A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  If, after reminding the President of the Agency’s charter restrictions and suggesting any appropriate alternatives, the President remains insistent, what is the DCI to do? He is neither a policymaker nor a judicial officer. Has he the authority to refuse to accept a questionable order on a foreign policy question of obvious national importance? If the President’s directive cannot be deflected, the DCI’s responses range from acceptance to outright refusal and presumably resignation.

  I faced two such instances. After having reminded President Johnson that he risked pushing me out-of-bounds, I agreed to attempt to find foreign influence in student and political dissidence in 1967. LBJ’s determination to uncover the foreign sponsors of the dissidence was adequate reason for our initial investigation abroad. (As our effort continued, we erred in examining and analyzing domestic aspects of the problem.) In contrast, the police investigation of the Watergate break-in soon escalated into a vital domestic political issue. When President Nixon ordered his White House staff—Messrs. Haldeman, Ehrlichman, and Dean—to direct me (via General Walters) to supply bail for the Watergate burglars, and to deflect the FBI’s investigation of the crime, I instructed Walters to refuse their demands. Rather than force my resignation, and presumably face the likely intense public curiosity about the reasons for my leaving, President Nixon backed away.

  One of the more publicized incidents attributed to Angleton by Agency critics is his alleged role in ruining the careers of various Agency officers with unfounded suspicions of their loyalty. I knew each of these officers and can vouch that they were well qualified for the positions they attained in the Agency, and could have expected further promotion. The security problems each encountered were quite different, and each officer was given every possible consideration. In the end, I had no choice but to accept a decision that in effect said each was innocent, but that the innocence could not be proved. This is the reverse of the verdict occasionally given in British law courts—“guilty but not proved.”

  In the very early days, my experience as a member of a board adjudicating a somewhat similar problem left me with a deep understanding of the complexity of each case. As DCI, there were no personnel problems that concerned me more than those of these four officers. Each officer was offered positions at his grade level elsewhere in the Agency and with the same promotion prospects offered in his original career discipline. The important difference was that the new positions would not require higher security clearances. The decision was a bitter disappointment to all, and each chose to retire with full benefits rather than accept a career change.

  In arriving at this difficult decision, the Office of Security and the Counterintelligence Staff collaborated closely. The CI Staff was advisory. The basic recommendation rested with the Office of Security. The final decision was mine alone.

  From the time in the SSU days when I was first involved in such drastic security decisions, I made every possible attempt to keep from having to dismiss an employee or radically to change his career path. But when all the evidence has been judged and innocence cannot be proved, there is no choice but transfer to less sensitive work, retirement, or dismissal without prejudice.

  As evidence of the importance of staff security, it is worth recalling a few lines from the National Security Act of 1947. “In effect, and notwithstanding the provisions of any other law, the Director may, in the Director’s discretion, terminate the employment of any officer or employee of the CIA when the Director shall deem it necessary or advisable in the interests of the United States” (emphasis added).

  The tolerance with which the British service handled the case of the traitor George Blake, who was taken prisoner by the North Koreans and endured a severe hardship before offering his services to the KGB, is a sad example of the equities involved. Along with a mass of other data, Blake betrayed the Berlin and Vienna tunnel operations.

  The most I can add to this difficult issue is that in the future I would have the Agency make it absolutely clear to every prospective employee that at any time in his career conditions might, through no fault of his, mandate either a career shift or dismissal. This might come from a security problem that cannot be resolved, a blown operation which results in widespread true-name publicity, or any other incident peculiar to high-security intelligence employment.

  The widespread notion—spread in part by retired officers who should be better informed—that Angleton brought the Agency’s Soviet operations programs to a halt in the last few years of his career is patently false. Defectors were welcomed, debriefed, and resettled. New operations were approved and went forward. The root of the allegations against Angleton appear to me to have been the decisions of the Soviet operations division to drop some long-standing activities of doubtful value in the interests of a new look and a change in operational emphasis. The Counterintelligence Staff had no part in these decisions.

  Jim Angleton had his faults. He became too isolated late in his career, and failed to recognize some of the changes occurring within the Agency. He overvalued some sources, and became too focused on European problems. Jim should have left a better written record, and might have participated more directly in creating vitally important new counterintelligence training programs. Although Jim would have fought it with all his formidable strengths, I should have insisted that he step aside, and into a position where he could research his operational views and put them on paper. With it all, he served the country well and deserves a far better press than he has had.

  *See this page.

  *The above-mentioned files were all destroyed by the Agency.

  Chapter 29

  —

  “FORGING” AHEAD

  My first public appearance before Congress came in June 1961, a few weeks after the Bay of Pigs, when the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee opened a hearing on “Communist Forgeries.” I was still officially Dick Bissell’s deputy. Rather than attempting to explain all this, and because my name was not to appear in the published report, I was identified only as an “Assistant Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency.” It was a nonexistent title, and a notional step above my post.

  The paper I presented was prepared by Angleton’s Counterintelligence Staff. Aside from illustrating Moscow’s well-honed ability to exploit the international media, I suspect that the staunchly anti-communist members of the subcommittee also hoped to generate some favorable press and to balance a bit of the criticism that followed the Bay of Pigs. For that reason, “Forgeries” was the first transcript of a Senate hearing ever to be translated into French, Italian, and Spanish.

  From the early years of the Cold War, Moscow and its dependent communist services had plagued the United States with dozens of forged documents, usually prepared on official letterhead paper stolen or reproduced in Moscow. Each document was “authenticated” by the forged signature of one or more appropriately senior American officials. The forgeries invariably purported to show the sinister aspect of an alleged secret American activity or policy. The texts were relatively well prepared but quite easily shown to have been fabricated. Errors in format, spelling, syntax, and official titles were common. However obvious these mistakes or ludicrous the policy content, the allegations invariably reached a far greater audience than our subsequent crystal-clear—to us at least—proofs of forgery.

  To avoid the appearance of coming directly from Moscow, the forgeries were most often slipped to left-leaning or communist-owned foreign newspapers. The sensational story would then be picked up and trumpeted by Soviet and Eastern European media. In due time the Western press would latch on.

  Two interrelated incidents show how, with a minimum of discernible effort, Moscow was able to manipulate the world press. The first occurred in June 1961, and nearly resulted in the cancellation of a planned meeting between President Kennedy and Charles de Gaulle, the president of France. Before the dust settled in the second incident, a significant number of Americans had apparently been convinced that CIA and the Pentagon,
supported by the “military-industrial complex,” had successfully cooperated in murdering President Kennedy on November 22, 1963.

  Moscow had long sought to tie the United States to France’s strenuous efforts to suppress Algerian resistance to French colonialism. On April 22, 1961, a handful of French general officers, based in Algeria, attempted a coup d’état. A day later, the Paese Sera, an obscure Italian daily newspaper with ties to the Italian Communist Party, published a report claiming that the attempted coup had been supported by CIA. Twenty-four hours later, Pravda, TASS, and Soviet radio replayed the Italian story. The Western media soon followed. As always, with each repetition, the original allegation gained credibility. In France, the story peaked when Le Monde, one of the most influential newspapers in Europe, ran a lead editorial stating, “It now seems established that some American agents more or less encouraged” the French generals who had instigated the attempted coup.

  Just how this judgment was “more or less” established was not disclosed. The fact that the U.S. embassy denied the allegation may even have underlined U.S. guilt in the eyes of the French left.

  When President de Gaulle realized that the uproar threatened a scheduled meeting with President Kennedy in Paris, the French took action. Foreign Minister Couve de Murville stepped before the National Assembly in Paris and forcefully denied the allegations. President Kennedy’s meeting with De Gaulle took place as planned.

  It was in early 1967 that I received the first inkling of one of the more bizarre and troublesome incidents in my tenure as DCI. It came in a telephone call from the New Orleans district attorney, James Garrison—“Jim,” as he referred to himself. I later learned that Garrison’s given names were Earling Carothers. When visions of national political prominence first danced into his dreams, he arranged a legal change. Garrison asked me to come to New Orleans and testify in his investigation of the Kennedy assassination.

  I had never heard of Garrison, and his investigation was news to me. After a noncommittal response, I arranged a meeting with Senator Richard Russell, then chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee and the Senate Subcommittee on Security, both of which had oversight of CIA. His advice was succinct. “Do not go to New Orleans, pay no attention to anything Garrison says about anything. He is unstable.” As I left his office, the senator said, “If he calls you again, tell me about it at once.” I then went to Congressman Hale Boggs, Senator Russell’s opposite number on the Armed Forces and Security Committees in the House of Representatives. He repeated Russell’s advice with an emphasis on “unstable.” With this, I assumed I had heard the last of Garrison. Wrong.

  In February 1967 a New Orleans newspaper reported that Garrison had begun his investigation of the Kennedy assassination. Oswald had lived in New Orleans for a few months before the murder, but it seemed unlikely that the district attorney had uncovered any data that the FBI and Warren Commission had missed. Neither the FBI nor CIA was particularly concerned. Wrong again.

  On March 1, 1967, Garrison announced that he had arrested Clay Shaw, a respected and well-known New Orleans businessman, and charged him with directing a plot that led to President Kennedy’s murder. As Edward Jay Epstein points out, this initial newsbreak attracted little more press attention than a “flying saucer report.”* Three days later, Paese Sera—six years after its first big scoop but still an obscure Rome daily—again beat the world press with the news that Clay Shaw was more than a mere businessman. In fact, the paper alleged, Shaw was a CIA operative involved in a trade promotion organization, Centrale Mondale Commerciale (CMC). Moreover, the CMC was “a creature of CIA,” and as such provided secret funds to support right-wing political activity in Italy. The Soviet press picked up the Italian story, and it was replayed in Paris by an organ of the French Communist Party (l’Humanité). Despite the foreign communist press coverage, American journalists were more restrained. In April the Saturday Evening Post published a long article demolishing Garrison’s theories and sources. A few days later, a New Orleans daily headlined a story “Mounting Evidence Links CIA to ‘Plot’ Probe,” sourcing the evidence to an influential Italian newspaper. The newspaper? None other than the Paese Sera.

  The obvious question as to how this obscure daily uncovered such a story might have been raised in the Western press coverage. It was not. It was weeks before the allegation was challenged.

  Thirty minutes after the first press reports, Clay Shaw’s CIA file was on my desk. From 1948 until 1956 Shaw had (thirty-three times) volunteered information to the Domestic Contacts Service (DCS) of CIA. The DCS was an overt activity charged with interviewing Americans—usually businessmen—who in the course of their work and travel abroad frequently had access to information not readily available through other sources. The DCS relationship with these contacts was entirely voluntary and without compensation. Keeping in touch with the national business community is a widely practiced technique, often shared by the respective foreign offices and the national intelligence services in developed countries.

  Clay Shaw was an intelligent and successful businessman with interests in South America and Europe. He spoke fluent French and Spanish, and was a keen observer. In 1948, Shaw founded the New Orleans International Trade Mart. In 1965 when he retired, the trade mart occupied a thirty-three-story building. He was an obvious contact for the New Orleans DCS office.

  The file showed that one of Shaw’s earliest reports concerned the commercial attaché in the New York offices of the new communist government in Czechoslovakia. The recently arrived Czech diplomat was attempting to expand Czech export trade through the New Orleans Trade Mart. Subsequent reports ranged from the efforts of Western European businesses to open trade with the Soviet bloc to the devaluation of the currency in Peru.

  CIA contact with Shaw had ceased in 1956. As in occasional other cases, the file gave no reason for the lapse in contact. My guess is that Shaw lost interest, and that the New Orleans DCS office simply set his file aside. Had there been any misunderstanding or quarrel, it would certainly have been noted in the file.

  The press firestorm that followed Garrison’s initial “disclosures” gradually subsided as the more informed journalists began to poke holes in the many totally false statements and allegations stemming from the attorney general and his staff.

  As some observers have suggested, Garrison’s attempt to prove that Shaw was a CIA agent might have been resolved by Shaw’s admission of his overt relationship and my testimony that he was by no stretch a CIA agent. I would also have testified that the Agency had no contact with or interest in the Centrale Mondale Commerciale. Had Shaw made such an admission, I would, of course, have confirmed it. On his own, Shaw decided not to mention his relationship with the DCS. As long as he remained silent, I would in no circumstance have disclosed it.

  I think now, as I did then, that in the prevailing atmosphere, Shaw’s decision was correct. An admission by him of any relationship with CIA would have added unquenchable fuel to the blaze Garrison had created.

  In May 1967, Garrison issued a subpoena to me. I was to produce a photograph showing Lee Harvey Oswald—presumably arm in arm—with a “CIA agent” in Mexico City. There was no such photograph. I informed Senator Russell of the subpoena, and ignored Garrison’s demand.

  When Clay Shaw finally had his day in court, the jury pronounced him innocent of all charges after fifty-four minutes of deliberation. Two days later, Garrison struck back and again arrested Shaw. This time the crime was perjury. Before this charge was adjudicated, Shaw’s attorneys sued to stop Garrison from continuing the prosecution of their client. The suit worked, and Garrison’s case was thrown out of court. The verdict came too late. Garrison’s malevolent campaign had ruined Shaw’s life.

  In retrospect, Garrison’s shameless lies, fabrications, and distortions seem even more clearly self-serving than they did at the time. This is not the place to repeat the proofs of Garrison’s unjustified allegations. Epstein’s Counterplot demolishes Garrison’s charges, a
nd refutes his attack on CIA item by item.* More recently, False Witness, by Patricia Lambert, covers all of the data as well as detailed references to Oliver Stone’s film JFK.†

  Stone, who came back from combat service in Vietnam with a Bronze Star and a Purple Heart, established his reputation as a filmmaker with Platoon, a highly regarded film on combat in Vietnam. Apparently intrigued by Garrison’s absurd conglomeration of theories and allegations in his book, On the Trail of the Assassins: My Investigation and Prosecution of the Murder of President Kennedy,‡ Stone produced a “major moving picture.” JFK is a hagiography of Garrison and his efforts to “solve” the Kennedy assassination. Stone appears to have accepted all of Garrison’s allegations and composed an incident or two of his own.

  As presented by Stone and Garrison, the assassination would have involved at least twenty persons. In real life, any of these presumably extraordinarily disciplined operatives might, with the passage of time, have been moved to sell his story for a several-million-dollar fee. But Oswald had no confederates, and there is no evidence to the contrary.

  The movie was so skillfully produced that Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan noted that a poll taken on the thirtieth anniversary of the assassination showed that three quarters of those questioned were convinced that CIA had murdered the President.§