THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01350R000200050014-4
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 16, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 17, 2004
• Sequence Number: 14
• Publication Date: October 22, 1979
• Content Type: MAGAZINE

ARTICLE APPEARED A.t WOXEAW% '
Approved For R '@W/t~ : CIA-RDP88*00020
THE MAN WHO
KNEW Too MUCH
THE MAN WHO KEPT THE SECRETS. By
Thomas Powers. 393 pages. Knopf. $12.95.
Graham Greene can relax. This history of
master spy Richard Helms by a Pulitzer
Prize-winning journalist is not one of those
works of fact that rival cloak-and-dagger
fiction. Rather, it is an intelligent collec-
tion of mostly well-told tales about the CIA
-its cold-war origins, oddball personal-
ities, plots against Castro, connections with
Watergate-culled from: private inter-
views, . public records (the Rockefeller
Commission, a special Senate committee,
the Pentagon papers) and previously pub-
lished works about intelligence and Water-
gate by more than. .80 authors. Instead of
derring-do or dramatic deductions, Powers
provides the bureaucratic background-or
at least as much, he acknowledges, as those
who know are willing to tell.
ILL FIT: Helms is not an easy subject. The
man who kept the CIA's secrets under
Congressional questioning-and pleaded
nolo contendere to criminal charges as a
result-remains a mystery himself. Powers
says that Helms was always dubious about
the value of covert operations and secret
fiddling, yet the record shows his name
connected with just about every controver-
sial CIA project that has come to light-
drug-testing, mail-opening, at least
secret
one plot against Castro, political interfer-
ence in Chile and help for Richard Nixon's
White House plumbers. The urbane Helms
also enjoyed the loyalty and respect of
many colleagues and a Who's Who of
influential men about Washington. But
most of the personal details F:that Powers
produces make him seem curiously ill fit for
sensitive intelligence work-slow to reach
hard decisions, quick to compromise with
powerful opponents, a passer-on of other
people's papers and a promoter of incompe-
tents. Perhaps this is the kind of man who
succeeds in a modern intelligence establish-
ment-or perhaps there is still more to
Helms than we know.
Few anecdotes about the man exist, an-
other serious problem for the author, and
those that do add little to Helms's image.
After Lyndon Johnson promoted Helms to
deputy director in 1965 (making him the
first career CIA officer to rise that high), he
invited him to a dinner at the LBJ ranch; at
the table, Sen. Eugene McCarthy twitted
the twenty-year veteran of intelligence
work. Did he know the wine being served?
Helms did not. The sauce on the dishes?
Sorry. The flower in the centerpiece? No,
again. "McCarthy nodded in a knowing
manner, and remarked that James Bond
would have done better."
BORED: More seriously, Powers suggests,
Helms as CIA director was not precisely
suited to those high councils where intelli-
gence intersects with national policy. Says
Powers, "He knew all there was to know
about operating a secret intelligence agen-
cy, but he was bored by arguments over
precedence in the Central Committee of the
Chinese Communist Party, or the exact
characteristics of some new Soviet missile.
Participants in meetings of the United
States Intelligence Board (USIB) would
sometimes notice Helms, USIB's chair-
man, staring dreamily off into space ... His
relative lack of interest made him vulner-
able at the National Security Council.".
Powers did talk with Helms-and this
version of his career will probably have to
stand until Helms writes his own. For one
thing, Helms furiously denies the notion
(put about in a novel by Nixon aide John
Ehrlichman) that he blackmailed Richard
Nixon into making him U.S. ambassador to
Iran. But Powers speculates that Nixon,
typically, might have presumed such a.
threat and discussed it with Ehrlichman.
Powers also dismisses the suggestion that
the CIA itself hatched the Watergate plot to
topple Nixon, and he concludes that the
agency's comic-opera campaign to assassi-
nate Castro was carried out under orders
from John and Robert Kennedy: If Helms
had ever attributed .the Castro plot to the
Kennedys, Powers writes, "he not only
would have been the target of some ex-
tremely caustic comment, but from that
day forward he would have lunched alone."
Once the CIA's dirtiest secrets-its so-
CURTAIN OF ILLUSION: In the end, Powers
concludes, Helms kept the CIA's secrets to
protect himself, salvage what he could of
public trust in the CIA and maintain that
curtain of illusion essential to intelligence
operations. But the times had changed
enough so that Helms could not go unpun-
ished; he eventually was fined 52,000 and
sentenced to two years in jail (suspended).
Powers sees a proper public revulsion at the
"callous, reckless and offhand" use to
which the CIA has been put in the past. But
he has the sophistication to wonder wheth-
er-after all the shouting, charter-rewrit
ing and Congressional watchdogging is
done-things will ever be very different.
called "Family Jewels"-were out, Powers
says, Helms felt isolated and confused.
Why was he suddenly being blamed for
practices accepted, for a generation by the
powerful few who knew about them? He
despised the new CIA director, William
Colby, for spilling so much in hopes of
restoring the agency's credibility, and he
thought Frank Church and some other
senators on the CIA's trail were showboat- 1
ing hypocrites. Surely, Helms believed, the
senators knew the need for dark deeds, the
pressure for them from the highest levels of
government-and the need to keep things
secret.
Approved For Release 2004/10/13 : CIA-RDP88-01350R000200050014-4.