Flattery worked. Helms was diligent, attentive to Nixon’s perennially wounded pride. When the president did a nationally televised interview in January 1971 with four network correspondents, Helms tuned in. Nixon discussed the war, the economy, and student unrest. The group discussion format played to his strengths: his analytical rigor, his mastery of detail, and his command of policy. Helms responded with a note in his neat cursive.
“My dear Mr. President, Without I hope being thought presumptuous, may I say how effective I found your appearance on television last evening. You were persuasive and constructive, all in a ‘real world’ context, and it came over as a most impressive performance in the best Presidential tradition. It gave even me a big lift.…”1
Nixon was grateful but daunted. The problems his administration confronted in early 1971, he later recalled, “were so overwhelming and so apparently impervious to anything we could do that might change them that it seemed possible I might not even be nominated for re-election in 1972.” Unemployment hit 6 percent, the highest in a decade. The dollar hit a record low.2 Expanding the war into Cambodia had not relieved pressure on the South Vietnamese government. It had merely opened another battlefront for the communists. In the Senate, leading Republicans, men whom he had helped over the years—Chuck Percy in Illinois and Hugh Scott in Pennsylvania—were rebelling against the war that everyone hated. Nixon’s claim that he was “winding down” the conflict was losing credibility, even if the death toll was less appalling. Two hundred fifty-nine men died in Vietnam that month. They came from every state in the union except for Maine and Vermont. Two hundred twenty-three were white, twenty-six were black. There were four homicides and three suicides.3
While Nixon brooded, Helms waltzed. He relished his job, ran laps in the basement of the CIA headquarters, played a moderately competent set of tennis on the weekends, and got to bed early. Helms loved ballroom dancing. He and Cynthia attended the parties of the Waltz Group, a network of like-minded couples in government, law, and the press. Once a month they put aside the business of power in favor of Brahms.4
Tom Hughes, the director of Intelligence and Research at the State Department, and his wife, Jane, were also regulars at the events held at the Sulgrave Club in Dupont Circle. The mood was gay, the banter flowed, and Helms enjoyed himself, Hughes recalled in an interview. “He was an excellent dancer and an avid gossip, always in control. I’d look over and there would be Helms rolling his eyes because Cord Meyer was drunk again.”5
Other evenings, Dick and Cynthia read spy novels aloud to each other. Helms didn’t care for the fictions of John le Carré, the nom de plume of David Cornwell, a former MI6 man whose dour tales of the Circus, a fictional version of the British service, did not glamorize the Cold War. Le Carré’s bestseller The Spy Who Came in from the Cold had been made into a movie with Richard Burton, and never had Helms’s profession looked less heroic. “He found Le Carré too dark and cynical,” Cynthia said.6
Helms got his fill of the dark and cynical on page B7 of the Washington Post on January 18, 1971, where syndicated columnist Jack Anderson, successor to the retired Drew Pearson, published a nasty and all-too-accurate column headlined “6 Attempts to Kill Castro Laid to CIA.”7
The shadow of JFK’s assassination fell on Dick Helms once again.
“Locked in the darkest recesses of the Central Intelligence Agency is the story of six assassination attempts against Cuba’s Fidel Castro,” Anderson’s column began. The story was true, as Helms knew better than anyone. Anderson was referring to Inspector General John Earman’s top-secret report of May 1967, which recounted the Mafia and AMLASH plots in dispassionate detail. Helms’s predecessor John McCone, now retired and serving on corporate boards, was quoted as saying he had objected to the plots.
Then came the nasty but true part.
“To set up the Castro assassination, the CIA enlisted Robert Maheu, a former FBI agent with shadowy contracts who had handled other underworld assignments for the CIA out of his Washington public relations office,” Anderson wrote. “He later moved to Las Vegas to head up billionaire Howard Hughes’ Nevada operations.”
Anderson was describing the same events Drew Pearson reported in March 1967 but with more detail. Helms knew the story could have only come from Maheu himself.
“Maheu recruited John Rosselli, a ruggedly handsome gambler with contacts in both the American and Cuban underworlds to arrange the assassination,” Anderson went on. “The CIA assigned two of its most trusted operatives William Harvey and James (Big Jim) O’Connell to the hush-hush murder mission.”
Helms was not a man prone to self-deception. With its naming of names, Maheu was sending a blunt message to both the White House and the CIA. He was reminding the president of their collaboration in throttling Aristotle Onassis’s monopoly on Middle East oil shipments back in 1954. He was warning Helms that he could spill secrets on the Castro plots that would raise JFK questions.
Déjà vu blackmail. Maheu had squeezed RFK and the CIA men in 1962, forcing the Justice Department to drop the charges of snooping on mobster Sam Giancana’s girlfriend. In 1967, he and Rosselli had floated the story of the Mafia plots to Drew Pearson, via his attorney Edward Morgan, to fend off the Long Committee. Now Rosselli was under grand jury investigation for running a rigged high-stakes gambling casino at the swank Friars Club in Los Angeles. If convicted he faced deportation to Italy, where he was born but had never lived. Maheu’s lawyer called his CIA contacts to say that Rosselli’s lawyer was putting out the word that unless someone interceded on his behalf Rosselli was going to make a “complete expose” of his activities with the CIA.8
That did the trick. Maheu came to Washington for a meeting at the Justice Department, which he later recounted to researcher Michael Ewing.9 Maheu explained to Attorney General Mitchell, whom he called his “close friend,” that he had a problem with a subpoena. If compelled to testify, he would talk about the Castro plots, Maheu emphasized. “There [is] a CIA report that can verify this,” he said, which was true. Maheu was referring to the 1967 inspector general’s report. By insinuating that the Mafia plots might have led to JFK’s assassination, Maheu increased the pressure on all concerned. The JFK story was back in the news. The New York Times reported that retired Dallas police chief Jesse Curry had just published a book saying he did not believe the Warren Commission report and called for a new investigation.
And what was the JFK story? Maheu told Mitchell the same story he told Anderson: the Mafia bosses had sent a team to Cuba to kill Castro. The team had been captured, and Castro retaliated with Oswald. There was a core of fact—the CIA had enlisted the mob bosses to kill the revolutionary they detested. The rest was window dressing. There was no evidence—no documents or testimony—that Castro “turned around” a CIA assassination plot. But the core of the story was enough. By the end, Mitchell was shaking in amazement. He offered Maheu a deal. Instead of going before the grand jury, he would be interviewed by Justice Department officials. Maheu did not need to talk about his assistance to the Agency. “I assured them, I intended to keep my word and maintain the secrecy of the mission,” Maheu said.10
Helms apparently blessed the deal. A month later, an unnamed Agency official met with the commissioner of the Immigration and Naturalization Service. “The purpose of this effort was to intercede … on behalf of Mr. Rosselli in the action being initiated for deportation,” read one memo. “It was determined that this Agency would be kept informed of the progress of the action against Mr. Rosselli in an effort to forestall public disclosure of his association with the United States government.” In short, Maheu and Rosselli had blackmailed the CIA once again.
It was a fallen world in which Dick Helms lived. Later that month, he spoke at a private family memorial for Frank Wisner at CIA headquarters on the fifth anniversary of his death. Cynthia was best friends with Frank’s widow, Polly. Only friends and family were invited. The director recalled Wisner’s foundational role in building the American clandestine service. Wisner’s conception of the Free World—the empire of American influence in righteous struggle against communism—had defined the Agency’s mission. Helms reflected too on the crushing pressures of a life in secret intelligence. He spoke of Wisner’s “night of dark intent” when he killed himself. This disparity between Wisner’s Free World fervor and the despair that drove him to pick up his shotgun chastened Helms.
“He sought perfection,” Helms lamented, “which we all must acknowledge, is yet to be attained by any wise man in the world of ambiguity and imperfection.”11
The world of ambiguity and imperfection often made Dick Nixon uncomfortable. He yearned for clarity, control, knowledge. His file card memory wanted data, dates, transcripts. He wanted to know what had happened, who said what, and why. In February 1971, he ordered recording devices placed in the White House, just as John Kennedy had.12
The first conversation captured between Nixon and Helms was a fight. It came halfway through a dismal meeting on February 27, 1971, about Laos, where South Vietnamese forces faced a powerful communist offensive. Admiral Tom Moorer, chairman of the Joint Chiefs, gave the battlefield statistics in a soft Virginia drawl. “They reported ten tanks destroyed, one by artillery, nine by tank fighting arms.”
Nixon broke in with a blunt challenge to Helms.
“One point, Dick, that concerns me is our intelligence people are saying our intelligence is inefficient, inadequate, bad,” Nixon spat, “and that’s the reason we’re running into more resistance that was expected.”
“Mr. President,” Helms perked up. “This is precisely what we expected.”
Nixon interrupted him by reading from a New York Daily News story about the fighting.
“Quote. ‘A high official said.’”
Helms was still talking and Nixon repeated himself louder.
“… a high official said…”
“What that high official doesn’t know,” Helms barked back, “… before the operation kicked off, we identified all those units.”
The president and the director were shouting at each other.
“What are you talking about?” Helms said.
They talked over each other until Helms finally gave up. The room fell quiet.
“Find the high official who said…” Nixon said, almost to himself.
Was Nixon implying Helms was the high official quoted in the article? He almost certainly wasn’t. Helms didn’t talk to the tabloids. Nixon was just in a bad mood because his invasion of Laos was sputtering. Easier to blame the CIA than acknowledge the enemy’s strength.
“All right, go ahead,” the president said morosely. “That’s about it.”
Admiral Moorer resumed the dismal briefing.
A week later, Helms was back in the Oval Office for another meeting of the war cabinet. Entering the room, he wasted no time quoting one of Nixon’s most vociferous defenders on the editorial pages of the Washington Post. “I was talking to our friend Joe Alsop,” he blurted, “and he understands this…”
Helms wanted to show his support. Nixon needed an audience.
“The mood of the country at the moment is negative and it will continue to be for the next couple of weeks because of television,” Nixon said. “Television has created doubts. The network news coverage of the offensive had been negative. They show this horrible killing, they show the helicopter people.… They show the South Vietnamese getting killed. And the people get the idea that the United States is taking a hell of a licking. And that’s why we’re gonna win.”
The logic was loose, but the conviction was not. As always, Nixon believed sheer willpower could turn things around.
“This country doesn’t lahk to lose,” drawled Moorer. “This country doesn’t lahk to lose. We have got to win this.”
“And I just feel so strongly now that’s why we popped them here,” Nixon yelped. “We popped them here and the same thing was true in Cambodia last year…”
Helms came to the aid of his beleaguered commander in chief.
“I have no personal reservations about any of these decisions, Mr. President,” he declared. “I’m with you all the way. These are my profound convictions. I think that the U.S., if we stick our tails between our legs and come slinking out of Vietnam would effectively, as you say, finish us as a world power.”
Nixon, heartened, wanted more wisdom from his counselor.
“What about Cuba?” he asked. “My conviction is very strong.… We cannot relent in our policy toward Cuba.… They’re still of course bent on revolution.… If we threw in the towel with Cubans, the effect in Latin America could be massive, in encouraging Communists.”
“Do you, from the intelligence and everything else, think we should hold the course on Cuba?” Nixon pressed. “Or should we start being nice to Castro?”
“Sir, I testified about a year ago on this question,” Helms replied, “and I gave you the answer then. I was opposed to the idea of relenting on Cuba. I’m just as opposed today and in fact even more so. I think what’s happened in Chile makes it even more advisable to keep a tough line on Cuba.”
What’s happened in Chile. The failure to prevent a leftist victory weighed on both of them. The assassination of General Schneider had accomplished nothing. For Helms that meant it was no time to let up on Cuba.
“What I’m afraid is a wave in Latin America anyway is going to crash on the beach a lot faster,” he explained. He anticipated a wave of popular support for the left in Latin America, driven by global opposition to the war in Vietnam. “It’s a lot easier for this country to handle Cuba the way we handle her now, than to start these little pacifying moves which are really cosmetic and just make it difficult to face the problem.”
“’Do this, or that, or the other thing with the damn Cubans?’” Nixon snarled. “To hell with them.”13
Just like that, Helms was back in Nixon’s good graces.
Howard Hunt, in linen suit and wraparound sunglasses, puffed his usual pipe at the monument to the fallen solders of the Bay of Pigs on Southwest 8th Street in Miami’s Little Havana. He and Dorothy loitered as a crowd gathered. It was the tenth anniversary of the failed invasion, an emotionally potent occasion for Hunt to reunite with some old friends.
Hunt had stuck a note in the mailbox of Macho Barker, his deputy on Operation Zapata, whom he hadn’t seen in years. He said he wanted to meet him and Musculito too. Musculito was the nickname of muscular Rolando Martínez, the veteran boat captain who had run many a mission for the Agency.
“Eduardo was a name that all of us who had participated in the Bay of Pigs knew well,” said Martínez in an oral history. “Eduardo had been the maximum representative of the Kennedy administration to our people in Miami. He occupied a special place in our hearts.… He blamed the Kennedy administration for not supporting us on the beaches of the Bay of Pigs. So, when Barker told me that Eduardo was coming to town and that he wanted to meet me, that was like a hope for me.”14
After abrazos all around, the three men and Dorothy went out to eat. Hunt told his Cuban friends how bad he still felt about the Bay of Pigs, avowing “the whole thing is not over yet.”15
“He made us believe if we would help, the influence that he might have, later on, will be of benefit for our fight against Castro,” Martínez said. He was certain Hunt was talking about Agency-approved business.
“We were going to work in national security because they had formed an organization that was between the CIA and the FBI,” he said. “He convinced us. He selected our names for clearance, and, later on, he came and said, ‘You have the clearance.’ … Where am I going to suppose he is finding out about us? With the CIA.”16
Hunt insisted his misadventures in political burglary began when he went to work for the Nixon White House in July 1971. He was responding, he said, to the publication of the Pentagon Papers and the revelation that former Defense Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg was the source.
Rolando Martínez and Bernard Barker said otherwise. They said Hunt was looking for “national security” operatives ten weeks before he went to work at the White House, which was ten weeks before Daniel Ellsberg became a household name. Hunt wasn’t working for the White House at that time. He was working for the Mullen Company with a security clearance from Tom Karamessines for an undisclosed project.17
As Hunt recruited help in Miami for national security work, Helms pressed for authority in Washington to conduct more aggressive operations against the radical antiwar movement and other targets. Policy measures would echo in political crime.
Helms was not averse to conducting covert operations in the United States, even if that was forbidden by the Agency’s charter. In February 1971, an Agency break-in team entered the second floor of a photography shop in Fairfax City, Virginia. Helms authorized the entry as part of an investigation of an Agency employee who ran the studio with Orlando Nuñez, a former Cuban government official. While working in the CIA records division, the employee tried to find out what Agency files existed on Nuñez.18 The surreptitious entry was justified, Helms said, because the Agency sought evidence of a Cuban penetration operation. It found none.
Helms favored such measures as a matter of policy. He convened a meeting with Hoover, Admiral Gayler, and John Mitchell. He wanted to discuss “a broadening of operations, particular of the confidential type in covering intelligence both domestic and foreign.”
The grumpy Hoover said he was “not at all enthusiastic … in view of the hazards involved.”19 Helms talked up “further coverage of mail.” He offered some choice classified details about the LINGUAL program, which opened and copied international correspondence of several thousand Americans every year. He followed up by sending a letter to Mitchell formally requesting the end of Hoover’s freeze on domestic wiretaps. Mitchell approved.20 Nixon couldn’t count on Hoover to implement his domestic surveillance agenda, but he could count on Helms.
Not the least of Helms’s contributions was to plausibly deny that such an agenda existed. As the butler of intelligence, he was especially convincing. In April 1971 he made a rare public appearance to send a reassuring message. The Agency did not have or seek the power to spy on Americans, he told the annual conference of the American Society of Newspaper Editors.
“I can assure you,” he explained to several hundred editors and publishers assembled in a Washington hotel ballroom, “that except for the normal responsibilities for protecting the physical security of our own personnel, our facilities and our classified information, we do not have any such powers and functions [in the area of domestic intelligence]. We have never sought any; we do not exercise any. In short, we do not target on American citizens.”21
Well intentioned or not, that was a falsehood. Two CIA operations, authorized by Helms, LINGUAL and CHAOS, targeted thousands of American citizens on a daily basis. Between 1970 and mid-1972, the CHAOS operatives distributed 1,064 reports and 75 special studies in the Langley headquarters while receiving more than 5,800 cables and 2,400 dispatches.22 Targeting American citizens, in other words, was not forbidden. It was routine. Helms believed that function could be plausibly denied in service of national security.
He wasn’t wrong. The desire to believe in a law-abiding CIA director was strong in the Washington press corps. The editors of the New York Times placed their story of Helms’s speech at the top of the front page under the headline “Helms Defends the CIA As Vital to a Free Society.”23 An accompanying sidebar declared, “Richard McGarrah Helms: His Mission Is Facts.”24
Nixon was starting to feel better. Chinese leader Chou En-lai responded positively to his feelers about discussing the future of the two nations’ relationship. The vision that Nixon had nurtured since his 1967 Foreign Affairs article—to reconcile the world’s most powerful nation with the world’s most populous nation—might finally be achieved. “I told the President the tide was turning,” said the unctuous Kissinger. “We were beginning to see the outlines of a new international order.”25
Helms was clued in. To conduct the secret negotiations, Kissinger replaced the U.S. Navy facility he had been using with a secure communications channel set up by the CIA.26 “Helms knew how to limit the flow of cables,” Kissinger said. “He handled backchannels discreetly and competently.”27
Nixon was cheered on May 1 when Attorney General Mitchell delivered a crushing blow to the antiwar movement. With expectations of up to 250,000 protesters coming to Washington, Defense Secretary Laird called up 10,000 troops. “If the government won’t stop the war,” went the movement’s new slogan, “the people will stop the government.” The crowd was smaller than expected, and the demonstrators failed to shut down the capital. The offices of Congress, the courts, and the Executive Branch functioned normally. The protesters smashed windows, slashed tires, blocked fire trucks, abandoned cars on the bridges over the Potomac, and dumped trash in the street. In a massive sweep that a federal judge later ruled unconstitutional, Washington police arrested more than seven thousand people. They were held in Robert F. Kennedy Stadium and then released. “For his bloody victories over the movement—the Days of Rage, the New Mobilization, Kent State and May Day, John Mitchell was never forgiven,” wrote the attorney general’s admiring biographer.28
A grim satisfaction emanated from the president in the summer of 1971 that was shared by Chuck Colson, White House strategist. Nixon invited Colson along with Kissinger, Haldeman, and Ehrlichman for an evening cruise on the Sequoia.
“After the craft passed by Washington’s Tomb at Mount Vernon,” Colson recalled, “Nixon and his men gathered in the wood paneled dining room, drank wine and scotch, dined on New York strip steak and corn on the cob, and plotted their political futures. While the yacht drifted along the darkening waters of the Potomac, Nixon looked ahead to 1972 and the battles that were to come against Congress and others over Vietnam and his domestic agenda.”
Colson observed the president stroking the rim of his wineglass with a pointed finger.
“One day we will get them,” Nixon growled. “We’ll get them on the ground where we want them. And we’ll stick our heels in, step on them hard and twist—right, Chuck, right?”
The glowering president looked around for approval. Kissinger smiled and nodded. Haldeman said nothing. Ehrlichman jerked his head back to stare at the ceiling, a silent dissent. “You’re right, sir,” vowed Colson, the true believer. “We’ll get them.”
With the benefit of hindsight from a prison cell, Colson saw the cruise on the Sequoia as a voyage to self-destruction. “They who differed with us, whatever their motives, must be vanquished,” he recalled. “The seeds of destruction were by now already sown—not in them but in us.”29
Helms wasn’t there that night, but he was not one to discourage his boss. No personal reservations.… Keep a tough line.… I’m with you all the way. In his season of retribution Dick Nixon could count on Dick Helms.
On Sunday, June 13, 1971, the New York Times published a front-page story headlined “Vietnam Archive: Pentagon Study Traces 3 Decades of Growing U.S. Involvement.” The bylined author, veteran correspondent Neil Sheehan, quoted extensively from a secret Defense Department study of U.S. policy in Vietnam as it evolved from President Truman to President Johnson. Nixon’s first reaction was mild, recalled John Dean, former White House counsel. “He said, this is good for us. This will really be a problem for the Democrats because they are the ones who’ve been deceiving. It’s not reached Republicans. And so, he felt very comfortable about it.”30
Henry Kissinger returned to Washington the next day and, in Dean’s view, pressed “the president’s manhood button.” Dean quoted Alex Butterfield, the deputy chief of staff who was perhaps the most frequent daily observer of the president’s moods, as saying, “Everything changed with Nixon after the leak of the Pentagon Papers and … after his meeting with Henry.”
Soon Nixon was raging against the man who had supplied the Times with the secret history, Daniel Ellsberg, a former Pentagon analyst turned war critic.Nixon loathed him. “We’ve got to get this son of bitch,” he told John Mitchell, Nixon’s hatred was visceral, bubbling up from the depths of his insecurities and resentments. Ellsberg was everything Nixon loathed, a creature of Harvard, who was both Jewish and countercultural. Nixon called him, derisively, “Ellstein” or, simply, “the Jew,” the embodiment of the hated outsider.
“Don’t worry about his trial,” Nixon hissed to Mitchell. “Just get everything out. Try him in the press. Everything, John … that there is in the investigation … leak it out. We want to destroy him in the press.… There’s where we won the Hiss case. I didn’t try it in the goddam courtroom. But I won it before it ever got to court.”31
Many years later, Nixon calmed himself.
“What Ellsberg had done was despicable and contemptible,” he wrote in his memoirs. “I felt there were serious concerns about what he might do next. There were rumors and reports of a conspiracy,” most of which proved phantoms of Nixon’s imagination.
Nixon asked Haldeman to get him a copy of the Pentagon file on Anna Chennault and the events leading up to Johnson’s bombing halt in 1968. The file was supposedly held by former Pentagon official Leslie Gelb, now a fellow at the Brookings Institution, a liberal think tank. “I wanted the documents back,” Nixon recalled in his memoirs. “When I was told the documents were still at Brookings, I was furious and frustrated. Top secret reports were in the hands of a private think tank in the hands of antiwar Democrats. I said I wanted it back, even if it meant getting it surreptitiously.”32
“Yes, but you need somebody to do it,” Haldeman said.
“That’s what I’m talking about,” Nixon said. “Don’t discuss it here. You talk to Hunt.”
“Helms says he’s ruthless, quiet, careful,” Haldeman said.
It was a revealing aside. Helms sometimes protested that he didn’t even know Hunt was working at the White House in July 1971. In fact, Helms had recommended him to Haldeman.
“He’s kind of a tiger,” Colson said. “… He spent 20 years in the CIA overthrowing governments.”
“I want the break-in,” Nixon stormed. “Hell, they do that. You’re to break into that place, rifle the files, and bring them in. Just go in and take it, period.… Bob, now you remember Huston’s plan?” Nixon barked. “Implement it!”33
The Huston Plan, which supposedly died the year before, was still an operative concept in the Nixon White House a year later. The president wanted his policy implemented and Hunt was the man to do it.