ''de jure'' the neutrality of the Kingdom of Laos, obtaining commitments from both the Soviets and the Americans. Nonetheless, such a neutral ''status quo'' in Laos soon became threatened ''de facto'', e.g., by North Vietnamese (NVN) armed support for the communist Pathet Lao. The CIA in 1963 was tasked to mount an armed defense of the "neutrality" of the Kingdom. Helms then served as DDP and thus directed the overall effort. It was a ''secret war'' because both NVN and CIA were in violation of Geneva's 1962 terms.

Thereafter during the 1960s the CIA accomplished this mission largely by training and arming native tribal forces, primarily those called the Hmong. Helms called it "the war we won". At most several hundred CIA personnel were involved, at a small fraction of the cost of the Vietnam war. Despite prior criticism of CIA abilities due to the 1961 Bay of Pigs disaster in Cuba, here the CIA for years successfully managed a large-scale paramilitary operation. At the height of the Vietnam war, much of royal Laos remained functionally neutral, although over its southeast borderlands ran the contested Ho Chi Minh trail. The CIA operation fielded as many as 30,000 Hmong soldiers under their leader Vang Pao, while also supporting 250,000 mostly Hmong people in the hills. Consequently, more than 80,000 NVN troops were "tied down" in Laos.

At the time of Nixon's Vietnamization policy, CIA concern arose over sustaining the ''covert'' nature of the secret war. In 1970 Helms decided "to transfer the budgetary allocations for operations in Laos from the CIA to the Defense Department." William Colby, then a key American figure in Southeast Asia and later DCI, comments that "a large-scale paramilitary operation does not fit the secret budget and policy procedures of CIA."

About Laos, however, Helms wrote that "I will always call it the war we won." In 1966, the CIA had termed it "an exemplary success story". Colby concurred. Senator Stuart Symington, after a 1967 visit to the CIA chief of station in Vientiane, the Laotian capital, reportedly called it "a sensible way to fight a war." Yet others disagreed, and the 'secret war' would later draw frequent political attack. Author Weiner criticizes the imperious insertion of American power, and the ultimate abandonment of America's Hmong allies in 1975. Other problems arose because of the Hmong's practice of harvesting poppies.

Due to political developments, the war ultimately ended badly. Helms acknowledges that after President Nixon, through his agent Kissinger, negotiated in Paris to end the Vietnam war in 1973, America failed to continue supporting its allies and "abdicated its role in Southeast Asia." Laos was given up and the Hmong were left in a desperate situation. Helms references that eventually 450,000 Laotians including 200,000 Hmong emigrated to the United States.

As the 'secret war' eventually became public it created a firestorm in Washington. While this Laotian struggle continued on the borderlands of the Vietnam War, DCI Helms was blindsided when several senators began to complain that they had been kept in the dark about "CIA's secret war" in Laos. Helms recalls that three presidents, Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, had each approved the covert operation, the "secret war", and that 50 senators had been briefed on its progress, e.g., Senator Symington had twice visited Laos. Helms elaborates on the turnabout:

In 1970, it came as a jolt when, with a group of senators, Senator Stuart Symington publicly expressed his "surprise, shock and anger" at what he and the others claimed was their "recent discovery" of "CIA's secret war" in Laos. At the time I could not understand the reason for this about-face. Nor have I since been able to fathom it.

Israel: Six Day War

Liaison with Israeli intelligence was managed by James Jesus Angleton of CIA counterintelligence from 1953 to 1974. For example, the Israelis quickly provided CIA with the Russian text of Khrushchev's Secret Speech of 1956 which severely criticized the deceased Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin. In August 1966 Mossad had arranged for Israeli acquisition of a Soviet MiG-21 fighter from a disaffected Iraqi pilot. Mossad's Meir Amit later came to Washington to tell DCI Helms that Israel would loan America the plane, with its up-until-now secret technology, to find out how it flew. At a May 1967 NSC meeting Helms voiced praise for Israel's military preparedness, and argued that from the captured MiG-21 the Israelis "had learned their lessons well".

In 1967, CIA analysis addressed the possibility of an armed conflict between Israel and neighboring Arab states, predicting that "the Israelis would win a war within a week to ten days." Israel "could defeat any combination of Arab forces in relatively short order" with the time required depending on "who struck first" and circumstances. Yet CIA's pro-Israel prediction was challenged by Arthur Goldberg, the American ambassador to the United Nations and Johnson loyalist. Although Israel then had requested "additional military aid" Helms opines that here Israel wanted to control international expectations prior to the outbreak of war.

As Arab war threats mounted, President Johnson asked Helms about Israel's chances and Helms stuck with his agency's predictions. At a meeting of his top advisors Johnson then asked who agreed with the CIA estimate and all assented. "The temptation for Helms to hedge his bet must have been enormous". After all, opinions were divided, e.g., Soviet intelligence thought the Arabs would win and were "stunned" at the Israeli victory. Admiral Stansfield Turner (DCI 1977–1981) wrote that "Helms claimed that the high point of his career was the Agency's accurate prediction in 1967." Helms believed it had kept America out of the conflict. Also, it led to his entry within the inner circle of the Johnson administration, the regular 'Tuesday lunch' with the President.

In the event, Israel decisively defeated its neighborhood enemies and prevailed in the determinative Six Day war of June 1967. Four days before the sudden launch of that war, "a senior Israeli official" had privately visited Helms in his office and hinted that such a preemptive decision was imminent. Helms then had passed the information to President Johnson. The conflict reified America's "emotional sympathy" for Israel. Following the war, America dropped its careful balancing act between the belligerents and moved to a position in support of Israel, eventually supplanting France as Israel's chief military supplier.

In the afternoon of the third day of the war, the American SIGINT spy ship ''USS Liberty'', outfitted by the NSA, was attacked by Israeli warplanes and torpedo boats in international waters north of Sinai. This U.S. Navy ship was severely damaged with loss of life. The Israelis quickly notified the Americans and later explained that they "had mistaken the ''Liberty'' (455 feet long) for the Egyptian coastal steamer ''El Quseir'' (275 feet long). The US government formally accepted the apology and the explanation." Some continue to accept this position. Yet "scholars and military experts," according to author Thomas Powers, state that "the hard question is not whether the attack was deliberate but why the Israelis thought it necessary." About the ''Liberty'' Helms in his memoirs quotes the opinion of his deputy, DDCI Rufus Taylor, and mentions the conclusion of a board of inquiry. Then Helms adds, "I have yet to understand why it was felt necessary to attack this ship or who ordered the attack". In his CIA special collection interview, Helms said, "...I don't think there can be any doubt that the Israelis knew exactly what they were doing. Why they wanted to attack the 'Liberty,' whose bright idea this was, I can't possibly know. But any statement to the effect that they didn't know that it was an American ship and so forth is nonsense."

On the morning of the sixth day of the war, President Johnson summoned Helms to the White House Situation Room. Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin had called to threaten military intervention if the war continued. Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara suggested that the Sixth Fleet be sent east, from the mid Mediterranean to the Levant. Johnson agreed. Helms remembered the "visceral physical reaction" to the strategic tension, similar to the emotions of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. "It was the world's good fortune that hostilities on the Golan Heights ended before the day was out," wrote Helms later.

LBJ: Tuesday lunch

As a result of the CIA's accurate prognosis concerning the duration, logistics, and outcome of the Six-Day War of June, 1967, Helms' practical value to the President, Lyndon Baines Johnson, became evident. Recognition of his new status was not long in coming. Helms soon took a place at the table where the president's top advisors discussed foreign policy issues: the regular Tuesday luncheons with LBJ. Helms unabashedly called it "the hottest ticket in town".

In a 1984 interview with a CIA historian, Helms recalled that following the Six-Day War, he and Johnson had engaged in intense private conversations which addressed foreign policy, including the Soviet Union. Helms went on:

And I think at that time he'd made up his mind that it would be a good idea to tie intelligence into the inner circle of his policy-making and decision-making process. So starting from that time he began to invite me to the Tuesday lunches, and I remained a member of that group until the end of his administration.

Helms' invitation to lunch occurred about three-and-a-half years into Johnson's five-year presidency and a year into Helms' nearly seven-year tenure as DCI. Thereafter in the Johnson administration, Helms functioned in proximity to high-level policymaking, with continual access to America's top political leadership. It constituted the pinnacle of Helms' influence and standing in Washington. Helms describes the "usual Tuesday lunch" in his memoirs.

gathered for a sherry in the family living room on the second floor of the White House. If the President, who normally kept to a tight schedule, was a few minutes late, he would literally bound into the room, pause long enough to acknowledge our presence, and herd us into the family dining room, overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue. Seating followed protocol, with the secretary of state (Dean Rusk) at the President's right, and the secretary of defense (Robert McNamara, later Clark Clifford) at his left. General Bus Wheeler (the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) sat beside the secretary of defense. I sat beside Dean Rusk. Walt Rostow (the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs), George Christian (the White House Press Secretary), and Tom Johnson (the deputy press secretary) made up the rest of the table.

In CIA interviews long after the war ended, Helms recalled the role played in policy discussions. As the neutral party, Helms could come up with facts applicable to the issue at hand. The benefit of such a role was the decisiveness in "keeping the game honest". Helms comments that many advocates of particular policy positions will almost invariably 'cherry pick' facts supporting their positions, whether consciously or not. Then the voice of a neutral could perform a useful function in helping to steer the conversation on routes within realistic parameters.

The out-sized political personality of Johnson, of course, was the dominating presence at lunch. From his perch Helms marveled at the learned way President Johnson employed the primary contradictions in his personality to direct those around him, and forcefully manage the atmosphere of discourse.

Regarding the perennial issues of Vietnam, a country in civil war, Helms led as an important institutional player in the political mix of Washington. Yet CIA people were themselves divided on the conflict. As the DCI, Helms' daily duties involved the difficult task of updating CIA intelligence and reporting on CIA operations to the American executive leadership. Vietnam then dominated the news. Notoriously, the American political consensus eventually broke. The public became sharply divided, with the issues being vociferously contested. About the so-called Vietnamese 'quagmire' it seemed confusion reigned within and without. Helms saw himself as struggling to best serve his view of America and his forceful superior, the President.

Viet Cong numbers

Differences and divisions might emerge within the ranks of analysts, across the spectrum of the USG Intelligence Community. Helms had a statutory mandate with the responsibility for reconciling the discrepancies in information, or the conflicting views, promoted by the various American intelligence services, e.g., by the large Defense Intelligence Agency or by the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the United States State Department. While the CIA might agree on its own Estimates, other department reports might disagree, causing difficulties, and making inter-agency concord problematic. The process of reaching the final consensus could become a contentious negotiation.

In 1965, Johnson had substantially escalated the war by sending large numbers of American combat troops to fight in South Vietnam, and ordered warplanes to bomb the North. Nonetheless, the military put stiff pressure on him to escalate further. In the "paper wars" that followed, Helms at CIA was regularly asked for intelligence reports on military action, e.g., the political effectiveness of bombing Hanoi. The military resented such review of its conduct of the war.

The American strategy had become the pursuit of a war of attrition. The objective was to make the Viet Cong enemy suffer more losses than it could timely replace. Accordingly, the number of combatants fielded by the communist insurgency at any one time was a key factor in determining whether the course of the war was favorable or not. The political pressure on the CIA to conform to the military's figures of enemy casualties became intense. Under Helms CIA reports on the Viet Cong order of battle numbers were usually moderate; CIA also questioned whether the strategy employed by the U.S. Army would ever compel Hanoi to negotiate. Helms himself was evidently sceptical, yet Johnson never asked for his personal opinion. This dispute between Army and CIA over the number of Viet Cong combatants became bitter, and eventually common knowledge in the administration.

According to one source, CIA Director Richard Helms "used his influence with Lyndon Johnson to warn about the growing dangers of U.S. involvement in Vietnam." On the other hand, Stansfield Turner (DCI 1977–1981) describes Helms' advisory relationship to Lyndon Johnson as being overly loyal to the office of president. Hence, the CIA staff's frank opinions on Vietnam were sometimes modified before reaching President Johnson. At one point the CIA analysts estimated enemy strength at 500,000, while the military insisted it was only 270,000. No amount of discussion could resolve the difference. Eventually, in September 1967, the CIA under Helms went along with the military's lower number for the combat strength of the Vietnamese Communist forces. This led a CIA analyst directly involved in this work to file a formal complaint against DCI Helms, which was accorded due process within the Agency.

Vietnam: ''Phoenix''

As a major element in his counterinsurgency policy, Ngo Dinh Diem (President 1954–1963) had earlier introduced the establishment of strategic hamlets in order to contest Viet Cong operations in the countryside. From several antecedents the controversial Phoenix program was launched during 1967–1968. Various Vietnamese forces (intelligence, military, police, and civilian) were deployed in the field against Viet Cong support networks. The CIA played a key role in its design and leadership, and built on practices developed by Vietnamese, i.e., the provincial chief, Colonel Tran Ngoc Chau. These CIA activities, if not outright illegal (the declared opinion of critics), were at the margin of legality as the CIA was ostensibly forbidden from domestic spying. Later in 1974, the Chaos operation became national news, which created a storm of media attention.

With the sudden rise in the United States during the mid-1960s of the opposition to the Vietnam War, President Johnson had become suspicious, surmising that foreign communists must be supplying various protest groups with both money and organization skills. Johnson figured an investigation would bring this to light, a project in which the CIA would partner with the FBI. When in 1967 he instructed Helms to investigate, Helms remarked that such activity would involve some risk, as his agency generally was not permitted to conduct such surveillance activity within the national borders. In reply to Helms Johnson said, "I'm quite aware of that." The President then explained that the main focus was to remain foreign. Helms understood the reasons for the president's orders, and the assumed foreign connection. Later apparently, both the Rockefeller Commission
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