Helms, the civil servant, wanted to be helpful.
“I was being asked about an operational matter,” he later explained of the explosive June 23 conversation. “That was what was concerning me. What did they have in mind? What were they up to? It did not occur to me that the President of the United States would be asking me to perform an illegal act right there in the White House.” But he admitted he did not want to cross Nixon, adding the credo of a Washington survivor: “Anybody who thinks you can say the president’s wrong … lives in a very dangerous life in the executive branch.”1
John Dean, an ambitious lawyer just hired by Haldeman as White House counsel, wanted to prove his toughness. Just thirty years old, he summoned Walters to the White House the following Monday. He wanted to make sure the burglars didn’t talk about their connection to the White House. Walters told Dean that further checking showed the FBI investigation did not threaten any CIA activities. “I could not say that further investigation would jeopardize Agency sources,” Walters explained.2
Dean was frantic. He asked Walters to come again the next day. Could the CIA have participated in the burglary without him knowing it?” he wanted to know. “Impossible,” Walters replied. Dean suggested Barker had been involved in a break-in at the Chilean Embassy.3 Walters said the Agency didn’t know anything about it.
Dean kept probing. He said some of the suspects were “wobbling.” Walters said no matter how scared they were, they couldn’t implicate the CIA because the Agency wasn’t involved in the break-in. Dean didn’t believe it. He wondered if the CIA would provide bail money for the defendants. “Would it be possible for the CIA to pay the salaries of these individuals while they served their jail sentences?” he asked. Walters raised the possibility with Helms, who said he would have to clear it with the chairmen of the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. In other words, forget it. Following Dean’s proposed course, Walters added, “would only enlarge the problem.”4
Helms wanted to be helpful without compromising the Agency. In advance of a scheduled meeting with Gray on June 28, he briefed two colleagues who wanted to accompany him: Ted Shackley, the new chief of the Western Hemisphere Division, and Lawrence Sternfield, chief of Cuban operations. He wrote a memo for the record to Walters. “I informed them that the Agency is attempting to ‘distance itself from the investigation’ and that I wanted them along as ‘reference files’ to participate in the discussion when requested,” he wrote. By “reference files,” Helms meant that Shackley and Sternfield would answer any questions about the Cubans.
“I told them I wanted no free-wheeling … hypothesis or conjecture about responsibility or likely objectives of the Watergate intrusion,” Helms went on. He didn’t need speculation because he knew enough already. “At such a meeting it is up to the FBI to lay some cards on the table,” Helms wrote. “Otherwise we are unable to help.” The director staked out a hard line. He would not share anything until he knew who the FBI wanted to question.
“In addition,” he closed, “we still adhere to the request that they confine themselves to the personalities already arrested or directly under suspicion and that they desist from expanding this investigation into other areas which may well, eventually, run aground of our operations.”5
Walters’s message to the FBI on Friday was better to taper off the matter. It echoed in Helms’s memo five days later: desist from expanding this investigation.
The meeting never happened. Ehrlichman called Gray and told him to cancel. Gray then called Helms. The acting FBI director was surprised Helms didn’t ask why the meeting was called off. “Instead, he gave me two more names [of CIA officers] not to interview,” Gray recalled. They were Karl Wagner, Cushman’s assistant, and John Caswell, an officer in Technical Services Division. Both provided help to Hunt while he was scheming to discredit Ellsberg. “They’re active CIA agents,” Helms told Gray, no doubt apologetically. “Their names have to be kept secret.”6
Helms closed by offering a tip. He said he’d heard that Howard Hunt worked for Ehrlichman. That was a Helmsian masterstroke, the first of several that summer. In one conversation, Helms had blocked the FBI’s Watergate agents from investigating CIA support for Hunt while nudging the Bureau to investigate Ehrlichman, whom he loathed. It worked, with lasting impact. The burglary at Dr. Fielding’s office and the Chilean break-ins would not become public knowledge for ten months. In that crucial formative year, Watergate was a story about White House burglars, not CIA burglars.
Only later did Gray realize that Helms shielded the two officers because they knew all about Hunt and the campaign to smear Ellsberg. It never occurred to Gray that the CIA director might be lying to him. Gray was one of the many people in Washington who believed in the story of the law-abiding CIA director.
“Nowhere in my entire upbringing, from childhood through the Navy and into the highest levels of government service, had I ever been given any reason to suspect that in private conversation the Director of Central Intelligence would be anything less than brutally honest with the acting director of the FBI,” Gray wrote in his memoir. “In the Defense Department’s dealings with Congress and the executive branch, we had always relied on the ‘presumption of regularity’ working in both directions.… We may have disagreed, and we might even have disliked one another, but we didn’t lie to one another. The high public trust we all held simply didn’t allow for it.”7
Helms had a different conception of the public trust, one that enabled him to retain his reputation and high position while Pat Gray, believer in the “presumption of regularity,” was swept into disgrace.
Henry Kissinger admired Dick Helms’s quality of unflappability. It was on display on June 30 when he delivered the director’s annual State of the Agency address to an auditorium full of CIA employees. If beset by a uniquely complex set of problems, the director showed no signs of worry. He wanted to tell a humorous story.
“I was reminded coming down here,” he said, “of a story which may be old to some and new to others but I’ll take a chance and tell it anyway because I think that in its peculiar way it sets a sort of a focus on the kind of life we lead in the Agency and some of the uneven problems we have.”
There were a couple hundred people in the room—analysts, operatives, clerks, researchers, division chiefs—more than a few of whom were wondering about the arrests at the Watergate.
“This is the story of a traveling salesman,” Helms began. The crowd tittered in expectation of a bawdy joke. “Don’t start laughing because it doesn’t come out the way you think it does.
“About midnight one night [the salesman] got a flat tire on a bridge across a roaring stream,” Helms said. “As the rain pounded down, he got out and got his jack out and got himself organized to change the tire. In the process of this he took the hubcap off the offending wheel and he put it up on the edge of the bridge on a little stone parapet and then he took the lugs off the wheel and put them very carefully inside the hubcap. Then he got himself down to get the tire off. But as he gave it that extra lurch,… off went the hubcap and the lugs into the roaring stream.
“The rain was still pelting down,” Helms continued. “He got up, tried to remember exactly how far it was to the next town, or how far he’d come from the town he’d been in before. As he was focusing on this problem, he saw a strange little figure standing behind a fence just on the other side of the stream looking at him intently. He wondered how long that man had been there and he was uncomfortable because of the lateness of the hour. But anyway he turned to him and said, ‘I’ve had a flat tire here and maybe you saw what happened.…’”
The director had the room’s attention.
“So the little man said, ‘What’s your problem?’ And the driver explained in great detail just what had happened to him. The little man said, ‘Look, instead of walking to one town or the other, why don’t you just go around the automobile and take one lug off the other three tires and put those lugs on the fourth tire and that will enable you to drive to the next town where then you can get yourself properly taken care of in a garage.’
“The traveling salesman thought about this. His eyes visibly brightened. But he began to get very pensive and had a very strange feeling. And suddenly he said, ‘Isn’t that building over there the insane asylum?’
“The little man said, ‘Yes, ’tis.’
“And he said, ‘Well, are you an inmate?’ And the little man said, ‘Yes, I am.’
“He said, ‘Well, how were you able to figure out this thing?’
“And the little fellow said, ‘Well, I may be crazy but I don’t have to be stupid.’”
As knowing chuckles filled the auditorium, Helms coughed slyly. “Maybe you see what I mean.”8
What he meant was clear enough for his audience. The men and women of the CIA might be a little crazy, but they knew how to solve problems that confounded most mortals.
The director’s dance with the president was a little crazy, at least in its latest incarnation. There was nothing like the Nixon-Helms relationship in the Agency’s twenty-five-year history. Harry Truman shuffled directors until he found one he trusted, General Walter Bedell Smith. Allen Dulles’s relationship with Eisenhower was one of arm’s-length respect. The friendship of Dulles and Kennedy, poisoned by the Bay of Pigs, congealed to mutual patrician disdain. Kennedy tolerated the overbearing John McCone while Johnson tired of him and welcomed Helms as an adviser. Nixon and Helms, by contrast, were enemies, allies, confidantes, and now, potentially, partners in crime.
In the wake of the arrests at the Watergate, they both sought to impede the FBI’s investigation of the burglars in fear of what disclosure might bring. For Helms, it was his friendship with Hunt, his relationship with McCord, the national security operations that they had carried out, and the reporting that came back to the Agency. For Nixon, it was his knowledge of the use of Hunt and Liddy as campaign spies and White House plumbers. For both, the Watergate arrests threatened to expose the subterranean politics of assassination—the Castro plots, Diem’s demise, Dallas, and the elimination of General Schneider that they had to hide.
In this perilous situation, Helms had one advantage that Nixon did not. For the president, it was illegal to conceal or destroy material evidence, suborn witnesses, or dissemble to law enforcement. For Helms, not so much. He had authority, derived from the language of the 1947 National Security Act, to protect the Agency’s sources and methods. Helms’s successful effort to prevent the FBI from interviewing witnesses knowledgeable about Hunt’s role in the targeting of Ellsberg, for example, may have been unethical, but it was not illegal. As CIA director, Helms had discretion to hide certain activities from law enforcement. As the duly sworn president, Nixon did not. And that would make all the difference in determining who would fall first.
As for the Watergate break-in, Helms said at the end of his State of the Agency address, “I don’t know what’s behind it. I don’t know who put up the money. I don’t really know anything about it. But I want to put your mind at rest; the Agency had nothing whatever to do with it.”9
Nothing whatever was his story, and he was sticking to it. It just wasn’t completely true. Helms knew that the White House was behind the burglars. He had recommended Hunt to Haldeman. Helms knew a lot, and he put his colleagues’ minds at rest by disclosing none of it.
Helms followed up with a second ingenious move: he left town. The calm audacity! The effortless mastery! The sangfroid! As Dave Phillips noted, Helms’s style in running covert operations ran to “controlled boldness.” In the Watergate fiasco, he played the subtlest of variations: passive boldness.
On July 1, exactly two weeks after the Watergate arrests, Helms departed for a tour of Agency facilities in Australia and New Zealand—previously scheduled, he insisted. No director had ever felt the need to visit the region, but now, it seems, was the time.10 Helms spent the next three weeks out of the country. Before leaving, he duly signed the papers formally designating Dick Walters as acting director.
The working vacation had the benefit of removing him from Washington. Helms was still in charge but at an immense distance. He could always be reached on a secure line in an emergency, but that would be complicated for all concerned. He had massaged the president’s demands. He had laid down the law for his subordinates. If something disastrous happened, it wouldn’t technically be on his watch. He expected the White House demands to continue, but that was Walters’s problem for the duration. Helms just had to inspect the station in Sydney.
The FBI soon came calling. Acting Director Gray spoke to Acting Director Walters on July 6. “I can’t hold up on this anymore,” Gray said. He needed formal notification that the FBI’s investigation should taper off, with respect to certain CIA activities. Walters expressed surprise. “But Pat,” he said, “I told Dean to go ahead,” adding that the Agency had no objection to expanding the investigation.
Gray was confused. Dean hadn’t told him anything. Walters’s message was suddenly very different from what he had said on June 23 (better to taper off the matter) and what Helms said in their call on June 28 (desist from expanding the investigation, and you can’t talk to Wagner or Caswell). When Gray asked for a memo saying the investigation might compromise CIA operations, Walters had reached the limit of the Agency’s passive cooperation. The CIA men might agree to something like that orally, but they would not put it in writing. Walters said—“with some emotion,” he recalled—that he would not say that the FBI investigation threatened Agency operations.11
Gray called Nixon. What the president knew about the burglars’ activities and when he knew it would forever be unclear. At that point, Nixon wanted Helms to head off the FBI, and, as far as he knew, the CIA director had done just that. Gray warned the president that certain people on his staff “are trying to mortally wound you by using the FBI and CIA.”
Nixon was all smooth confidence. This Watergate fuss would pass. It was too transparently a Democratic ploy, and he had ways to make it go away. What did it matter what Walters said to Gray?
“Pat, you just continue your aggressive and thorough investigation,” the president purred. Nixon, like Helms, would make no overt demands. That was the end of CIA interference in the FBI’s investigation, Gray said in his memoir. “No more attempts were made by anyone in the CIA or the White House.”12
For three weeks, Helms had cooperated with Nixon. Now the interests of the president and the director were diverging. The loser in the process was the hapless fugitive Howard Hunt.
In his hour of need, Hunt’s marriage improved. Dorothy and Howard reunited in Chicago. He flew in from Los Angeles. She had returned from England to Washington, trying to reassure the family that everything was going to be okay. Her cousin in Chicago called her and suggested she pay a visit. Dorothy caught a flight to Chicago.
“The reunion was if not joyous—given the circumstances—warm, loving and without recrimination on her part,” Hunt wrote in his memoir. Dorothy was kind in that way. At that time, Dorothy wanted a divorce, said St. John Hunt. “Around nineteen sixty-eight or sixty-nine, I think was when she first started talking about divorcing my father, and then by seventy-two she was all set.”
Howard recounted the miserable sequence of events, finishing with his faith that he and his accomplices “would be taken care of company style,” implying the Company, the CIA, would come to his rescue. By the time she flew back to Washington, Hunt stopped skulking. “Her positive reinforcement gave me the morale boost that I needed and renewed energy to confront the situation.”
Hunt hired William Bittman, a former Justice Department prosecutor now with Hogan & Hartson, a prestigious D.C. law firm. He told Bittman he “resented being cast in the role of a fugitive” and “was ready to speak to whatever government agencies were looking for him.” He paid his retainer in hundred-dollar bills.
Hunt expected help from “the right people” in Langley and didn’t get it. Somehow, he learned that John Dean had pressed Dick Walters for legal and living expenses. “Walters opted out of doing things Company style,” Hunt noted bitterly. Fortunately, he added, “Haldeman rode to the rescue,” ordering a subordinate to disburse $75,000 to the defendants.13
Dorothy went to work as Howard’s courier, negotiator, and all-around secret agent. Through Bittman she met a man identified only as “Mr. Rivers” who asked her to estimate the expenses for the five men under arrest, plus her husband and Liddy. She called McCord, Liddy, and Barker, who gave their estimates. Mr. Rivers told her to go to a particular pay phone in Dulles Airport where she would find a key to a locker. She found the money in the locker, just not as much as promised. Instead of five months of expenses for her husband and the others, she found three.14
Dorothy delivered a share to Jim McCord, now out on bail. When they met at the Lakewood Country Club in Rockville, she mentioned that Paul O’Brien, a lawyer for the Committee to Re-elect the President, had expressed the view that the burglary was a CIA operation. Dorothy assumed it was, but McCord denied it.15 He emphasized the point with fundamentalist conviction: Watergate was not a CIA operation!
When Dorothy got home she sliced open a letter from family friend Bill Buckley.
Dear Dorothy,
I don’t know where Howard is obviously but get word to him that if I can help I stand ready to do so. How are you?
Lots of love
Wm. F. Buckley Jr.16
When Dick Helms returned from his working vacation, the handwritten report of Bob Bennett’s case officer was waiting on his desk. Bennett, owner of the Mullen Company and employer of Howard Hunt, was a CIA informant. The case officer, Martin Lukoskie, transmitted Bennett’s reporting to the Agency on a regular basis. He wrote out his first post-Watergate memo by hand “because of the sensitivity of the information.”17
He reported that Bennett was protecting the Agency from reporters who came calling about Hunt’s job at the firm. Some suspected the Mullen Company might be a front for CIA operations, an accurate conclusion that Bennett sought to discourage. Bennett bragged that he had dissuaded reporters from the Post and Star from pursuing a “Seven Days in May scenario,” implicating the CIA in a Watergate conspiracy. He was referring to the best-selling book and Hollywood movie about an incipient military coup against a liberal president deemed soft on the Soviet Union.18 Bennett didn’t want reporters thinking the CIA was plotting against Nixon. Bennett later bragged of feeding information, not for attribution, to Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, who was said to be “suitably grateful.” The Mullen Company’s association with the CIA would not be reported by the Post for almost two years.19
Bennett reported that he had contacted Edward B. Williams, lead attorney for the Democratic National Committee, which was suing the Committee to Re-elect the President for violating its rights in the burglary. Bennett wanted to “kill off” any reference to the Agency’s relationship with the Mullen Company in the course of the litigation. Williams agreed, which was no surprise.20 Williams and Helms were social friends and Mullen’s ties to the Agency could only complicate the DNC’s litigation against the Republicans.
Helms believed he had put the matter behind him. At least that’s what his official biographers said. Their conclusion was cheerful. “By mid-July 1972 the Watergate incident no longer involved him or CIA,” they wrote of Helms. “He had made it clear that any assistance the CIA had given Howard Hunt was merely to help staunch the unauthorized flow of national security information. He had repeatedly denied the CIA had any direct connection to the break-in.”21 Then Helms received a clandestine letter from his friend Jim McCord, the connection which Helms preferred to conceal.
“From time to time, I’ll send along things you may be interested in from an info standpoint,” McCord wrote in an unsigned letter to the director’s office in early August. Someone, perhaps Elizabeth Dunlevy, Helms’s longtime secretary, passed the letter to Office of Security “as a routine piece of junk mail.”22 Chief Howard Osborn recognized McCord’s handwriting because McCord had worked for him for most of his career.
“This is a copy of a letter that went to my lawyer,” McCord wrote. The accused burglar, now out on bail, had retained Gerald Alch, an associate of F. Lee Bailey, the famous criminal defense attorney. The White House was seeking to blame the Agency for the burglary, McCord said, noting that “leaks this week by the prosecutor and/or the FBI to the NYT are trying to infer this was a CIA operation.… Rest assured I will not be a patsy to this latest ploy.…”23
Osborn took the letter to a meeting with Helms and Larry Houston, general counsel for the Agency.24 Helms asked for their advice. Houston said they did not have to turn it over to Watergate prosecutor Earl Silbert. Osborn said they did. Helms did not hesitate. He told Osborn to file the letter away and say nothing.25
Helms’s controlled boldness bought him precious time. McCord was facing serious criminal charges. The Agency was publicly denying any relationship with him. Yet the defendant was sharing his legal strategy with the director. If there was no relationship, Helms would have had no reason to withhold the letter from the prosecutors. There was a relationship, which Helms had to hide. McCord’s missive made clear he wanted to protect the Agency and his former boss without implicating them. He wanted a back channel to the Agency while navigating his legal ordeal. The CIA did not turn the letter over to the Justice Department for nine months, by which time McCord was no longer Dick Helms’s problem.26
Two weeks later came Helms’s true masterstroke—the deft operational response that confounded law enforcement and protected the Agency’s equities. In a summer of supple spy work, the Pennington ruse was sheer genius.
It began ominously for Helms. On August 18, a special agent in the FBI’s Alexandria office asked the Agency for a name trace on a “Mr. Pennington,” said to have been McCord’s supervisor. Frederick Evans, in the Agency’s Personnel Security division, recalled a conversation with Edward Sayle of his staff. Sayle had said that Pennington told him he had “entered Mr. McCord’s office and home” and destroyed “any indication of connections between the Agency and Mr. McCord.”
The Watergate investigators were also interested. Earl Silbert wrote in his diary that he and senior FBI agent Angelo Lano were working on “the problem of trying to locate this fellow Pennington. We are still trying to locate him as possible source of information for the equipment that McCord had.”27
The question of how to handle the FBI’s query went to Howard Osborn, chief of the Office of Security, who did not make major decisions without consulting with Helms.
“Pennington’s file was very closely held,” Osborn explained when grilled by Senate investigators two years later. So somebody at the Agency—it was never clear who—provided the inquiring minds at the FBI with the name of Cecil Harold Pennington, no relation, a former Office of Security employee who was retired and had never been McCord’s supervisor. Cecil Pennington was duly interviewed. He sincerely denied knowing McCord or burning anything, which of course was true.28 The CIA had sent the FBI on a fool’s errand with beneficial results.29 Prosecutors did not learn about the fire at McCord’s house while preparing their indictments of the burglars. “Pennington had been interviewed,” the unsuspecting Earl Silbert wrote in his diary, “and he had nothing to do with the removal or destruction of property that Baldwin had brought out to the McCord residence.”30
The Pennington ruse threw the FBI off McCord’s trail, which bought Helms all the time he needed. The Watergate investigators only learned about the flame-fest at McCord’s home after he had pled guilty to the burglary charges. They only caught up with the real Lee Pennington eighteen months later, and he denied all. They never learned why McCord kept carbon copies of the conversations he wiretapped or what he did with them.
Helms, now in his seventh year as director, showed few outward signs of stress. On the weekends he played tennis, still sporting his long linen trousers last stylish before World War II. Once a month he and Cynthia went to the Sulgrave Club for the Waltz Group, where Helms favored friends with his slightly twisted grin. Cynthia had formed a women’s environmentalist group, which advocated for the banning of lead paint and phosphates in detergents. Helms was a convert. He started buying recyclable toiletries and talking up the ecological crisis. “It gave him something to chat about at social events,” his wife observed, “and an excuse not to discuss his work, particularly Vietnam.”31
Cynthia’s son, Rod McKelvie, asked Helms how he slept at night with so many hot topics on his mind. Helms confided that he focused on “recreating tennis games in his mind. Back and forth. Back and forth,” McKelvie recalled him saying. “He fell asleep to the distraction.”32
Helms was a self-satisfied and self-aware man, not so stodgy as he looked. Above all, he would survive. I may be crazy, but I don’t have to be stupid.