The Falcon and the Snowman (54 page)

It is also impossible to assess fully other aspects of the damage done to the United States by the two friends' espionage scheme. Ironically, only the Soviet Union knows in full all of the secrets that flowed out of the Black Vault. Chris may have been drunk some of the time he selected the secrets he gave Daulton. And Daulton did not remember all his merchandise because it was only that—goods to be sold for a price.

At the least, the Russians obtained an unprecedented look at the day-to-day operations of American espionage satellites, particularly Rhyolite. They became privy to the function of the Australian bases and the American deceptions against them. And they learned technical details about U.S. spy satellites at a time when the two countries were negotiating agreements to control strategic arms with the intent to use such satellites to verify compliance with them—and when each country was urgently preparing weapons, such as TRW's laser gun, to disable the other's spy satellites.

The dual loss of the data from the Black Vault and the Iranian monitoring stations came at a particularly unfortunate time for the CIA. In the spring of 1979, the Carter Administration negotiated a new SALT agreement With the Soviet Union in which the world's two superpowers agreed to throttle back development of new nuclear missiles. The issue of whether the United States could verify Soviet compliance with the agreement became the subject of a major national debate.

The Administration (which didn't publicly reveal the security breach at TRW) conceded that the loss of the Iranian listening posts was serious, but said it was confident that the United States would be able through other means to verify Soviet compliance with the agreement, hinting that satellites could take over much of the work of the Iranian stations. To help fill the gap, the CIA accelerated work on low- and high-altitude eavesdropping satellites more advanced than the four Rhyolite satellites which were then in orbit. As it did, it appeared that Moscow was in an enviable position to anticipate the United States' next move in the high-stakes game of technological one-upmanship that the superpowers play.

Not only did the Soviets have intimate knowledge of the Rhyolite system; they had blueprints and voluminous other data regarding Argus, a system that was to have an antenna almost twice as large as the one on Rhyolite; moreover, when the Soviet Union bought the Project 20,030 study from Andrew Daulton Lee, it had become privy to what some of the best brains in the American aerospace industry thought would be possible technologically in the 1980s to intercept Soviet telemetry. Certainly, the CIA's knowledge that the KGB possessed these data would be likely to persuade the agency not to build a new system exactly as it was laid out in the study.

But there are certain things in this spectrum of technology that cannot be changed if a country wants to use its technical capabilities to the fullest, and in the Project 20,030 study it appears that the Russians bought at least a partial preview of how good American abilities to monitor their missile tests would be far into the future.

The Russians had also obtained copies of numerous classified cables, including the report of a CIA submarine's secret mission to monitor Soviet missile tests over the Arctic; they had obtained reports on the surveillance of China and other intelligence operations that cannot be disclosed here; and perhaps most important, they had received the classified TWX message listing the capabilities of many of the American satellite systems used to monitor the Soviet Union and other countries from space.

But what this information really meant to the Russians, only they know. Some capabilities of the American reconnaissance satellites had previously become known to the Soviet Union across the negotiating table at the SALT conferences. Certainly, some of the information they obtained from the two Americans about U.S. satellites was available by simple deduction through analysis of orbital data collected by their own tracking stations or supplied routinely by the United States to the United Nations.

The Russians never got the transmission frequencies they needed to use with the ciphers from the Black Vault to eavesdrop on CIA communications. Chris had seen to that. Prosecutors Stilz and Levine would argue that possession of the ciphers alone would allow the Russians to read the CIA's secret mail; again, only the Russians know the importance of the tables of ciphers from the vault they bought from Lee.

Some mysteries about the affair remain.

Daulton frequently and openly visited the Soviet Embassy for more than a year and a half, and it is astonishing that the CIA did not discover his visits before January 6, 1977, if in fact it did not.

The Soviet Embassy in Mexico City is, for the CIA, one of the most closely watched foreign embassies in the world. It had been a principal target of American intelligence for decades before Daulton began making his visits.

Long before Daulton sat down for vodka and caviar with Vasily Ivanovich Okana, Lee Harvey Oswald demonstrated how convenient a destination it was for a disaffected American seeking contact with the Russians.

Phone taps and electronic surveillance techniques of the newest designs are used to monitor the embassy. Its KGB personnel are kept under surveillance by their counterparts in the CIA, some of whom are assigned to the U.S. Embassy with specific assignments to compromise Russians and turn them into double agents. Attempts are made regularly to plant American agents as servants in the embassy.

There are suggestions, but only that, that the CIA might have been aware of Daulton's business dealings with the KGB, at least during the latter months of the espionage operation. Despite the bench warrants that were outstanding against him during much of his commerce with the Russians, he was never stopped at the border; there was Chris's recollection, albeit one after a night of drinking, that Gene Norman told him he had heard Chris was going to jail for the rest of his life; there was another employee's claim that he was on “everybody's list.” Perhaps these were the distorted memories of a troubled young man seized by paranoia, but there are other curiosities about the case. Why TRW would place a $140-a-week, twenty-one-year-old college dropout in such a sensitive national-security position in the first place is, at least in retrospect, a puzzle. Circumstantially, TRW's decision to leave the Pyramider papers unlocked in the vault where Chris could read them shortly before his departure suggests they could have been left as bait. And there was the mystery of Daulton's fingerprints on the circuit boards. An FBI fingerprint expert testified that he had found Daulton's prints on a circuit board from one of the encryption machines in the vault. Yet both the two spies, when denials meant nothing regarding whether they might be convicted or not, insisted that Daulton had never entered the vault nor had he ever touched the circuit boards. And certainly, the presence of a U.S. Embassy official at the Soviet Embassy on the morning of Daulton's arrest added another curiosity to the case.

In the black world of espionage, it is tempting to hypothesize that the CIA discovered the two young men's cottage industry of selling American secrets to the Russians and either attempted to spread false information through them or had other motives in mind. If nothing else, the CIA confirmed through the two young men that the Russians were in desperate need of improved infrared technology for their own spy satellites. And it is inviting to speculate that the list of American satellites sold to the Russians with the specifications on their respective capabilities to spy from space might have been leaked with a purpose to the Russians on the eve of a new round of SALT talks.

At the trials of Chris and Daulton, the prosecution insisted repeatedly that the government had known nothing about their scheme until Daulton was arrested in Mexico City. This is a critical legal point: if the CIA in fact knew about it before the arrests and didn't inform the prosecution, many lawyers would argue that it put the United States Government in a position of withholding evidence that the defense could have used to claim entrapment—a defense that might have freed the two young men.

The CIA successfully resisted efforts by the defense to obtain its internal reports of the affair. Judge Kelleher inspected at least some of the reports in the privacy of his chambers and said that he found nothing that would have been of significance to the two friends' defense attorneys. Still, the feeling that the CIA might have manipulated their clients lingered with the lawyers long after the trials ended.

If their thoughts were ill founded; if the CIA had not in fact been on to the two spies; if it had not been aware of the scruffy young man who so brazenly and so often entered the Soviet Embassy over such a long period, only one other conclusion is appropriate: the affair of the snowman and the spy who called himself Falcon was an episode that demonstrated amazing ineptitude on the part of the Central Intelligence Agency.

54

Lots of young people grew up during the nineteen-sixties and early seventies, went off to college, began careers, got married, raised families and started on the road to middle age uneventfully, despite having been bathed in the emotional heat of a controversial war, assassinations, racial strife and Watergate. Many young Americans were revulsed by a discovery that America the Real did not invariably measure up to America the Ideal, and many were seduced by the instant euphoria and easy money of drugs.

Chris and Daulton were two people amid a horde—the generation of the postwar baby boom: better off materially than most, but seedlings growing in the same soil as millions of others. Bill Dougherty said of Chris: “He was like a lot of other kids. He had a high draft number, so he never got called; but he was affected by Vietnam just the same. He saw what it did to the country, how ten years went down the drain. He saw Spiro Agnew, John Mitchell and Richard Nixon.”

Yet others like him did not become Soviet spies.

Ken Kahn, the bearded hippie lawyer who specialized in defending troubled youths from Palos Verdes, said of his client:

“Daulton was a Greek tragedy figure. He grew up with too much money. Things were too easy for him. He could have been a really brilliant businessman; he was a capitalist; he may have been amoral, but aren't a lot of capitalists? He could have been John D. Rockefeller. But he got into dope and he became a big shot, and then he just couldn't get out of it. Daulton's dream was to be a Big Man; drugs made him one.” Palos Verdes, he added, might or might not be typical of similar enclaves of the affluent around America; many of the young people he knew who grew up there, he said, never got into trouble and began productive lives. But, Kahn said, he had worked for enough young people from The Hill to be troubled by what he saw:

“The kids get in trouble over drugs, but shouldn't the parents have to take some of the blame? The only thing those kids had, a lot of them, was what money could buy. Their fathers were into making money as fast as they could, and their mothers were up to their ears pursuing their social interests, and they just blinded themselves to what was happening to their kids. I know a lot of these kids were smoking pot and snorting coke and heroin when their parents were in the house; some of them were
dealing
right out of their houses, the parents were taking calls from their customers—and the parents were oblivious to it. It was incredible. The parents gave their children all the material things, and that made them think they had discharged their duties; it gave them a clear conscience so the father could go back to making money and the mother could keep up with her tennis and social life. Then, all of a sudden, when their kids are seventeen or eighteen and in trouble, or on drugs, they ask, ‘What happened to my children?'”

Yet there were lots of young people in Daulton's generation who used drugs and sold them. They did not become Soviet spies.

What made Chris and Daulton different was opportunity.

What brought them together in the basement of the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City with Boris Grishin of the KGB was a confluence of circumstances: Daulton's cynical pursuit of money and self-importance and his desperation to escape prison, coupled with Chris's disillusioned idealism which rejected centuries of man's concepts of nationalism and patriotism, and his almost accidental employment at the age of twenty-one in a tiny room that gave him intimate access to some of America's most sensitive defense secrets.

At their trials, each blamed the other: Chris said he had been blackmailed by Daulton, and Daulton claimed that Chris had told him from the beginning that they were both working for the CIA. The fact is that Chris never told Daulton that they were working for the CIA—but neither did he tell Daulton the real motive for his invitation to commit espionage. In truth, each entered the espionage conspiracy with different motives. In a grotesque way, each used the other.

To Daulton, secrets became a commodity to sell, like marijuana or heroin. His was the generation of the rip-off, and to Daulton, the Russians were merely another victim to be ripped off. And when the time came when the Russians asked for more secrets and Chris did not give them to him, Daulton did threaten blackmail—to go to Chris's father, striking him in his most vulnerable spot.

But this was not only a case of evil corrupting good; it was a case also of good corrupting evil.

In the end, the Russians knew they had been had. They had paid for some grains of gold in what would become an avalanche of dust. In the end, they threw Daulton out of the embassy car, and when he came back, they left him out on the street.

Chris, as he lay on his prison bunk, would muse that he had made fools of both the Russians and the Americans. He would lie back and study the ceiling of his cell and think of Robin resting in his grave, a foolish grin on his face.

To Chris, the man-boy who rejected nationalism and dreamed of One Nation, the nation of man, his job in the Black Vault became an opportunity to take a saber stroke at both the world's superpowers at once. It was, he told himself, a flimflam against the Russians and a nonviolent protest against what he believed was the corruption of his own country. And Daulton had had the greed to serve his purpose.