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No one better personifies that description than Richard Helms, the man who now heads CIA. Although he has been with the agency since its start, no CIA chief ever came into office with such a passion for anonymity and downright disdain for public acclaim. His predecessors assumed the directorship after long public exposure in Government (Allen Dulles), industry (John McCone), or the military (General Walter Bedell Smith and Admiral William Raborn), with tangible accomplishments and medals to show for it. Richard Helms? He had a 1965 award from the National Civil Service League, the sort given annually to groups of career bureaucrats, for "significant contributions to excellence in Government." But who could say just what these contributions were?
His relative anonymity is ironic in view of his prewar background, which promised prominence as well as accomplishment. Helms's father was an aluminum sales executive who upon retirement took his family to live in Europe. The move stretched Richard's prep schooling from Orange, N.J., to Switzerland and Germany and gave him lifelong fluency in French and German. He returned to the U.S. to attend Williams College, class of 1935. Few students accumulated more honors: a Phi Beta Kappa key, the presidency of his class and of the senior honor society, the editorship of the student newspaper and the senior yearbook. He was also voted most likely to succeed. Journalism would be his career, his goal a newspaper of his own.
Henie to Hitler. For a fast start, he became a United Press European correspondent—after agreeing to pay his own way to London in 1935. Two months later he went on to Germany, covering the 1936 Olympics and the Nazi Party rally with correspondents twice his age and many times his experience. His interview subjects ranged from Sonja Henie to Adolf Hitler. He returned to the U.S. after two years, settled for a job as office boy in the advertising department of the now defunct Indianapolis Times. By 1939, he was the paper's national advertising director. That year he married Divorcee Julia Bretzman Shields, a sculptor. They have one son, Dennis, 24, a student at the University of Virginia Law School.
What was to be his real career started in 1943, when Navy Lieut. Helms was transferred to the Office of Strategic Services, a switch that took him from desk duty in New York to Washington, Britain and finally Germany, where he worked under Allen Dulles. After his discharge in 1946, he went into the War Department's intelligence unit, then joined CIA when it was founded.
"Dirty Tricks." Helms's public record for the next five years is a total blank. When he surfaced in 1952, it was as deputy to the chief of the plans division, the so-called "dirty tricks" department, which handles espionage and other undercover operations. Thirteen years later, he was to make a rare autobiographical effusion: "I would suppose that you would describe it as working my way up through the ranks during the years."
Helms became head of the plans division in 1962, when CIA's top echelon was reorganized as a result of the Bay of Pigs fiasco. At this stage, the agency was smarting under severe external criticism and riven by intramural factionalism. Helms, even-tempered and affable, managed to avoid office politics and grudges.