I had seen so many injustices done in the court by well-meaning people. I had lost fourteen clients to gang violence in only seven years. I was angry at a system I thought had failed my clients, and I was part of it.

Helms served as DCI under Johnson then Nixon. Helms generally favored information gathering (whether covert or overt) and its analysis and counterintelligence but remained a skeptic about clandestine operations. In 1977 as an indirect result of earlier clandestine operations in Chile he became the only DCI convicted of misleading Congress.