WASHINGTON, June 5 (UPI) -- On Nov. 4, 1977, federal Judge Barrington Parker imposed a two-year suspended sentence and $2,000 fine on former CIA Director Richard Helms. His crime? Failure to testify in public, "fully and completely" before a congressional committee.
Hours after his sentencing, Helms traveled to the Kenwood Country Club, just outside Washington, to attend the regularly scheduled luncheon of the Central Intelligence Retiree Association.
"The news of my conviction had been on the radio," he writes, "and to my complete surprise, every one of the several hundred guests rose and applauded thunderously."
He should not have been surprised. Helms was the first career intelligence officer appointed to the agency's top post. He was one of them and he had, metaphorically speaking, taken a bullet on their behalf.
"Before the luncheon, someone had fetched two large wicker baskets. Despite my remonstration, the baskets were rapidly circulated and soon filled with cash and checks that exceeded my $2,000 fine," he writes of the attempt by his brethren to take some of the sting out of his, in their minds, unmerited disgrace.
Helms started with the CIA in 1947, after working in Europe for the OSS during World War II. He stayed until 1973, when President Richard Nixon pushed him out the door a few days prior to his 60th birthday, the age at which the agency policy "specified retirement."
"A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the CIA" is a posthumously published memoir "that I never expected to write," Helms says as it opens. Indeed, for anyone with a more than casual interest in the history of U.S. intelligence services, the idea that Helms would write his memoirs is unthinkable. After all, didn't Thomas Powers call his 1979 Helms biography "The Man Who Kept the Secrets"?
Helms' reputation is preserved by this recollection of his life in the shadows. It is not a tell-all kind of memoir. No great state secrets are revealed, no heretofore classified missions exposed. Until the end, Helms remained a firm believer in the ban against revealing U.S. intelligence secrets.
So why write his memoirs after a lifetime of, on at least one occasion, punishing silence?
"The end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and the several post-Gorbachev governments in Moscow are at the root of my decision to put some of my impressions of the secret world on paper," he writes. His is not a history of the agency, "the existing histories are adequate" he writes, so much as it is "a background to intelligence as it exists today."
As an overview of major U.S. intelligence operations undertaken during his more than 30-year career, "A Look Over My Shoulder" is interesting but not particularly compelling. The U-2 flights, the Bay of Pigs, the efforts to assassinate Fidel Castro and to topple Salvador Allende from power in Chile have all been rehashed in greater detail elsewhere.
What is of value is the recollection of what former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in the forward calls "fascinating, acute and subtle about the various administrations in which he served (and) the increasing reliance on covert operations in the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations."
Through Helms' eyes, we get a sense of how political leaders came to believe covert operations could be used as substitute for strong and decisive leadership in foreign policy. Having the CIA topple government hostile to U.S. interests became, in their minds, the cheap, quick and easy way to solve complex problems. As history records, this led to their almost whimsical use, creating problems for the United States that have yet to be resolved.
Helms does not spend as much time on the congressional investigations of the CIA in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate as he perhaps should have.
In his view, they were ultimately damaging to U.S. interests. "In 1975 a volcano in the form of the Church and Pike Committees' hearings in Congress erupted. Between the committees' demands for files and Director William Colby's (Helms' successor as DCI) eagerness to volunteer additional data, the hearings turned into a wanton breach of the secrecy understandings which had existed between the Congress and the Agency until that time."
"My impression was that these hundreds of thousands of words were more useful to the KGB and some of our other adversaries than to the American taxpayers who footed the bill," he says.
With at least two of the Democrats currently running for president in 2004 making very public noises about possible intelligence failures leading up to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, this observation should be a cautionary note.
Grandstanding politicians seeking to score political points, like the late Sen. Frank Church, D-Idaho, who was preparing his own ultimately short-lived 1976 presidential bid, can badly damage U.S. security interests and intelligence capabilities if they allow their ambition to cloud their judgment.
Helms could have devoted a full volume to the investigations and their impact. he could have been far less diplomatic about Colby's betrayal of the old rules, and those like Helms who lived by them.
Colby later cast his efforts as a desperate bid to save the agency itself from destruction. Helms, in his version of the events, seems doubtful and suggests several instances when Colby's testimony amounted to little more than some grandstanding of his own.
It is most unfortunate that Helms died in October 2002, shortly after the book was finished but before it was published. Given his personal code, it is unlikely he would have had much more to say about the incidents he covered in the book. Even so, he would have added much to the ongoing debate of the need for fundamental reform of U.S. diplomatic and intelligence organizations in the wake of the war on terrorism.
His likely suggestion that much of what is being argued and disclosed in public would be better handled in private is, at least in the view of some, a good idea.
("A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the CIA" by Richard Helms and William Hood, Random House, 512 pages, $35.)
