Isegoria

As deputy director of the CIA, Annie Jacobsen explains (in Area 51), Richard Helms was a huge fan of Oxcart:

Despite playing a key role in planning and executing covert operations in Vietnam, Richard Helms did not believe the United States could win the war there. This posture kept him out of step with Pentagon brass. Helms believed Vietnam was fracturing consensus about America’s need to win the Cold War, which he saw as the more important battle at hand. He was an advocate of using technology to beat the Russians by way of overhead reconnaissance from satellites and spy planes, which was why he liked Oxcart so much. And unlike Pentagon and State Department officials, who, for the most part, cautioned the president against ever sending spy planes over the Soviet Union again, Helms, like McCone, felt the president should do just that.

“The only sin in espionage is getting caught,” Helms once said. He believed the best intelligence was “objective intelligence.” Photographs didn’t have an opinion and couldn’t lie. Helms attributed his respect for objectivity to his working as a journalist for the wire service United Press International. In 1936, a then twenty-four-year-old Richard Helms got his first big scoop: covering the Berlin Olympics as a reporter, he was invited to interview Adolf Hitler. Six years later, Helms would be recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor organization to the CIA, to spy on Hitler’s men.

[…]

When on base, Richard Helms was known to stop in for a drink. He was a great conversationalist but almost always refrained from telling stories about himself. And as far as World War II was concerned, Helms rarely discussed the subject. In 1945, as a young OSS officer, Helms had worked in postwar Berlin. He was one of the key players in Operation Paperclip; Helms had been tasked with finding a group of Hitler’s former scientists and offering them positions on classified programs back in the United States. Jobs involving biological weapons, rockets, and stealth. Years later, Helms justified his recruitment of former Nazis by saying that if the scientists hadn’t come to work for us, they’d have gone to work for “them.” Helms knew things other men did not know. At the Agency he was the man who kept the secrets.

In 1975, Helms would unwittingly become an internationally recognized figure famous for destroying CIA documents to avoid having their secrets revealed. After allegations surfaced that the CIA had been running a human-research program called MKULTRA—which involved mind-control experiments using drugs such as LSD—Helms as director of the CIA was asked to take the stand. While testifying to Congress, Helms stated that he had ordered all the MKULTRA files destroyed two years earlier, in 1973.

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