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# Posted 1:29 PM by Patrick Belton

GOOD SPY, BAD SPY: The partially-unclassified, and partially not, Studies in Intelligence journal, run out of Langley's Center for the Study of Intelligence, has a retrospective out on the life of former DCI Richard Helms. I have great respect for DCI Helms, as a consumate intelligence professional who accorded great respect to the profession and who was content to labor in quiet. I have only two reservations about his career: first, that he may have permitted excessive leeway to controversial counterintelligence director James Angleton; and second, that he acceded to President Nixon's request to supply Agency equipment to the President's "Plumbers," on the rationalization that had he declined, the president would only have replaced him with someone less ethically fastidious. (By contrast, I believe quite strongly that the principal duty of an officer of the executive branch is to the Constitution, and in DCI Helms's position would have chosen to resign my commission and office.)

I note Helms also as a way of recognizing his strong belief in the profession of intelligence, and consequently his strong conviction that the profession's analysis not be politicized. This is an inherently difficult proposition: intelligence is inevitably supplied into policy branches which are preoccupied with pushing visions and agendas, where dispassionate weighing of the latest intelligence briefs is in a realistic world hardly the norm. But the intelligence community suffers enormous losses to its credibility and independence when it moves away from its professional role. Currently, there's great unhappiness in the community of analysts that it is being told by appointees what it "should" come up with (see last week's NYT Week in Review piece by William Broad, abstracted here). It's difficult to assess from a vantage point outside the community how grounded these protests are, but they are troubling.

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