OBITUARY: Richard Helms, R.I.P - Obituary

Some time after my first novel (Saving the Queen) was published, I had a handwritten note from Richard Helms. He had read the book, he said, and enjoyed it. I replied and, subsequently, we had one or two visits at lunch.

I was especially pleased inasmuch as he had been Director of Central Intelligence and would have been put off by any spytime solecisms he'd bumped into. And he might have found a number of these, inasmuch as my protagonist, Blackford Oakes, was inducted into the CIA as an undergraduate, trained, and deployed in Great Britain where -- as one might put it, in a trade in which one divulges nothing more than necessary -- Oakes took on more than the CIA gave him to chew.

But what obviously caught the Director's eye was the predicament my protagonist was caught up in: He was asked to testify before a congressional committee about activity he had engaged in, and declined to answer questions.

The Senate committee asked Helms, in 1973, to disclose what he knew about the derailment of the Salvador Allende regime in Chile. Helms dissimulated. He had already left the CIA, Richard Nixon having replaced him when Helms refused to block the FBI's inquiry into Watergate. Nixon sent him off as ambassador to Iran, which was a shelter of sorts, but in 1976 he came home to Washington to face the music, pleading no contest to charges that he had lied to a congressional committee. He tried to explain his problem to the judge, as Blackford Oakes had tried to explain his silence to his own senatorial inquisitors. "I found myself," Helms told the court, "in a position of conflict. I had sworn my oath to protect certain secrets. I didn't want to lie, I didn't want to mislead the Senate. I was simply trying to find my way through a very difficult situation in which I found myself."

The judge had zero understanding of any such difficult situation. "You now stand before this court in disgrace and shame," he pronounced on this singular man of honor, sentencing Helms to two years in prison (suspended) and a $2,000 fine. An important book was generated. Thomas Powers's The Man Who Kept the Secrets told something of the unresolved conflict of the intelligence agent who promises to keep a secret, yet is questioned by an authorized investigator of government.

Richard Helms was impenitent, and at lunch spoke of the quandary, branching off to other of his encounters as DCI. As director of the CIA he attended, ex officio, the cabinet meetings of President Lyndon Johnson. "There was only one way to get the president's ear," he recalled. "It was to be the first to speak, and as CIA director I had this assignment, and to make the very first thing I said -- interesting. The president gave you no second hearing."

He was relaxed, authoritative, a prominent figure in Washington, composed but not indifferent to damaging vicissitudes-of-state. He indulged a bitterness. "There are two men in the history of the time I served whom I truly despise. One was Frank Church, the other was William Colby." It was Senator Church who presided over the investigating committee that sought out the secrets, and it was William Colby, the incumbent director of the CIA, who gave away the secrets.

Dick Helms had a very full life, president of his class at Williams College, and editor of its newspaper; before that, two years of preparatory school in Switzerland, rendering him fluent in French and German, which helped when as a young journalist he had an exclusive interview with Adolf Hitler (Sieg Heil, Herr Shitface). He will need no evasive tactics where, R.I.P., we trust he finds himself.

-- WFB

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