Richard (Dick) Helms, who died this week aged 89, is the only director of the US Central Intelligence Agency to have been convicted of lying to Congress about the organisation's undercover activities. He was sentenced in 1977 to the maximum fine and a suspended two-year prison sentence for lying about the agency's involvement in the overthrow of President Allende in Chile.
Helms maintained to the last that he had had no choice, that his overriding responsibility was to US national security. His opponents argued that the real reason for his reticence was his personal involvement in many of the agency's darkest episodes, including Cuba,Vietnam and Watergate.
Helms's original ambition had been to make his way in newspapers. He was born in St Davids, a smart suburb of Philadelphia. Two of his secondary school years were spent in Europe, where he learned French and German.
In 1935, he graduated from Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, and the next year the United Press news agency sent him to help cover the Berlin Olympic Games.
On America's entry into the second World War, Helms joined the navy, and plotted German submarine activity. Then he was approached by his former news agency bureau chief in Berlin to join the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the covert action body being formed by William Donovan.
Helms rejected the approach, but then the Navy Department was asked for a German-speaking officer with a journalistic background, and in August 1943 Helms was posted to the OSS.
The principal professional lesson he drew from the experience of organising intelligence operations against Germany was to rate information-gathering far higher than the often flashy sabotage raids to which "Wild Bill" Donovan was drawn. It also inculcated his lifelong belief in the importance of extreme secrecy in all intelligence work.
After the German surrender, he helped round up suspected Nazi war criminals. Then he became one of 600 field officers transferred to the newly formed Office of Special Operations (OSO). At the age of 33 he was put in charge of intelligence and counter-intelligence activities in Germany, Austria and Switzerland.
The National Security Act of July 1947 created the CIA, of which OSO became a division. President Truman established the Office of Policy Co-ordination (OPC), which was funded by the CIA and instructed to conduct covert anti-communist operations around the world.
Helms was convinced that the new body's often naïve entanglement with emigre organisations threatened the life and work of the far more effective agents employed by his OSO. The two arms of the service were eventually amalgamated into the Directorate for Plans. Helms was made deputy director, working under the man who had been running the despised OPC.
The new department was responsible for all the agency's "black" operations. What started for Helms in disappointment became a blessing when the CIA's 1961 attempt to invade Cuba foundered in the Bay of Pigs and put his boss, Richard Bissell, in the firing line.
The CIA's internal inquiry established that Bissell had made little if any effort to determine whether the arrival of Cuban exile forces was likely to trigger the supposed anti-Castro uprising. When Bissell eventually resigned, Helms was the natural choice to take over.
He immediately came under pressure from President Kennedy and his brother Robert, the Attorney General, to increase US efforts to get rid of the Castro regime. Operation Mongoose had nearly 4,000 operators involved in attacks on Cuban economic targets.
One of the murkier aspects of the period was the degree of Helms's involvement in Mafia attempts to assassinate Castro. A congressional inquiry never got to the bottom of it, never finding anything on paper. In the end the Mongoose venture was a total failure and soon eclipsed by the far greater issue of Soviet missiles on the island.
Perversely, the CIA lost ground with the Kennedy administration when the dust had settled on that crisis, mainly because its evaluation of the intelligence from Cuba had been more accurate than the White House's. With this friction in the background, Helms was dispatched to Vietnam, where President Ngo Dinh Diem's treatment of Buddhist unrest was creating a problem.
Washington favoured a coup to overthrow Diem, which was engineered by the CIA. Diem and his brother were murdered by the officers who mounted the operation and Helms was surprised at Kennedy's horrified reaction, saying that the president did not seem to have understood what he had authorised. Kennedy himself was assassinated three weeks later, on November 22nd, 1963.
President Lyndon Johnson appointed Admiral William Raborn, a fellow Texan, head of the CIA. Helms was made Raborn's deputy but, when Raborn quickly demonstrated that he was out of his depth, Helms assumed effective control.
He began to make some of the crucial decisions about Vietnam which were to haunt the US for a decade. One was to enlarge the area of conflict through the secret creation in neighbouring Laos of a vast army of Meo tribesmen, charged with attacking North Vietnamese supply columns moving down the Ho Chi Minh trail. Another was the organisation of South Vietnamese counter-terror teams, which soon acquired a fearsome reputation for arbitrary brutality.
Within a year, Johnson put Helms into the top job at the CIA - the first director to have worked his way up from the ranks. His standing improved dramatically a year later with the threat of war in the Middle East. In response to an urgent request from Johnson, the agency calculated that Israel would win any conflict within 10 days, a judgment which critically affected America's subsequent policy.
However, the quagmire of Vietnam continued to suck the agency and the country into deeper trouble, and Helms began to tell the president what he wanted to hear. One of the worst examples concerned the size of North Vietnamese and Viet Cong forces. The Pentagon, anxious to show it was winning the war, said they had been reduced to 270,000. The CIA produced the much less welcome figure of 500,000.
A ferocious bureaucratic battle erupted which only ended when Helms directly ordered George Carver, the CIA's man in Saigon, to accept the Pentagon's estimate. On November 13th, 1967, Helms formally signed the document containing the supposed enemy order of battle, by now massaged even lower, to 248,000. Two months later the North Vietnamese forces, which had been argued out of existence in Washington, emerged across South Vietnam to attack Saigon and 48 provincial capitals in the Tet offensive.
The arrival of President Nixon brought hard times for Helms. Not only was Nixon an awkward boss, but he brought in Henry Kissinger as national security adviser. Helms got involved in an early fight about the capabilities of the new Soviet SS-9 missile, which Kissinger and the White House thought much more dangerous than it was. Helms turned out to be right, but that removed the Russian threat the administration needed to justify its anti-ballistic missile system.
Nixon's paranoia about the growing opposition to the Vietnam war brought out Helms's tendency to act as the obedient bureaucrat. He agreed without an apparent qualm to the so-called Huston plan, a proposal for all the country's security services to combine in a massive internal surveillance operation. It was politically horrific, but it was also illegal for the CIA to operate within the US. Nixon eventually withdrew his consent, but discussion of the scheme revealed that the CIA had been involved in domestic intelligence since Helms took control.
Then came Watergate, with its revelation that a CIA man had been one of the burglars and that some of the other intruders into the Democratic Party headquarters had long CIA connections. Two of the central figures, Howard Hunt and Gordon Liddy, had received technical help from the agency.
Helms distanced his organisation as far as possible from the scandal. He was immediately successful, but the freebooting days of the agency were drawing to a close, and much tighter congressional controls were introduced. Nixon considered Helms disloyal, and sent him to become US ambassador in Tehran. But much of his time in the post was spent commuting to Washington to answer congressional questions about the unwholesome revelations of CIA misdemeanours.
The agency's subversion of Chilean democracy was Helms's undoing. For years the CIA had poured money into the country to ensure that the Christian Democrats held power. The 1970 elections, however, seemed likely to put Salvador Allende's Socialist Workers' party into office.
Various multinationals, particularly International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), feared the loss of their assets, and backed the rightwing candidate. Without the knowledge of the State Department, and in defiance of official policy, Helms helped them channel their funds.
When Allende still won, Nixon directly ordered Helms to overturn the result and, in the manoeuvring of the local CIA representative, a senior Chilean general was killed by military plotters. When ITT's involvement was revealed in press reports two years later, Helms was questioned by Senator Stuart Symington at the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Had the CIA tried to overthrow the government of Chile? No. Did you have money passed to the opponents of Allende? No.
Investigation by the agency's inspector general showed both answers were untrue, and he was prosecuted. The Senate Select Committee on Intelligence found he had not only been involved in illegal domestic surveillance and the 1961 murder of Patrice Lumumba in the Congo, but of covering up his predecessors' misdemeanours, including secret drug-testing experiments on unwitting victims. However, Helms has gone to his grave with the sole knowledge of what Congress did not manage to uncover. He is survived by his second wife.
Richard McGarrah Helms: born March 30th, 1913; died October 22nd, 2002