On his departure from the CIA, Helms was appointed Ambassador to Iran, and underwent Congressional nomination hearings by the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. In both 1973 and 1975 he point blank denied that the CIA were involved in Chile. ‘If the Agency had really gotten behind the other candidates and spent a lot of money and so forth, the election might have come out differently,’ he said at the earlier hearing, although in 1975 he admitted that he might have made a mistake but pointed out that Allende was still in power at the time ‘and we did not need any more diplomatic incidents or any more difficulties’.
Only a few months later, Allende would be gone, the victim of a coup by General Pinochet that took place in September 1973. Unlike similar operations in other countries, this wasn’t orchestrated by the CIA, although even the Agency admits that ‘because [the] CIA did not discourage the takeover and had sought to instigate a coup in 1970 [it] probably appeared to condone it’. Rather than accept an offer of safe passage, Allende stood his ground in the presidential palace, and, as a forensic report in 2011 showed, he committed suicide with an AK-47 given him by Fidel Castro.
When it became clear that Helms had lied to Congress, it seemed as if he was part of yet another cover-up by an associate of disgraced President Nixon. However, as far as Helms was concerned, ‘I found myself in a position of conflict,’ he told a court in November 1977, when pleading guilty to a charge of perjury. ‘I had sworn my oath to protect certain secrets. I didn’t want to lie. I didn’t want to mislead the Senate. I was simply trying to find my way through a very difficult situation in which I found myself.’ Passing sentence, Judge Barrington D. Parker said, ‘If public officials embark deliberately on a course to disobey and ignore the laws of our land because of some misguided and ill-conceived notion and belief that there are earlier commitments and considerations which they must observe, the future of our country is in jeopardy… You stand before this court in disgrace and shame.’ As far as Helms was concerned, ‘I don’t feel disgraced at all. I think if I had done anything else I would have been disgraced.’ His $2,000 fine was paid by CIA officers.
By the time Helms was facing the perjury charge, the tide in America had turned very definitely against the intelligence services. Seymour Hersh’s article, ‘Huge C.I.A. Operation Reported in U.S. Against Antiwar Forces, Other Dissidents in Nixon Years’, appeared on the front page of the New York Times on December 22, 1974, and revealed the existence of a set of internal CIA documents called the Family Jewels. According to the compiler, future CIA DCI William Colby, these consisted of ‘693 pages of possible violations of, or at least questionable activities in regard to, the C.I.A.’s legislative charter’; that among the contents were ‘bizarre and tragic cases wherein the Agency experimented with mind-control drugs’; and that accompanying them was ‘a separate and even more secret annex’ that ‘summarized a 1967 survey of [the] C.I.A.’s involvement in assassination attempts or plans against Castro, Lumumba and [Dominican Republic dictator Rafael Leónidas] Trujillo [who was in fact killed by his officers of his own army]’. Certainly that material is in there, but the majority of the documents chronicle times where the CIA may have been acting outside their remit domestically — for example, in assisting a suburban Washington police department. The device they supplied may have helped prevent a policeman’s death, but they shouldn’t have been involved.
The article was yet another attack on the Agency, and prompted the formation of both a commission headed by Vice President Nelson Rockefeller and the United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities — chaired by Senator Frank Church, and known as the Church Committee. The headings of the latter’s final report give an indication of the concerns it threw up: ‘(A) Violating and Ignoring the Law (B) Over-breadth of Domestic Intelligence Activity (C) Excessive Use of Intrusive Techniques (D) Using Covert Action to Disrupt and Discredit Domestic Groups (E) Political Abuse of Intelligence Information (F) Inadequate Controls on Dissemination and Retention (G) Deficiencies in Control and Accountability.’
While there were concerns that Senator Church was using the Committee to further his own political ends, it undeniably threw light on the CIA — as well as the FBI and the NSA — which the Agency didn’t want. For example, at the first televised hearing, Church displayed a CIA poison-dart gun as a way of illustrating the committee’s discovery that the CIA had directly violated a presidential order by maintaining stocks of shellfish toxin. Over the months it took evidence, many previously hidden CIA operations came to light — from the drug experiments of MKULTRA to the assassination plans against Castro and Patrice Lumumba; from the financial assistance for political parties in foreign countries to the support of indigenous populations during time of war.
Helms had been replaced as DCI by James Schlesinger, but Nixon soon tapped him to serve as Secretary of Defence. The attitude of his successor William Colby, was to reveal what needed to be revealed and create a working relationship with those who had been set up to monitor and investigate them. Unfortunately, there were those on all the various committees set up — as well as the Rockefeller Commission and the Church Committee, there was also the Pike Committee set up by the House of Representatives — who were determined to bring the various agencies to heel, and the hearings became power plays between the committee members, the CIA and even, at times, the White House.
Chairman Otis Pike did come out of the hearings with an improved respect for the CIA:
We did find evidence, upon evidence, upon evidence where the CIA said: ‘No, don’t do it.’ The State Department or the White House said, ‘We’re going to do it.’ The CIA was much more professional and had a far deeper reading on the down-the-road implications of some immediately popular act than the executive branch or administration officials. One thing I really disagreed with Church on was his characterization of the CIA as a ‘rogue elephant.’ The CIA never did anything the White House didn’t want. Sometimes they didn’t want to do what they did.
Colby was certain about the effect that the work of the various committees was having on the CIA: ‘These last two months have placed American intelligence in danger,’ he said in May 1975. ‘The almost hysterical excitement surrounding any news story mentioning CIA or referring even to a perfectly legitimate activity of CIA has raised a question whether secret intelligence operations can be conducted by the United States.’
The end result of the various committees was that the CIA came under increased government scrutiny, not just operationally but also in terms of its budget. Its days of plausible deniability and acting at one remove from the president were gone. Thirty years after its creation, with a new DCI, future US President George H.W. Bush, the CIA was forced into a new role.
In addition to the openness being imposed on it by demands from the oversight committees, the CIA also had to deal with information being revealed publicly by one of their own former officers. Philip Agee, who had left the Agency in 1969, published Inside the Company: CIA Diary, an exposé of CIA practices, in Britain in January 1975. Supported by the KGB, it named 200 officers worldwide, and accused the CIA of corrupt practices: ‘In the CIA we justified our penetration, disruption and sabotage of the left in Latin America — around the world for that matter — because we felt morality changed on crossing national frontiers,’ Agee wrote. He added to his revelations in the extreme left-wing magazine Counterspy — and as a direct result, Richard S. Welch, the CIA station chief in Athens, was murdered in December 1975.