In January 1978, two months after his appearance in federal court, Dick Helms went to lunch at the Metropolitan Club, a few blocks north of the White House, an emporium of wood paneling and chintz upholstery where lawyers, lobbyists, and politicos do their murmuring business. The former director suddenly found himself looking at Howard Hunt, his friend who had served thirty-three months in prison before his release from federal prison at Eglin Air Force Base in Florida in March 1977. Helms had never come to his rescue or spoke up on his behalf, not even after he lost Dorothy.
With a gulp in his throat Helms recalled the moment while being cross-examined in a court deposition years later.
Q. When was the last time you saw Mr. Hunt?
A. Saw Mr. Hunt? I believe I saw Mr. Hunt way across the Metropolitan Club dining room four or five years ago, but I’m not sure that it was he.”1
It certainly was Hunt who was also eating at the club that day. After his release, Hunt had embarked on a lucrative lecture tour, resumed his novel-a-year writing schedule, and proposed marriage to Laura Martin, a Spanish teacher from Georgia who corresponded with him while he was in prison. Hunt recognized Helms, the buddy who believed in him, the former boss he idolized as “Avery Thorne,” the former friend who abandoned him while he was on hazaradous duty. Hunt could not forgive him.
“I was lunching in D.C. at the Metropolitan last month,” he wrote to Bill Buckley in February 1978. “Dick Helms was nearby and we stared wordlessly at each other. Appropriate, I thought, Dick having testified so often that he didn’t know me.”2
The improbable and ultimately doomed friendship of Dick Helms and Howard Hunt was the seed of the Watergate affair, which grew into the collaboration of the gentlemanly spymaster and the paranoid president. While the savage, dishonest war in Vietnam discredited the U.S. government and emboldened the Congress, the counterculture, and the press corps, Nixon and Helms stayed the course set by the National Security Act of 1947, which prescribed an aggressive global defense of American interests overseas and management of public opinion at home.
As that strategy foundered in Southeast Asia, the arrest of McCord, the wiretapper; Sturgis, the soldier of fortune; Martínez, the boat captain; Barker, the wing man, and González, the lock pick, exposed a criminal class cultivated by the Agency to serve U.S. policy purposes. A lawless White House and an agency with impunity suddenly began to lose the respect and the deference they had once enjoyed on Capitol Hill, in newsrooms, and among the general public. The Agency’s impunity, once tolerated and even admired, came to be seen as incompatible with a self-governing democratic Republic. Nixon and Helms were swept from power to disgrace as a bipartisan reform movement took power in Washington.
The results reshaped the U.S. government. Nixon and Helms were the last president and director to exercise the impunity in national security affairs that their predecessors had enjoyed since the end of World War II. In 1975, the legislative branch imposed its will on the CIA for the first time. The defunct system in which the Director of Central Intelligence reported only to the chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services committees was replaced. In 1977 the House of Representatives established a permanent committee on intelligence to oversee the work of the Agency. The Senate did the same in 1979. In between, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, requiring U.S. intelligence agencies to obtain permission to spy on American citizens. Impunity was supposed to be replaced with accountability. That didn’t quite happen.
Watergate, ironically, wound up fortifying the CIA’s power in the American scheme of government. The post-1975 intelligence oversight system has endured, albeit weakly. Oversight didn’t stop top agency officials from conspiring in the 1980s with the Reagan White House in the Iran-Contra affair to nullify a congressional ban on CIA support for brutal counterrevolutionary forces in Central America. Nor did oversight influence the Agency as senior officials implemented a harsh, illegal, and ineffective torture regime after the September 11 attacks. And when the Senate Intelligence Committee investigated in 2014, the CIA prevailed on President Obama to block full public release of its findings. By nominally sharing responsibility for covert operations with Congressional leaders and staff, the oversight system diffused responsibility, which helped the Agency regain legitimacy and influence.
In Cuba, all of the CIA’s efforts to overthrow the communist government ended in failure. Castro’s one-party state compiled an abysmal record on human rights while preserving Cuban sovereignty and preventing capitalism from gaining a foothold on the island. As part of his efforts to engage the United States diplomatically, Castro released several thousand political prisoners in August 1979, including Rolando Cubela, a.k.a. AMLASH. His friend, Santiago Morales, freed at the same time, said, “He was done with politics.”
Cubela moved to Madrid, where he remarried and worked as a cardiologist. “He had a good life,” Morales went on. “He was a great guy. But he never got rid of his past.” Cubela later moved to south Florida to be closer to relatives and to the parents of his martyred friend José Antonio Echeverría. As of October 2021, Cubela was living in a nursing home in Miami.
“In the end, I think he had been beaten by the events,” Morales said. “It was a miracle he was alive.”3
In Guatemala, the successors of the client regime installed by Howard Hunt and company in 1954 imposed a military dictatorship that provoked a leftist rebellion in the 1980s that was, in turn, crushed by a genocidal counterinsurgency war supported by the Reagan administration and the CIA. In 1999 President Clinton felt obliged to apologize for U.S. support of “military forces and intelligence units which engaged in violence and widespread repression.”4 By that time Guatemala had become a failed state.
In Chile, the assassination of General Schneider demonstrated to right-wing officers that Washington would support any effort to oust Allende. The neoliberal dictatorship established by General Augusto Pinochet in 1973 felt confident enough of Washington’s support to assassinate Allende’s former foreign minister in 1976 with a car bomb less than two miles from the White House.
As for the “whole Bay of Pigs thing,” Helms kept the secrets and the Agency wrote the JFK story, or least the first draft. But Harry Truman intuited that the Directorate of Plans, as run by Dick Helms, was somehow complicit in JFK’s death and events lent credence to his conviction. When the AMLASH conspiracy was exposed in 1975, the CIA lost control of the secret history of Kennedy’s assassination. The Church Committee found the Agency’s investigation of Kennedy’s murder “deficient,” calling into question the process that produced the lone gunman theory. The CIA’s own historian found the Agency’s response “passive, reactive, and selective.”5 The House Select Committee on Assassinations concluded that “in all probability” there had been a conspiracy but could not identify the perpetrators.6
In 1997 the Assassination Records Review Board uncovered Operation Northwoods, illuminating the anti-democratic and conspiratorial mindset that pervaded in the highest echelons of the Pentagon and CIA. The board also declassified the pre-assassination Oswald file, showing Helms’s testimony to the Warren Commission was misleading. Senior undercover officers on his staff knew far more about the accused assassin than he ever admitted. When Bob Maheu and Johnny Rosselli used their knowledge of the story to blackmail the Agency, Nixon demanded the whole story. He never got it. Helms controlled the JFK record, albeit with a cost.
When Helms insisted, “I have not seen anything, no matter how far-fetched or grossly imagined, that in any way changes my conviction that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated Kennedy, and that there were no co-conspirators,” most Americans did not believe him and for good reason.7
As memories of Watergate faded and the U.S. government recovered from defeat in Southeast Asia, Nixon and Helms were rehabilitated and reunited in cordiality. The former president believed his former adversary had been wrongly condemned for dissembling about the assassination of General Schneider. When President Ronald Reagan bestowed the National Security Medal on Helms in 1983, Nixon sent his congratulations.
“You suffered a great injustice simply because you were carrying out the assignment which I felt was vitally important to the national security,” Nixon wrote. “The attempt to castrate the C.I.A. in the mid-seventies was a national tragedy. Let us hope the recognition you have so justly received will assist in reversing that negative trend.”8
With the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War in 1991, Nixon and Helms could claim victory in the war against communism, and bask in their reputations as elder statesmen.9 When Nixon died in April 1994 every living former president attended his funeral, as well as friends such as Rose Mary Woods, admirers such as Gordon Liddy, and rivals such as Howard Baker and George McGovern. Helms’s name did not appear on the guest list.10
In 1997, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Agency’s founding, Helms was honored as one of fifty CIA “trailblazers” and extolled as a leader who had a “strong impact in furthering the Agency’s mission” and “cleared a path for others to follow.”11
He may have worn his 1977 misdemeanor conviction as a badge of honor but he could not escape its shadow either. On September 10, 2001, General Schneider’s sons, René and Paul, filed a civil lawsuit in U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia against Helms and Henry Kissinger for “designing, ordering, implementing, aiding and abetting, and/or directing a program of activities aimed at, and resulting in, the assassination of the Plaintiffs’ father, Chilean Army Commander-in-Chief.” The lawsuit was pending when Helms died in Washington, D.C., on October 22, 2002. It was thirty-two years to the day since General Schneider was ambushed in morning traffic.