From 1969 through 1972 Theodore Shackley led the CIA station in Saigon. Given that CORDS’s purpose fit classic definitions of political action, and that Colby’s organization held formal responsibility here, room for conflict with Shackley existed. In particular the two groups competed over who would run the most promising agents recruited in the course of Phoenix. The CIA had first dibs as the nation’s front-line intelligence agency. That led to temptation among CORDS advisers to keep secret their best spies so as to avoid having them taken over. Vietnam intelligence suffered as a consequence.

  Possibly the most contentious matter to arise during Shackley’s time in Saigon was the conflict with army Special Forces over the so-called Green Beret Affair, the June 1969 execution—or murder—of a Vietnamese agent working for Special Forces at Nha Trang. Killed after a long, inconclusive interrogation, on grounds he might be a spy for Hanoi, the case came to the attention of U.S. commander Gen. Creighton V. Abrams, who ordered a full investigation. Counter Intelligence Corps inquiries traced orders for the killing up the chain of command to the head of the Fifth Special Forces Group, Col. Robert B. Rheault, and he plus a number of Green Berets were remanded for courts martial. Their defense was that CIA—Shackley and the agency’s regional officer-in-charge, Dean Almy—had demanded the murder.

  Lawyers threatened to subpoena Shackley, Almy, and Richard Helms. During preliminary hearings, the agency began sending its people off on temporary duty assignments so they would be unavailable. The issue rose to the highest levels: memoranda from CIA general counsel Lawrence Houston, meetings between counsel for the agency and the army, even a session of the United States Intelligence Board at which the murder was the only subject, no notes were permitted, and all backbenchers were kept out—unprecedented in U.S. intelligence history. The army dropped all charges without ever going to trial.

  Saigon politics per se remained within Shackley’s purview, and there would be another presidential election in 1971. To both Colby’s and Shackley’s credit, their differences remained relatively minor.

  Another intelligence mission, principally involving Special Forces, particularly MACSOG, was prisoner rescue, under the code name Bright Light. The most spectacular mission was a raid carried out quite close to Hanoi in November 1970. It hit a complex near the town of Sontay, where Americans were thought to be held. The raid, Operation Ivory Coast, came off without a hitch, unlike the later Iranian hostage rescue fiasco, but it illustrated a different problem with these kinds of missions: no prisoners were found. Intelligence on prisoner locations in rescue missions was always uncertain. Twenty-eight more rescues were attempted after Sontay. Of the total of 119 missions undertaken between 1966 and 1973, fully 98 were raids. The rescue missions freed several hundred South Vietnamese soldiers and 60 civilians but only one American prisoner, and he died shortly afterward from wounds inflicted at the last moment by his captors. Raids might be spectacular, but they were not about to determine the outcome of the war. That could only be done on the ground, in the South, and the prospects dimmed every day.

  Thomas Polgar followed Shackley in Saigon, taking over in January 1972. A European specialist with no Asian experience whatever, recently posted in Latin America, Polgar did pretty well, but the war had already gone bad. Hanoi staged a huge offensive that year, finally driving the United States out of the conflict, at least in terms of military involvement. The Paris cease-fire agreement sealed the fate of the Saigon regime. Polgar presided over thirty more months of battles that pitted Saigon, on its own, against Hanoi. In some respects the CIA role actually grew with the U.S. military out of the game, but the South Vietnamese gradually lost ground until, in March 1975, their defenses collapsed. Over two frantic months the issue became the evacuation of South Vietnamese, including the agency’s assets. Many were left behind, along with the Saigon station’s records, which fell into Hanoi’s hands when the U.S. embassy was captured on April 30, 1975. Frank Snepp, Polgar’s top analyst, has left a searing account of the CIA’s final days in-country, and others have also described those terrible weeks when a few CIA officers saved some Vietnamese, often heroically, but the larger defeat remained inexorable. The fall of Saigon brought the end of the wars.

  The secret wars in Southeast Asia represented many things to many people. To some they were laboratories to test techniques, to others a political morass at the edge of the Vietnam quagmire. These many years later the full story of secret operations in Southeast Asia is still untold. To some Americans, Laos symbolized government secrecy used to cloak doubtful legality. To many, Vietnam symbolized power illegitimately unleashed and inevitably defeated. To most, all this seemed a terrible mistake. Yet even as these events unfolded, the Central Intelligence Agency had more going on, at home as well as around the globe.

  16

  Global Reach

  BLESSED WITH a perfect background for an internationalist, Richard McGarrah Helms could have been a diplomat, a banker, or a military officer. His maternal grandfather, an international banker, lived in Basel, Switzerland. His father had been an executive with the Aluminum Company of America. But Helms chose to be a spy. Born on Philadelphia’s Main Line, as a boy Helms lived in New York City and New Jersey. Herman Helms saved the family the horrors of the Great Depression by cashing out of the stock market before the crash, affording Helms opportunities denied to many among his generation. Herman and Marion Helms wanted their children to have an international education and moved them to Europe, just as Dick finished his junior year at a private high school. Helms summered in France, spent a year at the Swiss prep school Le Rosey, then another at a German gymnasium in Freiburg. Skiing, soccer, and crew soaked up his time, and much of the rest was spent trying to understand geometry taught in French or Latin taught in German. Helms needed a tutor for the Latin, given that Williams College, the family school, required four years of the language but the gymnasium did not teach it. After a late bout with chicken pox—acquired during a family trip to Italy—Helms arrived at Williams in the fall of 1931.

  Aside from inducing the college to accept his dual major in English and history, Helms learned a lesson for later life. As editor of the newspaper he wrote an editorial advocating ending both the Latin requirement and compulsory attendance at chapel. The world crashed down then, with demands he be expelled for expressing such heresy. Helms had been an excellent student—he would graduate magna cum laude with a Phi Beta Kappa key—and survived this confrontation. No doubt the memory of his Williams experience helped him in certain CIA controversies.

  But the spy life came later. Richard Helms wanted to be a journalist or lawyer. He toyed with Harvard Law School but instead took a job with the United Press in London. His later assignment to Berlin led to an unforgettable lunch in 1936 with Adolf Hitler and other Nazi luminaries. Helms also saw the nadir of journalism—being scooped by the rival Associated Press on reporting the Nazi Party rallies at Nuremberg. And he covered the Olympics where American athlete Jesse Owens won the two-hundred-meter dash. Helms hoped to have his own newspaper one day and left the United Press to learn the business end of journalism with the Indianapolis Times, where he became advertising manager. While in Indianapolis he married Julia B. Shields, recently divorced from the founder of one of the larger grooming products firms of the day.

  World War II brought a sea change for Dick Helms as for so many others. A former United Press boss, now with the OSS, asked Dick to join him, but nothing came of that. Helms volunteered for the naval reserve and ended up at Harvard after all—as an officer trainee. Detailed to the navy’s anti-submarine warfare staff, after just a few weeks Helms was simply detached to the OSS one Sunday morning. Two weeks of training, assignment to the OSS planning unit, and long hours monitoring the counterintelligence program from Washington led Helms to do everything he could to get into the field. In early 1945 that finally happened when he went to London, where William J. Casey led OSS efforts to penetrate Germany. Dick Helms never returned to journalism.

  The London job opened Helms to the inner sanctum of operations, bewitched him, and brought him to his life’s work. He shared an apartment with Casey and became the spy’s spy, a master of clandestine espionage in Europe, for which education and experience equipped him perfectly. He soon moved to Paris with Casey, continuing the work. By the end of the war, Helms was an established expert on Germany. When OSS sent a mission into the defeated nation, Helms went along. Allen Dulles, supposed to head the unit, stayed in Switzerland to wind up affairs there while his deputy focused on management, leaving Dick Helms the key field officer. Helms met many who became towering figures in the CIA, including not only Dulles and Casey but Walter Bedell Smith, Frank Wisner, Gordon Stewart, Peter Sichel, Rolf Kingsley, and such fellow travelers as Robert Joyce, intelligence officers and diplomats who played major roles in the agency’s covert actions.

  Like many of them, Richard Helms stayed on when the OSS became the Strategic Services Unit, and then through its meanderings until it emerged as the Central Intelligence Agency. Already in a senior position, Helms rose to become the CIA’s staff chief, then division chief for Germany, responsible for a major theater of the secret war. He only went on to greater glory. By the 1950s Helms had a reasonable expectation of selection as chief of the Directorate for Operations, but then Allen Dulles passed him over for Wisner. Helms served as chief of operations. Active and engaged, Helms told a group of officers, “My job is to hold an umbrella over you fellows and catch the crap so you can get on with your operating.”

  When it became impossible for Wisner to continue as DDO, Dick Helms, who had already twice acted in that position, held the strongest claim to the job, but Dulles selected Richard Bissell instead. The spy maven thought of resigning. Near the end of his life, Dulles told Helms that not making him DDO had been his worst mistake. Dulles’s choice reflected Eisenhower’s predilection for covert operations. But after the Bay of Pigs, the man who kept the secrets could not be denied.

  In early 1962 the forty-nine-year-old Helms, affable and precise, became deputy director for operations in his own right. In the Congo, Laos, South Vietnam, and South America, Helms showed he could play the covert action game as well as anyone, and he ably seconded John McCone in this pursuit. The CIA director sometimes took Helms to meetings at the White House, and at one of these he introduced the DDO to the president.

  With Lyndon Johnson, John McCone never achieved anything like the rapport he had had with Jack Kennedy. Johnson remained slightly suspicious. A man of the Senate, LBJ probably resented how McCone threw his weight around on Capitol Hill in 1963, at the time the Senate debated an arms-control agreement (the Partial Test Ban Treaty), staking out a political position and even lending CIA analysts to those who believed as he did. McCone’s penchant for policy advice also irked Johnson. LBJ increasingly cut out face time in the Oval Office, which annoyed McCone. By early 1965 John McCone, at loggerheads with LBJ over Vietnam and access, had had enough. That April he quit.

  A few days later Johnson aide Marvin Watson telephoned Helms at Langley and asked him over the next morning. The Secret Service ushered Richard Helms into the Oval Office, and when LBJ got off the telephone he announced to the startled spook that John McCone had resigned. President Johnson appointed Vice Admiral William F. Raborn as successor. But Raborn, a Navy rocket specialist, knew nothing whatever about intelligence. Johnson wanted him backed up by someone with real knowledge of the agency’s work. Richard Helms was that man. On April 28, 1965, he became deputy director for central intelligence.

  Returning from the LBJ Ranch after the appointments were announced, the president told Helms that he and Raborn were to shake up the agency. LBJ must have liked what he saw. Little more than a year later, when Johnson decided he wanted no more of Red Raborn, he elevated Dick Helms. Raborn displeased LBJ in a different way, by doing what the president asked and keeping away from him. The CIA director was not helped by a low-level campaign of guttersniping from agency people and their allies, annoyed at this neophyte on the Seventh Floor. President Johnson named Vice Admiral Rufus Taylor as DDCI. “I thought he had the personality of a dead mackerel,” an LBJ lieutenant was later quoted as saying of Helms. “But he certainly had the respect of the president.”

  Johnson appointed Helms on June 18, 1966. Ten days later the Senate confirmed him, and he was sworn in on June 30. One of the longest-running tenures of any director of central intelligence began that day.

  Helms became the first CIA director to have to deal with a major flap over CIA domestic activity. Allen Dulles and his predecessors had had problems with paramilitary operations abroad, or with the agency’s perceived intelligence failures, but it would be on Helms’s watch that domestic activities attracted attention and quickly made waves. The unraveling can be said to have begun in the spring of 1966 with publication in the New York Times of articles on U.S. intelligence. Both the CIA and the White House were forewarned about the series by some of the people the reporters spoke to. The agency even sent out an all-hands cable instructing stations how to respond to local questioners. When the Times began publishing, stations reported back what parts of the stories were getting the most attention in their countries. The CIA subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee asked for and received an agency briefing on the articles. Most of the material dealt with older chestnuts: the power of secret intelligence in general, the Bay of Pigs, the Congo, and so on; but there were hints of other issues. Probably most important, the stories challenged some Americans who were involved with certain CIA secret activities.

  Key here were the officers of the National Student Association (NSA). Nongovernment and nonpartisan, the NSA functioned as an umbrella group of mainly student organizations at various colleges. The agency’s International Organizations Division had seen the NSA as a counterweight to Soviet-sponsored youth groups in the 1950s. Although sensibilities had changed, impelled especially by growing opposition to the Vietnam War, the NSA had remained active in the cultural Cold War. Into the 1960s the CIA paid for NSA international activities, arranged for its offices in the Dupont Circle section of Washington (the group had a rent-free fifteen-year lease for space on S Street, Northwest), and contributed to the upkeep of its senior officials. The CIA also funded summer seminars for student leaders and used them to spot talent for recruitment. By some accounts, agency cash, channeled through friendly foundations, amounted to $3.3 million. Even at the time this information surfaced, membership dues accounted for just $18,000 of an $800,000 NSA budget. After 1962, when CIA’s International Organizations Division merged into its Covert Action Staff, that unit ran the student project.

  Later investigation established that the CIA had made operational use of some of the students on their foreign sojourns. One, on an NSA scholarship as an exchange student in Poland, had to be pulled out for fear he would be picked up as an American spy. More frequently the agency simply asked students to keep a watchful eye during their trips and tell what they had seen.

  By 1965 NSA leaders were uncomfortable with the CIA relationship. The press revelations of 1966 soured them still more. Shortly before the Times series on the CIA, NSA president Phil Sherburne told his director of development, Michael Wood, of the CIA’s role. Not all were witting—Cord Meyer of the Covert Action Staff made sure of that, monitoring NSA elections, revealing agency backing only to the association president and its vice president for international affairs. When Wood learned of the connection he was scandalized. He first tried to replace the CIA money, contacting Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey, who did some fund-raising but had little success. Association officials attempted to dissuade Wood, who saw their pleas as bribery. Wood then told others at NSA of the CIA connection and began talking to the San Francisco–based magazine of political commentary, Ramparts. The magazine had already raised eyebrows at Langley with an exposé reporting that the CIA had hired Michigan State University to furnish assistance to the South Vietnamese police. Very much against the Johnson administration and strongly anti-war, Ramparts saw the opportunity to make a powerful statement against covert action by revealing the CIA-NSA links. Subsequent events would test Helms’s umbrella theory of management.

  The Johnson administration became perfectly aware of this brewing cauldron of trouble. By May 1966, within a month of the Times revelations, Director Helms sent the White House information about Ramparts and its editor, Robert Scheer. The White House wanted more, and Helms initiated an investigation of the magazine’s alleged Communist ties, using its own files and those of the FBI. There were none to find. The agency reluctantly reported this to national security adviser Walt Rostow.

  Cord Meyer, whose name appeared in the ensuing flap, writes of this almost as if he were an innocent bystander implicated by NSA’s irresponsible young radicals. In fact the CIA, before the event, acted preemptively to limit the damage. A special assistant to the deputy director of operations, ordered to pull together the data on Ramparts, progressed to schemes to wreck the magazine. Langley considered asking the Internal Revenue Service to audit Ramparts’s tax returns but dropped that idea. Edmund Applewhite, a seventeen-year agency veteran of literary bent, who had once worked with Buckminster Fuller, coordinated these schemes for the DO. Applewhite told a later interviewer, “I had all sorts of dirty tricks to hurt their circulation and financing. . . . We were not in the least inhibited by the fact that the CIA had no internal role in the United States.” Later Applewhite was promoted to deputy inspector general of the CIA and decorated with the Intelligence Medal of Merit.

  In early January 1967 Langley picked up rumors in New York publishing circles that a Ramparts piece on the agency and the National Student Association, written by Marcus Raskin, had been scheduled and would focus on CIA subversion of American youth—hardly an image in the democratic mold. About the same time the agency intercepted a letter from an unknown organization, probably contrived, mailed from Vienna, still a spy haven. The letter alleged that the CIA employed someone in the coordinating secretariat of the International Student Conference in Brussels, with purloined documents from secretariat files that seemed to substantiate the charge. The NSA was a Conference affiliate. This permitted Langley counterspy James Angleton to assert that the entire matter was a Soviet disinformation plot. Had CIA followed Angleton’s advice it would have been even less prepared for the coming storm.