Richard Helms Interviewed by R. Jack Smith, 21 April 1982

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forgotten which month of summer, [Jordan’s]King Hussein came to visit the Shah [of Iran] and was
staying at a private home which the court had taken over for his comfort on the shores of the Caspian. I
can’t remember now, whether he asked to see me or whether the State Department sent me to see him.
In either event this was my introduction to an interesting matter of protocol, which was that if I wanted
to visit King Hussein, I had to get the Shah’s permission since he was his guest. In other words, this was
not something I could just go off and do, I had to go to the court and get permission and so forth.
Anyway, I flew down to the Caspian on one of the planes of the court and went to see King Hussein.
Well, after we had finished with whatever the business was that I’d been sent down there on in the
first place, he gave me a detailed rundown on reports they’d been getting fiom a Syrian agent about the
fact that the Syrians were intending to wage war on the Israelis. They had already missed one date for
this attack to take place, as I recall the story. But they were sure of their agent; they were sure this was
gonna happen; and they wanted me to know about it. They laid it out in considerable detail. So when I
got back to Tehran, I obviously sent my telegrams back and one of them was encompassing this
information. So why it was the intelligencepeople with the Agency who missed on the Yom Kippur war
to me is still an enigma because this material looked so solid that even if you thought it was irrational for
the Egyptians to attack the Barlev line, the fact remains that it was gonna be an active possibility. So
something went askew, no doubt about it.
End of transcript
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