Richard Helms may be the closest thing to a master spy that America can claim. He was not a James Bond, roaming the world in exotic machines, wooing (and always winning) dazzling women, vanquishing villains beneath the sea and in the air. Perhaps he came closer to "M," Bond's legendary boss who sent 007 on his journeys down the world's back alleys. But even in the courtroom last week where Helms was given his $2,000 fine and suspended sentence for misleading Senators about the CIA's efforts to keep Salvador Allende Gossens from becoming President of Chile, there was the smell of adventure about him.
Though Helms retired from the intelligence business in 1973, his mind and his heart still explore the world, striking flinty sparks when they encounter in the newspapers old adversaries from the Kremlin or East Germany or Cuba. For 31 years Dick Helms fought the silent war with terrorists, killers, subversives, guerrillas and power maniacs who would have smashed their way to authority. Crisp handkerchief tucked in his glen-plaid breast pocket, shod in Ivy League loafers, Helms stayed a step or two ahead of them all. He was faster, sharper and, yes, at times more brutal. If he had not been he would have been fired.
So in the warm, moist nights of last week, Dick Helms sipped a little Iranian vodka (straight over ice) and played a little bridge with his family (he made four spades with ease). He lunched with old agency colleagues, who gave him a long, standing ovation and, over his protests, passed around a pot for money to help him pay his fine. He seemed to be wryly accepting the next chapter of a spy's life. Instead of a medal for brilliant, selfless service, he was convicted of a misdemeanor.
What neither Congress nor the bureaucracy could take away from Helms was three decades of memories, challenge and exhilaration—a record beyond the grasp of people like Senator Frank Church, an unrelenting Helms critic. Helms helped tug the strings that toppled the left-leaning Mossadegh in Iran and brought 25 years of comparative stability to that nation.
His thumbprint is somewhere in the overthrow of Guatemala's Jacobo Arbenz, an open Communist sympathizer and another destabilizing force in the fragile years after World War II.
Helms worked on the U-2 project, which brought us our first aerial photographic views of Soviet military capability and later warned us of the Cuban missile crisis. He was part of the undercover seduction of Soviet Spies Oleg Penkovsky and Pyotr Popov, the former passing along a manual on the field operation of Russian nuclear missiles.
Helms loved the big tunnel that the spooks dug into East Germany in 1956 so that they could tap into the phone cables. For months U.S. intelligence was able to listen to secrets that reached all the way back to Moscow.
When he tells that one, Helms breaks into a big grin. It cost next to nothing.
Not a life was lost.