Richard Helms facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Richard Helms
Official portrait c. 1966–72
United States Ambassador to Iran
In office April 5, 1973 – December 27, 1976
President	Richard Nixon Gerald Ford
Preceded by	Joseph S. Farland
Succeeded by	William H. Sullivan
8th Director of Central Intelligence
In office June 30, 1966 – February 2, 1973
President	Lyndon B. Johnson Richard Nixon
Deputy	Rufus Taylor Robert E. Cushman Jr. Vernon A. Walters
Preceded by	William Raborn
Succeeded by	James R. Schlesinger
7th Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
In office April 28, 1965 – June 30, 1966
President	Lyndon B. Johnson
Preceded by	Marshall Carter
Succeeded by	Rufus Taylor
Deputy Director of Central Intelligence for Plans
In office February 17, 1962 – April 28, 1965
President	John F. Kennedy Lyndon B. Johnson
Preceded by	Richard M. Bissell Jr.
Succeeded by	Desmond Fitzgerald
Personal details
Born	Richard McGarrah Helms (1913-03-30)March 30, 1913 St. Davids, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died	October 23, 2002(2002-10-23) (aged 89) Washington, D.C., U.S.
Resting place	Arlington National Cemetery
Relations	Gates W. McGarrah (grandfather)
Education	Williams College (BA)
Military service
Allegiance	United States
Branch/service	United States Navy
Years of service	1942–1946
Battles/wars	World War II

Richard McGarrah Helms (March 30, 1913 – October 23, 2002) was an American government official and diplomat who served as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from 1966 to 1973.

Early life and education

Helms was born and raised in Pennsylvania. He attended Institut Le Rosey in Switzerland, where he learned French and German. He returned and graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts.

Career

After graduation, Helms worked as a journalist in Europe, and for the Indianapolis Times. When America entered World War II, he joined the Navy. He was then recruited by the war-time Office of Strategic Services (OSS), for whom he later served in Europe. Following the Allied victory, Helms was stationed in Germany serving under Allen Dulles and Frank Wisner. In late 1945, President Truman terminated the OSS. Back in Washington, Helms continued similar intelligence work as part of the newly instituted Strategic Services Unit (SSU) established to carry on the espionage and intelligence work of the OSS, which was subsequently transferred to a new Office of Special Operations (OSO). During this period, Helms focused on espionage in central Europe at the start of the Cold War and took part in the vetting of the German Gehlen spy organization. The OSO was incorporated into the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) when it was founded in 1947.

In 1950 Truman appointed General Walter Bedell Smith as the fourth director of Central Intelligence (DCI). The CIA became established institutionally within the United States Intelligence Community. DCI Smith merged the OSO (being mainly espionage, and newly led by Helms) and the rapidly expanding Office of Policy Coordination under Wisner (covert operations) to form a new unit to be managed by the deputy director for plans (DDP). Wisner led the Directorate for Plans from 1952 to 1958, with Helms as his Chief of Operations.

In 1953 Dulles became the fifth DCI under President Eisenhower. During the Kennedy presidency, Dulles selected Helms to testify before Congress on Soviet-made forgeries. Following the 1961 Bay of Pigs fiasco, President Kennedy appointed John McCone as the new DCI, and Helms then became the DDP. Helms was assigned to manage the CIA's role in Kennedy's multi-agency effort to dislodge Castro. During the Cuban Missile Crisis, while McCone sat with the president and his cabinet at the White House, Helms in the background supported McCone's significant contributions to the strategic discussions. After Kennedy's assassination, Helms managed the CIA's complicated response during its subsequent investigation by the Warren Commission.

Director of Central Intelligence

Richard Helms in the White House Cabinet Room, March 27, 1968. Four days later Johnson announced his decision not to run for reelection.

In June 1966, Helms was appointed director of Central Intelligence. At the White House later that month, he was sworn in at a ceremony arranged by President Lyndon Baines Johnson. In April of the prior year, John McCone resigned as DCI. Johnson then had appointed Admiral William Raborn, well regarded for his work on the submarine-launched Polaris missile, as the new DCI (1965–1966). Johnson chose Helms to serve as Deputy Director of Central Intelligence (DDCI). Raborn and Helms soon journeyed to the LBJ Ranch in Texas. Raborn did not fit well into the institutional complexities at the CIA, with its specialized intellectual culture. He resigned in 1966.

As DCI, Helms served under President Johnson during the second half of his administration, then continued in this post until 1973, through President Nixon's first term. At CIA Helms was its first Director to 'rise through the ranks'.

Ambassador to Iran

In late 1972, Nixon had appointed Helms as Ambassador to Iran. During his confirmation hearings before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in February, 1973, Helms was questioned concerning the CIA's earlier role in Chile. Because these past operations were then still effectively a state secret, and because the Senate hearings were public events, Helms, following past congressional understandings with the CIA, in effect, denied that the CIA had, in 1970, aided the Chilean opponents of President-elect Allende.

After Nixon's 1974 resignation, information uncovered in 1975 by the Church Committee hearings showed that Helms's February 1973 statements were clearly in error. He had misled Congress. Helms was prosecuted in 1977. Later that year, Helms pled nolo contendere to two lesser, misdemeanor charges that he had not "fully, completely and accurately" testified to Congress. He received a two-year suspended sentence and a $2,000 fine.

Later years

Helms allowed the journalist Thomas Powers to interview him over four "long mornings" about his years of service in the CIA. The interview transcript totals about 300 pages. Although not overly pleased, Helms was apparently satisfied with the product: a widely praised book by Powers, The Man Who Kept the Secrets. Richard Helms and the CIA, published in 1979 by Knopf.

In the years following his retirement from government service in 1977, Helms was interviewed many times. Always guarded, Helms spoke for the record with British television personality David Frost in 1978. The CIA's 1982–84 sessions conducted by Agency historian Robert M. Hathaway and by Russell Jack Smith (former CIA Deputy Director of Intelligence under Helms) were used for their classified, 1993 CIA book on the former DCI; other agency interviews followed. In 1969 and 1981, Helms had participated in the Oral History Interviews for the Johnson Library in Austin. Other interview requests arrived, and eventually Helms was queried by many authors and journalists including Edward Jay Epstein, Thomas Powers, John Ranelagh, William Shawcross, and Bob Woodward.

After returning home from Tehran, Helms in late 1977 started an international consulting company called Safeer. The firm was located in downtown Washington on K Street in a small office on the fourth floor. Safeer means ambassador in Persian. It was "a one-man consulting firm" set up among other reasons "to help Iranians do business in the United States".

In 1983, President Ronald Reagan awarded Helms the National Security Medal, given to both civilians and the military. That year, Helms also served as a member of the President's Commission on National Security. After Reagan's election in 1980, Helms had been a behind-the-scenes proponent of William Casey for the DCI position. Helms and Casey (DCI 1981–87) first met while serving in the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. Also in 1983, Helms gave a prepared speech on intelligence issues, before dignitaries and five hundred invited guests gathered at a Washington awards banquet held in his honor. Here Helms was given the Donovan Award.

Eventually Helms began work on his memoirs, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency, published posthumously in 2003 by Random House. William Hood, formerly of the OSS then CIA (1947–1975), assisted Helms with the book. Henry Kissinger wrote the foreword.

Death

Richard Helms died at the age of 89 of multiple myeloma on October 23, 2002. He was interred at Arlington National Cemetery in Arlington, Virginia.

Personal life

In 1939 Helms had married Julia Bretzman Shields, a sculptor six years his senior. Julia brought two children into the marriage, James and Judith. Together, Helms and Julia had a son, Dennis, who as a young man briefly worked at CIA; he later became a lawyer. This marriage came to an end in 1967. Later Helms married Cynthia McKelvie, originally from England. She would write two books, both of which included her public experiences during their long marriage.

Although a reader of spy novels for diversion, as was common in the intelligence field, reportedly Helms did not like one well-known novel in particular. The cynicism, violence, betrayal, and despair in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold (1963) by John le Carré offended Helms. As a leader of professionals, Helms considered trust as essential to intelligence work. So strong was his negative reaction that Helms' son Dennis said he "detested" this novel. Yet 20 years later, Helms included books by le Carré among "the better spy novels" in his memoirs.

Helms letter

While serving as an OSS intelligence officer in Europe in May 1945, Helms wrote a letter to his son Dennis, then three years old, using stationery he had recovered from Adolf Hitler's office in the ruins of the Reich Chancellery in Berlin. He dated the letter "V-E Day" (May 8, 1945), the day Germany surrendered. Sixty-six years later, Dennis Helms delivered the letter to the CIA; it arrived on May 3, 2011, the day after the death of Osama bin Laden. It now resides at the private museum at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.

He was not related to the late-U.S. Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina.

In the media

• The character William Martin, portrayed by Cliff Robertson in the 1977 television miniseries Washington: Behind Closed Doors (based on John Ehrlichman's novel The Company), was based loosely on Helms. In the series, Martin ends up as ambassador to a Caribbean island, not Iran, as Helms did. He is shown engaged in dogfights with the White House and FBI, and as blackmailing President Monckton (obviously based on Nixon) into keeping him on, by playing him secretly recorded tapes of discussions of the Watergate break-in. The writer Ehrlichman had been convicted in the Watergate break-in and coverup.
• Helms was portrayed by actor Sam Waterston in a memorable scene in the 1995 film Nixon, deleted from the original release but included in the director's cut DVD.
• The character Richard Hayes, portrayed by actor Lee Pace in the 2006 film The Good Shepherd, was based loosely on Helms.

See also

• Tennent H. Bagley
• Desmond Fitzgerald
• Roscoe Hillenkoetter
• Thomas Karamessines
• Sidney Souers
• Hoyt Vandenberg