It was my angry, Dickensian novel, I suppose. It was cathartic - I expended a lot of frustration on that one.

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.