Richard Helms

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Richard McGarrah Helms (March 30, 1913 – October 23, 2002) was the Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from 1966 to 1973. He was the only director to have been convicted of lying to Congress over Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) undercover activities. In 1977, he was sentenced to the maximum fine and received a suspended two-year prison sentence. Despite this, Helms remains a revered figure in the intelligence profession. CIA Historian Keith Melton describes Helms as a professional who was always impeccably dressed and had a "low tolerance for fools."

Helms was born in Philadelphia in 1913. In 1936, a year after he graduated from Williams College in Williamstown, Massachusetts, he was sent by the United Press to help cover the Berlin Olympic Games; he had spent two of his high school years at the prestigious Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland where he learned to speak German and French.

He joined the advertising department of the Indianapolis Times; within two years he was national advertising manager.

During World War II he served in the United States Navy. In 1943, he was posted to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) because of his ability to speak German. In the aftermath of the war, he was transferred to the newly formed Office of Special Operations (OSO), where at the age of 33 he was put in charge of intelligence and counter-intelligence operations in Austria, Germany, and Switzerland.

The OSO became a division of the CIA when that organisation was created by the National Security Act of July 1947. Helms became Director of the OSO after the CIA's disastrous role in the attempted invasion of Cuba in 1961. After falling out with the Kennedys, he was sent off to Vietnam where he oversaw the coup to overthrow President Ngo Dinh Diem. Following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Helms was made Deputy Director of the CIA under Admiral William Raborn. A year later, in 1966, he was appointed Director.

The ease of Helm's role under President Lyndon Johnson changed with the arrival of President Richard Nixon and Nixon's national security advisor Henry Kissinger. After the debacle of Watergate, from which Helms succeeded in distancing the CIA as far as possible, the Agency came under much tighter Congressional control.

In 1972, Helms ordered the destruction of most records from the huge MKULTRA project, over 150 CIA-funded research projects designed to explore any possibilities of mind control. The project became public knowledge two years later, after a New York Times report. Its full extent may never be known.

Nixon considered Helms to be disloyal and fired him as DCI in 1973. Helms then served from 1973 to 1976 as US ambassador to Iran in Tehran.

Helms' ultimate undoing was the CIA role in the subversion of Chilean democracy and the overthrow, under Nixon's orders, of that country's president Salvador Allende in 1973. Helms had reportedly opposed this operation.

Helms' answers to Congress on the CIA's role in the Chilean affair were proved to be false and he was prosecuted and convicted in 1977. He received a two-year suspended sentence and a $2,000 fine. He wore the conviction as a badge of honor; his fine was paid by friends from the CIA.

Helms testified, under oath, in 1979, that Clay Shaw, the only man ever put on trial for John F. Kennedy's assassination, had, from 1948 to 1956, been a part-time contact of the Domestic Contact Division of the CIA; a claim that has remained unproven from Shaw's trial.

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan awarded Helms the National Security Medal.

Following his death in 2002, Richard Helms was interred in Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.

Helms was portrayed by actor Sam Waterston in a memorable though deleted scene in the 1994 film Nixon.

See also: Operation Mockingbird.

[edit] External links

• Role in bringing Saddam Hussein to power
• Video of Helms discussing his role in Watergate

Preceded by: Vice Adm. William Raborn

Director of Central Intelligence June 30, 1966 - February 2, 1973

Succeeded by: James R. Schlesinger

Directors of the Central Intelligence Agency
Souers • Vandenberg • Hillenkoetter • Smith • Dulles • McCone • Raborn • Helms • Schlesinger • Colby • Bush • Turner • Casey • Webster • Gates • Woolsey • Deutch • Tenet • Goss • Hayden