Richard Helms was slippery - even for a spy, as novelist Thomas Mallon observed. 

When the former CIA director faced the Senate Watergate Committee, Helms pummeled the table angrily: “It doesn’t seem to get across very well for some reason but the Agency had nothing to do with the Watergate break-in,” he bellowed. The fact that five of the seven burglars arrested in the Watergate complex in 1972 had ties to the CIA was immaterial - at least in Helms’ opinion. The Agency had no involvement, he repeated loudly for the benefit of the newsmen at the back of the room.

The appearance was vintage Helms, the master of charm-and-disarm, a silky operator described by biographer Thomas Powers as a ‘gentlemanly planner of assassinations’.

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Richard Helms: Charm and disarm‍

Helms, a naval officer born in Philadelphia and educated in Switzerland and Germany, climbed the greasy pole of intelligence from the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in WWII to become director of the CIA from 1966 to 1973 - finally pushed out by President Richard Nixon, who’d resign in disgrace himself a year later. 

As Helms rose, he oversaw clandestine operations, served five US presidents, and met CIA officer and Watergate burglar-in-chief Howard Hunt in 1950s Havana, a city Hunt described as “a mafia-riddled, spy-infested, booze-addled, women-crazy city with the world’s best nightlife”.

Helms and Hunt remained in touch in the decades leading up to Watergate, lunching three to six times a year when Hunt worked state-side. Yet Helms had given US Senators the impression he barely knew the Watergate burglar. The CIA director couldn’t even put his finger on the details of his encounters with Hunt when pressed.

Was it a polished act or an honest oversight by a man who had his finger in many pies? Helms not only edited the formal National Intelligence Estimates for the White House, but as CIA director he administered an annual budget of $1bn, employed 15,000 staff, and monitored covert activities across 80 countries. Helms’ memory may well have failed him. 

Helms’ tango with Hunt and Watergate would bring the spymaster to the brink but it was an entirely separate covert operation that would prove to be Helms’ undoing.

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The making of CIA spymaster 

Born in 1913, Helms’ father was a business executive and his grandfather a banker. Helms learned French and German while studying in Switzerland. Back in the US, Helms edited the student newspaper at Williams College, a private liberal arts college in Massachusetts, and soon returned to Europe as a reporter for United Press where he landed an exclusive interview with Adolf Hitler.

Helms’ language skills were in demand during WWII and he began working in intelligence with the CIA’s predecessor, the Office of Strategic Services, where Helms plotted the positions of German submarines in the western Atlantic. Covert operations were more his style, however. By 1955, Helms was supervising the digging of a secret, 500-yard tunnel from West Berlin to East Berlin. Operation Gold tapped the main Soviet telephone lines between Moscow and East Berlin.

Helms cut his teeth under CIA directors Allen W. Dulles and Richard Bissell, both sidelined after the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. The failed attack orchestrated by the CIA during the JFK administration aimed to push Cuban leader Fidel Castro from power but ended in defeat and bloodshed. Cleverly, Helms kept his distance from the operation and remained ‘untainted’ by the scandal, Howard Hunt recalled in his autobiography, Undercover.

Hunt, who’d established Brigade 2506 and spearheaded the attempted overthrow of Castro’s Cuban government, also found himself persona non grata. Hunt ended up back in the US writing spy novels in his spare time (he cast Richard Helms as fictional spymaster Avery Thorne) and running disinformation campaigns for the CIA. Richard Helms’ career, conversely, was on an upward trajectory. Helms was now overseeing the clandestine service and going from strength to strength. Nothing, it seemed, stuck to the Teflon spy.

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Richard Helms: CIA officers, not Boy Scouts

“We’re not Boy Scouts,” Helms liked to remind CIA critics. 

While painting himself as a skeptic of assassination, Helms was linked to the Project AMLASH controversy in which the CIA cooperated with Major Rolando Cubela of the Cuban military in plans to assassinate Fidel Castro in the 1960s. When a US Select Committee asked Helms if he’d told President Lyndon B. Johnson about efforts to assassinate the Cuban leader, Helms replied, “I just canʼt answer that, I just donʼt know. I canʼt recall having done so.”

Helms told interviewer David Frost that he “never believed in assassination” and wrote in his autobiography, A Look Over My Shoulder: “There are invariably other solutions, not the least of which is time - time for the immediate and sometimes fierce tactical pressure to subside or for the problem to be reevaluated or another solution found.” 

Helms even denied Project AMLASH was an assassination operation - apparently by necessity, former US Army officer John Whitten told Jefferson Morley, author of Scorpion’s Dance: The President, the Spymaster, and Watergate. Helms needed to head off a counterintelligence investigation that could have ruined Helms’ career, Whitten said: “I think Helms withheld the information [about AMLASH] because he realized it would have cost him his job and would have precipitated a crisis for the Agency, which could have very adverse effects.” 
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Was Project AMLASH an assassination operation?

“It was a tribute to Helm’s immense charm that, in the face of a paper trail studded with words like ‘eliminate’ and ‘execution,’ punctuated by the delivery of two weapons to a man who would later be convicted of an assassination conspiracy, and corroborated by sworn testimony of CIA officers,” Morley writes, “Helms still managed to convince two competent biographers and his worldly wife that AMLASH was not really an assassination operation.”

Talks of homicides took on a more sinister tone on Nov. 22, 1963, however, when President John F. Kennedy was killed in Dallas.

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Helms and JFK 

Helms visited US President John F. Kennedy days before the November 22, 1963 assassination and was later given the responsibility of investigating accused assassin Lee Harvey Oswald and the CIA.

CIA files uncovered in 1998 revealed what Helms sought to hide, Morley said. In the summer of 1963, Helms’ top psychological warfare specialist was paying $25,000 a month to anti-Castro Cuban exile students in Miami. When Kennedy was killed in November 1963, the students, using CIA funds, published allegations that accused Oswald of acting as Castro’s agent. It was one of many conspiracy theories, but this one was linked to the CIA.

“Helms and his defenders bemoaned the conspiratorial bent of the American public, which often implicated the CIA in Kennedy’s death. Yet Helms was hardly in a position to complain about conspiracy-mongering. He himself had been instrumental in the publication of the first JFK assassination conspiracy theory,” Morley wrote in Slate. 

Regardless, President Lyndon Johnson eventually appointed Helms director at a time when the Vietnam war was threatening to haunt America for years to come. “The quagmire of Vietnam continued to suck the Agency and the country into ever-deeper trouble, and Helms began to tell the president what he wanted to hear,” according to Guardian reporter Harold Jackson.

The election of Richard Nixon, his paranoia about the opposition to the Vietnam war, and the Watergate scandal tightened the noose around Helms’ neck. Nixon considered Helms disloyal and sidelined him, appointing Helms as US ambassador in Tehran. Some believe the subversion of democracy in Chile in 1970 was, ultimately, Helms’ undoing, however. 

Richard Helms: The CIA spy who wore his criminal conviction with honor 

US Senator Stuart Symington questioned Helms about Chile at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee: Had the CIA tried to overthrow the government of Chile? “No.” Did you have money passed to the opponents of Allende? “No,” Helms said.

This time, the consequences were more serious. Helms’ tainted testimony involved a US attempt to prevent Salvador Allende from becoming president of Chile during open elections. By 1977, Helms had become the first CIA director convicted of lying to Congress about undercover operations. He pleaded no contest in a federal court to charges of failing to testify fully before Congress.

Helms received a suspended two-year prison sentence and a fine which the CIA officer wore as a “badge of honor”, his lawyer told journalists. Helms’ overriding responsibility was to US national security, he explained, so Helms really had no choice but to withhold some of the facts. Or did he?

Helms’ critics argued that his testimony may have had more to do with covering up Helms’ personal involvement in the CIA’s darkest operations during the Cold War when mind-control experiments and ‘executive action’ - removing unfriendly foreign leaders from power - were served up regularly alongside domestic burglaries and break-ins.

Throughout his life, Helms’ greatest strength was his ability to keep secrets, meaning that he was rarely held accountable. He died, at age 89, in 2002, bringing a great deal of those secrets to his grave.