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

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(U/FB61Q) Now let’s move on to Watergate, this is just as good a time as any to talk about that.
I assume, because I’ve never read all the Congressional material and I understand that there are
thousands and thousands of words on the Watergate and the Agency, and if one has the entire stack you
can probably find almost anything that went on at that time, some explanation of it. I’d simply like you
to have, and I want to make two or three points about various aspects of it. They’re rather gross points
but they’re important points to me.
( U / h Q ) One - when Howard Hunt was hired by the White House to go to work there, I was never
informed or consulted. To the best of my knowledge, nobody in the Agency was ever informed or
consulted. It seems to me that in the minutes of the Executive Meetings that we used to have every
morning there must have been some reference to the fact that at one time I inquired whether anybody
was asked by the White House about Howard Hunt’s employment record and so forth. That related to
his later request to [DDCI General] Bob Cushman about the wigs and various gadgets that were involved
in his escapades.
His requests were eventually turned off when he wanted to get a secretary from Paris that he had
there and was really leaning on the Agency for services that didn’t seem to make any sense.
(U/Fwrq) Now, the criticism that seems to have been directed at both Cushman and me was that we
never should have gone along with his request in the first place. By the same token, I think it was a
pretty tough thing to ask of Cushman that a guy who was calling up on [Robert] Erlichman’s behalf in
those days to ask for something without any indication of what it was that he planned to do with it. That
was hardly beyond Cushman’s good sense to say, “OK, give it to him. He is a White House man and
he’s working for the President and all the rest of it i d we don’t need to get into his private business. I
mean they must know what they are doing.” And at that particular time there was not the slightest
suggestion anywhere that anybody in the White House intended to do domestic operations with
something later called the Plumbers or anything else. There wasn’t a suggestion of it at the time. This
was in its infancy and I swear to you I don’t understand how anybody could have expected either
Cushman or me to have gone down and quizzed the President or Erlichman why it was that Hunt wanted
X, Y , and Z when it was a piddling request. And it seemed to me that it got turned off in plenty of time.
And if he went out and tried to steal Fielding’s files and so forth we certainly knew nothing about it.
With all the evidence that has been accumulated, including those photographs that were alleged to have
been sent to out laboratories and so forth, I can only assure you that I knew nothing about it. I just want
to leave it there. I just want to tell you that as far as I was concerned, absolutelythere was no suggestion
of any of these things. Now when the Plumbers business came along, and David Young was talking to
various ones of us about getting information and profiles on [Daniel] Ellsberg and things like that, I
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