Dennis Helms’s own search has been less revelatory. “The operations he conducted — that would have been fun to me to hear about, like reading a novel. In that sense, he was a little frustrating,” he said. “The trouble is, as a lawyer, I can tell you that to find out the actual truth to any of those allegations, you have to go back and dig. But I don’t have the capacity or time to do stuff like that.”
On Christmas Day 1991, Richard, by now enjoying retirement with his second wife, Cynthia McKelvie Helms, wrote a letter to Dennis and his wife, Meg Helms, summing up his career. Intentionally or not, Richard was writing a bookend to the Hitler letter from 1945.
“[M]y life has spanned an historic period, and I am rather awed by that fact,” he wrote. “As I recalled other events, I realized that . . . Adolf Hitler, Josef Stalin and how many others bit the dust during this century. Now I am afraid that we are entering a troubled time, but of a different kind. . . . So-called ‘terrorism’ may get a new lease on life. . . . But why be pessimistic?”
He signed it “Devotedly, The OM.” (For “Old Man.”)
A piece of history
Earlier this year, the CIA contacted Dennis Helms to let him know the agency was redesigning its in-house museum and wanted to increase its memorabilia from Richard Helms and the three other CIA directors who also served in the OSS: Allen Dulles, William Casey and William Colby.
They asked: Got anything interesting lying around the house?
Dennis mentioned the Hitler letter. Sure, they’d take that.
“When we got it, the hair on our arms stood up,” said Toni Hiley, the CIA museum’s curator.
“Helms had such a sense of his own moment in history,” she said. “The artifact itself would have made any museum professional’s day. But the fact that we received it on the very day that we in the museum received news along with the rest of the world of the successful bin Laden operation stunned us.”
In exchange for the original, the CIA sent Dennis a replica, framed under glass. Dennis figured the original was safer in Langley. For Christmas, he already plans to give the replica to his son, Alexander Helms, a college senior majoring in studio art and photography.
In particular, Dennis loves the letter’s ending. His father signed off with a term that he rarely used for himself.
“The price of ridding society of bad is always high. Love, Daddy.”
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