A Look Over My Shoulder

by Richard Helms

  Sam Nunn, who had heard Bell’s remark, told me later that Judge Bell was “probably right, but a written record in an oversight committee is much more valuable in such cases.”

  This was Sam’s polite way of saying that the knowledge which Senator Russell kept in his head should have been on record in his committee. I could only agree.

  Chapter 45

  —

  BROWSING

  While reading a recent magazine comment on President Lyndon Johnson, I was reminded of the last time I had visited him on business. LBJ had called President Nixon and asked that someone come out to the ranch and bring him up to date on foreign affairs. I welcomed the invitation and the opportunity to visit LBJ and Lady Bird on their home ground. Taking the Agency’s propeller-driven aircraft meant getting under way early in the morning, but the plane was easily accommodated on the landing strip at the Johnson family’s Texas spread.

  LBJ settled into a chair in the sunroom, tilted back, and thrust his feet up on a stool. Ten minutes into my briefing on Vietnam and the rest of the world—a briefing several minutes longer than LBJ would have tolerated while in the Oval Office—it became obvious that he was losing interest. As I was closing down, he interrupted.

  “Dick,” he said, “what do your luncheon notes show about who was responsible for cutting back on the big increase in troops the Pentagon wanted in Vietnam?”

  “If you mean at one of the Tuesday lunches,” I said, “it was you. After listening to a discussion of the Pentagon recommendations, you said flatly that you were not going to commit any more troops.”

  “That’s exactly what I remember,” Johnson said. “I knew damned well that I made that decision.” He grunted and pulled himself erect in the chair. “It’s just that now they’re telling me that Clark Clifford’s claiming he took the lead that day.”

  “That’s definitely not the way I recall it,” I said.

  “When you get back to Washington, take a look at your notes and give me a ring.”

  “But Mr. President, I don’t have any notes. You had forbidden it.” For a moment, I half suspected that this might have been a sly probe to find out whether I had a stack of Tuesday luncheon memoranda. “You were constantly reminding us that everything said at the luncheons was completely off the record.”

  LBJ shook his head and uttered a deep sigh. “I know, but I always assumed that you guys kept notes anyway.” President or ex-President, he was always vintage LBJ.

  It was clear that Lyndon deeply resented the allegation that anyone else, particularly Clark Clifford, who at that time had been secretary of defense, might have made the difficult decision.

  I had to refuse LBJ’s tempting invitation to have a swim before leaving for the long trip back to Washington.

  The last time I saw LBJ and Lady Bird was also at their ranch. Before departing for Iran, Cynthia and I were en route to Mexico for a vacation, and we stopped for a visit. Lyndon looked much the same but appeared to be slowing down slightly. Sadly, I noticed that he had again begun to smoke. We exchanged the usual Washington gossip and did a little reminiscing. I particularly remember LBJ wishing me well in my new assignment and promising that he and Lady Bird would visit us in Iran as soon as we were comfortably in place. As ever, Lady Bird was an attentive hostess and always unobtrusively supportive of her husband. More than anyone I recall, LBJ still personified the cliché “larger than life.”

  Ironically, it was sometime after I left government that I first got to know an incumbent President socially. In 1983, I was still running Safeer, my consulting firm, when President Reagan awarded me the National Security Medal in the Roosevelt Room at the White House. I was more than pleased by the award, the highest decoration in the security field. Vice President George Bush, one of my successors at the Agency, was also present. The award also brought a letter of congratulations from ex-President Nixon. It was the first I had heard from him since we shook hands at Camp David.

  For some time after the White House ceremony, I worked with Nancy Reagan as head of her anti-drug program, Just Say No. It was two years later that our social relationship slipped into high gear. Cynthia and I had become acquainted with Rex Harrison when he came to Tehran to participate in an international film gathering. In 1985, when he and Claudette Colbert were in Washington starring in a play headed for New York, we invited Rex and his wife, Mercia, for dinner. With the help of Michael Deaver, the White House chief of staff, we also invited the only other actors we knew—the President and Nancy Reagan. At the time, I had logged some forty years in Washington, long enough, I thought, to have a sound notion of how things were done thereabouts. Not so.

  The proceedings began with a top-to-bottom inspection of our house by a handful of Secret Service experts. The attached garage was deemed a bit narrow for Secret Service purposes, but it was decided that, with some practice, one of the White House drivers could back the President’s limousine into it without necessarily damaging the vehicle or our otherwise serviceable garage. Within the house, the kitchen and the living and dining areas were carefully examined, and chairs suitably safe for the President were chosen. This was not a question of weight-bearing strength, but rather to deny a line of sight for any assassin possibly lurking in the neighborhood. Scrupulous electronic probing presumably eliminated any hidden surveillance possibilities. I say “presumably” because it had been my experience that the most up-to-snuff secret audio and other clandestine monitoring techniques always seemed to be a step ahead of the counter-surveillance teams.

  The Secret Service then alerted all of the neighbors along the street to a “happening” that required them not to park in front of their dwellings from 6 p.m. to midnight, by which time our mystery guests would presumably have left for home. Everyone cooperated in good spirit. This allowed ample space for the (by Cynthia’s rough count) twenty-three vehicles involved in the President’s entourage—a communication van, radio units, a decoy limousine, an ambulance, motorcycles, and miscellaneous prowl cars—to navigate and park.

  The final step was oversight of the food and drink. At the risk of possibly compromising any still useful security precautions, I will admit that before any drink was poured, food put on the table, or coffee brewed, ample precautions were taken. I wondered how civil service regulations might describe the job that in time past was known simply as “food taster.”

  The motorcade arrived punctually; the President and Nancy made their way into the fortress without incident. I dutifully indicated the chair that had been selected for the President. Without the slightest hesitation, Ronald Reagan slipped into another, more comfortable chair.

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  My first invitation to the annual dinner of the Gridiron Club came in 1967. The fifty journalist members of the club use the white-tie event to singe, but not burn, a few of the hundreds of invited guests. I had hoped to rest quietly, far to the side of the scaffold on which more prominent guests were expected to suffer. Not at all. I learned that my job at the Agency was only cover. My actual job was writing schoolbooks, and my name was really McGuffey. This was a clever but rather stretched pun, which I thought might have slipped past most of the guests. My middle name, which I have seldom used, and which it is unlikely most of my acquaintances would have known, is McGarrah. There followed a joyous rendering of a song set to the tune of “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi,” but with twisted lyrics. Entitled “The Sweetheart of CIA,” it described “the girl of my dreams” as “a snake-eyed girl,” and then noted that “the cloak on her back is a subsidized black” and “her bank account continues to mount.” In context, I got off easily.

  In 1969, Dean Acheson and I drove together to another Gridiron dinner. It was almost midnight before the guests were toasted and I could find Dean in the dense crowd. We agreed that it was time to leave, but then Dean hesitated. “First, I want to pay my respects to the new President,” he said. As I followed him to the suite where President Nixon was holding court, I remembered the relentless antagonism with which t
hese two men had confronted each other during the McCarthy era. As secretary of state, the highly competent Dean Acheson was pilloried—Nixon referred to him as the “Red Dean.” Various Nixon enthusiasts, including senators and congressmen, demanded Dean’s resignation on the grounds that he was a communist sympathizer. Years later, in his memoirs, Acheson referred to this as “the attack of the primitives.”

  I stood back a bit when Dean, the next in line, leaned forward, extended his hand, and in a deep voice said, “Mr. President, I am Dean Acheson.” “Thunderstruck” best describes Nixon’s appearance as he struggled to understand why this distinguished statesman should feel he needed identification. “Yes—I know,” he finally blurted.

  It was a nifty lesson in Washington establishment manners.

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  It is tempting, in closing, again to praise the staff who were so influential in guiding the Agency through the turbulent early days and shaping this country’s first national intelligence service: Larry Houston, from OSS and CIG to CIA, a peerless general counsel, dealing every day with unprecedented legal problems; Colonel Lawrence “Red” White, a superb executive director and comptroller; Tom Karamessines, the most steadfast operations officer; Albert “Bud” Wheelon, scientist extraordinaire; and Sherman Kent, the flamboyant Dean of Intelligence, with red suspenders and a vocabulary to match.

  Among the legion of operatives, analysts, scientists, and scholars whom I have had to refrain from giving at least a bit of the credit they have so richly earned are two who deserve special mention:

  John Bross, one of our most distinguished officers, graduated from Harvard Law School in 1933, and for six years practiced law in New York City. In 1942, he was one of the earliest OSS volunteers; he was the first American to graduate from the British commando training school in Scotland. The officer students—who wore no insignia of rank—were relentlessly subjected to rough treatment by the rugged, noncommissioned commando instructors. Hardy Amies, the English fashion designer, was one of John’s fellow trainees. After an exhausting day, the pair limped back to their quarters. John and Amies were commiserating over the treatment that “Bob,” the roughest instructor, had inflicted. Amies flung himself on his cot, spluttering, “I’d like to see that bastard Bob design a hat!” Although he was a solid ten years older than his English classmates and had been injured in a parachute jump, Bross graduated first in his class.

  In London, John was chief of the OSS mission to the United Kingdom, Norway, and Denmark. After the war, he rejoined his law firm in New York. He returned to government in 1949 as deputy to the general counsel to the U.S. High Commissioner for Germany, and he joined CIA in 1951. He headed the Eastern European Operations Division until 1957, when he became chief of our offices in Germany. On his return to Washington, he served as chief of the DDP Senior Planning Office, as CIA comptroller, and then as deputy to the DCI for national programs evaluation. He retired in 1971, but remained as a consultant until 1988. Throughout his career, John handled some of the most difficult and intricate jobs in the Agency. His performance was never less than outstanding.

  Bronson Tweedy will be more than miffed to find that I have violated his determination to slip into retirement unnoticed and without responding to any of the pressures to share his inside view of the history to which he contributed. Brons began his intelligence career in the U.S. Navy, interrogating captured Nazi U-boat survivors. After the war, he returned briefly to his Madison Avenue career; by 1947, he knew it was no longer for him, and he joined the Agency. I was lucky to have known him from the earliest days of his career—first as a case officer in Europe, then as chief of station. Brons returned to Washington for a staff assignment, and then went to Austria as chief of one of our busiest Cold War offices. After a senior headquarters assignment came another CIA station. Before he retired, Brons had also served as chief of two area divisions. His last assignment, for which he was singularly well qualified, was deputy to the DCI for the intelligence community.

  It was my good fortune that throughout Bronson’s various Washington assignments, our houses were closely enough situated to make carpooling possible. The hours we spent threading our way through traffic allowed me the full benefit of his friendship, wide experience, and levelheaded and highly perceptive comments and counsel.

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  In keeping with CIA regulations, some of which I instituted, this manuscript was submitted to the Agency for security clearance. As with all former employees, the Agency has requested that I remind readers that the opinions I have expressed are not necessarily those of the Central Intelligence Agency.

  ABOUT THE AUTHORS

  After his retirement, RICHARD HELMS lived in Washington, D.C. He died in October 2002.

  WILLIAM HOOD was born in Maine and entered the military in 1942. After serving in the Armored Force and military intelligence, he volunteered for the Office of Strategic Services; he was at the London headquarters of OSS until 1945, when he joined Allen Dulles in Switzerland. He remained in OSS carryover units until CIA was formed. He served abroad and as chief of station, with responsibilities involving Eastern Europe, the USSR, and Latin America, and was executive officer of the Counterintelligence Staff when he retired from CIA. He has published three novels and a nonfiction book, Mole. He divides his time among New York City, Maine, and East Hampton, New York.