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

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\come it went on so long, all the money paid on it and so forth. Now it was obviously authorized in the
[John F.] Kennedy administration when we were actually ordered to get involved with the Meos and
various others and try and keep Laos from falling under the aegis of the Pathet Lao. I think when one
looks at it is was an enormously successful operation that was run there and I think the outcome was
extraordinarily successful - all things considered. The thing that has gummed up, or tended to dirty up,
a rather major Agency effort here was the conduct of Senator [Stuart] Symington in connection with this
whole thing. He twice visited Laos and knew all about this war. On one occasion he called, or had the
Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee call, a meeting of the whole Armed Services
Committee. Ted Shackley was back from Laos -1 t and Shackley briefed
the entire Armed Services Committee in detail on what the Agency was doing in Laos. And at the end
of the meeting Symington gets up and says, “I wanted you gentlemen to hear this because that’s the way
. to fight a way a war in Asia. They don’t spend in a year what we spend in Vietnam in a day and I just
want you to know that this is a great affair that’s going on here and I just wanted you to hear all.about
it.” And a year later he’s talking about the ”secret war” in Laos. And he got a lot of publicity with this.
He kept talking about the “secret war” in Laos. So it was that that sort of cast a pall over it and a lot of
Senators believed that it was a secret war. Sometime after 1975 Senator [Richard] Schweiker took me
aside after a hearing one day and said, “Now that stuff that you’re doing there in Laos . . .’,I said,
“Senator Schweiker, go and ask anybody on the Appropriations Committee about the war in Laos. They
authorized every dollar that was spent; they knew all about it.” He said, “Is that right? Is that right!” I
said, “Of course that’s right. You ought to know better.” So I make this point not because I’m
interested in making the case for or against Symington. I simply think that if history is worth anything,
because to those who read it you would hope they would learn by it, it seems to me that some of these
points ought to be identified rather than just a straight recital of we spent X dollars and we killed Y
people and so on. This eternal problem which the Agency has in any of its operations of anybody being
able to go off and make a television program or a statement in the Congress or a speech or something of
that kind. And this becomes truth and it never gets untangled and never gets taken back. This is a good
case in which to do something about that.
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(UD- The last item on the list are allegations from the Church Committee Report about
National Estimates.
(LJ)JS: Have you read them, Dick?
( U / m O ) RH: No, I have not, I’m ashamed to say, but I know that there’s an intimation in there that I
yielded to political pressures from the White House. At least I believe there’s [such] an intimation. I
wanted to ask you to talk to Dick Lehman and to Paul Walsh, both [of] whom individually told me that
they have tried to persuade the young lady who was writing that report that this was simply not true as
far as they were aware. And they were for some reason unable to persuade her. Now who it was that
appeared before the committee, or appeared before the staff, who gave this impression, whether it was
Abbot Smith or it was John Huizenga, I haven’t any idea. The point of the matter is that my recollection
is that the only time that there was anything like this particularly at issue was over the business of
MRV’s [Multiple Re-Entry Vehicles] and MIRV’s [Multiple Independently Targetable Re-Entry
Vehicles). This was early in the Nixon administration. This was the time in which people were talking
about so-called “foot print” that were made by these MRV’s of the Soviet Union. After attending
several meetings in the White House and talking with people in the Department of Defense, it became ’
clear to me that they at least had a legitimate point, that it was a point that had to be covered in the
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