Helen Wilburforce Gandy (April 8, 1897 – July 7, 1988) was the American longtime secretary to Federal Bureau of Investigation director J. Edgar Hoover, who called her "indispensable".

Serving in that role for 54 years she exercised great behind-the-scenes influence on Hoover and the operations of the Bureau.

When Hoover went to the Bureau of Investigation (its original title; it became the FBI in 1935) as its assistant director on August 22, 1921, he specifically requested Gandy return from vacation to help him in the new post.

Though she would receive promotions in her civil service grade subsequently, she retained her title as executive assistant until her retirement on May 2, 1972, the day Hoover died.

In all those fifty-four years he never once called her by her first name.Hoover biographers Theoharis and Cox would say "her stern face recalled Cerberus at the gate",[2] a view echoed by Anthony Summers in his life of Hoover, who also pictured Gandy as Hoover's first line of defense against the outside world.

"Put that damn thing on Miss Gandy's desk where it belongs", Hoover would declare.

That she held her position for fifty-four years was the best evidence of this, for it was a Bureau tradition that the closer you were to him, the more demanding he was.William C. Sullivan, an agent with the Bureau for three decades, reported in his memoir that when he worked in the public relations section answering mail from the public, he gave a correspondent the wrong measurements for Hoover's personal popover recipe, relying on memory rather than the files.

[8] Mark Felt, deputy associate director of the FBI, wrote in his memoir that Gandy "was bright and alert and quick-tongued—and completely dedicated to her boss, whose interests she constantly protected".

Tolson then called Gandy's private number with the news of Hoover's death along with orders to begin destroying the files.

Anthony Summers reported that G. Gordon Liddy had said of his sources in the FBI: "by the time Gray went in to get the files, Miss Gandy had already got rid of them."

She then transferred at least 32 file drawers of material to the basement recreation room of Hoover's Washington home at 4936 Thirtieth Place, NW, where she continued her work from May 13 to July 17.

Gandy later testified in court that nothing official had been removed from the FBI's offices, "not even Mr. Hoover's badge."

In 1975, when the House Committee on Government Oversight investigated the FBI's illegal COINTELPRO program of spying on and harassment of Martin Luther King Jr. and others, Gandy was summoned to testify regarding the "Personal Files."

Representative Andrew Maguire (D-New Jersey), a freshman member of the 94th Congress, said "I find your testimony very difficult to believe."

In J. Edgar Hoover: The Man and His Secrets, Gentry describes the nature of the files:[10] "their contents included blackmail material on the patriarch of an American political dynasty, his sons, their wives, and other women; allegations of two homosexual arrests which Hoover leaked to help defeat a witty, urbane Democratic presidential candidate; the surveillance reports on one of America's best-known first ladies and her alleged lovers, both male and female, white and black; the child molestation documentation the director used to control and manipulate one of the Red-baiting proteges; a list of the Bureau's spies in the White House during the eight administrations when Hoover was FBI director; the forbidden fruit of hundreds of illegal wiretaps and bugs, containing, for example, evidence that an attorney general, Tom C. Clark,[11][12] who later became Supreme Court justice, had received payoffs from the Chicago syndicate; as well as celebrity files, with all the unsavory gossip Hoover could amass on some of the biggest names in show business."

[18] In 1961, she and her sister, Lucy G. Rodman, donated a portrait of their mother by Thomas Eakins to the Smithsonian American Art Museum.