Richard McGarrah Helms (March 30, 1913 – October 23, 2002) was an American government official, intelligence officer, and diplomat who served as Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) from 1966 to 1973 as well as United States Ambassador to Iran from 1973 to 1976.
Helms served in the Office of Strategic Services, a wartime predecessor to the CIA, in Europe during World War II. After the war, he returned to Washington, DC, to become one of the founding officers of the CIA.
Following the 1947 creation of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), Helms rose in its ranks during the presidencies of Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy. Then, Helms was DCI under Presidents Johnson and Nixon, yielding to James R. Schlesinger in early 1973.
During his tenure as head of the CIA under presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and Richard Nixon, Helms oversaw the agency's involvement in the Vietnam War, Six Day War, and efforts to undermine Chilean president Salvador Allende. Domestically, he directed surveillance of American radicals in Operation CHAOS and was a key figure in the earliest stages of the Watergate scandal, delaying the investigation into the initial break-in and distancing the CIA from public involvement, but ultimately declining to use state secrets privilege to complete the cover-up.
He was forced to resign by Nixon in 1973 and appointed Ambassador to Iran, where he served from April 1973 to December 1976.
After leaving public office, Helms was subject to scrutiny for his tenure at the CIA during a period of growing distrust of American intelligence agencies. Helms was a key witness in the Church Committee investigation of the CIA during the mid-1970s, but the investigation was hampered severely by his own 1973 order to destroy all files related to the MKUltra program. In 1977, as a result of earlier covert operations in Chile, Helms became the only DCI convicted of misleading Congress.
Richard McGarrah Helms was born on March 30, 1913 in St. Davids, Pennsylvania. His father, Herman Henry Helms, was the son of Lutheran immigrants from Sudwalde, Lower Saxony and a senior executive at Alcoa. His mother, Marion Helms (née McGarrah), was the daughter of Gates W. McGarrah, the first president of the Bank of International Settlements.
Helms received part of his education in Switzerland and Germany, which contributed to his fluency in German and French. He attended Institut Le Rosey, a private boarding school in Switzerland. He graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts. After graduating from Williams College, he worked as a journalist in Europe and for the Indianapolis Times.
Upon the United States entry into World War II, Helms joined the Navy. He was recruited to the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime intelligence agency of the United States, and served in Europe. Following the war, he was stationed with the OSS in Germany.
While there, he wrote a letter to his son Dennis on stationery he had recovered from Adolf Hitler's office in the ruins of the Reich Chancellery. The letter was dated "V-E Day" (May 8, 1945), the day Germany surrendered. In 2011, Dennis Helms donated the letter to the private museum of CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia.
In 1945, the OSS was terminated, and Helms joined the Strategic Services Unit, which had been established to take over the work of the Secret Intelligence and X-2 Counter Espionage branches of the OSS. Helms focused on espionage in central Europe at the start of the Cold War and took part in vetting the Gehlen Organization in Germany. When intelligence and counter-espionage was transferred to the Office of Special Operations (OSO), Helms followed.
In 1947, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) was founded, and OSO was transferred into the new organization. Helms was made head of OSO shortly before Director of Central Intelligence (DCI) Walter Bedell Smith merged OSO with the Office of Policy Coordination in 1952 to form the new Directorate of Plans. The Directorate was led by Frank Wisner as Deputy DCI for Plans (DDP) until 1958, with Helms serving as his Chief of Operations. During its early period, the CIA had a reputation for political liberalism stemming from its opposition to fascism during World War II.
In 1953, Allen Dulles was named DCI, and his brother John Foster Dulles was appointed United States Secretary of State. During this period, as Chief of Operations, Helms was specifically tasked with defending the CIA against threats from Senator Joseph McCarthy and the development of the controversial project MKUltra. He oversaw Operation Gold, a joint British-American effort to wiretap Soviet Army headquarters in Berlin using a tunnel into the Soviet occupation zone. The plan was revealed to the Soviets by a mole in MI6, George Blake, and the Soviets revealed their knowledge to the public in 1956, causing a media sensation.
Because the Soviets could not publicly reveal their foreknowledge without risking Blake's cover, the mission was celebrated as a success in the United States, where Allen Dulles claimed that it had revealed order of battle plans and other information about communist operations behind the Iron Curtain.
As Chief of Operations, Helms generally focused on espionage and information-gathering, emphasizing long-term strategy over high-risk covert operations. However, Dulles and Wisner directed such operations to influence regime change in Iran (1953), Guatemala (1954) and the Congo (1960), which Helms oversaw. In Iran, regime change brought Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, who had been Helms's classmate at Institut Le Rosey, to power.
In 1958, Wisner resigned from the CIA. Rather than elevating Helms, Dulles chose Richard M. Bissell Jr. as the new DDP. During the early presidency of John F. Kennedy, Dulles selected Helms to testify before Congress on the topic of Soviet forgery.
In 1961, the failed Bay of Pigs Invasion resulted in the resignation of Dulles as DCI. Although Helms, as chief of operations, was involved in the failed operation, he successfully distanced himself from its disastrous results. CIA official and author Victor Marchetti later noted that Helms had been meticulous to ensure "that not a single piece of paper existed in the agency which linked [him] to ... the Bay of Pigs."
Deputy Director for Plans (1962–65) and Deputy DCI (1965–66)