The Woman Who Kept the Secrets
Updated | In the late summer of 1969, the CIA director urgently sought a meeting at the White House. Richard Helms was determined to get President Richard Nixon to quash an Army investigation into the murder of a Green Beret informant in Vietnam. The case threatened to expose not just the CIA’s assassinations program in that country, he argued, but some of the agency’s more discreet killing devices, including lethal drugs.
Nixon despised the urbane, New England–educated Helms—and the CIA as a whole, which he considered part of the fashionable Georgetown crowd that looked down on him. But after letting Helms stew over his decision for a few weeks, Nixon forced the Army to drop the case, which indeed represented a Pandora’s box of CIA dirty deeds. The assassinations issue went away until Congress caught up with it again after a series of news beginning in 1971. Helms was tainted by the scandal but escaped town with an ambassadorship to Iran, leaving his successor, William Colby, the last CIA director to come from the clandestine service, to take the fall in widely televised .
