THE MAN WHO KEPT THE SECRETS: RICHARD HELMS AND THE CIA BY THOMAS POWERS

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200050008-1
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 17, 2004
• Sequence Number: 8
• Publication Date: November 3, 1979
• Content Type: NSPR

Affil CLE- : 'Y q'+yeA For Releasergp04tw/jl;apl. I1 DP88-01350
1979
OI PAGE 3 November
The Man Who Kept the Secrets:
Richard Helms and the CIA.
by Thomas Powers
(Knopf; $12.95)
In his 26 years in the CIA, Richard M.
Helms was a busy fellow. It was Helms
who personally proposed MKULTRA,
the CIA's notorious program of mind-
control and drug testing, which led,
among other things, to the death of Dr.
Frank Olson, a civilian employee of the
Army. When the CIA finally suspended
the program 10 years later in 1963--not
for moral considerations, but in fear that
the secret experiments might become
known-it was Helms who kept pushing
for renewed testing of drugs on un-
suspecting people. The agency had been
administering LSD to American citizens -
who were lured out of bars by
prostitutes in New York and San
Francisco. Helms argued that the people
drugged by the CIA must be "unwitting"
or the results would be unreliable,
creating only a "false sense of ac-
complishment."
Helms was, of course, deeply involved
in the CIA's assassination plots. As the
deputy director, for-- Plans (now
Operations), he was personally in
charge of the effort in 1962 to hire the
Mafia to poison Fidel Castro. A hazar-
dous business: in 1976, the mobster in
question, Johnny Rosselli, was found
dead, stuffed inside a 55-gallon oil drum
floating in the ocean near Miami. Helms
approved the transfer of sniper rifles to
the Dominicans plotting to kill Trujillo.
He helped arrange for the CIA to open
first class mail for 20 years in violation of
the laws of the United States. He spied
on American students for presidents
Johnson.. and. Nixon, : delivering.. one
.report. to Henry Kissinger with an
explicit warning that it was "extremely
sensitive," since the CIA had no legal
authority to prepare it
`He presided over Operation CHAOS,
the CIA's illegal program of domestic
spying on the antiwar movement, which
collected 3C0,000 names in its files in the
CIA basement. He helped the Nixon
White House smear Daniel Ellsberg by
ordering the CIA's chief headshrinker to
prepare a' psychological profile on the
man who~ leaked the Pentagon Papers.
He authorized the agency to provide
Howard Hunt with technical assistance,
including. his famous red wig, then
ordered the CIA to cover up its help to
Nixon's Plumbers when the govern-
ment's prosecutors were investigating
Watergate. Until the potato became too
hot to handle, he. complaisantly assisted
tell the story of the CIA since World War
II by tracing the career of the senior
clandestine official with the longest
record for survival, Richard Helms. But
somewhere along the line, Powers 1
became enamored of his subject, and the
result is a book that is defensive, semi-
adulatory (as its title suggests), and
often querulous.in tone.
It is easy to see how this occurred.
Richard Helms is 'a man of marked
personal charm. It was not by acting the
curmudgeon that he cultivated a wide
circle of influential friends within the
press corps in -Washington, in the
foreign policy establishment, and among
the most vowerful grandees on Capitol
Watergate burglary itself. He ordered Hill. These friends put- a great deal of
ir
th
k
the CIA's drug-testing files destroyed,
and destroyed his own files during
Watergate. He tried to block Salvador
Allende's election as president of Chile,
later followed Nixon 's secret orders to
try to overthrow him, and then lied
about it to the United States Senate. For
this-he-was convicted, fined $2000, and
sentenced to two years in jail. (The
d h
) A
d
d
e
n
.
e
prison sentence was suspen
agreed with the observation of his ! were rewarded for their-loyal years of
' 1 d t' a service by being' forced to
s in
distinguished mouthpiece, Edward
Bennett Williams, that he would bear
the conviction as "a badge of honor."
A man who was able to accomplish
this much can't be all bad, and Thomas
Powers had doggedly set out to find his
good side. It is an effort that evokes the-
little girl who, given a pile of manure for.
Christmas,. cheerfully digs in, exclaim-
4 a pony in here
Alas, it is a task foredoomed to failure,
and Powers; a. reporter of not incon-
siderable talents,'soon finds himself
mired dowry::: and hip-deep, trying
valiantly ' to -interpret the distorted
images in the fun house mirrors of the.
CIA. Along the way, he discovers some
previously hidden - passageways, some
new anecdotes, and some fresh perspec-
tives on old tales- But the pony eludes
him., It was never there.
e
eep
I
pressure on Griffin.. Bell to
friend Dick out of the stammer, where
Bell had no stomach for sending him in
the first place--7, 7
In researching this book, Powers
talked at. length with Helms, who
devoted "four long mornings" to inter-
views. And he talked to everybody else,
,
can e
walk the plank by Admiral Turner, who
had, unfortunately, gone to Annapolis
instead of Groton. He talked to?Johnny
Bross, and Richard Bissell, and Frank
Lindsay, and Tom Parrott, and Jack
Maury, and a lot of other retired "black"
operators. And to his credit, he read
everything, steeping himself in the
growing literature about intelligence;
and the CIA, familiarizing himself with 1
the minutiae of past . intelligence
triumphs, failures, rivalries, internal
wars, and ambiguities.
or almost everybody, including a heavy
sprinkling of the patrician Old Boys who
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As not er major con en n the names of John McMahon, the CIA's
unintended value, not as an exculpation is that Nixon fired Helms and shipped deputy director for Operations; Joseph
of Richard Helms, or as a history of the him off to Iran as ambassador because Burkholder Smith, the author of a book
CIA, but for the detail, the fine I Helms had refused to cover up on the CIA; Admiral Noel Gayler,
brushstrokes it adds to what is already i Watergate. While it is possible that former head of the National Securit '
known. For example, we learn a bit more Nixon may have felt that way, the facts y
Agency; Manuel Ogarrio, the Mexican
about the agency's assassination plots,. are that Helms, at Nixon's request, did lawyer who laundered the Watergate
about Richard Nixon's relationship to attempt to cover up Watergate. To money; Robert Keuch, a deputy assis-
the CIA, . about the scandalous perpetuate the myth that Helms did not, 11
willingness of the agency-and Helms which the Powers book does, is a taut attorney general; and the late
Laurence Stern of the Washington Post.
to cook its Vietnam estimates to please disservice to history. The facts are But these are minor lapses alongside
the Johnson White House. And some of indisputable: Nixon, . through H. R. the central problem. At bottom, what
Mr. Powers's character sketches Haldeman, asked Helms and his deputy, Powers seems to be telling us is that
particularly his portrait of James Vernon Walters; to tell the FBI to
Angleton-are very good indeed. confine their investigation to the Richard Helms is a patriot who lied for
his country, lied because he was ex-
On the other hand, the author goes to burglars already nabbed at the petted to by the establishment he served
great lengths to persuade us that Helms, Watergate. Helms did exactly that for.
the CIA's quintessential covert two crucial weeks. Not until the unfor- so well, but which abandoned him when
operator, at heart did not approve of tunate Pat Gray, the acting FBI director, he was caught and permitted him to be
covert operations. Which is rather like destroyed. There may be a case to be
demanded that the CIA put its cover-up made here, but it is a weak. one at best.
saying that the Beatles never really liked . request in writing did Helms back off. I prefer to remember the words of
rock and roll and were secretly off in a And almost a full year went by before Judge Barrington Parker, whom Powers
corner listening to Buxtehude when the CIA told the justice Department quotes- at the sentencing of Richard
the Secrets is that Helms was something of one-of the difficulties faced by If public officials embark deliberately to
an innocent, who often did not know powers, or anybody else writing about a disobey and ignore the laws of our land because
what was going on. He even quotes secret agency, is that in some areas the . of some misguided and ill-conceived notion and
Helms, at the time the number two man truth remains mercurial. For example, belief that there are earlier commitments and
in the agency's dirty tricks division, as he offers us five versions of how the CIA considerations which they must observe, the
saying in German,"Aber keiner sagt mir obtained Khrushchev's famous 1956 future of our country is in jeopardy. There are
'was!-No one tells me anything!" secret speech denouncing Stalin. Which those employed in the intelligence security
Powers, who has a Pulitzer Prize to his is true? Who is to say? Similarly, he community of this country. who feel that
credit (for his UPI reporting on Diana reports that the CIA - "managed to they have a. license to operate freely outside the
Oughton, the Weatherperson terrorist), persuade Time's bureau " chief in dictates of four.. Public officials at every
is too good a reporter to believe such a Washington to abandon plans for a level, whatever their position, like any other
premise, which is soon laid threadbare cover story" on The Invisible Government, of, person, must respect and honor the Constitu-
by his own evidence. Indeed, 31 pages ,:which I.was the co-author. I called John Lion and the laws of the United States.
of operations Helms may have com the book was published, and asked him David Wise
plained that no one ever told him any whether this was true. He said no one at
thing, but in truth there cannot have CIA had asked him not to do a cover David Wise is a political writer based in
been much that slipped entirely by him. story on the book, and that none had Washington. He is co-author of The
Powers argued that the really big been planned. Who to believe? Invisible Government (Random House), the
secret that Helms kept was that Presi ? .To defuse any possible criticism about first critical study of the CIA
dent Kennedy and Robert Kennedy in his personal background, Powers tells us
fact authorized the CIA to kill Castro. forthrightly in a chapter note that he
While this may or may not be true,
Powers offers no new evidence to
support the indictment. He suggests
that Helms and the CIA did not implicate
the Kennedys in their testimony to the
Church committee out of tradition and
loyalty to the presidency. And because,
he concedes, there was no proof.
used to work for the Rome Daily American,
which turned out to be a CIA front, and
that his father, Joshua B. Powers, ran
something called Editors Press Service,
which the New York Times has identified.
as a CIA propaganda service in Latin -
America,. which the senior Mr. Powers
denies.
There are a number of`errors in 'the
book:'for example,, the author misspells
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