Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,987

This is the grave of Richard Helms.

Born in 1913 in St. Davids, Pennsylvania, Helms grew up in a German Lutheran household. His parents were loaded, as his dad was a bigshot Alcoa executive. So Helms spent much of his time growing up in Germany and Switzerland. He went to Williams College and after graduation, took a job as a reporter on a paper in Indianapolis. He did this for awhile and then World War II broke out. Helms volunteered for the Navy and was recruited into the Office of Strategic Services. Fluency in German and all that time spent in the enemy nation was a big reason why, which makes sense. He eventually went with the OSS to Germany and was one of the officers who visited Hitler’s bunker after the war. Helms stole some of Hitler’s stationery.

Helms decided to stay with intelligence as World War II moved to the Cold War. He joined the CIA when it formed in 1947. Before that he was with the Office of Special Operations and when that was folded into the new agency, Helms stayed on to direct the OSO. When that became the Directorate of Plans after further mergers in 1952, Helms became the Chief of Operations of the new division, under Frank Wisner, another key intelligence figure of the Cold War who is important but somewhat less remembered today. In 1953, Helms got a special job from CIA director Allen Dulles–he was to dedicate himself to protect Joe McCarthy from foreign threats, as if the Soviets wanted to assassinate McCarthy or something. He was in charge of developing MKUltra, the CIA program to use drugs on prisoners to get them to confess. Much later, when all the illegal CIA shit was being investigated by Frank Church, Helms had all the info on this illegally destroyed.

But then of course Helms did this because was the worst kind of CIA leader, the kind who loved him some illegal activities, coups, and general ratfucking of anyone who did fit his politics overseas. He was in charge of Operation Gold, which was a wiretapping effort against the Soviet military in Berlin. The Soviets knew about this immediately but just manipulated the Americans for awhile because they needed to protect their intelligence so they could gather more. American officials thought they had pulled one on the Soviets, but it was the opposite. As Chief of Operations in the 1950s, Helms was involved in all the gross stuff. For example, the Shah of Iran was his old school buddy, which definitely did not hurt our Shah as he took power after the American sponsored coup against the democratically elected government of Mossadegh in Iran in order to protect western oil supplies. It’s a true wonder the U.S. remains the enemy of the Iranian government today.

Helms was superb at being a mole inside his own agency too in order to protect himself. He was somewhat skeptical of the Bay of Pigs invasion it seems, for he had already done the work to make sure his name was not on key documents and so when it failed, it cost Allen Dulles his job as the head of the CIA but Helms remained nice and clean, or clean enough to stay on. He then headed Operation Mongoose, the American terrorist operation against Castro and his regime that included all the ridiculous failed attempts to assassinate him through exploding cigars and the like.

By 1966, when the CIA director job came open again, Lyndon Johnson finally promoted Helms to the job, after several disappointments for Helms when he was passed over. Helms was already deeply involved in Vietnam and had been since at least 1962. He spent a lot of time on Laos, moving American resources to protect that government from the Pathet Lao communists. Helms always considered this part of the war a success, though of course eventually the communists would take over Laos. Somehow the world didn’t end when that took place. Amazing. Throughout the Johnson administration, Helms’ CIA gave the government far too optimistic reports about defeating the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, the intelligence version of the body count problem, with pressure to make things seem better than they were. Reader, they were not good. This included the CIA launched Phoenix program of torture and counterintelligence.

Richard Nixon was happy to keep Helms on as Director of Central Intelligence. After all, they shared a lot of politics and ideas about what to do with Global South leaders who didn’t do what Americans wanted. This came to a head in 1973, when the CIA arranged for the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile and his replacement with the fascist military thug Augusto Pinochet. Now, by the time of the coup itself, Helms was no longer head of the CIA, but he had done the groundwork since 1970 to send American money to right-wing unions and the Chilean military to move public opinion against Allende.

But the infighting in the Nixon administration was epic, especially with the ever greedy Henry Kissinger around, who wanted to control everything. Helms and Kissinger engaged in epic turf wars that eventually alienated the CIA director from Nixon. Vietnamization was Nixon’s order of the day and reduced CIA influence in the running of the war, to Kissinger’s advantage. Helms also distanced the agency from Watergate, despite former agents being involved. Nixon wanted Helms to run interference for him over Watergate and he did for a time. Nixon and Kissinger also both thought that the sheer existence of Allende as president of Chile was a sign that Helms wasn’t really good at his job; they would have made sure he never took power.

Finally, in 1973, Nixon forced Helms to step down from the CIA by naming him ambassador to Iran. Not a bad landing spot, especially as he and the Shah were school chums, but still, a defeat for Helms. Nixon actually offered him the ambassadorship to the Soviet Union, but Helms demurred that it was too sensitive of a position. Relations were smooth with Iran there for awhile because of this.

But here came Congress investigating all the CIA’s crimes. Helms denied that the CIA had anything to do with the coup in Chile. But then came all the evidence that it did. Helms was caught red-handed and then convicted of lying to Congress. The two-year suspended sentence did not exactly serve as a punishment. It did make a hero to the CIA though, since he refused to tell even Congress what the agency did.

Helms spent his last years as an informal advisor to the Reagan administration, lobbyist, and senior foreign policy and intelligence guy. He died in 2002, at the age of 89.

Richard Helms is buried on the confiscated lands of the traitor Lee, Arlington National Cemetery, Arlington, Virginia.

If you would like this series to visit other CIA directors, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. They are such a lovely group of fellows. William Raborn is in Annapolis, Maryland and John McCone is in Seattle. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.