A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  More important than the attitudes of the lesser White House aides toward the Agency and to me was President Nixon’s opinion. It had long been clear to me that Nixon had disliked CIA from the time that he lost the 1960 election. He was apparently convinced that CIA Director Allen Dulles had given Senator Stuart Symington information which allowed the Democrats to blame the Eisenhower administration for the famous “missile gap”—that is, permitting the Soviets to outdo the United States in the production of long-range missiles. The missile gap did play a role in the Democratic campaign rhetoric, and Nixon’s vengeful reaction to what he imagined to have been Dulles’s action devolved upon me and the Agency. In my view, it would have been quite unlike Allen Dulles to engage in any such political maneuvering with any senator, Democrat or Republican.

  The fact was that in 1960, despite our strenuous efforts, the Agency did not know if there was a missile gap, or if the United States was behind the USSR in the race to develop effective intercontinental ballistic missiles. Our initial overhead reconnaissance flights probing Soviet missile activity were brought to term when the U-2 aircraft piloted by Gary Powers was shot down over the USSR on May 1, 1960. It was not until April 1961, and after President Kennedy’s election, that Colonel Oleg Penkovsky’s reports to CIA could be tested against the earlier U-2 data and collated. Only then did these evaluated reports show that the American ICBM program was significantly ahead of the Soviet effort. Colonel Penkovsky, a senior officer in Soviet military intelligence (GRU), had excellent access to high-level sources within the Soviet ICBM programs. He was a volunteer spy—as were many of the great agents in history—and was handled jointly by CIA and the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS).

  I was never sure why President Nixon distrusted me, aside from associating me with Allen Dulles and the other East Coast, Ivy League, establishment figures whom he loathed and thought of as dominating the upper brackets of OSS and subsequently CIA. In contrast, I always had an excellent relationship with Lyndon Johnson, who had at least as much claim as Nixon to have been born in a log cabin, and whose views of Ivy Leaguers were, at the best, reserved.

  Walters delivered his message and for a while we thought the matter had been put to rest. Not at all. In Washington, allegations and speculation about the Agency’s possible role in the break-in continued to pop like kernels of corn on a hot stove.

  At a subsequent staff meeting, one of our older hands suggested a way of convincing the press that CIA had nothing to do with the break-in. “Just have someone show it up as the tradecraft mess it actually was. The entry team had no cover for being in the building and no cover story for resisting interrogation. Their clothing hadn’t been sanitized—Hunt’s check, his White House telephone number, and Lord knows what else were in various pockets. They all knew one another’s true name, and everyone knew where everybody else worked. What’s more, McCord actually went along with the entry team—it’s unbelievable.”

  There was no one at the table—including those who had no operational experience or responsibility—who did not know that in the real world a team undertaking an operation like this would have been recruited by a cutout—“Mr. Lopez”—who would say he was fronting for some well-heeled émigrés who wanted proof that the Democrats were taking money from Castro. It would have been a cash-and-carry event—all cash and no checks. None of the team would have anything to reveal but a sterile telephone number and a physical description of Señor Lopez, who would have vanished the moment the gong rang.

  And from the end of the table someone muttered, “No intelligence service worth the name would run an operation like that.” This was too obvious to be helpful.

  Three days later, John Dean, the White House counsel, summoned Dick Walters. I told him to listen to Dean but to make no commitments. Dean had one request. The White House wanted money from CIA to make bail for the burglars. I reminded Walters that although the Agency had unvouchered funds, the money could be released only by the director. If the circumstances were unusual or if large amounts were involved, it would be my responsibility to inform the chairmen of the Senate and House Appropriations Committees in detail. I added that I had no intention of supplying any such money, or of asking Congress for permission to dip into funds earmarked for secret intelligence purposes to provide bail for a band of political bunglers.

  The next day, Walters was called back to the White House, and Dean leaned even more heavily on his request for help to the burglars. On his return, Walters, deeply troubled by the situation, reminded me that he had had a long and full career. As he put it, “I’ve had my ticket punched, and I’ve got a great place to live in Florida.” He then offered, rather boldly in the circumstance, to take the heat by attempting to work out something to pacify Dean’s repeated request. This brought me forward in my chair. Speaking as plainly as I could, I told Dick there was no way he could take the fall without destroying his own reputation. Given the nature of our work, I said, CIA’s reputation depends on straightforward, honest relations with both the executive branch and the Congress. There was no way that the deputy DCI could furnish secret funds to the Watergate crowd without permanently damaging and perhaps even destroying the Agency.

  It has long since become clear to me that President Nixon himself called the shots in the Watergate cover-up, and that Attorney General John Mitchell and H. R. Haldeman were his closest associates. The failed break-in was a considerable jolt to the reelection campaign, but the arrest of former CIA employees and agents at the scene handed Nixon a weapon that he thought would serve his cover-up. He might more plausibly have blamed the burglary on his reelection staff, admitted it was a stupid mistake, and promised that nothing like it would happen again. Had Nixon done so, the headlines would shortly have disappeared, and despite any knowing snickers from within the Beltway, he would have gone on to win the election. But no, Nixon chose to deny all responsibility, and incidentally to protect his good friend Mitchell and the other confederates at the reelection headquarters and the White House. He would blame CIA, an agency he disliked and which he knew would have difficulty defending itself. The cover-up failed, and the effort boomeranged to destroy the Nixon presidency.

  Five months later, and a few days after his reelection, President Nixon called me to Camp David. It was the last time we spoke while he was in office.

  Chapter 2

  —

  LUNCH WITH ADOLF

  The circumstances of my family life and education might well have been devised for what turned out to be my career. I was born in St. Davids, on the Philadelphia Main Line. After his service as an officer in the First World War, my father moved the family to New York City, then to South Orange, New Jersey, near his office as district manager for the Aluminum Company of America. I had finished my junior year at Carteret Academy when my parents, Herman and Marion, who were convinced that knowledge of foreign languages and culture were essential to a good education, took the family—my older sister, Elizabeth, or Betty, younger brothers Pearsall and Gates, a preschooler whom we called Wuz—to Europe. This was twice lucky. Along with broadening our education, Dad decided to close his margin stock market accounts before leaving, and thus escaped the crash that erased the holdings of so many others.

  After a summer in Aix-les-Bains, I was enrolled at the last possible moment in Le Rosey, a preparatory school in Switzerland, with all courses, including geometry and German, given in French. My sister, Elizabeth, and brother Pearsall entered school in Lausanne. Like many Americans whose parents have insisted they study French as children, but who have never heard the language spoken outside the classroom, I experienced a jolt of language shock when I found myself in the beginners’ French class after ten weeks in Aix. However humbling, I got the message. My Swiss roommate, Jacques Mallet, was as determined to learn English as I was to conquer French. I’m not sure who won, but Jacques went on to become a diplomat and I received the academic prize for my age-group—a copy of Flaubert’s Salammbô, a long, complex novel which the
faculty may have thought contained enough romance to keep an adolescent turning the pages.

  The curriculum at Le Rosey was a creative mix of study and sports. Soccer was dominant in the fall. The game was new to the American contingent, but there were enough Europeans to make it a good team. I qualified as a goalie. In November the school moved to winter quarters at nearby Gstaad, a fine ski area, if even then a fashionable resort. Academic courses continued at full blast, but were arranged to provide ample time for sport. Skiing excellence was not graded, but the competition was such that we all learned quickly. By springtime I was sweating through many exhausting miles as bow oar on a four-man rowing shell on Lake Geneva.

  Crown Prince Mohammed Reza Pahlavi, later the Shah of Iran, attended Le Rosey sometime after I had left but, despite what others have written, I never knew or met him there. Our first meeting came years later and in quite a different context.

  In the spring, we returned to the United States. It didn’t take long for Dad to realize that the depressed economy offered few promising business opportunities and he soon decided to take the family back to Europe. My paternal grandfather had emigrated from Germany and this probably influenced Dad’s decision to settle in Freiburg im Breisgau, a pleasant city in southern Germany. This is not far from Basel, Switzerland, where my maternal grandfather, Gates W. McGarrah, had just been appointed the first president of the newly established Bank for International Settlements.

  As profitable and pleasant as the year at Le Rosey had been, school in Freiburg was an abrupt change, not only because all classes were in German. As a guest student, I entered the Realgymnasium as an Unter Primaner, a junior in a local high school. Education in the Weimar Republic was a dead serious activity. Classes ran five and a half days a week, from early morning until late afternoon with no study periods. Study, and there was a lot of it, was to be done at home. There were few organized sports, and the occasional exercise classes were a poor substitute.

  My German gradually became conversational, and I began to read quite easily, but much of the academic classwork was beyond me. Because Williams College—for which I was headed—required four years of Latin, my father found a classics professor to be my tutor. He was a spry, rather affable German academician who taught at the Humanistisches Gymnasium, where classics were emphasized. Although we worked alone in a sparsely furnished room in his house, the professor always wore a tailcoat, perhaps as a badge of office. He had just enough English to read and criticize my translations. But we got on well, and solved any remaining language problems by speaking French with each other.

  An examination in European history remained as a final hurdle for admission to Williams. Fortunately this problem and my continuing difficulty at the Gymnasium solved themselves. On a family tour in Italy during Easter recess, I was felled by a nasty case of chicken pox. To protect the immediate family, I was moved to my grandparents’ house in Basel and given a bedroom with a ladder leading to the garden. There, with a college syllabus in hand, and capitalizing on a very relaxed sort of quarantine—chicken pox was a serious disease in those days—I plowed through the recommended books. These quiet weeks, the excellent foundation provided by Le Rosey, and freedom from the pressure cooker of the Gymnasium made the final College Board examination in Geneva a relative success.

  In four years I’d moved through three languages, and from an American prep school to Le Rosey, and to the Gymnasium. In 1931, Williams College was a fourth terra incognita. I had never visited the campus, been interviewed by any admissions official, or been introduced to anyone at the college. Once I settled down, Williams was even more than I had hoped for, and offered a near-perfect mix of study and a range of nonacademic activity.

  In our junior year, Henry Swan, a classmate, and I decided to take advantage of the Honors Work tutorial system by trying an experiment of combining English literature and history as a single major. Although this is now a standard in many liberal arts colleges, in 1933 it took some doing to get the two separate academic departments to collaborate in the experiment. Swan became class valedictorian and later one of the most distinguished pioneers in open-heart surgery. He was by any standard an extraordinary man, with a passion for sixteenth-century music and a strong taste for adventure: after having casually bought a sextant in a junk shop, he became interested in sailing, and piloted a trimaran from Spain along Columbus’s route to the New World.

  Four years at Williams taught me a lot, not the least of which was the reminder that the boys who note that certain emperors are wearing no clothes are more likely to get a knock on the head than an encouraging pat on the back. This came when as editor of The Williams Record, I wrote an editorial urging the elimination of the four-year Latin requirement and compulsory chapel attendance. For good measure, I added that these were probably the reasons the college was sliding downhill, and student admissions were dropping. As a final touch I titled my views “Downhill.”

  Fortunately, the sulfurous reaction of the college president, the faculty, and the board of trustees to my helpful suggestions and judgment did not result—as some recommended—in my expulsion, or even affect the granting of a magna cum laude degree. Both the chapel and Latin requirements were soon dropped, but my experience was an early lesson in the problems of “speaking truth to power.”

  Another useful bit of experience came in an American history course given by Professor T. C. Smith, who had written a biography of President James Garfield, the only Williams alumnus to reach that office. He required students to prepare “problem papers” in which we developed sources on both sides of a given subject and then had to decide which represented the best policy or course of action. This is, of course, much the same approach used by CIA in preparing assessments and position papers.

  By graduation I had narrowed my immediate plans to Harvard Law School or journalism. In those days one could get into Harvard Law on the strength of a Williams diploma; journalism had a tougher standard. An interview was wangled with Hugh Baillie, president of the United Press. If I could get myself to Europe, there would be a job in the London UP offices. This was exciting enough to suggest rowing across, but the family financed the trip as a graduation present.

  As low man in the UP bureau in the News of the World building in London, my job ranged from writing and updating obituaries of British politicians to searching the press for “brighteners”—the odd bits used as fillers in the dailies—and occasionally monitoring telephone calls from other European bureaus. The high point came one morning when an Italian-accented clerk in the Rome office blurted, “Flash! Webb Miller reports the Italian Army invaded Abyssinia today.” This, at last, was journalism.

  The depression was a dominant factor in England in 1935 and the Home Office was not about to take bread from the tables of English journalists by giving work permits to foreigners, particularly cub reporters. I was no exception, and left London in time for Thanksgiving in Berlin, where Frederick Oechsner, already a well-known foreign correspondent, was in charge of the UP office. Edward W. Beattie, an open-faced and heavyset Yale graduate, and Paul Kecskemeti, a Hungarian, bent-backed and small, were the stars. Beattie became a well-known war correspondent. Kecskemeti, who wrote treatises on mathematical logic in his spare time, emigrated to the States and subsequently joined the Rand Corporation.

  It was in Berlin that I began my real training as a newsman. Because my German was reasonably fluent, Oechsner was well disposed, and some work came my way that might otherwise have gone to the more experienced staff. Along with a variety of what we called street assignments, I translated Hitler’s speeches for the UP’s important Latin American clients, principally La Prensa in Buenos Aires, rewrote significant articles from the German press, and chased down queries from various UP clients scattered around the world.

  I found an apartment, actually a bed-sitter, in the Wittenberg Platz with rent that could be squeezed within the approximately $25 a week I was earning. This left enough cash to cover occasional evening meals
and beer at the foreign press Stammtisch in a pleasant restaurant, Die Taverne. Although I was very much a junior member, I got to know some of the best newsmen in Germany at the time. Among those occasionally at the press table were H. R. “Red” Knickerbocker of the Hearst chain, William “Bill” Shirer, Louis Lochner, Ralph Barnes, and H. V. Kaltenborn. There was also a stream of visitors—among them, Bennett Cerf and Frederick Birchall, former managing editor of the New York Times.

  At the time, my life was pretty much fettered by my wages. When not at Die Taverne, I saved a bit by ordering a plate of borscht at a Kneipe (café) on the corner near my apartment. Unlike the borscht usually found in Poland and Russia, the Berlin barroom version was a thick stew of vegetables and meat. Aside from an occasional movie or night at the theater, my social life was a bit thin. The Nazi German population was already becoming leery of open social relations with Americans and other foreigners. As a result, the American community—as too often happens in these days—was to a degree turned in upon itself and even the newsmen spent too much time with the American business and embassy community. One of my friends from the time in Berlin was Wallace Deuel, a correspondent for the Chicago Daily News.