The Falcon and the Snowman (33 page)

Daulton fell out on what felt like a cobblestone street.

The car sped off and disappeared into the evening traffic. The car had been going slowly enough so that Daulton wasn't hurt. He caught a cab and returned to the Holiday Inn, where he wondered if the scam had finally run its course.

Chris, meanwhile, had discovered a new field, and it was to provide him with a few minutes of escape from the sense of doom that weighed him down the remaining hours of each day. It was fifty acres, spared somehow by the subdividers and the shopping-center builders, in the city of Compton, a twenty-minute drive from the beach and TRW.

Chris was eating little these days and, he told himself, drinking too much. There had been no response to his letter about the job in Colorado. There had been no reply to his application to the university. He was sure of one thing: he would leave TRW now. But it would be a miracle if he got a chance to go to the university or make a new start in Colorado. Whatever would happen now was inevitable.

How insane the world had become, he reflected; he thought of ancient Greece and Rome, about the great cities man had built, his great works of art, and then he thought of the cities smoldering in the darkness of a civilization that had snuffed itself out in atomic warfare. What madness man had created!

His mind focused on the silos that pocked Siberia and the base of the Urals and other areas of the Soviet Union; he thought of identical silos dug into the plains of Wyoming, North Dakota and Arizona and other stretches of the prairie, where, less than a century before, American Indians had fought for survival with bows and arrows. Each silo on both sides of the world had a missile with enough energy to destroy several cities. These were not abstract illusions, he thought, but reality. They were
there
. In each silo was a missile with a nuclear warhead; each missile was alive, with the gyrocompass in its guidance system spinning relentlessly twenty-four hours a day, awaiting a signal to carry the warhead to a target that had already been chosen by men and their computers.

How had man come to this brink? Civilization was so close to annihilation. Why weren't other people as panicked as he was? The missiles were in the silos, ready to be launched at an instant … ready to extinguish in minutes what man had taken thousands of years to build. Didn't people know that?

As Chris looked at the field, he wondered where the missile was that was targeted for this piece of earth. It was crazy! How had man arrived at this moment where a mistake, a false move or a fragile human ego had the capability to turn
everything
into ashes?

He thought again of the crazy quest for manhood that war fulfilled for so many men, that blindness he had first discovered in
Lee's Lieutenants
, the blindness he had seen in the eyes of Boris, which he could see every day in the eyes of the CIA spooks at Pedal and Banjo. They were adolescent boys trying to prove themselves to one another. But didn't other people realize what this mindless groping for manhood was going to do to the world?

There was talk in the papers about the SALT negotiations to limit nuclear weapons. There's no hope, he thought. Hadn't the generals always
used
every new weapon they acquired? Hadn't all of the wars for at least a century been preceded by just such disarmament negotiations?

In the field in Compton, Chris managed to forget some of his fears, because of Nurd. Nurd was a tercel—a male hawk—that Chris had trapped on a weekend trip to Arizona, and in the shortening days of early November, Chris brought Nurd often to the field to hunt rabbits. He set his alarm clock for 4
A.M.
, went to the plant, set up the coding machines for the day, accepted whatever traffic had accumulated from CIA headquarters and then went home, picked up Nurd and drove to the field with him for an hour or so. Almost every day Nurd got a cottontail, and one morning he caught two.

How long, he wondered, would it be before he was caught?

On November 12, Chris was advised by the University of California at Riverside that he had been accepted for admission in the winter quarter, beginning in January, 1977. He informed TRW that he was returning to college and requested termination on December 17, after the company had had time to train a successor.

Now that he had made this decision, Chris decided to make one final gesture. There was no pressure from Daulton, no threats of blackmail. But he had promised Boris to make one last delivery, and he intended to keep it.

“They're catching on, I'm telling you, man, it's getting spooky,” Daulton said when Chris told him they should make a final delivery. “They say the recent stuff isn't any good,” he said. Chris said he shouldn't worry and then motivated Daulton with the kind of words that, as always, he knew would do the job: he said he had access to documents that he
knew
would be worth at least $75,000 to the Soviets. Daulton listened and agreed. The documents were about a project, Chris said, that sounded as if it were “something out of the movies.”

34

The essence of running an espionage network in a foreign country is communications. Whether an agent is recruited or planted in an unfriendly nation, whether his mission is to obtain secret information or to bring down a government, reliable communication between the agent and his intelligence service is essential. What good is the work of a spy who gleans warning of a coup d'état or an invasion if he can't transmit the information to his control? What good is an agent whose supervisor cannot control the spy and direct an espionage operation?

Spies during the Napoleonic Wars used invisible ink to write messages concealed on harmless-looking public documents. German spies during World War I used hollowed stones to leave messages. Hidden radio transmitters in the Low Countries of Europe flashed reports of Nazi research on rockets during World War II.

The cameras, infrared heat sensors, radio antennae and other instruments on spy satellites revolutionized the collection of strategic intelligence information during the nineteen-sixties. But the science of communicating with individual agents remained rather primitive. The KGB gave Daulton a spool of adhesive tape to place on lampposts; it sent him coded postcards at a mail drop and gave him a schedule of prearranged telephone calls.

Late in the nineteen-sixties, the CIA began to fashion a scheme for a global grand design of espionage communications. It was to be the ultimate method of controlling and exchanging information with operatives working undercover in what the agency, euphemistically, called “denied areas of the world.”

Earlier in the decade, the agency had begun using Pentagon communication satellites to exchange information with agents. With portable radio gear, spies could broadcast and receive information via the satellites. But these systems were only partially satisfactory. Agents in some regions of the world did not have access to them because, geographically, they were out of range of the satellites. Agents in other areas could use them only at limited times of the day, and the technology was such that a sophisticated counterintelligence service might eavesdrop on the signals and discover the spy.

The grand design that began to take shape within the Central Intelligence Agency was a new kind of satellite system designed for, and dedicated solely to, espionage—a push-button system of communications that was to enable agency officials in Langley, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, to maintain, twenty-four hours a day, undetected communications with a spy anywhere in the world.

A spy was to be given a miniature, portable transceiver disguised in any number of ways: as a wallet, a pocket calculator, a cigarette case, an ashtray, a flashlight or something similarly mundane. No matter where he or she was located, the agent would be able to communicate secretly and instantaneously with Langley.

It was a concept with ingenious possibilities: a CIA officer could come to work after a morning round of golf in Virginia and hold a two-way conversation of encrypted telegrams with an agent located on a roof in Cairo, then switch to an exchange of data with agents in Kiev, Peking or Entebbe.

In November, 1972, the CIA sent Lockheed, TRW and several other companies a Top Secret letter disclosing that it was considering implementation of a series of research studies aimed at developing a “world-wide cover communication satellite system.”

In the language of the aerospace industry, such a letter is called an RFP—a Request for Proposal.

TRW responded that it would submit a proposal in an effort to win a CIA study contract on the project.

The CIA's RFP read:

The principal requirements for the satellite network are as follows:

* Provide maximum protection of the user against signal detection and direction finding leading to determination of user location.

* Minimize dependence upon overseas ground stations.

* Provide multiple simultaneous access capability to users employing different types of traffic, data rates, modulation techniques and radiated power levels.

* Provide communications on demand with essentially no waiting time regardless of type and location of user.

* Provide protection against traffic analysis, which could imply numbers, types, purpose and location of users.

The CIA said it wanted a design that could not only provide a clandestine avenue of communication with agents, but also relay information from robot transmitters that were to be dropped secretly on foreign soil to transmit intelligence information by remote control—seismic measurements, for example, disclosing the incidence, time and magnitude of nuclear-weapons tests. There was also a third desired capability—the capacity to serve in an emergency as a conduit for communications between Washington and American embassies around the world.

The intelligence agency dictated that the system had to be able to handle up to about one hundred agents at one time, a daily volume of some fifty messages to Langley and about twenty messages sent from Langley to agents. Some of the transmissions would be as long as two hundred words, but most would be in short bursts, the equivalent of about ten words.

There was to be one fundamental requirement for the system, the CIA told TRW: the chance of transmissions' being detected was to be less than I percent.

The CIA letter stated:

This study effort is classified TOP SECRET and has been assigned a code-word designator, “PYRAMIDER.”

All contractor personnel working on this study effort must have a current TOP SECRET clearance and must be approved by Headquarters prior to being briefed on PYRAMIDER.

Contractor personnel proposed for clearance access to this study must qualify by holding a currently valid BYEMAN security access approval.

While this study effort will be conducted within the contractor facilities as TOP SECRET, and while only those personnel holding active BYEMAN access approvals are eligible for consideration, the effort is not a BYEMAN study, but is to be conducted in all aspects of document control, physical security standards, communications within Headquarters, and the like, as if it were BYEMAN.

Security officers will assure documents within the contractor facility are stamped TOP SECRET/PYRAMIDER only, and are not entered into the BYEMAN system.

The highly sensitive nature of this effort cannot be emphasized enough. Personnel submitted for access approval will be submitted via cable message which shall fully outline their need-to-know. No Form 2018 will be submitted to Headquarters. A list of those persons approved for access to PYRAMIDER shall be maintained by Headquarters Security Staff. Cable messages shall be sent via secure TWX and shall be slugged PYRAMIDER on the second line. PYRAMIDER shall enjoy limited distribution within Project Headquarters.

In February, 1973, a Top Secret TWX arrived at the Black Vault from Langley notifying the company that it had been selected to develop a design for the Pyramider project. A few weeks later a formal contract arrived from the CIA. It was signed in a broad scrawl with the name James Cranbrook, a pseudonym assigned to a CIA official to give him anonymity. The initially authorized spending for the study was only $50,000. But as was common in the aerospace industry, TRW would invest considerably more than this in the study in the belief that it would lead to a CIA production contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars.