The Falcon and the Snowman (44 page)

He made the discovery during pretrial hearings: Daulton's lawyers announced that their client intended to prove his innocence by showing that he had been enticed into spying by Christopher John Boyce under the pretext of working for the CIA—and that he had been abandoned by his friend and the CIA after his chance arrest by Mexican police. Chris was further antagonized against his old friend when a mutual acquaintance sent a message to Chris from Daulton urging him to take full blame for the espionage operation. Chris ignored Daulton when they saw each other, and when he did speak, his few words were a caustic denunciation of Daulton's stupidity for getting arrested and his betrayal of him.

Further pretrial hearings and other procedural delays consumed the final weeks of March and the first few days of April. Shortly before Chris's trial was finally scheduled to start, Chris and Daulton encountered each other at the jail again, and afterward, Daulton told Ken Kahn about the meeting:

“I managed to have a few preliminary words with Boyce to break the ice; it would have gone further, but a marshal stopped us,” he said. Boyce's spirits, he added, seemed somewhat improved. “After court, in the transfer cells, I walked past and he said, ‘cheerio.' He's beginning to weaken.” He asked Kahn to counsel him on “what to say to him or what to ask him. Our present diplomatic aura is very shaky. I must tread carefully.”

Daulton also revealed some doubts about the strategy for his defense:

“If there is no CIA involvement, then aren't we putting ourselves out on a limb? I mean, all this could be coincidence.”

Since the night of his arrest, George Chelius had implored Chris to write to his parents. Chelius had known Chris's father as an initially standoffish boss with a conservative point of view who, after a while, warmed up to his friends. He knew that he adored his eldest son, and he had known of the many trips they had taken together and the many afternoons he had spent coaching teams on which Chris played. And so he had been amazed to discover the depth of Chris's philosophical estrangement from his father during the long night they had spent in his cell after Chris was arrested. Later, he had delivered a message to Chris from his parents: they loved him and would stick by him and wanted to see him and help with his defense. But Chris told his jailers he did not want any visits from his parents.

Finally, on the eve of his trial, at Chelius' continued urgings, Chris consented to write a letter to his father. In the letter, he wrote that he did not want any members of his family at the trial.

44

The espionage trial of Christopher John Boyce started at 10
A.M.
on April 12, 1977, in the United States District Court for the Central District of California. A jury of seven men and five women was selected to hear the case in a wood-paneled courtroom on the second floor of the Los Angeles Federal Courthouse, an imposing monolith of concrete and glass a block from the city's landmark City Hall tower.

There were unusual aspects of the trial from the beginning. Judge Kelleher immediately ordered his bailiff to prevent spectators, except reporters with official credentials, from taking notes at the trial. Although the judge did not explain his reasons for the unusual order, it was evident that he anticipated that sensitive defense information would be discussed at the trial and wanted to prevent, as best he could, agents of hostile countries from recording the facts unraveled in his courtroom.

Chris's face was pale from life in the shadows of his cell. Nevertheless, as he was escorted into the courtroom, he looked, as ever, the scrubbed, all-American boy. He was dressed in a corduroy suit that was the color of polished copper and an open-necked sport shirt. He sat down at the defense table with Chelius and Dougherty, and a Federal marshal was nearby.

At the prosecution table, Stilz and Levine sat with FBI Agent Jim White, the bureau's case officer assigned to the prosecution; sitting near them were other Department of Justice lawyers and close behind, in the spectator gallery, a lawyer for the Central Intelligence Agency.

Ken Kahn was auditing the trial in preparation for his defense of Daulton. Ken Kahn's mother was there too. A petite woman with gray hair and intelligent eyes, Fay Kahn would remain throughout Chris's trial as well as Daulton's. “This is the biggest case Kenny's ever had,” she replied proudly when a reporter inquired about her devoted attendance at the proceedings. Sitting near Mrs. Kahn on the opening day of the trial was a curious-looking man wearing what appeared to be a military uniform—a blue tunic similar to the kind Air Force officers wear and a matching cap. But on close examination it proved to be something else: the tunic and cap were festooned with toy rockets and plastic airplanes and a collage of badges issued by political candidates of years past and assorted commercial enterprises, and he introduced himself as “General Hershey Bar.” The general was a court buff, the kind of spectator who can be found in any major court around the country on any given day, monitoring the drama of other people's lives.

Several days before the trial began, Joel Levine had carried three large cardboard cartons into the chambers of Judge Kelleher. The boxes were stuffed with some of America's most sensitive secrets, detailing how the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies collected photos and other information about the Soviet Union, China and other countries from far out in space. There were documents about Projects Rhyolite and Argus and other reconnaissance satellites, and they described how much of the data from the satellites flowed through the Black Vault at TRW. There were also reports of the CIA's own investigation of the Boyce-Lee case.

The delivery had been a critical juncture for the prosecution: if the judge read the papers and then decided it was essential that the defense lawyers also be given access to them, the Department of Justice, on instructions from the National Security Council, planned to suspend prosecution of the two youths. But Judge Kelleher, after reading the documents and the CIA's investigative reports, decreed that they were
not
vital to the defense. With that, the prosecution had gone forward, despite strident objections from lawyers for both defendants.

It was now up to Stilz and Levine to prove that Chris and, by inference, Daulton had conspired to steal the classified Pyramider documents with the intent of selling them to the U.S.S.R., and then had actually done so. The CIA had declassified portions of the Pyramider papers for use as evidence and had allowed copies to be made available to each defendant.

With Chris's statement to the FBI on the night of his arrest now certain to be used against him, his lawyers began the trial with a pitifully thin hand of cards to play. They retreated to a strategy that they believed gave them their only chance of an acquittal: to argue that the Pyramider documents were “overclassified”; that they had no value to the Russians because the project had never been implemented, and moreover, that the technical data in the study were essentially common knowledge available to any sophisticated electronics engineer. The strategy was to convince the jury that the material really didn't deserve a top security label and that Chris had not sold secrets to the Soviet Union that would harm the United States. “We'll have testimony that the government could have gone to any Radio Shack to get that kind of thing,” Dougherty confided to a reporter on the opening day of the trial.

The trial began with a summary by Joel Levine of the prosecution's allegations. In itself the opening argument was newsworthy: it was the first public admission by the United States Government that the CIA and TRW were involved in clandestine satellite operations. Levine told the jury that the case he would present involved a secret project called “Pyramider,” purloined secrets in potted plants, miniature cameras and other elements of intrigue that he made sound like a James Bond thriller. He told the jurors they would be hearing a lot about a man named Andrew Daulton Lee, a childhood friend of Christopher John Boyce. “From that friendship,” he said, “the seeds of an espionage conspiracy were born.”

FBI Agent White was the first witness and presented a long review of Chris's statement on the night of his arrest, including the damaging allegation “He told me that they had delivered to the Soviets the contents of thousands of documents.”

“Thousands of documents?” Stilz asked.

“That's right, thousands of documents.”

White did not mention Rhyolite or Argus or the other classified projects Chris had discussed during his interrogation by White. Dougherty, in his cross-examination of White, did not mention them either; Judge Kelleher had already advised the defense attorneys that he would not allow any mention of the other projects.

There was testimony from the FBI agents who had arrested Chris, and who maintained that his confession had been made voluntarily; from Thomas Ferguson, the Foreign Service officer, who described Daulton's arrest and the film in his pocket with the words “Pyramider” and “Top Secret” on them; and from Regis Carr of TRW, who described Chris's job in the vault and said he had not been briefed on Pyramider and therefore had not had legal access to information about it. To link Chris and Daulton, Stilz and Levine presented Barclay Granger, Darlene Cooper and other friends of Daulton's as witnesses.

After a week of testimony, the jury for Daulton's trial was impaneled by Judge Kelleher and immediately sequestered in a hotel to await the outcome of Chris's trial. The judge took the unusual step of sequestering jurors in a trial even before testimony had begun because he did not want them exposed to news reports of the Boyce trial that could influence their judgment of Daulton.

Before Chris's trial had been under way very long, reporters began to notice a man with reddish hair and a ruddy complexion monitoring every session with what seemed to be extraordinary intensity. He sat alone in the back of the courtroom, his chin resting on the back of the pewlike seat in front of him, following every word of testimony. Initially, it seemed he was just another court buff watching an unusual trial. But after a while, reporters noticed that during each recess or lunch break, he promptly went to a pay telephone down the hallway from the courtroom and spoke animatedly in a foreign language that sounded Slavic to some people who overheard him. After one such call on the third day of the trial, a reporter introduced himself to the man and asked if he was Russian or if he was observing the trial for another foreign country.

Caught off guard by the question, he answered, “I am Polish.” Eyeing the reporter warily, he refused to identify himself further or otherwise explain his interest in the trial.

“I'm not representing anybody but myself and my shoes,” he said when the reporter persisted. And then he fled into an elevator moments before the door closed.

He was back the next day. Identifying the man and his purpose became a contest for reporters covering the trial, and after an article mentioning the mysterious Pole appeared in
The New York Times
, the Columbia Broadcasting System assigned an artist to sketch him, and for several nights a week he was featured on the six-o'clock news with Walter Cronkite. But reporters never managed to find out who he was.

Kent Dixon, using large photo-blowup comparisons for illustration, testified that tests in the FBI Crime Laboratory had forged an indisputable link between the Minox camera in Daulton's home and the photos of the Pyramider documents; an FBI fingerprint expert testified that Chris's fingerprints had been found on the Pyramider documents and those of Chris and Daulton had been found on circuit boards for one of the encrypting machines. A Palos Verdes travel agent testified that Daulton had made airline reservations with her to go to Vienna—one of many such examples which illustrated that Daulton, as much as Chris, was on trial here, even though at the moment only Chris's fate was being debated.

Leslie Dirks, the CIA's deputy director for science and technology, a tall, gaunt, balding physicist with the sterile aura of a pathology laboratory, traced the history of the Pyramider project. He testified that even though the TRW design had not been implemented, the disclosure of data from the study to the Soviet Union would be a serious setback to American intelligence. Communicating with secret agents, he testified, was vital to fulfilling the CIA's fundamental responsibility—to avert another Pearl Harbor. “Agents around the world are our primary sources. Only from the minds of men can we find out what is going to happen in the world,” he said. Knowing the state of American expertise in covert satellite-communications technology at the time the study was made and the kinds of options that were considered for providing secure communications with agents would be invaluable to Soviet analysts, he asserted emphatically. In more than four hours of cross-examination, George Chelius did not knock any significant holes in Dirks's testimony. He had left a solid impression with the jury that Chris's actions involved grave harm to the United States.

With Dirks, the prosecution rested its case.

By this point in the trial, Bill Dougherty and Joel Levine were no longer talking to each other except through the judge. With little ammunition to work with, Dougherty had repeatedly hammered at the prosecution's refusal to give it access to all the information it possessed from the CIA regarding the vault and the agency's investigation of the case. Judge Kelleher invariably upheld prosecution efforts to keep the trial from wandering into national-security matters beyond the bare essentials of the Pyramider papers, frustrating the defense attorneys. In open court as well as private discussions, Dougherty had assailed Levine and Stilz for not giving the defense access to all of the information it had, and Levine was furious at what he perceived as assaults on his integrity. After one such encounter outside the courtroom, Levine threatened to punch Dougherty. The confrontation cooled before any punches were thrown, but Levine's anger had subsided only for the moment.