REVIEW Espionage memoir intriguingly recalls creation of the CIA

Portions of the book are bedeviled by lack of details, however.
By LEV RAPHAEL
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
"A Look Over My Shoulder," by Richard Helms with William Hood (Random House, $35)
A life of privilege helped lead Richard Helms into a life of espionage. The former director of the CIA, a Williams College graduate, attended prep school in Switzerland and high school in Germany. Knowing German helped him land a job first as a UPI reporter in Germany in the mid-1930s, and then at the OSS, precursor to the CIA, in Berlin at the end of World War II.
But if you're expecting to read breathtaking stories about Nazi Germany or the rubble of bombed-out Berlin, guess again. Helms' descriptions of a pre-war Hitler rally and a lunchtime meeting with Hitler are fairly bland, as is his depiction of Berlin under Allied control. But then you can't really blame Helms -- or at least not completely. This celebrity memoir was most likely written by the man listed as co-author, William Hood, a former CIA agent who has previously written about Cold War espionage.
Slow start
Hood's job of turning Helms' memories into memoir material yields some mixed results. Supplementing his brief description of a rubble-filled Berlin in 1945, for instance, is the quote of a secretary as saying, "This Berlin's a 'real mess.'" The effect is so anticlimactic it's almost comic. However, once we reach 1947 and the CIA's creation, the narrative really takes off with fascinating, detailed stories about elaborate surveillance of the Soviets in Berlin, and CIA involvement in the Cuban Missile Crisis, Iran, Chile and the Six-Day War. Helms and Wood are riveting on the long "nightmare" of Vietnam and CIA attempts to infiltrate the North while in-house analysts thought withdrawing from the conflict would not substantially harm American interests, unlike far more vociferous proponents of the domino theory.
It's very instructive to learn here that the hard-core work of intelligence isn't like James Bond movies, as Helms notes with asperity, complaining that presidents and ordinary citizens alike are prone to think it is. Intelligence could not succeed without "the platoons of skilled scholars, analysts and scientists" who are at the heart of the matter.
And in passages that feel very current, we learn that Helms' CIA had difficult relations with President Nixon, who wanted the CIA to tell him only what he wanted to hear. After his stint at the CIA, Helms served as ambassador to Iran, but was not consulted when the Carter administration launched its abortive hostage rescue there. All of which lends special post-9/11 urgency to the stringent observation that "there is no greater threat to world peace than poorly informed or misinformed leaders and governments."