For her coverage of the Spycatcher controversy she received the British Press Award for Specialist Writer of the Year.
[1] In 1987, she won the Laurence Stern Fellowship, allowing her to work as an intern for The Washington Post.
[3] As The Independent's Diplomatic Editor from 1989, she covered the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War and developments in the Middle East.
[1] In 2007, Helm married her long-time partner, Jonathan Powell, who had been Tony Blair's chief of staff since 1997.
[4] Helm's first book, A Life in Secrets: The Story of Vera Atkins and the Lost Agents of SOE (2005) traces the lives of missing female members of the Special Operations Executive and intricate details of the woman who searched for them.