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

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N R H : Well, you know, it was a great aircraft. And I just would not like to have those flights over
North Vietnam, the speed in which they were made, the excellence of the photography - all the rest of
the stuff, to just get lost.
. .
. .
? I l ( : I l . .
(U/F
madebyto ntelligence is the extraordinary ideas and technical achievements that have come out of the
Agency. Really has been absolutely first class. And even though I realize as it’s the conscious policy to
say that it’s the Intelligence Community and give all due credit to the Defense Department because they
have been putting up the money and so forth. The fact remains that all the ideas came from the Agency
or from various people in the Agency. Not one sillgle fellow, just several people responsible for these
things. Well, I think it’s absolutely extraordinary how good it was over the years and somewhere in the
. historical record out there that point should be pretty clearly made. So that as we go to our Maker,and
other generations have a good look at what went on, that the credit doesn’t suddenly get shifted to a
bunch of people at the Pentagon that couldn’t have done it if they’d had to.
0)Because I truly believe that one of the great contributionsthat the CIA, over the years, has
(U) JS: Right.
started, during the Helms administration when [Deputy Director for Scienceand Technology] Les Dirks
came up with this idea that maybe this kind of a thing could be worked out with the use of, well I don’t
know what the technical terms are anymore, it’s been so long since I’ve discussed them with anyone.
b)RH:Yes. That was the basic thrust of it, but in order to achieve this we were going to have to
demonstrate that you could actually use some kind of chips that they had in mind to perform this
function. And it was a way-out scheme at the time, there was no doubt about it. And I remember
vividly, the sessions I had with Dave Packard, who was then Deputy Secretary of Defense, as you also
remember he was also Chairman of NRO [National Reconnaissance Office] in those days and also the
fellow that had the money in the Pentagon. So he was the one that really helped to get the seed money to
get this thing started. Because with his background in electronics in Hewlett-Packard and having spent
his life in this general area, although he was no expert on this particular thing, at least he knew the state
of the art and so forth; he’d made the personal calculation that maybe it was do-able and if it was do-able
it was certainly worth doing. So he was the one who provided the support and the seed money to get this
whole thing rolling. And so it was really rolling by the time I left. 1remember that was just the last
thing I OK’d in connection with the project was setting up this, whatever they called the i n s t a l l a t i o n n
7 1 And after that I left the Agency, so obviously had been perfected and so forth. And I can
only assume there’s been a great success. Because you know you can’t avoid getting that impression. I
simply wanted to give that little bit of history as to why it was r l f i n a l l y came on-stream
because various people tried to kill it over time as being way out.
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