The Falcon and the Snowman (39 page)

Chris never got the warning.

38

On January 16, 1977, ten days after Daulton's arrest, a yellow Mazda station wagon approached a small pink house made of concrete blocks on a turkey ranch 1,600 miles north of Mexico City. It was little more than a shack in the rural outskirts of Riverside, sixty miles south of Los Angeles, with a decaying old windmill beside it.

A year earlier, the twenty-five-acre ranch had vibrated with the noisy energy of thousands of turkeys. But the owner had given up turkey ranching because it wasn't profitable anymore, and he supplemented the family's income by renting the small blockhouse for $100 a month to students from the nearby campus of the University of California.

The same evening that Chris had gone dancing with Alana, Florence Carlson had remarked to her husband, Walt, that the new tenant who was sharing the cabin fifty yards from their own home was “very nice.” He was not only warm and polite, but quite intelligent, she said. The Carlsons had first met Chris two or three years earlier, when he'd knocked at their front door and asked if he might use their property to hunt sparrows with an air rifle. (Brown, rolling hills rose up behind the Carlson place, and they abounded in wildlife.) Chris explained that he needed the sparrows for his training of falcons, and the Carlsons had been impressed by the intensity of his interest in falconry, and they'd encouraged him to come back whenever he wanted.

Around Christmastime, he had arrived at the Carlsons' home again with news that he was going to enroll at the university, and he had inquired if they still rented the small cabin. They said they did, but that it was not available because another young man was staying there. But Mrs. Carlson suggested the tenant might be willing to share the place and divide the rent. Chris moved in a few days later.

There were two young men in the Mazda that arrived at the Carlson place shortly before three o'clock on the afternoon of the sixteenth. But the eyes that followed the approaching vehicle from between cracks in the corrugated-steel walls of the turkey pens were interested only in the young man in the passenger seat.

Chris, wearing Levi's, a sport shirt and the sweater that had been given him as a good-bye gift by his friends at TRW, looked like any other college student on a Sunday afternoon. With his boyishly handsome face pinched slightly at the cheekbones, and his conservative short dark hair combed back over his forehead, Mrs. Carlson would say he looked more like a product of the fifties than of the seventies.

That morning, Mrs. Carlson had spotted a car driving down the dirt road from the top of the knoll where her daughter and son-in-law had built a new home. This had puzzled her, because she knew they liked to sleep in on Sunday mornings.

Mrs. Carlson hadn't known it then, but FBI agents had moved into her daughter's home the night before. They had politely asked if they could use the home while they looked down on the pink concrete blockhouse beside her parents' house. The agents refused to explain their interest in the cabin, but the couple agreed.

Shortly before 8
A.M.
, a half-dozen cars carrying FBI agents had careered down the steep hill and stopped outside the shack. Agents, guns outstretched, had burst into the room and found two young men asleep.

“What's your name?” one agent said as he roused one of the sleeping youths.

“Joe Shmo; what's yours?” Steve Rasmussen, Chris's roommate, said into the muzzle of a revolver.

“Where's Boyce?” the agent had demanded, ignoring the remark.

Chris wasn't there because he had left the night before on a falcon-trapping expedition in the hills behind Riverside with George Heavyside, a falconer he knew from Palos Verdes. Steve had asked his brother, Gary, to spend the night at the cabin; in the morning, they planned to drive to Lytle Creek, in the mountains beyond Riverside, to pan for gold. Finally, the brothers had convinced the FBI agents that neither of them was Christopher John Boyce, and they said they planned to go ahead with their trip. Okay, the agent who was in charge of the raiding party had said; but he assigned two of his agents to go with them. The other agents had remained, resuming a vigil from atop the knoll, which looked down on the Carlson property and the twin concrete ribbons of the Riverside Freeway beyond it. Some of the agents had moved into the old turkey pens, and they were there, watching, when George Heavyside and Chris arrived, joking about the night and day they had spent and the wise hawks they had tried—and failed—to entice into the trap resting on Chris's lap.

As the station wagon pulled to a stop next to the shack, one of the FBI cars that had been waiting at the top of the hill suddenly raced up from behind, passed the windmill and skidded with an abrasive slide on the sandy driveway. Two agents lunged out, and each pointed a revolver at the head of one of the two youths in the Mazda.

“Freeze!” they shouted at once as other agents cascaded out of the turkey pens and surrounded the car. Chris had lived with stories of arrests such as this for as long as he could remember. He had heard about stakeouts and FBI busts from his father, his uncle and all their friends who used to visit the Boyce house, and the thing he remembered most was not to move; if he did, one of the trigger-happy agents might shoot him.

“Who's Boyce? Who's Boyce?” one agent shouted.

Heavyside, trembling and trying to gather his senses so that he could fathom the bizarre events that were happening all around him, raised his hands in shocked semiparalysis. He was led away and searched, and once the agents established that he was not Chris, they let him go.

Chris said nothing. But when he was convinced they were calm enough so he wouldn't be shot, he methodically placed the hawk trap on the seat beside him and got out of the car. As he did, one of the agents grabbed his shirt and spun him around.

“Get out, you fucking traitor!” he screamed.

“Do you know what you're charged with? Espionage!” he said, and wedged Chris against the car and snapped handcuffs on his wrists behind his back.

“Where are the documents, you fucking traitor? Where are the documents?” he demanded.

And then he said it again and again: “You fucking traitor, tell us where the documents are!”

When the FBI agents entered the small house with their prisoner, Mr. Pips looked up from his perch on a dresser and began to screech wildly at the strangers' intrusion. He flapped his long wings furiously and for a moment seemed ready to lift off and attack the intruders, before Chris talked to him and calmed him down. Later, as the agents ransacked the cabin and peppered him with questions, Chris sensed a presence behind him, and he looked around to discover the dark eyes of Pips boring into him like sabers. His eyes were wild with fury, and Chris translated instantly what his bird was trying to tell him:
You betrayed me
.

He felt ashamed and chastened by Pips's angry stare. But at the same time, he felt proud of his best falcon—as wild and as defiant as it had been on the day he first trapped it.

39

“Is there anyone here from the CIA?” Chris asked as he dried his hands in the men's room at the Los Angeles regional headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation a few minutes after six on the evening of January 16, 1977.

“We don't have any of those people here; why?” asked George J. Moorehead, an FBI agent who had helped arrest Chris at the turkey ranch three hours earlier. Moorehead had liked him, and had seemed to develop an almost paternalistic interest in the prisoner.

“I can't discuss some things with you,” Chris responded. It was one of the more bizarre remarks in the records of espionage investigations: a young man who had just been arrested as a Soviet spy said that he couldn't discuss with FBI agents the secrets he had sold to the Soviet Union because the agents weren't cleared for the projects.

Moorehead was a big, beefy man in his middle forties with light-colored curly hair and horn-rimmed glasses that gave him a vaguely professorial look. There was a casual warmth in his personality that contrasted with the chilly efficiency of some FBI agents, and when Moorehead had seemed to extend an arm to lean on, Chris had accepted, and he gravitated to the soft-spoken agent who had seemed kinder than the other agents during the confrontation at the turkey ranch. Moorehead had been puzzled during the ride in from Riverside by the discovery that Chris's father and uncle were former FBI agents. A twenty-five-year veteran of the FBI, Moorehead would later say that he hadn't forgotten he was dealing with an accused Soviet spy. But he had been impressed by his quiet good manners—what some adults referred to as his “sweetness”—and he had wondered what forces had brought Chris to where he was now. Chris might have been his own son, Moorehead thought.

“We have agents here who are cleared for anything you were working on,” he replied when Chris said he couldn't discuss certain information without violating the law. Chris didn't respond. As they walked out of the men's room, Chris said he needed time to collect his thoughts. “Is there some place I can sit and think for a while?”

“Sure,” Moorehead said, and he led him down a hallway, giving him a guided tour of the functions of the various specialized offices they passed.

The FBI headquarters in Los Angeles could have been designed by Kafka. Occupying most of the sixteenth story, and parts of other floors, of a high-rise building on Wilshire Boulevard not far from U.C.L.A., it is a big, sterile warren of rooms, many with partitions, that look out at a central bull pen of seemingly endless rows of desks lined close together, each with its own telephone. The several hundred rank-and-file agents assigned to the L.A. office used this central bull pen as their base of operations.

Chris had $744 in cash in his wallet when he was arrested in Riverside. His wallet was taken from him when he was booked, and he was photographed and fingerprinted. During the fingerprinting, a young woman clerk had such trouble rolling legible prints that Chris offered to do it himself, saying that in his last job he had fingerprinted lots of people. Joking that Chris was out of money now, Moorehead bought him a pack of cigarettes and a cup of coffee from vending machines, and he escorted him to the office of the FBI's chief stenographer. It was empty on a Sunday evening, and Moorehead said he could collect his thoughts there. Before they reached the office, Moorehead asked Chris how many children were in his family, and Chris said there were nine, including himself. Moorehead shook his head and said he felt sorry for Chris's father. “This will really rip him up,” he said.

“It's inconceivable,” Charles Boyce told the two FBI agents who had knocked on the door of the Boyce home in Rancho Palos Verdes, about the same time that Chris was sitting by himself in the office of the FBI chief stenographer, and said that his son was under arrest for espionage. A newspaper reporter had already called the Boyce home with a report that Chris had been arrested as a Soviet spy, and his parents had been immobilized by disbelief when the agents arrived with a search warrant for the Boyce home.

They told the FBI agents that it was impossible Chris was involved in any way in espionage. If anything, Chris was a political conservative. “He voted for Gerald Ford last year,” his father said. And he had been considered a conservative for as long as anybody could remember. Mr. Boyce told the agents about the priest who, when Chris was a child, had said he was more conservative than Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angeles. It was true his son was interested in history and had talked once or twice about the Soviet Union and the future international balance of power, the father added, but “his attitudes on the surface were conservative—unless they were a subterfuge.

“It's not a political act unless he's really been fooling us for a long time,” the father said of the alleged treason. His wife agreed. “I have no idea what would have prompted it,” Mr. Boyce said. It couldn't have been drugs. Although Chris had smoked marijuana once in high school, his parents said, it had made him sick, and he didn't have a drug habit. The agent showed the Boyces a photograph of Andrew Daulton Lee; they identified him as a friend of Chris's who they knew had had problems with the law as a drug pusher. But they said they'd urged Chris not to associate with him because of the drugs, and Chris had stopped bringing him to the house. But they agreed Chris was probably still seeing him because of a shared interest in falconry.

Six miles away on the other side of The Hill, shortly before the FBI agents had knocked at the Boyce home, four other agents rang the doorbell of the rambling Lee residence in Palos Verdes Estates. Dave Lee opened the door, and the agents showed their credentials and asked for his father.

“Do you have a warrant?” Dave asked. Agent George S. Bacon, as if he had never heard the remark, asked again if Dr. Lee was in. Almost instinctively, Dave slammed the door of the house. One of the agents quickly rang the doorbell again. After about thirty seconds Dave reopened the door and said his father would be there shortly.

Dr. Lee had been napping when the agents arrived. He was not surprised by the callers. Over the years there had been many policemen who arrived at the same door. But he expected such calls to deal with Daulton's narcotics enterprises.

The agents informed Dr. Lee that his son had been arrested in Mexico, that he was being deported and that he was going to be charged by the United States Government with violation of espionage statutes; furthermore, he said that Daulton's friend Christopher John Boyce had just been arrested for the same offenses. Before Dr. Lee could react to this news, Agent David Reid said Daulton had told U.S. officials in Mexico there were photographs in his bedroom which the FBI believed were related to the case and requested him to sign a consent allowing them to search the home. Dr. Lee signed the statement. Then another agent produced a search warrant. Dr. Lee was annoyed. “If you have a search warrant why did you have me sign this?” he asked. The agents said it was the government's policy that occupants of premises should first be allowed to give their consent to a search. In fact, Justice Department lawyers had decided to seek both the search warrant and Dr. Lee's consent agreement to reinforce the legality of the search if evidence seized at the home was later challenged in court. The same strategy was followed at the Boyce home.