The Falcon and the Snowman (40 page)

Like the Boyces, Dr. Lee said that it was impossible that his son was involved in espionage, although he knew he was involved with drugs.

“It seemed strange to us that he never worked but seemed to have money,” Dr. Lee said in the statement he gave Agent Reid and Agent Andre L. Knightlinger while Bacon and Agent David Smith began searching the house.

“Mrs. Lee and I questioned him about this,” he continued, “but he never answered our questions. I assumed that he'd obtained the money through his involvement in drugs.”

Asked if Daulton had ever said anything about furnishing false information to the Soviet Union, Dr. Lee said he hadn't.

“A long time ago,” he said, when Daulton was in high school, “he told me that he was tired of doing things my way. He said that from then on he was going to do things his way.”

After that, Dr. Lee added, Daulton had simply refused to discuss his activities outside the home with his parents. “I suspected that when he went off somewhere, he was up to something illegal,” he said, “but I thought it was drugs.”

Despite his son's frequent brushes with the law, Dr. Lee went on, Daulton was “still my son, and I wouldn't kick him out of the house.”

Anne Lee, who had recently obtained a license as a real estate agent to occupy herself after her children were grown, walked in the door then, arriving home after a day of trying to sell property on The Hill. The length of time without a telephone call from Daulton had caused her to half-expect official callers inquiring about her son. But like her husband, she said she knew relatively little about her son's recent comings and goings. When she'd asked Daulton about his trips to Mexico, she said in her statement to the FBI, “he told me not to worry about it.” Once, when she heard Daulton had made a trip to Vienna and she had asked about it, she said, “he wouldn't tell me anything about the trip.” An agent inquired about the two youths' friendship. Daulton and Chris Boyce, she explained, were best friends; the friendship went back many years and had continued because of their mutual love of falconry. Chris's father had helped him get a job at TRW, she said, but Chris had called it a “flunky job.”

“He said he was involved in cleaning up after everybody,” she said.

David Lee was also interviewed. He told the agents that Daulton had told him months previously that he and Chris Boyce were involved in a scheme to sell false information to the Soviets. Daulton claimed to be working for the CIA, he said, and had shown him a Minox camera. “My brother said it was a misinformation program and he was doing it for the money; he said each roll of film he brought was worth approximately ten thousand dollars.” In a camera case in Daulton's room, David helped the agents find the two photos of the encryption equipment Daulton had retrieved from the Russians in October.

Four hours after they had arrived, the FBI agents left the Lee home. They had a Minox camera found in a rolltop desk in Daulton's room (a room they described on their official report for the day as “in extremely cluttered condition”) and so many other items from his room that it took twenty minutes to load their cars.

A half-hour after Chris asked to be left alone in the chief stenographer's office at the Los Angeles FBI office, he asked Agent George J. Moorehead, who was waiting outside in a corridor, if he could ask a question.

“Sure,” Moorehead said. “I'll do my best.”

“Has anybody else been charged with the same thing as me?”

Chris suspected that Daulton had also been arrested for espionage because of his call to the Holiday Inn, but he couldn't be sure. It could have been a drug bust.

“Do you mean in the past or now, this case?” Moorehead asked.

“This specific case,” Chris said.

Moorehead said that he didn't know.

In that case, Chris said, he would have nothing to say. He didn't want to say anything because he didn't know what Daulton had—or hadn't—told the authorities. After his refusal to talk more, Chris was handcuffed again and led out of the room by Moorehead, who said they were on their way to the Los Angeles County Jail. In the hallway, they met James E. White, another member of the FBI's Los Angeles Espionage Squad. Moorehead told White that Chris had asked if anyone else had been arrested in the case. White left them in the hall and checked via telephone with Richard A. Stilz, an Assistant United States Attorney who had already begun preparing the government's case against Andrew Daulton Lee and Christopher John Boyce. Stilz advised him that Chris could be told of Lee's arrest in Mexico and that his friend would soon be deported to the United States.

When he heard this news, Chris thought a moment, and shortly before seven o'clock, four hours after his arrest, he said:

“Let's talk.”

The agents told Chris that if he wanted to say anything, he would have to sign a
Miranda
waiver of his rights. Earlier in the day—after the raid at the turkey ranch—Chris had refused to do so. This time, he agreed to sign the waiver. Moorehead asked him to write out a statement declaring he had not been coerced into consenting to interrogation. But Chris told Moorehead that his hands were shaking so much that he couldn't write anything more than his signature.

His heart was pumping so hard that later he said he felt as if it were about to burst.

One of the agents said he would write a statement in longhand for Chris to sign, and he did so. The statement read:

I, Christopher John Boyce, requested from Special Agents G. J. Moorehead and William M. Smith that at 6:25 P.M. this date I be given a period to collect my thoughts regarding charges for which I was arrested today. At 7 P.M., 35 minutes later, I decided by my own free will, and without any promises, threats or inducements, to furnish a statement to the FBI regarding this matter. Any delay experienced at the Los Angeles Headquarters of the FBI, therefore, was specifically at my request and strictly voluntary.

Chris signed the handwritten statement, and during the next hour or so he surrendered any chance he might have had to avert what he had decided almost two years ago was inevitable.

As he began his monologue, Chris explained why he had asked about Daulton: “I just wanted to know if he was off the streets.”

40

“I worked in the Black Vault at TRW, handling encrypted communications for the Central Intelligence Agency,” he began.

On his first day on the job, he continued, a co-worker had joked with him about selling ciphers used to encode messages to the Soviet Union and speculated that they might be worth $20,000 a month. A few weeks later, after a night of drinking and pot, smoking with friends—“I was extremely high,” he said—he had hinted at the nature of the job. After a while, he continued, “it just kept rolling out,” and he and his friend Daulton Lee had begun joking about selling the material to the Russians. The idea that Chris had access to information worth a great deal of money, he said, “excited Daulton.”

“It just got more serious as the conversations kept going.”

“Whose idea was it to sell documents to the Soviet Union?” White asked Chris.

“It was a combination of seeking each other out,” he said. “Security was so lax you could walk out with hundreds of documents. I was always drunk.

“I worked on the Rhyolite project for the CIA,” he went on. “I handled all communications between the people who built the satellites and those who used them.” An agent asked how much information had been delivered to the Soviets. Chris said he wasn't sure, but thought it “numbered thousands of documents.” Most involved projects Rhyolite and Argus, he said, but there were others. “Sometimes,” he said, “the CIA fucks up and sends naval traffic and military traffic and stuff about other programs and projects with other companies, and about submarine activity.”

The agents asked who, besides Daulton, had been involved in the operation, and he said Daulton was the only one. They asked if Chris had a girlfriend and whether she knew about it. Chris refused to give them Alana's name, but acknowledged that he had a girlfriend “who was aware that I had been given sums of money, and she knew I worked on a secret project.” But she didn't know the whole truth, he said. “She is law-abiding, a Christian Scientist.” He said he had become fearful and distraught and moody because of his involvement with the Russians, and finally it had broken them apart.

“It was more than she could handle,” Chris said.

“Did you ever tell Andrew Daulton Lee or anyone else that you were in a project to furnish false information to the Soviet Union?” White asked.

Chris shook his head.

“Did Lee understand what you were doing?”

“Totally,” he said.

In considerable detail, he described Daulton's meetings with the Russians in Mexico City, the purchase of the Minox camera, the booze runs, the surreptitious trips with secret documents in potted plants—and the day the NSA inspector had nearly tripped him up.

“He blew it; I was right in front of him, and he really blew it.

“I thought they were on to me long before now,” Chris told the agents. It “amazed” him that they had not been caught sooner. Chris recounted his long friendship with Daulton, which, he said, had begun in elementary school, and their mutual interest in falconry. “His parents were very wealthy.”

Daulton, he added, was a “hoodlum” who had “cheated” him—“he lied and would use me”—and kept samples of everything sold to the Russians to hold against Chris. After he described Daulton as a hoodlum, he was asked to describe himself. Chris said that perhaps he might be called “an adventurer.”

“I got involved with the Soviets through drugs,” he said, and he added, “Politically, I'm very disenchanted with this government; it's done many things wrong.”

The name of FBI Agent White was paged on the public-address system, and he left the room to take a call from another agent calling from Chris's home. He returned and asked Chris if he wanted to speak to his father. Chris felt the agents suspected his father might be involved with him; in any case, he was not in any mood to talk to his father now.

“No,” Chris said, and the questioning went on.

He described some of the documents he had photographed—the ciphers; data on Rhyolite, Argus, the 20,030 project study; and the message traffic—thousands of documents in all, he admitted. He said the Pyramider documents had been left out unlocked in the vault just before he left TRW, which surprised him, but said other TRW employees had called it a “dead project.” Chris recited the details of his two trips to Mexico, Boris' instructions to return to college and eventually get a job in the diplomatic corps or the CIA and his fears he would become indentured forever to the Soviet intelligence service.

“The whole thing has been a nightmare,” he said. “Once it began, there was no way to stop it … except for the way it did end.”

After the interview, Chris was handcuffed again and Moorehead led him out of the Wilshire Boulevard high-rise office tower to begin the twenty-minute automobile ride to the Los Angeles County Jail. Chris was silent. As they walked together, Moorehead looked over at the curious young man. His head was canted toward the ground and there was a blank expression on his face. Then Chris turned his head slightly to look at the FBI agent, and he said:

“I fucked my country.”

The following morning, the newspapers were filled with reports of the arrests of the two young men from Palos Verdes. At the Boyce home, a familiar figure approached the front door. It was Msgr. Thomas J. McCarthy.

Charles Boyce had not slept much the previous night. The arrest of his eldest son had seemingly shattered his life. His own values were relatively simple: he believed in his country, in his family, in obedience to the law, in following the rules and in punishment for those who did not. All that he had really expected of his son was that he be honest and loyal to his country, and he was overwhelmed by the hurt and humiliation.

Monsignor McCarthy told Mrs. Boyce that he wanted to talk to them, to offer whatever help he could. She went into the bedroom where Charles Boyce was sitting alone, but he refused to see the priest.

“I can't see anyone,” he said.

He was sobbing. The only other time his wife had ever seen Charles Boyce cry was at his mother's funeral.

The next few days were not any easier on the family. When the youngest Boyce children went to school they were called “Nazis,” and the youngest Boyce sons were set upon by classmates who sent them home with bloodied faces.

On January 26, 1977, a Federal grand jury in Los Angeles indicted the two friends from Palos Verdes for espionage. Although twelve counts were included in this original indictment, they would subsequently be consolidated into eight counts:

* Count One charged Andrew Daulton Lee and Christopher John Boyce with conspiring to transmit national-defense information to a foreign nation, to wit, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

* Count Two charged Andrew Daulton Lee with attempting to transmit national-defense documents entitled “Proposal for Covert Communication Satellite Study No. 24151.0000, dated December 14, 1972, marked Top Secret—Pyramider,” and other Pyramider documents to the U.S.S.R.

* Count Three charged both defendants with conspiring to gather national-defense information.

* Count Four charged both defendants with the act of gathering national-defense information—specifically, the Pyramider documents—intending, or having reason to believe, that such information would be used to the advantage of the U.S.S.R.

* Count Five charged Daulton with receiving national-defense information—the Pyramider documents—from Christopher John Boyce knowing, or having reason to believe, that such information had been obtained illegally.

* Count Seven charged Daulton with having unauthorized possession of national-defense information—the Pyramider documents—and attempting to transmit such information to unauthorized persons, to wit, representatives, officers, and agents of the U.S.S.R.