To help with Helms’s defense, Edward Bennett Williams brought in Gregory Craig, a thirty-two-year-old associate in his law firm. Craig was a leading indicator of change in Washington. He had been a leader of the antiwar movement at Yale, signed public letters against the war, and spoke at teach-ins. When he read about CIA director Richard Helms during the Watergate hearings, one word came to his mind: “nefarious.” Now Williams wanted Craig to do the legwork on Helms’s legal defense.
To his surprise, he and Helms hit it off immediately.
“He was a well-read, cultivated, and cultured man who seemed to me to have all the sensibilities required of civilization…,” Craig recalled in an interview. “He was charming and he was witty. And he was also very good at getting your attention and your loyalty, which I think probably was a career maker.”
Craig liked his merry side. “He loved to gossip and trade stories and wink and nod and laugh,” he recalled. “He was always well-dressed. He was totally in control all the time.” Craig went on to become senior counsel at Williams & Connolly. He represented President Bill Clinton during his impeachment trial and served as White House counsel for President Barack Obama. He was a Democrat proud to say Dick Helms was a friend for life.
Helms did not talk about his relationship with Nixon, Craig said, except to admit that after Nixon was reelected in 1972, he knew he would not be reappointed. Craig got the impression that Helms harbored a certain contempt for Nixon. “Dick was a bit of a snob and elitist,” he said. “He treasured being surrounded by the Ivy League elites. He saw Nixon as a climber and a parvenue. Although [Nixon] was very, very smart, he was not someone that Dick Helms, given the choice, would have socialized with.”
Helms was baffled by his legal predicament, Craig recalled. The combination of Vietnam and Watergate had transformed Washington.
“It was unthinkable that the Establishment could turn against Dick Helms,” he said. “That was one of the mysteries about the whole case for him to figure out. He could not understand with all these powerful friends and with all these connections and with all these people who he had helped and become socially close to them and that still retained positions of influence and power, that this could nonetheless still be done to him. It was a nightmare to him. It took an enormous amount of fortitude and grace not to lose it.”
As for his successor Bill Colby, Helms nurtured a simmering animus for his decision to turn over the Family Jewels to the Justice Department. “I don’t think he called him a coward,” Craig said, “but he certainly said he showed a lack of spine.… I think Dick felt that he represented the whole institution [of the CIA] and that Colby was his evil mirror twin who was torpedoing, sabotaging, undermining, [and] defeating an institution that had served the nation well.”
Helms was disappointed with his friend Senator Stuart Symington.
It was Symington who asked the question about Chile that led to all his troubles. “And Symington knew the answer to that question before he asked it,” Craig said. “Helms could not understand why he did that.”
Williams pounded the table for his client, literally. Williams and Craig were meeting with the Justice Department prosecutors when Williams all but dared them to bring the case to trial. “Ed slapped the table. Whap! And he said, ‘You understand that if this prosecution goes forward, there will be no more secrets.’ And he slaps the table again. Whap! ‘No more secrets!’ That was memorable.”
The Justice Department had no appetite for a trial. Griffin Bell respected Helms for his service in government. But President Carter had been elected on a pledge to restore “a government as good as the people,” and that meant doing business in a new way. The outsiders from Georgia in the White House had no particular investment in the cozy Capitol Hill understandings that, for better or worse, had facilitated the work of the clandestine service. Carter wanted to make clear that no CIA director or cabinet secretary, had a license to lie to Congress.
After Williams and Craig heard the government’s case, they met with Helms.
“It was a pretty difficult case to defend,” Craig admitted. The story of General Schneider “was a chapter in his life in the CIA where he was not particularly proud of what they did and how they did it. And he may have wanted to reduce the role that he played in it by telling me, and through me, by telling his legal team that this was really not his idea. That he was not enthusiastic about it. He thought it had … no chance of success and could blow up.”
Craig was making the best possible case for his friend and client. But if U.S. v. Helms had come to trial, a central issue would have been what exactly Helms concealed with his false statements. And the paper trail the Justice Department had in its possession was detailed. It showed a line of command that ran from Nixon and Kissinger to Helms to Tom Karamessines to Dave Phillips to Tony Sforza to General Viaux’s gang to the ambush of the general’s car to the sledgehammer in the window, and the gunfire that ended the life of a blameless military officer. That was not a story Helms cared to defend in court.
The only defense, Craig said, was that “he had two conflicting obligations, and he did not intend to break the law or to commit a crime. You can’t successfully prosecute someone for a major felony of that nature unless you can prove that he intended to commit a crime, knowingly committing a crime here. The defense would be Dick’s state of mind when he went into that hearing. He was not intending to mislead or misrepresent or commit perjury.”1
The Justice Department offered a deal. If Helms would plead guilty to making false statements (a misdemeanor, not a felony) and pay a $2,000 fine, the two-year sentence would be suspended, and Helms’s CIA pension would not be threatened by his conviction.
In post-Watergate Washington, the deal struck top TV news correspondents as lenient.
Brit Hume of ABC News said the case was a test of whether “the Carter administration would have the stomach to bring criminal charges against the former CIA chief.”
“The prosecutor’s eagerness to plea-bargain and avoid a trial,” said Fred Graham, CBS News legal correspondent, “demonstrate how the secrecy and power of the CIA tends to make it difficult and distasteful for the government to enforce its law against a CIA director.”
President Carter released a statement saying he thought the Justice Department’s decision “upholds the authority of law in Congress and at the same time protects legitimate national security interests.”2
Helms was ready to go to trial. “He had the mental fortitude,” Craig said. “He had all his friends ready to stand up for him and hold his jacket. We had a raft of character witnesses. But again, this is going to be a D.C. jury, which was hostile to Nixon, sympathetic to Carter.” Cynthia Helms said she and her husband talked about the case and doubted any D.C. jury would appreciate the nuances of his defense. Williams made the same point.
A plea bargain, advised Craig, “would be one day of agony, maybe a week of agony, which would be unpleasant. But then he could go on and live his life, rather than spending the next two and half years in combat. Dick Helms was practical if nothing else.” The reality, Craig added, was that the agreement “was unbelievably favorable to Richard Helms.”
Helms took the advice of counsel. Williams asked Bell for one symbolic concession. Helms would not plead guilty. He would plea “nolo contendere,” no contest. Helms, ever attentive to the historic record, could say that he did not admit guilt, that he simply did not contest the charges.
As part of the plea agreement, Helms had to go to the U.S. Marshall’s office in the basement of the D.C. courthouse to get his fingerprints taken and stand for a mug shot, just another man in the never-ending parade of miscreants corralled by law enforcement in the nation’s capital. The walls were drab, the lights fluorescent.
“It was, by any measure, a demeaning kind of exercise for someone who had been at the height of government, who had been meeting with heads of state and briefing very famous and very important people,” Craig recalled. “He was totally a champ all the way through. There was no one watching. So he wasn’t doing it for the history books, he was doing it for himself. And I think for his own sense of who he was. He was polite. He took it very seriously. He never made light of what he was going through. I was really impressed with his poise and his control, and his decision about how to handle this personally.”3
It was the last place Richard McGarrah Helms ever expected to be. In the basement of the D.C. courthouse, brought low by the American system that lifted him so high, judged for his loyal service to the CIA and to the unrepentant Richard Nixon. When he finally had his day in court, on November 4, 1977, Helms experienced the full variety of America’s peculiar righteousness. In the course of a few hours he was condemned and celebrated, convicted and congratulated.
Accompanied by Williams and Craig, Helms went to the federal courthouse in Judiciary Square to appear before Judge Barrington Parker, an African American Republican appointed by President Nixon. At a pretrial hearing a few days before, Parker had objected to the reports of plea bargaining between the Justice Department and Helms. Parker made it clear he did not feel bound to accept any agreement.
“Helms and Williams smiled and chatted as they waited for Parker to take the bench…” the Washington Post reported, “but became increasingly grim as the sentencing procedure wore on.”4
Williams rose to praise Helms’s career and character, saying his client “found himself impaled on the horns of a moral and legal dilemma” when he testified under oath before the Senate committee. He had taken an oath never to divulge classified information.5
“Is that paramount to the oath that he took before the Foreign Relations Committee?” Judge Parker interjected.
“I think it is not paramount, your honor,” Williams replied, adding that he was mentioning it only to show the dilemma.
“Were there not other alternatives open to him, Mr. Williams?” the judge asked. “He could have very easily stood back and considered very carefully the other alternatives … and I am sure that he is experienced in meeting situations such as these.”
When Williams said Helms did what he thought was in the best interest of the country, Parker interrupted with a reference to Watergate.
“There have been a number of defendants before this court within the last five years who have weighed this question as to what is in the best interests of the United States,” the judge said, “and you have seen what has happened.”
Williams insisted that Helms was different, because “self-interests were at work in those cases. There was no self-interest at work in this case. There was no self-gain.”
Rising to speak for the Justice Department, Ben Civiletti repeated the government’s position that a conviction was enough to “uphold the principle of the rule of law and the paramount duty compelled by oath-taking” and that a jail term would serve no useful purpose.
Parker asked the defendant to rise. While reluctantly accepting the plea agreement, he castigated Helms with the voice of a Puritan.
“You now stand before this court in disgrace and shame,” Parker declared. “You considered yourself bound to protect the agency whose affairs you had administered and to dishonor your solemn oath to tell the truth before the committee,” Parker thundered.
Helms, whose arms had been at his side, began gripping the lectern stiffly as the judge’s tirade continued.
“If public officials embark deliberately on a course to disobey and ignore the laws of our land because of some misguided and ill-conceived notion and belief that there are earlier commitments and considerations which they must first observe, the future of our country is in jeopardy.
“There are those employed in the intelligence security community of this country,…” the judge went on, “who feel that they have a license to operate freely outside the dictates of the law and otherwise to orchestrate as they see fit. Public officials at every level, whatever their position, like any other person must respect and honor the Constitution and the laws of the United States.”6
“Dick was stunned,” Cynthia Helms recalled. “When he came over to me in the front row of the courtroom, he was literally shaking. It was a devastating experience for him.”7 Cynthia was furious. Her husband “just took it and tucked it away,” said Craig. He said he never heard Helms express a negative word about Judge Parker.8 The hearing was over.
Outside, on the steps of the courthouse, Williams held forth for a gaggle of reporters, with Helms at his side. “Dick Helms will wear this conviction like a badge of honor,” Williams declared. Asked about Judge Parker’s speech, Helms said, “I don’t feel disgraced at all. I think if I had done anything else, I would have been disgraced.” He had done nothing wrong. “There are endless secrets and confidentiality between foreign governments and this government which must remain secret and confidential, even from Congress,” he told the reporters.9
After thanking Williams for “standing up for the team,” Helms excused himself to attend a regularly scheduled luncheon of CIA retirees at the Kenwood Country Club in suburban Bethesda, a half-hour drive from Capitol Hill.
“The news of my conviction had been on the radio,” Helms wrote in his memoir, “and to my complete surprise, every one of the several hundred guests rose and applauded thunderously.” Someone fetched two large baskets and passed them around. These quickly filled with cash and checks that exceeded Helms’s $2,000 fine. “It had been a really rotten day,” said the choked-up Helms, “and I hoped that I managed to mask at least some of my emotion.”10
It was an American denouement. Judge Parker spoke for the American tradition that defined its creed in fidelity to words, that aspired to be a “City on a Hill,” the country that enacted the Fourteenth Amendment, sponsored the Nuremberg trials, and passed the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts, a government of laws, not men.
Helms’s supporters represented the American tendency founded in existential struggle against the Soviet Union and communism, a government that defined itself by actions in Berlin, Havana, and Saigon and did not apologize for Guatemala or Iran or the Bay of Pigs, a government they believed was led by good men in a just cause, the creed of the Free World.
Richard Helms and Richard Nixon rose in public life on the strength of the Free World creed, and they fell from power as the idea lost all credibility in Vietnam and Watergate. The wars that Nixon and Helms waged in Indochina were lost. The scandals they generated at home were investigated like few others in American history. Nixon escaped legal judgment. Helms did not. Justice was denied and then served, albeit gently. The president fell first. The spymaster fell farther. The events known as Watergate were over.