In July 1986 , after Rodrigo Rojas DeNegri was burned alive during a street demonstration against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile , Helms stated that DeNegri and his companion Carmen Quintana Arancibia were " Communist terrorists " that had earlier been sighted setting fire to a barricade . Helms also criticized United States Ambassador to Chile Harry G. Barnes Jr. for attending DeNegri 's funeral , saying Barnes " planted the American flag in the midst of a Communist activity " and President Reagan would have sent him home were he there . The following month , the Justice Department disclosed information to Senate Select Committee on Intelligence that linked Helms and a sensitive intelligence matter of the Chile government . Helms responded to the disclosure by telling reporters that the Justice Department " want to intimidate me and harass me , and it 's not going to work " and said that both the Justice Department and himself were aware he had " violated no rules of classification . " In a letter to Attorney General Edwin Meese , Helms made a request of the Justice Department to investigate if he or members of his staff had been spied on during the Chile visit and called the charges against him " frivolous and false indictment . " Helms became interested in the Vietnam War POW/MIA issue , and in October 1990 his committee staff chief and longest-serving aide , James P. Lucier , prepared a report stating that it was probable there were live American prisoners still being held in Vietnam and that the George H. W. Bush administration was complicit in hiding the facts . The report also alleged that the Soviet Union had held American prisoners after the end of World War II and more may have been transferred there during the Korean War and during the Vietnam War . ( Lucier also believed that survivors of the 1983 shoot-down of Korean Air Lines Flight 007 were being held prisoner by the Soviets . ) Helms stated that the " deeper story " was a possible " deliberate effort by certain people in the government to disregard all information or reports about living MIA-POWs " . This was followed up in May 1991 by a minority report of the Foreign Relations Committee , released by Helms and titled '' An Examination of US Policy Toward POW/MIAs '' , which made similar claims and concluded that " any evidence that suggested an MIA might be alive was uniformly and arbitrarily rejected ... " The issuing of the report caused other Republicans on the committee to become angry , and charges were made that the report contained errors , innuendo , and unsubstantiated rumors . This and other personnel matters led to Helms firing Lucier and eight other staff members in January 1992 . Helms subsequently distanced himself from the POW/MIA issue . ( The aides claimed vindication later in 1992 when Russian President Boris Yeltsin said that the Soviet Union had kept some U.S. prisoners in the early 1950s . ) In 1987 , Helms added an amendment to the Supplemental Appropriations Act , which directed the president to use executive authority to add HIV infection to the list of excludable diseases which prevent both travel and immigration to the United States . The action was opposed by the U.S. Public Health Service . Congress restored the executive authority to remove HIV from the list of excludable conditions in the 1990 Immigration Reform Act , and in January 1991 , Secretary of Health and Human Services Louis Sullivan announced he would delete HIV from the list of excludable conditions . A letter-writing campaign headed by Helms ultimately convinced President Bush not to lift the ban , and left the United States the only industrialized nation in the world to prohibit travel based on HIV status . The travel ban was also responsible for the cancellation of the 1992 International AIDS Conference in Boston . On January 5 , 2010 , the 22-year-old ban was lifted after having been signed by President Barack Obama on October 30 , 2009
Korean Air Lines Flight 007
Korean Air Lines Flight 007
Jesse Helms