In today’s Impromptus, I have occasion to mention Richard Helms, just in passing. He was CIA director from 1966 to 1973. Then he was ambassador to Iran. He was one of my favorite people in public life. (Sometimes the CIA isn’t very public, true.) I had a couple of exchanges with him — one by letter and one in person — and am grateful for them.
In my column, I mention that, as a journalist, he interviewed Hitler. This was in ’36. In the war that came, he was an intelligence operative. And he snuck into the Chancellery after Hitler offed himself (with Eva).
I pause for a language note: Good old Americans are allowed to say “snuck,” instead of “sneaked.”
On Hitler’s letterhead — swastika and all — Helms wrote a note to his three-year-old son, Dennis. It was addressed to “Master Dennis J. Helms / c/o Mrs. Richard Helms” in Orange, N.J. That is redolent of an age. We used to address little boys as “Master” on envelopes. And we said things like “Mrs. Richard Helms.”
The father and future DCI wrote,
Dear Dennis,
The man who might have written on this card once controlled Europe — three short years ago when you were born. Today he is dead, his memory despised, his country in ruins. He had a thirst for power, a low opinion of man as an individual, and a fear of intellectual honesty. He was a force for evil in the world. His passing, his defeat — a boon to mankind. But thousands died that it might be so. The price for ridding society of bad is always high.
Love,
Daddy
This letter now rests in the CIA’s private museum at Langley. To see an article about the matter, go here.
There is, as you have seen, a great deal of wisdom packed into Helms’s few lines. For one thing, we should beware anyone who has “a thirst for power, a low opinion of man as an individual, and a fear of intellectual honesty.” That describes Ali Khamenei and many others. (Helms, incidentally, left Tehran two years before the Iranian revolution won.)
I would like to add a coda. On Christmas Day 1991, Helms wrote a letter to that same son, Dennis, saying,
My life has spanned an historic period, and I am rather awed by that fact. As I recalled other events, I realized that … Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and how many others bit the dust during this century. Now I am afraid that we are entering a troubled time, but of a different kind. … So-called “terrorism” may get a new lease on life. … But why be pessimistic?