A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the Central Intelligence Agency

A fascinating book about Richard Helm's career in the CIA. From his work in OSS to his entering the foreign service in 1973, Helms made the CIA an effective weapon in the fight against communism. He was a devoted civil servant, who saved the country billions of dollars by using human intelligence to discover his enemies weaknesses. The CIA did some things right, some things wrong, but always served the nation. Helms was DCI for both the Johnson and Nixon presidencies. He chaffed at serving as a tool of Nixon in the Watergate episode, and contained Walters desire to pay off the Watergarte burglars. Nixon retaliated by ousting Helms two months short of his 60th birthday and retirement date. In his discussion about an ambassador position, Helms was asked a question on the Chilean coup. Since this was an open forum, Helms lied, even though he had answered the same question by the same senator in a closed session truthfully. That senator (Symington) was a disgrace to the nation. He played politics and discredited a patriot. This is a great read about the early CIA. Helms is as good an author as he was a Spymaster. A long but throughly interesting book.

This book is not afraid to look at fundamental problems in the area of intelligence, which America today is finding amazingly similar to the problems that Richard Helms observed in Germany immediately after World War Two. Helms was uniquely qualified to see the big picture, having been a newspaper reporter who had lunch with Adolf Hitler (Chapter 2 is called `Lunch with Adolf') the day of a big rally in Nuremberg in 1936, a privilege that Americans willing to spend a thousand dollars a plate to attend a fundraiser with American presidents more recently might be jealous of, if being a millionaire is not enough to make them happy. Henry Kissinger was happy to report in the Foreword that Helms was even invited to lunch with President Nixon after an early NSC meeting. (p. xi). There is even a picture of the famous Tuesday lunch group with LBJ, Rusk, Clark Clifford, General Wheeler, Walt Rostow, George Cushman and Walt Johnson. There is even a picture of a lunch with Vice President George Herbert Walker Bush with the caption, "At lunch in the Vice President's office. Aside from George Washington, the elder George Bush is the only President who had firsthand knowledge of the intelligence world."The Preface reports that February 2, 1973, was the day James Schlesinger was sworn in as head of CIA and Richard Helms lost the position which was his main claim to fame. Richard Nixon had something to do with it, and Chapter 1, `A Smoking Gun' reports enough about the Watergate break-in to give the CIA perspective from the top, and ends with "Five months later, and a few days after his reelection, President Nixon called me to Camp David. It was the last time we spoke while he was in office." (p. 13). The Preface even claims "President Nixon had ended my intelligence career with a handshake at Camp David." (p. vi). If Helms is right about that, there was no personal contact between the Director of the CIA and the President of the United States in December 1972 and January 1973, when the Vietnam ceasefire was being hammered into place and a record number of B-52 bombers were being shot down by North Vietnamese anti-aircraft guns and SAMs. That figures.The German spies are most fascinating in the beginning of the book. Helms calls Martha Dodd an American, as she was the daughter of the American ambassador to Germany from 1933 to 1938, but she was also girlfriend of Boris Vinogradov, the press secretary at the Soviet embassy in Berlin. After being charged with spying in 1957, she fled to Czechoslovakia. "Martha was seventy when she died in Prague in 1990." (p. 20). Spies and Richard Nixon have an acute sense of which side someone is on, and Helms seems to be particularly sensitive to the issues that Nixon would be prone to notice. Other major personalities are easy to locate in the index: Allen Dulles, James Angleton, Dwight D. Eisenhower, John F. Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, Yuri Ivanovich Nosenko, and Frank Wisner.Chapter 8, "The Gehlen Organizat

Pages 300/301 of the Helms book:One of the most disturbing incidents in the six days [war between Israel and the surrounding Arab states] came on the morning of June 8[, 1967] when the Pentagon flashed(urgent top-priority precedence) a message that the U.S.S. Liberty, an unarmed U.S. Navy communications(spy) ship, was under attack in the Mediterranean, and that American fighters had been scrambled to defend the ship........ The following urgent reports showed that Israeli jet fighters and torpedo boats had launched the attack. The seriously damaged Liberty remained afloat, with thirty-four dead and more than a hundred wounded members of the crew.Israeli authorities subsequently apologized for the accident, but few in Washington could believe that the ship had not been identified as an American naval vessel. Later, an interim intelligence memorandum concluded that the attack was a mistake and "not made in malice against the U.S."........ When additional evidence was available, more doubt was raised. This prompted my [D]eputy [Director of Central Intelligence], Admiral Rufus Taylor, to write me his view of the incident. "To me, the picture thus far presents the distinct possibility that the Israelis knew that the Liberty might be their target and attacked anyway, either through confusion in Command and Control or through deliberate disregard of instructions on the part of subordinates."The day after the attack, President Johnson, bristling with irritation, said to me, "The New York Times" put that attack on the Liberty on an inside page. It should have been on the front page!"I had no role in the board of inquiry that followed, or the board's finding that there could be no doubt that the Israeli's knew exactly what they were doing in attacking the Liberty. I have yet to understand why it was felt necessary to attack this ship or who ordered the attack.(299 words in a 452 page book)Murder... they KNEW they were murdering defenseless American kids barely in their twenties so that they could complete WHAT two Israeli Prime Ministers(Menachim Begin and Moshe Dayan) have since admitted was a "land grab".... ...to get more land, ....more land than they had already grabbed by the fourth day of the Six-Day War-they left 34 American families without their sons, brothers, dads... and sent a good subset of the 171 injured home to THEIR families in the US maimed for life.and the kids burned and maimed for life who are standing up for their 34 fallen comrades unable to rise from the dead to defend their own memories and blameless conduct... now the Israelis call them "liars" and "anti-Semites"......except a couple of the crew members of the USS Liberty were Jewish themselves... so they're not called "liars" and "anti-semites"... no, the Israeli attackers and Government of Israel call them "liars" and "self-hating jews"...THE OFFICIAL POSITION OF THE CIA IS THAT THIS WAS A "TRAGIC MISTAKE".... BUT HERE IS WHAT THE OFFICIALS AT THE NSA HAD TO SAY TO UNITED STA

Richard Helms is, after Allen Dulles, arguably the most significant US spymaster and intelligence manager in history. It is a fortunate circumstance that he overcame his reluctance to publish anything at all, and worked with the trusted William Hood, whose own books are remarkable, to put before the public a most useful memoire. Below are a few of the gems that I find worth noting, and for which I recommend the book as a unique record: 1) Puts forward elegant argument for permissive & necessary secrecy in the best interests of the public 2) Defends the CIA culture as highly disciplined--he is persuasive in stating that only Presidents can order covert actions, and that CIA does only the President's direct bidding. 3) Makes it clear in passing, not intentionally, that his experience as both a journalist and businessman were essential to his ultimate success as a spymaster and manager of complex intelligence endeavors--this suggests that one reason there is "no bench" at CIA today is because all the senior managers have been raised as cattle destined to be veal: as young entry on duty people, brought up within the bureaucracy, not knowing how to scrounge sources or meet payroll... 4) Compellingly discusses the fact that intelligence without counterintelligence is almost irrelevant if not counterproductive, but then glosses over some of the most glaring counterintelligence failures in the history of the CIA--interestingly, he defends James Angleton and places the blame for mistreating Nosenko squarterly on the Soviet Division leadership in the Directorate of Operations. 5) Points out that it was Human Intelligence (HUMINT), not Imagery Intelligence (IMINT), that first found the Soviet missiles in Cuba. 6) He confirms the Directorate of Intelligence and the analysis it does, as the "essence" of intelligence, relegating clandestine and technical intelligence to support functions rather than driving functions. This is most important, in that neither clandestine nor technical collectors are truly responsive to the needs of all-source analysts, in part because systems are designed, and agents are recruited, without regard to what is actually needed. 7) He tells a great story on Laos, essentially noting that 200 CIA paramilitary officers, and money, and the indigenous population, where able to keep 5 North Vietnamese divisions bogged down, and kept Laos more or less free for a decade 8) In the same story on Laos, he explains U.S. Department of Defense incapacity in unconventional or behind the lines war by noting that their officers kept arriving "with knapsacks full of doctrine". 9) In recounting some of CIA's technical successes, he notes casually that persistence is a virtue--there were *thirteen* satellite failures before the 14th CORONA effort finally achieved its objectives. 10) He gives Lyndon Baines Johnson (LBJ) much higher marks at a user and leader of intelligence, such that we wondered why Christopher Andrew, the noted author