Another Look at the CIA

By Hugh Sidey

Richard Helms, currently our Ambassador to Iran, was around Washington last week, a shadowy figure in the corridors of power. The former head of the Central Intelligence Agency was once again defending himself and the agency against charges of overstepping authority. Helms, now 61, moved about in the best traditions of his earlier trade, seeing few people, saying nothing, offering only a fleeting glimpse of his thin frame to newsmen.

In 32 years of Government service, it has been his lot to contend secretly with the real enemies of the U.S., knowing that at any time he might be destroyed by suspicions and accusations that he could not fully answer, ones perhaps made by the very people he sought to protect.

Nobody who has been that long in the spy business can be a saint. Helms knows his list of errors and misjudgments better than anybody else. At the same time, many of his successes and triumphs are not known and never will be. But the current charges of massive surveillance of American citizens, a kind of pointless but relentless assault on privacy, still do not add up. Helms' life has been dedicated in one way or another to opposing the abuse of power, outside and inside the U.S. Maybe some place, some time, something went wrong. If so, it is not on the record yet.

Helms sat at Lyndon Johnson's Tuesday-luncheon table, where the big decisions were made, and one of the handful of regulars there has said that it was Helms who kept them all honest. When L.B.J. would begin to perceive the world as he wanted it to be and not as it was, Helms would often speak up and say: "Just a minute, Mr. President, that is not what we have found."

It was in 1967 at that same luncheon table that Johnson began to order the CIA to pay more attention to the Viet Nam War protest groups and their foreign contacts. Johnson was convinced that the Communists were pouring money into the antiwar movement in the U.S. Helms kept going back to Johnson and telling him that it was not so, that the CIA could not find the connection. One day Johnson waggled his big finger at the men around him and complained: "I just don't understand why you can't find out about all that foreign money that is behind those war protesters."

There was the time Helms and L.B.J. had a shouting match outside the Oval Office. Johnson had made up his mind how a certain situation had come about. Helms told him it was not so. Helms would not yield, and though Johnson walked away from that encounter sore, he developed new respect for Helms.

Nixon came to the White House with a deep distaste for the CIA. He blamed the agency in part for his presidential defeat in 1960. The CIA, Nixon told his close aides, had aided John Kennedy's candidacy with phony figures about the missile gap between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

Then came the attempts by the White House to drag the CIA into Watergate. Helms got the signal immediately. Nixon was still distrustful of Helms, and so the efforts were directed at Lieut. General Vernon Walters, Helms' deputy and Nixon's friend. Helms' strategy was to pinch off this ruse without causing any trouble for the agency and/or any public flap. His reward was to be summoned to Camp David after the 1972 election and told by Nixon that he was going to be replaced as director. There was little doubt in Helms' mind that his resistance on the Watergate affair was behind the move.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.