Richard Helms - War-time Intelligence

War-time Intelligence

Following the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, Helms volunteered for the United States Navy, receiving officer training at Harvard. First stationed in New York City, he plotted the whereabouts of German submarines. Then in 1943 he received orders transferring him to the Secret Intelligence Branch of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) in Washington, D.C. He was chosen for the OSS because of: his ability to speak German and French, his journalism experience, and his time in pre-war Europe. His new training included some hand-to-hand combat. Also, he was told to get hired at a civilian defense factory without showing any identification papers; this gave him "a slight, very slight, taste of the anxiety and stress that are endemic to espionage."

After a period spent writing up fruitless "secret plans", Helms was pulled away and put into a small group under Ferdinand Meyers "responsible for coordinating intelligence collection on Germany". At the OSS office in Bern, Switzerland, Allen Dulles had made working contact with Fritz Kolbe, "a disaffected member of the Nazi foreign office in Berlin". Kolbe had approached the British first but, suspicious, the British considered him a plant by Nazi counterintelligence. Under American guidance rendered by Dulles, however, Kolbe became a valuable source of quality information, e.g., regarding German secret weapons, coding, and war strategy. "Kolbe's information is now recognized as the very best produced by any Allied agent in World War II." The Meyers group facilitated Kolbe's espionage file; Helms praised him as "an authentic hero of the German resistance to Hitler." Fritz Kolbe transmitted to the OSS some 1600 documents and cables, traveling between Berlin and Bern, "slipping through a half dozen Gestapo checkpoints while carrying his death-by-torture warrant in a shabby briefcase", Helms wrote. Kolbe "who in his active days had never sought compensation" after the war retired in Switzerland on a modest CIA pension.

In January 1945 Helms was sent to the OSS German Branch in London. Housing was in short supply and Helms shared a flat with his OSS superior William J. Casey (who would later head the CIA under Reagan). In passing, Helms notes the similarity between Bill Casey and General William J. Donovan, the first and only leader of the OSS (June 1942-September 1945). Both were charismatic, Irish Catholic lawyers, "furiouslly hardworking, impatient, demanding of everyone around them", public servants, and conservative Republicans. Both favored covert action; about "Wild Bill" Donovan an aura developed. At the time of Helms' arrival in London, talk about the recent German attack on the Ardennes front conceded that it had surprised everyone including the OSS. Bill Casey considered it an "Allied intelligence failure". Already the OSS office had been discussing whether to attempt parachuting new agents into Germany (in addition to in place agents, like Fritz Kolbe).

Casey assigned Helms to supervise the London office in preparing and dispatching OSS-trained German volunteers who were to be dropped, with false papers and portable radios (then awkward and heavy), into Nazi Germany to collect military information. They were provided with lethal pills in case of capture. Helms describes riding with one such agent at night, seeing him off at an unlit airfield. Few survived. His colleagues report that Helms reached conclusions derived from his wartime experience, and formed two general convictions: secret intelligence matters; but covert action "dering-do" seldom does.