The Falcon and the Snowman

by Robert Lindsey

  “I had a clientele you wouldn’t believe: older, more sophisticated people. I had the best product, and the best, cleanest highs. And in those days you could trust the people you were dealing with. The way it was then, we were into getting high first, making a profit second. Later, the whole thing got out of proportion. It became cutthroat, rip-offs, anything goes. When I first got into it, well, it broke down to a very legitimate business; it was illegal, but it was a very legitimate kind of business.”

  Eventually, Daulton was admitted to The Brotherhood, a measure of social acceptance in his milieu at least equal to his parents’ acceptance by the Palos Verdes Country Club. The Brotherhood was a drug cult founded by Dr. Timothy Leary, the onetime Harvard lecturer who in the late nineteen-sixties became an advocate of LSD and other drugs. Daulton would describe his association with The Brotherhood later as almost a religious experience, with drugs as its god: “We were just a tightly knit group of people who were aligned in the distribution of a high quality of drug. We weren’t talking about the overthrowing of governments; we were just talking about a different awareness, of viewing things from a different perspective. We didn’t want to hurt anybody.”

  Except for Chris, Daulton was by now spurning former classmates who had opted to lead conventional lives. “It was hard to find anything in common with people who worked all day,” he would explain. “They were all hooked to the grind of working eight to four, coming home, getting drunk every night, waking up with a hangover and going to work. I was sleeping late, playing handball, traveling; I had money, women when I wanted them; you couldn’t ask for a better life.”

  Early in 1973, Daulton moved out of his parents’ home into an apartment in Torrance, a city on the flatlands north of the Peninsula, with Aaron Johnson, another product of The Hill whose father earned $200,000 a year as vice president of a steel company. A muscular blond athlete who always had a string of girls pursuing him, Johnson, like Daulton, had abandoned college and was making his living by selling drugs. The two soon agreed to become partners. Daulton also formed an occasional partnership with Barclay Granger, another friend from Palos Verdes High.

  On the last day of July, 1973, with business thriving and Daulton enjoying himself as never before, a shaggy youth with shoulder-length hair and an unkempt beard approached Johnson in a bar and said he wanted to buy ten pounds of marijuana. When the new customer later showed up at their apartment to pick up the weed, Johnson said he would go after the merchandise and left with an empty shopping bag for one of the places where he and Daulton stashed their inventory. Daulton stayed behind and was chatting with the new client when cops—so many he couldn’t count them—shoved their way into the apartment. Suddenly, the new “customer” pulled out a revolver and announced he was a police officer. When Johnson returned, he and Daulton were taken to jail, and samples of marijuana, hashish, hashish oil and peyote found in Daulton’s bedroom were seized by the police. Within two days, he and his friend posted bail of $5,000 apiece—not much money for the prosperous drug traffickers—and they were released. Unruffled, they resumed business as usual.

  Four days later, the fourteen-year-old brother of Barclay Granger offered to sell a gram of cocaine to a bearded undercover policeman in Huntington Beach, a town on the coast south of Long Beach. The policeman expressed delight at the quality of the cocaine, asked for more and arranged to buy an additional twenty-three grams for $1,300 on July 12. Granger’s brother made the delivery, was arrested and led the police to his brother and Daulton, who had been using the fourteen-year-old as part of a cadre of youthful runners. Granger and Daulton quickly posted $10,000 each and were released on bail for the second time in two weeks.

  Daulton had now been arrested twice while he was on probation for his 1971 arrest. His parents warned him that he would have to go to jail. Daulton said that the arrests, both of them, were a frame-up. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I’ll beat it.”

  He was wrong.

  “I beg the court to let me continue probation,” Daulton wrote Judge Burch Donahue of the Los Angeles County Superior Court early in 1974. With the help of his attorney, Daulton had managed to postpone the moment of reckoning on the two new arrests for almost six months. But he had finally run out of delaying tactics and faced the revocation of his probation. He pleaded for mercy: “I have a deadly fear of the violence and homosexuality in jail; too many people have told me of it,” he wrote.

  But Judge Donahue, who had taken over Daulton’s case from Judge Miller, said two felony arrests for selling dangerous drugs while the defendant was on probation was too much. He revoked Daulton’s probation and sentenced him to serve one year in the Los Angeles County Jail’s minimum-security work camp, the Wayside Honor Rancho.

  If Daulton behaved himself, the judge said, he might consider a reduction in the sentence at some point in the future. But first, he said, Daulton would have to show a will to rehabilitate himself. Daulton entered the jail farm on March 7, 1974.

  While Daulton had plunged into drug dealing so profitably, convinced that he had found his life’s calling, Chris was still groping for his direction in life. In January, 1972, he enrolled at Harbor Junior College—an episode of mononucleosis had made him miss the previous semester—and he earned a B-plus average, suggesting he had rediscovered some of his old academic prowess. But Chris, still unable to resolve his religious doubts, felt disoriented. In the summer of 1972, 43 made a pact with himself: he would give the church one year; if it would save his faith, he would gladly become a priest.

  He decided that the best place to resolve his doubts was under the influence of the Jesuits, the most intellectual of the religious orders. In September, 1972, he entered Loyola University, the Jesuit institution that his father had attended. If the Jesuits could subdue the devils that were nibbling at his beliefs, he told himself, he would enter the priesthood the following year and devote his life to God and the Church.

  These were fast-moving times in America and in the world, and Chris continued to devour the news reports on television and in the newspapers. There were President Nixon’s visit to China, the departure of the last American ground troops from South Vietnam and, from Chile, reports of troubles within the administration of President Salvador Allende. Chris avidly followed news of the presidential campaign and President Nixon’s landslide victory over George McGovern and the reports beginning to emerge from Washington suggesting that the Nixon Administration might be attempting to hide some politically embarrassing secrets. There were other stories in the paper, although Chris did not notice all of them, including the dispatches from Australia noting that after twenty-three years of rule by the Liberal and National Country parties, the Labour Party, led by Edward Gough Whitlam, had been elected to run the country.

  As Chris lost himself in texts on religious philosophy, metaphysics and history, the news began to turn increasingly sour. The nation’s Vice President resigned after pleading no contest to accusations of tax evasion. Daniel Ellsberg and Anthony Russo were prosecuted for attempting to alert the public to corrupt policies pursued by the United States Government during the Vietnam War. There were reports that America had secretly bombed Cambodia. After the fall of the Allende government in Chile, there were ugly rumors that the Central Intelligence Agency might have had a hand in his death. And throughout the year, the cancer of Watergate continued to spread.

  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 Mo
rro 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.