A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  A third possibility would be to smother my pride and stay put—“soldiering on,” as Dulles delicately put it.

  My decision came down to a few facts. First, and certainly foremost, I was, and still am, fascinated by every aspect of intelligence activity. It is not for everybody, but for me it was the best possible work. Moreover, I felt that I could continue to make a useful contribution to the Agency for several more years. Aside from these personal feelings, I was, and still am, convinced that there is no greater threat to world peace than poorly informed or misinformed leaders and governments. The “Pearl Harbor factor” has by now been beaten into the heads of our policymakers. But even in the world of 1958, it seemed to me that the likelihood of an armed attack by a major power was slight. The wiggle room between a diplomatic standoff and military confrontation seemed most likely to be dominated by the nation with the wisest foreign policy and the best intelligence service. Today, the more likely perils—anthrax spilled in the subway or tucked into letters, car bombs cozied up to undefended targets—are as much a threat as any likely attack by a world power. And, as in the past, the first line of defense remains a competent intelligence service.

  My decision to remain in place was difficult but, for me at least, correct.

  Looking back at that time in my life I realize that my reaction to Dulles’s decision was more that of surprise than any lasting bitterness. I also thought that aside from the obvious personal qualities, the minimal necessary professional background for whoever might have taken Wisner’s place would have included some reasonably close-in experience with intelligence collection, counterintelligence, covert action operations, and some experience and knowledge of liaison with foreign intelligence services. I was also convinced that an understanding of the qualifications and training necessary for operations officers and a reasonable familiarity with the hundred or more professionals who held the key positions in the directorate would have been essential. Measured against these criteria, and despite his outstanding personal record, I could only regard Dick Bissell as a peculiar choice for the job.

  I assumed that Bissell would, early on, take me aside and give me an understanding of just what he expected and how he wanted our two offices to function. This was never to happen. Bissell settled down in his office, and for want of any other instruction, I carried on. This meant that I dealt with everything that crossed my desk which I assumed would not require Bissell’s direct attention. The only significant change in our offices was Bissell’s appointment of Tracy Barnes as a special assistant. When planning for the effort to unseat Castro began, Bissell named Barnes as his deputy for ZAPATA, the operation which ended at the Bay of Pigs. At the time Barnes settled in, the ZAPATA traffic no longer crossed my desk.

  Frank Wisner and I had worked as a team. We received simultaneous distribution of significant cable and dispatch traffic, and other communications, and we consulted on all the more important operations and senior personnel appointments. Our communication was always fluent and candid. Dick Bissell never discussed with me any activity or related personnel assignments involving activity which he personally directed. Nor do I recall his ever soliciting my advice. Bissell appeared to have little interest in espionage as such, and none whatsoever in counterintelligence. His lack of concern with what has become known as HUMINT—a barbarism encompassing secret intelligence collected by human beings—was obviously influenced by the scope and quality of the material flowing from his technical operations—particularly CORONA, the orbiting photographic satellite program.

  Although the superbly detailed photographs taken from what I call outer space could not show what foreign policymakers were thinking or discussing among themselves, the data on foreign capabilities were outstanding. A good agent in the right place can be expected to produce intelligence that cannot be duplicated by any amount of overhead photography, but no spy can hope to reveal the mass of data that were such easy pickings for the unmanned satellites. The fact that this material could be produced without any compelling diplomatic or political bothers is also a significant advantage. Outer space and other technical legerdemain costs millions. Espionage was—at least in those days—dirt cheap. Both activities are essential, and the one can be counted upon to nourish the other. There remains an obvious management problem in maintaining a balance between the two.

  From early in his Agency career, Bissell’s attention—partially conditioned by his work with the U-2 and CORONA—was fixed on the USSR and its satellite communist dependencies. A parallel concern involved high-level covert action operations, the potential importance of which had been driven home to him by the overthrow of Arbenz in Guatemala, and Allen Dulles’s abiding enthusiasm for that activity. But by 1960, Bissell’s attention and that of the White House and the National Security Council were increasingly focused on sub-Saharan Africa. Belgium’s hasty decision to grant independence to the Congo in June 1960 brought the developing confrontation of Soviet and Western interests to the forefront.

  At the time, the Congo seemed to be compounded of elements destined to fuse into an explosion at the slightest misstep by any of the interested parties—the impoverished and inflamed local population, the USSR, the United States, other Western democracies, and the United Nations. The country was rich in cobalt, tantalum, bauxite, and fistfuls of other strategic material. It was surrounded by states, some of which had yet to be blessed with experienced or stable governments.

  Belgium had surrendered the Congo without having educated and trained a body of Congolese who were prepared to take over from the colonial masters. This policy was not so much the product of neglect as it was to ensure that for some time to come the Congo would have no choice but to depend upon the cadre of Belgian officials who would remain behind to administer the government, staff the army officer corps, and man the sizeable security force. And perhaps not incidentally, to continue to exploit the country.

  With independence came Patrice Lumumba, a prime minister whose political wisdom and ability to govern were more apparent to some of his constituency at home than could be seen from abroad. After weeks of growing strife, the country erupted. The Congolese troops rebelled against their Belgian officers and Belgian military forces intervened to protect the considerable Belgian holdings. The richly endowed Katanga Province declared its independence from the Congo. The UN asked Belgium to withdraw, and prepared to deploy its own peacekeeping forces. Lumumba enplaned for Washington to plea for economic aid. After winning some support, he blithely admitted that he was considering inviting Soviet troops to help the Congo rid itself of the despised Belgian forces.

  At this time, Agency officers in the Congo cabled Washington to the effect that the country was about to succumb to a classic communist takeover, with strong Soviet support. Prime Minister Lumumba was seen as incompetent to run the country, let alone to preserve its independence from the USSR. A few days later, Allen Dulles met with President Eisenhower and the Special Group, the White House body that approved covert action operations. Eisenhower expressed his strong view on the need for very straightforward action in the Congo. The minutes of this meeting stated that the Special Group “agreed that planning for Congo would not necessarily rule out consideration of any particular kind of activity which might contribute to getting rid of Lumumba.”

  The following day, Allen Dulles drafted a cable to the Congo station saying in part, “In high quarters here, it is the clear-cut conclusion that if [Lumumba] continues to hold high office, the inevitable result will at best be chaos, and at the worst would pave the way for a Communist takeover of the Congo, with disastrous consequences for the prestige of the UN and for the interests of the free world generally. Consequently, we conclude that his removal must be an urgent and prime objective and that under existing conditions this should be a high priority of our covert action.”*

  In those days, whenever Allen Dulles drafted an operations cable, he invariably sent it to Bissell or me for coordination before releasing it to the field. As it ha
ppened, Bissell was on vacation when this cable was prepared and I simply signed for the DDP. The phrase “In high quarters” would have been understood by any senior Agency officer to be a reference to the President. The intent of the cable seemed as clear to me at the time as it does today. As a former commander of the Allied Expeditionary Forces in Europe, President Eisenhower had extensive experience in life-and-death decisions, and can only have known exactly what he was saying. In this context, I vividly recall the newsreel coverage of General Eisenhower on June 5, the eve of D day 1944. As he moved slowly along a file of heavily burdened and fully armed Rangers, he looked each in the face, and stopped to shake hands and encourage the young men who were to lead the landing assault in Normandy. No one could have known more certainly than General Eisenhower exactly what these men would face in the next few hours, or could have calculated their chance of survival more accurately. The decision to plan moves against Lumumba was President Eisenhower’s.

  The first brush that I had with a problem of this sort came early in 1947 when Elizabeth Dunlevy caught me at the door as I was leaving my office. She thrust an incoming cable into my hand. “Colonel Galloway wants to see you on the double.” In those days, we were still in the crumbling temporary buildings alongside the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool. I managed to glance at the cable as I made my way down the stairs, the only stable element in the decaying building.

  Colonel Donald Galloway, a regular Army cavalry officer, was a recent arrival, having been brought into the outfit by General Vandenberg. Given the title assistant director for special operations (ADSO), the colonel headed the espionage and counterintelligence components of the Central Intelligence Group. Galloway had a commanding presence: tall and square-jawed, he had big hands, long fingers, and a seldom modulated parade-ground voice. He was rarely known to issue an oral order without the coda, “And on the double, please.” He may also have been the last officer at West Point to have instructed the cadets in equestrian etiquette.

  Galloway fixed me with a frozen glare before I got through the door and into his office. “Just what are you going to do with that damned agent who’s been playing games with us in Germany.” It was less a question than a demand to know why I had not already done something about the cable that I had still not finished reading. I cannot remember the agent in question, nor do I recall exactly how I tried to temporize long enough to find out where Galloway was headed. I needn’t have bothered.

  “Why don’t you just have the bastard eliminated?”

  “You mean, have him killed?”

  “Yes, Helms. That’s exactly what I mean.”

  For a moment I considered reading the colonel a sermon on the propriety and the perils of any such peacetime action. Fortunately for our relationship as it was to develop, I realized that as an experienced frontline commander, Galloway might not need any such moralizing from me. I took a deep breath and settled for something along the line of “I … er … don’t think that would be wise.”

  “Why not?” Patience was not one of the colonel’s virtues.

  With this, I got down to business. “In the first place,” I said, “we want to make damned certain that we’re not creating a bigger problem than the one we’re trying to solve. Down deep, even the toughest-talking Americans are raised in the Boy Scout tradition. Under battlefield pressure, almost anything goes. Now that the shooting’s stopped, there’s no telling what immediate impact this sort of action may have on a person, or what he might come to think of it a few months later. It’s afterwards, when the pressure is off, the urgency has vanished, and the emotions have quieted, that there’ll be time to think it through again. But by then it will be impossible to re-create the pressure and the circumstances that led to the decision, and everything will look different. That’s when things begin to fall apart, and someone may think that an anonymous note to the local newspaper will put everything straight again.”

  “The NKVD does it,” Galloway said, and mentioned two of the Western services that in peacetime were known to lapse into what they called “executive action.”

  “They’re welcome to it—but in peacetime there are simpler solutions.”

  Having got across this much thin ice, I eased up. Colonel Galloway growled a few words and dismissed me.

  As Dean Acheson once commented, the writer of a memorandum of conversation does not come off second best. Nonetheless, I’ve recounted this incident as I remember it. I have a fond memory of Colonel Galloway and great respect for his combat record, but at the time it seemed to me that the veteran soldier had spoken too quickly and rashly. The fact that we never discussed this topic again makes me think that he came to agree with me.

  When Bissell returned from vacation, I dropped out of the command channel on the Lumumba matter. At one point, an officer Bissell had detailed to go to the Congo to direct the operation came to me to say that he had refused the mission. He asked if I agreed. I said that I did. Dick Bissell accepted the officer’s decision, and no more was said about it.

  At about this time, Lumumba was placed in protective custody—more accurately house arrest—by the UN authorities in the Congo. He escaped in November 1960 and attempted to lead his followers against his political rival, Joseph Mobuto, and the UN forces. He was captured by Mobuto a few days later, and in January 1961 was flown to Katanga, the secessionist province. Sometime after his arrival in Katanga, Lumumba was murdered, probably by Mobuto followers.

  Time had solved the problem. The Agency had no influence in the action whatsoever.

  There is no easy answer to the question of assassination. Clearly, boundless misery would have been avoided if Hitler had been struck down after he assumed absolute power in Germany, and his plans for the future had become clear. At least as much might be said had Stalin been eliminated before he established himself as the sole authority in the USSR. Lumumba was scarcely such a threat, but he was by any standard unfit to rule the Congo. This said, in peacetime the assassination of troublesome persons is morally and operationally indefensible. There are invariably other solutions, not the least of which is time—time for the immediate and sometimes fierce tactical pressure to subside or for the problem to be reevaluated and another solution found.

  As far as the United States is concerned, the issue was closed when in February 1976, Executive Order 11905 was issued. Section 5, Restrictions on Intelligence Activities, subparagraph “g,” states: “No employee of the United States shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.” I have no quarrel with this order other than to say that in wartime, when air raids are coincidentally killing hundreds of noncombatants, I see no reason the assassination of enemy leaders such as Hitler and his immediate staff should be forbidden.

  *U.S. Senate, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975), pp. 14–15.

  Chapter 16

  —

  CALL IT HUBRIS

  For some time before Fulgencio Batista, the president and resident dictator of Cuba, decided enough was enough and decamped for Miami on New Year’s Day 1959, the prevailing opinion of Washington’s Latin American experts was that although Raúl Castro was a fully frocked communist, his older brother Fidel was perhaps no such thing. Because Batista had long since outworn his welcome, Fidel Castro appeared to many to be a reasonably plausible change. He was surely a leftist, but he had parlayed a shoestring invasion into a full-fledged takeover in Cuba. Even in the quick-change atmosphere of Caribbean and Latin American politics, this was an accomplishment. What’s more, Castro achieved this after having failed to overthrow Batista in an earlier invasion effort, and had as a result served two years in Batista’s prison on the Isle of Pines.

  Castro was from the Cuban middle class and had a law degree. His well-propagandized enthusiasm for land reform, universal education, and social change had a significant appeal to Cuban peasants and the urban working class. He was young, energetic, forceful, and without question p
ossessed a considerable romantic charisma.

  The Agency had long maintained a presence in Cuba and had monitored Castro’s activity for months before Batista chose to decamp. Despite Cuba’s proximity to the United States, and the fact that the country was at least as vulnerable to radical political change and subversion as many others, it did not rank high on the White House list of priority concerns.

  In April 1959, four months after he had stepped into Batista’s vacated offices in Havana, Castro was invited to the United States by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. He was cautiously received by official Washington, but was welcomed by some of the media as a promising replacement for the thoroughly discredited Batista. Castro arrived well briefed. He dropped wreaths at the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials, told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee that he had no intention of expropriating American property, and assured TV audiences that he was opposed to communism and was an enthusiastic champion of a free press and open elections. But Castro had no luck at all with Vice President Richard Nixon. After spending three hours of a Sunday afternoon listening to Castro in the Vice President’s quiet office in the Senate Office Building, Nixon drafted a secret memorandum of conversation that left little doubt that he considered the Cuban a loose cannon and probably a communist.