The Falcon and the Snowman (7 page)

In June of 1973, Chris left Loyola. The experiment had failed. He told friends that he was now an agnostic. Once again, he told himself, he had to decide what he was going to do with the rest of his life.

The following September, he found a happiness that had eluded him before. He enrolled at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo, a semirural community about two hundred miles north of Los Angeles. Cal Poly was best known as an agricultural and technical school; it wasn't noted for history and prelaw studies, the curricula Chris selected. But he chose Cal Poly less for its academic strengths in these fields than for its proximity to Morro Bay, a town on the Pacific Coast twelve miles from the campus that was the site of a Federal sanctuary for peregrine falcons, which are among the largest and most prized of falcons. For Chris, it was a kind of earthly paradise. He would spend days at a time watching and photographing the birds.

The protected sanctuary was on Morro Rock, a giant monolith shaped like half an egg that rises out of the sea close to shore. He bought a rubber raft and rowed to the base of the rock to admire at close range the grace and ageless elegance of the predators and their instinctive skill so perfectly shaped by eons of evolution. He watched a pair of older birds train their young to hunt by killing a duck, picking it up and then dropping it in front of the young birds—an exercise that helped them to practice catching prey in midair. The coastal mountains behind Morro Bay were to Chris another refuge from what he increasingly thought of as the honky-tonk culture of Southern California orbiting around Los Angeles. He camped alone among the oaks and pines and studied prairie falcons nesting in the coastals, and thought, what better pursuit in life could there be than to study these birds? Professors in the History Department at Cal Poly encouraged him to apply for a Federal grant to finance a study of the history of falconry. The idea excited Chris. He envisaged an odyssey that would take him to Asia and Europe, to old castles, temples and archives, from the Pyrenees to above the Arctic Circle, where the great Arctic gyrfalcons flew. But the grant was not approved, and Chris, disappointed, decided to leave Cal Poly the following June. Gnawing at him was the implicit pressure that society wanted more out of him.

Several years later he would say of the year he spent on Morro Bay: “Why I didn't stay there I'll never know. I guess I was guilty about being so happy and felt that if I didn't at least try entering The Establishment I would have been forever locked in prejudices of my own making. How dumb.”

After school ended in June, he told his parents that he'd decided to quit college for a while, bank some money and make some decisions. Then he'd return to college in a year or two, probably to become a lawyer. His father said he would see what he could do about helping him to find a job. Maybe, he said, Chris might even find a job that he would like for its career possibilities and he could end his seemingly aimless wandering.

In the aerospace industry, as in many industries, there is a kind of informal “old boy network” that arranges jobs for the sons and daughters of members of the network. A company executive may not be able to hire his own son because it would invite charges of nepotism; but what is wrong in calling a friend who's an executive of another company and asking a favor? Such arrangements can work reciprocally without charges of nepotism.

Chris's father decided to ask a friend at the Hughes Aircraft Company if he might have any openings. But the friend, with an apology, said he couldn't help.

Then Chris's father called a friend who worked for TRW Defense and Space Systems Group in nearby Redondo Beach. This friend said he might be able to.

8

When his father told him about the job, Chris didn't know what kind of work people did at the dozen or so buildings marked “TRW” that sprawled over a sizable portion of Redondo Beach, one of the coastal cities that hug the rim of the Pacific north of the Peninsula. The fathers of several of his friends in Palos Verdes had worked at TRW when he was in high school. But the only thing Chris recalled about the company was that it had something to do with computers or electronics—like a lot of the industries that provided work for fathers on The Hill.

To Chris it didn't matter what business the company was in. He just wanted to work awhile, save some money and, eventually, return to college. His father told him the job would probably be in the mail room—a boring prospect, Chris thought, but a satisfactory economic bridge before going back to school and making a decision about what to do with his future.

In the middle of June, 1974, Chris made an appointment to see his father's friend. He drove to one of the several TRW compounds in Redondo Beach and presented himself at a reception desk; he signed his name on a visitor's card, and after a clerk made a telephone call to confirm his appointment he was given a badge allowing him to enter a limited portion of the plant under the guidance of an escort.

The complex looked much like the aerospace plant where his father worked—really more like a college campus than a factory. There were modern buildings fronting on wide expanses of grass and lots of trees; there were no smokestacks. On the top of several of the buildings were curious igloo-shaped white superstructures that puzzled Chris.

Inside the plant, he walked past rooms that seemed to stretch endlessly into the distance. Each room was illuminated by a ceiling of white fluorescent lights that glowed without shadows and seemed to sap the room of any color; inside each room there was a panorama of bobbing heads hunched over engineering drawing boards. Elsewhere in the plant, there were cavernous rooms with high ceilings, cranes and men in overalls working on glittering metallic hardware of the space age, seemingly without dust, dirt, grease or smoke.

The interview went well. His father's friend was a husky, warm man in his late forties who wore horn-rimmed glasses. The man had a lot in common with his father: he lived on The Hill, had a big family—eight children—and had served in the FBI. The man even knew Chris's uncle; they had served together in the bureau. The gregarious, beefy administrator liked the sober and intelligent youth sitting before him. He told Chris that the chances were good he could have a job at TRW, but first he would have to go through the usual Personnel Department application procedures; and he would have to pass a routine Government security check.

When Chris left his office, the TRW executive already knew exactly what job Chris was to have. But he didn't say anything about it, and Chris was not to know what was on his mind for another four months.

On July 16, Chris sat at a table in a TRW personnel office, a job application before him, and with a ball-point pen filled in his name, address, date of birth, educational background and job history (two jobs as a janitor, one as a pizza cook, one as a waiter and another as a liquor delivery boy), listed the members of his family and gave several neighbors as references. At the bottom of the application was a request:

“Tell us anything else about your work interests, experience, abilities, or career interests which may be helpful in evaluating your qualifications. Include any special skills such as typing and shorthand speeds, business machines, etc.”

Chris answered with candor, admitting he was job hunting at TRW only as a brief expedient before taking up more important things:

“I am delaying my prelaw studies at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo,” he wrote, “for financial reasons and seek employment to correct this situation, determined to work until September, 1976. I am also a licensed California falconer presently flying an Accipiter Cooper.”

Two days after Chris wrote out his job application at TRW, Andrew Daulton Lee sat down at the Wayside Honor Rancho and wrote an application of a different kind.

In pencil Daulton carefully printed a message to Judge Burch Donahue of the Los Angeles County Superior Court:

“The reason for my request for a modification in my sentence is for an education purpose. I feel the time I have spent here has given me mental as well as a physical advantage in returning to an educational pursuit. I am aware that my incarceration has helped me to evaluate my life and made it possible for me to formulate plans for the future. I was majoring in business and economics at the time of my sentencing and I would like to be able to return to school this upcoming semester.”

Daulton listed his occupation on the application as “scuba diver and cabinet maker.”

At Wayside, Daulton had taught some of the other prisoners some of the things he knew about woodworking. Fellow prisoners also taught him some wrinkles about drug dealing that he hadn't known before, and most important, he had met some people who promised to help him make a connection with major drug wholesalers in Mexico, something he had been trying to do for four years.

Christopher John Boyce went to work for TRW on July 29, 1974. His title: General Clerk. His salary: $140 a week. He was twenty-one years old.

On his first day at work, he was photographed and fingerprinted, completed more forms from the Personnel Department and was given a security badge for admission to the plant. The picture on the badge was of a smiling, untroubled young man looking out curiously through a slick plastic film, the kind of picture that might have been taken by an automated camera in an amusement-park arcade.

As he was processed through the Personnel Department, he was handed brochures describing the company's health-insurance and pension programs, a statement of policy on holidays and days off, and a wallet-sized booklet designed to explain to new employees the espionage laws of the United States. Along with other “new-hires” who had joined TRW that Monday, he was summoned to a classroom for a security briefing. They were told that working in a defense plant would seem different to them from any place where they had worked before. Badges were required to get onto the plant premises and should never be lost; no personal guests were allowed, and official visitors had to be approved by Security and be escorted when they were on the plant premises. It was possible, they were told, that they would have to deal with sensitive defense information, and for this reason an in-depth government security check would be made on each of them. Above all, they were told, their work at TRW would be guided by the fundamental rule of the defense industry in protecting sensitive information—the “need to know” rule. It stated: only persons with a specific, job-related
requirement
to know about certain classified work would be given access to it; to others, even in the same office, the information would be off limits. This rule, the new-hires were told, was essential to prevent the spread of secrets.

The briefing completed, Chris was handed a piece of paper on which he acknowledged he had been advised of these rules. “I shall not knowingly and willfully communicate, deliver or transmit in any manner classified information to an unauthorized person or agency,” he pledged.

His first assignment was in Classified Material Control, a department responsible for regulating the flow of secret documents through the plant. Many documents, he was told, had to be locked in safes and could be taken out only with the signatures of a handful of designated people given need-to-know authority. These documents could be transported within the plant only by armed guards. Precise records, his supervisor explained, had to be kept each time one of the secret documents was examined by anyone; the movement and second-by-second location of the data, which ran into tens of thousands of documents, were logged in computers and monitored. It was a dull job, mostly paper shuffling. Chris was not cleared to handle the documents themselves; he helped record their movement around the plant and processed applications for security clearances and issued badges.

On the first Friday after he started work, Chris received a notice to report to Building E-2 at 8:30
A.M.
for another briefing. Other new employees hired that week crowded with him into a classroom, and a young woman appeared at the front of the room and introduced herself.

“Good morning,” she said. “I am here to present the extremely important subject of industrial security, a subject which is of mutual interest and concern to you and me.

“Why? Because, one, as citizens of the United States we have a moral responsibility to protect the government's classified information; and two, as employees of TRW Systems Group, we are bound by a security agreement that obligates TRW to the Department of Defense to protect and safeguard classified information generated by or furnished TRW in the performance of its many classified contracts.

“You might respond to my vindication on security by stating that our formidable military strength should deter the aggressive efforts of the Soviet and satellite nations,” she said. “I agree.

“But the security provided by the Air Force's Strategic Air Command, the Army's Special Forces, the Navy's Polaris missiles and the Marine Corps's readiness is a defense against an overt and outright attack.” What the employees of TRW and other defense contractors must guard against, the voice droned on, is “an insidious effort by Communist agents to get government secrets that are covert.” And she began to list examples of how careless, foolish Americans had been duped by Soviet agents.

“One individual worked for Convair in San Diego,” the young woman said. “He had been contacted and agreed to furnish secrets for a price. The FBI got on to him after a while, but couldn't figure out how he was getting the volumes of material out. It was one of those plants that you don't carry anything in without having it searched and you fill out thirty forms to carry something out, and then copies go to everyone from the president to the janitor.

“His way was a simple one: he ran Xerox copies and put them in a contractor's envelope, prepared a contractor's label and mailed them to his contact on the East Coast via the company mail. He slipped up, though, when he put a wrong address on one package and it was returned marked, ‘No such address.' They opened it to see who it was from and found classified information. And they nailed him.