The Presidency

By Hugh Sidey

When the new U.S. Ambassador to Moscow, Jack Matlock, rose to toast his guests recently in the shadowy old Spaso House residence, even he was astonished at the scene before him. Around the dinner table were two former U.S. Secretaries of Defense, two former CIA directors and one former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff mixed in with Soviet officials, including Victor Sukhodrev, deputy director for U.S.A.-Canada in the Soviet Foreign Ministry.

"I don't think that this has ever happened before," said Matlock. Such lofty authorities from the U.S., their minds stuffed with the greatest secrets of the nation, had never clustered in the bear's den, for the simple, spy- novel reason that they might be compromised and the vital stuff sweated out of them.

Though these visitors were out of office, they still formed quite a data bank. Melvin Laird had been Richard Nixon's Secretary of Defense and John Vessey the Chairman of Ronald Reagan's Joint Chiefs. James Schlesinger had run the CIA for Nixon and then the Defense Department for Nixon and Gerald Ford. Richard Helms had spent his career as one of the nation's top spooks. Together they were on two study missions to investigate the security breaches in the old and new American embassies.

When the evening ended, Sukhodrev sidled up to Helms, smiled and said warmly, "I never expected to meet a chief of the CIA." It was one of those poignant moments that sometimes occur in the tortured destinies of the superpowers. Archadversaries come together and find their instincts are to like each other, then politics and duty send them off into the dark night to battle again. Author John le Carre could not have written it better: Spymaster George Smiley goes to Moscow and feels the great sadness of mankind's grim contention.

Helms could not visit the Soviet Union until now. He began his intelligence career with the OSS in 1943 and headed the CIA from 1966 to 1973. For 30 years he was the one who ran the spies. The unwritten but iron rule of the CIA was that no man who holds the secrets puts himself into a hostile environment.

Nevertheless, Helms knew Moscow. "I studied the pictures and the reports that came across my desk," he said. He memorized the sad face of his principal adversary, longtime KGB Chief Yuri Andropov, who went on to run the Soviet Union before he died. Helms fought Andropov in the back alleys of the world with his agents, in the heavens with his U-2s and satellites. He won plenty, lost a few -- stories that will never be told. "The man who kept the secrets," Author Thomas Powers called Helms. He still keeps them.

Before he left the U.S. for Moscow, Helms made sure he had proper bedroom attire, since he figured he might be photographed by a hidden camera. He also assumed his room would be bugged, and so he put his mind on caution: say nothing sensitive in close quarters. He found himself utterly unsurprised by the city as he drove from the airport to his hotel: "It was drab, monotonous, massive." Only the dazzling, painted spires and domes of the Kremlin and St. Basil's cathedral seemed to challenge the glum and crowded streets. The place brooded, threatened, Helms thought, "but then it always had from 5,000 miles away."

Helms and the others on the Laird commission did their investigation of what went wrong with security in the old embassy. Then Helms indulged himself just a bit: he made his way to the old KGB building where the enemy had plotted against him. He stood out front, unknown, unchallenged.

He wanted a picture of himself below the giant statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky, the man who started the Cheka, progenitor of the KGB. The statue stands in a circle in front of the building. Helms tried to make his way across the congested street but could not. The policeman refused to halt the rushing traffic. Helms stopped, chuckled and went off -- just as George Smiley would have done.