The Falcon and the Snowman

by Robert Lindsey

  There were more cipher cards and copies of several TWX messages between Pilot, Pedal and Moreno—the code name for the base at Alice Springs.

  After inspecting the documents briefly, Steely Teeth gave them to Karpov, who had reappeared after parking the embassy car. Daulton had tried to make conversation with him in English, but the chauffeur shook his head.

  With Karpov now in possession of the documents, Steely Teeth suggested that he, Daulton and Okana adjourn to a nearby restaurant for drinks, dinner and a celebration. The Russians were all smiles.

  Karpov appeared at the restaurant just as coffee was being served. He said something in Russian to Steely Teeth, who told Daulton they would like to have more time to examine the documents. Would it be possible for him to see them again the next day?

  At ten the following morning, Daulton was waiting at a bus stop near the Old City at a spot where he had been told to expect Karpov. The chauffeur was prompt and took Daulton on another high-speed trip through the narrow streets of the Old City, circumnavigating the Zócalo, Mexico City’s huge central square, and then plunging into alleys and seemingly getting lost in the byways of the city until the car arrived at the embassy with Daulton flattened on the back seat to avoid being seen.

  He was led into a room deep inside the embassy and greeted by Steely Teeth.

  Caviar and bottles of vodka were waiting on a table next to a tape recorder. Okana wasn’t there, but Karpov sat in a corner quietly watching Daulton. Under interrogation by The Colonel, Daulton told what he knew about the satellite operations. Again, he refused to identify his source. But he did his best to raise the Russians’ expectations of what he would deliver in the future.

  “I’m sure I can get what you want next month,” Daulton said, and this seemed to please the KGB men.

  Steely Teeth said the operation was going well, but that additional information was required pertaining to the TRW satellites. Daulton sensed that someone, outside the circle of Russians he had met, was being consulted each time Karpov or The Colonel left the room and came back with new inquiries. He suspected they might have brought a technical specialist from outside Mexico City.

  Steely Teeth said they wanted as much technical data about the satellites as Daulton’s friend could obtain, but particularly they wanted details of the infrared sensing instruments employed on TRW satellites. He also asked for copies of instruction manuals for the use of components of the satellites, the tables-of-contents of official publications dealing with the space vehicles, names of the people who worked with his friend, pictures of the place where the friend worked and photographs of the satellites. Still more data were needed, the Soviet agent continued, about the methods of transmission—especially the frequency and band widths—used in the system that employed the ciphers.

  Daulton slowly took notes on the questions and said optimistically he thought he could get what was wanted. After a while, Karpov came into the room and handed Daulton an envelope containing scores of $100 bills.

  Before Karpov took him back, Steely Teeth advised Daulton he was foolish to bring the documents physically to Mexico City; instead, he should photograph them and return them quickly to where his friend had found them. This would reduce the risk, he said.

  They said good-bye and agreed tentatively to another meeting the following month.

  Daulton had told his brother, David, that he was embarking on a scam to sell something to the Russians even before his first connection with the Soviets, and he had said that when it was over he would be wealthy.

  More than anyone else, Dave knew that Daulton liked to spin tales that cloaked him in importance. He had long observed at close hand the demons that haunted Daulton because of his size and looks, the humiliation that girls bestowed on him and his failure to please his father. Even when Daulton came home boasting that he now knew the Russians would “buy anything,” Dave was skeptical. But as Daulton made more trips to Mexico and returned home with envelopes stuffed with brand-new American currency, Dave began to suspect that there might be some truth to Daulton’s crazy claim that he and Chris were pulling off a scam involving the Soviet Union.

  Several months after Daulton started his periodic trips to Mexico City, Dave joined a group of Palos Verdes high school students on a tour of Eastern Europe.

  The tour proceeded normally until the delegation reached Kiev, the ancient city in the Ukraine. After David unaccountably became ill with a high fever and nausea, he blamed the attack on too much beer and sausage when the group had visited Poland. But a Russian doctor who was summoned to his hotel said he had a serious viral infection and he’d have to be hospitalized while the group continued without him.

  At a Kiev hospital, David had a visit from the group’s English-speaking guide, Ira Mironenko, who worked for Intourist, the Soviet tourist agency. He had noticed her during the tour and thought once or twice that she was trying to catch his eye. She had seemed to go out of her way to choose a seat next to him in the opera and had purposely rubbed against him as they left. David had been flattered by the attention and interested in the possibilities.

  When the girl arrived at his bedside he was even more encouraged. Ira visited him three times, staying several hours each time and asking to know all about America. She seemed particularly interested in Dave’s family, and when he said he had a brother she inquired at length about him.

  David felt he had made a conquest. They agreed to exchange letters; but after he was back in the United States, he wrote to Ira and she did not reply. He would never know why she had asked so many questions, or whether her interest was in him or in Daulton.

  20

  The first thing men noticed about Carole Benedict was her figure. She had blond hair the color of straw and blue eyes, but her hair and face were usually overlooked during the first glance. For as long as she could remember, whether she was rushing to class through the corridors at Rolling Hills High or stretched out on a blanket on the sand at Redondo Beach, Carole had seen men and boys, out of the corner of her eye, studying the lines and motion of her breasts. (Some of the football players who pursued her in high school calculated that she taped out at thirty-eight inches before the end of her junior year.)

  By the time Daulton met her in 1973, there was already the hint of tarnish on the looks of a girl whose shape, straw-colored hair and beauty were of the stuff which the myth of the California Girl (the girls of California were all supposed to look like that) relied on for perpetuation.

  Carole was the daughter of a lawyer who lived in the most exclusive part of the status-conscious Peninsula, the rural enclave of Rolling Hills. It was the kind of place that real estate ads referred to as “horse country.” It was isolated from the rest of The Hill by fences and guards at gates who made sure that only residents and their authorized guests entered the three-square-mile community-within-a-community of wooded high ground and $400,000-and-up homes. To live in Rolling Hills was to live “behind the gates.” In a world where some people chose their Mercedes-Benzes or Jaguars as much to communicate to neighbors their continuing upward economic climb in life as they did for transportation, living “behind the gates” represented the Peninsula’s supreme validation of having risen very high indeed.

  Carole Benedict had everything material that she wanted. But for years, her family had been ruptured by bitter combat between her mother and father. It was a turbulent union that would eventually dissolve in divorce, and Carole gravitated from her troubled home to Barclay Granger.

  If Carole epitomized Madison Avenue’s fantasy of the California Girl, Granger’s tanned, rugged beachcomber looks were a perfect complement. Barclay never looked better than when he was on a surfboard, his long brown hair streaming in the wind like the trailing scarf of an aviator, his knees slightly bent and arms outstretched, gliding beneath the curl of a six-footer while the gremmies—the girls who followed the surfers—watched in awe from shore.

  As a high school student he haunted the beaches up and down the Califo
rnia coast, pursuing the best waves and dreaming of someday riding the biggest waves of all at Sunset Beach in Hawaii. Girls were never a problem for Barclay; they hovered around him like kids surrounding an ice cream vendor on a hot day at the beach. His life was nonstop surfing, sex, drinking and drugs. And even though some of his friends died of overdoses, Barclay merely regarded this as “part of the territory.”

  When his friends at Palos Verdes High scattered after graduation to enter college or go to war, to begin careers or marry, Barclay clung to his waves. His father—a business executive who was divorced from his mother—like Daulton’s father tried to interest his son in college. Barclay tried a semester at Harbor College but didn’t survive even its relaxed academic standards. The only thing he wanted to do was surf. For a while, he found a compromise between work and play—a job at a shop that shaped long planks of lightweight foam plastic into surfboards; but he didn’t like the work part of this compromise.

  Carole’s parents didn’t approve of Barclay, who was more than three years older than she was. But they were distracted by the final throes of the dissolution of their marriage, and Carole was edged into a side room of their lives. A few weeks before her seventeenth birthday, Carole moved in with Granger, who tried to support both of them on the sporadic earnings he made shaping surfboards. But that didn’t bring in enough money, so Carole got a part-time job selling women’s clothing in a dress shop.

  Like Daulton, Barclay resisted the discipline of a regular job. And as with Daulton, the easy money of drug dealing seemed exactly what he was looking for.

  He managed to find a reliable supply before Daulton did, and for a while Daulton had acted as a subcontractor to him, selling marijuana, for which he got a cut of the profit. Later, Daulton found his own source and they teamed as partners; they diversified into cocaine and, eventually, heroin until some weeks they were grossing more than $3,000. Their timing was lucky: just when many customers on The Hill had become bored with pot, they had found a source of coke, and then heroin. Coke was a more expensive high than pot—$20 or more a pop compared with $2—but they found plenty of buyers who could afford it.

  Daulton saw a lot of Carole and Barclay during the spring and summer of 1975. During his quick trips from Mexico or from Santa Cruz for a deal, he often stayed at their apartment, making his deals over the telephone, keeping the windows shaded and the doors locked.

  After the arrest warrant was issued, Carole thought she noticed a change in Daulton. He still boasted of the big deals he was going to pull off, and still entertained lavishly at his cost-be-damned parties that had become a legend on The Hill. But, as she would recall, “He wouldn’t relax: he was nervous all the time and always complaining of trouble with his stomach.”

  Meanwhile, stresses had begun to appear in the fragile relationship that Carole and Barclay had built for themselves in the small Redondo Beach apartment. Now that she had a steady job, she suggested that Barclay give up pushing drugs, get a real job and then marry her.

  Carole believed she was still in love with Barclay, but their apartment was often a battleground, not only over his drug dealing and her fears that he would have to go to jail, but over her suspicions that he was seeing other girls. They were suspicions, unfortunately for Carole, that were justified.

  Daulton had fancied the well-built girl, who was four inches taller than he was, for several years, and he was not unaware of the troubles she was having with Barclay. He placed a call to her from Mexico and suggested that she and Barclay come down for a holiday—or, he added, if she wanted to come alone, that would be fine too. Daulton said he needed a mule to carry money—someone to carry cash across the border. The most he could bring over the border, he explained, was $5,000; any amount over that had to be declared to Customs officers. So all she had to do for a free holiday in Mexico was carry that amount for him—and there was nothing illegal about it.

  In truth, Daulton had more in mind for Carole than carrying money.

  Several times Carole had seen Daulton flashing stacks of $100 bills that he had explained casually he had obtained in Mexico. She’d wondered about the source of all this money but had decided he was probably just doing well in his drug business.

  Barclay told Carole he couldn’t go to Mexico now because he was scheduled to appear in court within a few days to answer charges on another drug bust. But, he said, she should go and have a good time without him.

  Barclay was glad to see Carole off on the plane to Mexico. He had found another interest: her name was Darlene Cooper, and she was yet another teen-age refugee from Palos Verdes.

  Darlene had been one of the original “groupies”—the teen-age girls who systematically pursued rock-music stars in the sixties like quarry in a fox hunt, sneaking into their hotels and trying to seduce them and, after succeeding, comparing their scores with one another like frontier bounty hunters. Darlene’s family was well-to-do, and she had all the money she needed to finance expeditions to New York, Chicago, San Francisco and other cities on rock stars’ concert tours. Darlene was a well-organized camp follower and, according to the gossip heard on The Hill, had one week boasted of bedding at least one member of every group listed on Billboard magazine’s chart of the top five best-selling single records.

  Darlene constantly wove fantasies about her future. Some of her friends had told her that she was tall enough and pretty enough to become a fashion model, especially when she bleached her hair and it came out a stunning blend of gold and ivory, and Darlene began to dream of going to New York City and becoming a model. But that wasn’t her only dream. Darlene admired the rugged looks of Barclay Granger, and the day that Carole left to see Daulton in Mexico, Darlene went to bed with Barclay.

  Carole’s destination was Mazatlán, which had been an obscure fishing village on the Gulf of California in Mexico until the mid-sixties, when travel agents and tour operators, and then tourists, discovered its turquoise waters and beaches with sand like granules of snowy-white sugar. These days, jets were bringing gringos by the thousands every week, most of them from Southern California, on charter flights to Mazatlán, where a week under the sun (including hotels and air fare) cost just under $200. For Daulton, Mazatlán had attractions besides sun and sand. It was within driving distance of Culiacán. As the gang warfare there became more intense, and the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration began having success in deploying undercover agents to fight the drug trade, some of the Culiacán drug traffickers began using Mazatlán as a safer base of operations. Lost amid the hordes of tourists who jammed the high-rise hotels that had sprouted like sunflowers along the edge of the ocean, Daulton could conduct business as well as enjoy himself.

  Carole landed at the Mazatlán airport and took a taxi eight miles north of the city to the Camino Real Hotel. As usual, Daulton had chosen to live in the most expensive hotel in town. Perched on a promontory overlooking the Pacific, the city’s busy port and nervous tourists floating past beneath huge billowing yellow-and-red parasails towed through the air by speedboats and long tethers, the Camino Real was Mazatlán’s newest hotel. Carole located him near the pool; he had a drink in his hand, and mentally she noted that Daulton might have been right—it did look like a good life.

  Daulton, who was registered as Ted Lovelance, lived with Carole in the hotel for four days, and it was the start of a curious romance. For years Daulton had dreamed of getting the big-busted girl into bed—one friend joked he’d probably spent $5,000 at it—but despite uncounted gifts, expensive dinners and drugs, he hadn’t succeeded. In Mazatlán, Daulton would believe that the tall, willowy, sexy girl was falling for him, and he later boasted in detail of their nights spent in bed at the Camino Real. Carole, in the blank, empty gaze that often characterized her, later said their relationship had been mostly platonic. But during the stormy final months of her affair with Barclay, and for a short time after that, she used Daulton to lean on.

  On the night of Carole’s arrival, they celebrated with margaritas and dinner
at Señor Frog’s, a noisy Mazatlán restaurant where seafood was served family style on long tables, while a tinny mariachi band strolled past and serenaded the diners. Afterward, they went for a swim in the hotel pool before going to bed. It was probably one of the happier episodes in Daulton’s frequently tormented life.

  They hired a car the next day and went sight-seeing like tourists along the spectacular curving shoreline near Mazatlán. They lunched on the jumbo shrimp for which Mazatlán is famous, then visited an arcade of shops that promoters had built to cater to the growing number of American tourists who visited the resort.

  Carole admired a leather jacket in one shop, and Daulton immediately bought it. When she admired jewelry at another shop, he bought that for her too.

  After they went swimming, with Carole wearing a bikini that caused one distracted American tourist to fall into the pool, Daulton returned to the arcade and spent $800 on an Oriental cloisonné vase and some pottery for Carole. During their shopping trips and at meals, she observed that the wad of cash in Daulton’s wallet seemed inexhaustible; and later, she discovered why: whenever he ran out of cash, he merely picked out more from a suitcase in the room. Carole asked where the money came from, and Daulton boasted that he’d found a profitable new enterprise—selling stolen securities in Mexico.

  The idyll over, Daulton bought an airline ticket to Los Angeles for Carole and kissed her good-bye.

  The reason Daulton had so much cash at Mazatlán was that three days before he met Carole at the Camino Real he had made another delivery in Mexico. Chris had supplied him with another batch of month-old key-list ciphers that were supposed to have already been destroyed and copies of TWX messages regarding Rhyolite.

  Along with the documents, Daulton gave the Soviets a personal message from Chris. It was in code, about thirty numbers printed on a 3-by-5-inch file card. Chris had devised the code during a quiet moment in the vault. The code was based on the number seven. Starting backward, he took the letters of the alphabet and assigned each a number based on seven. Z, the last letter of the alphabet, was assigned 7; Y was 14; X, 21; W, 28, and so on. And then he reversed the digits. X became 12; W, 82; and so forth. At the end of his coded message was the telephone number of a pay phone in Hermosa Beach, the town north of Redondo Beach. Chris had told Daulton that they needed a means to communicate with the Russians from the United States and suggested in the note that the KGB men in Mexico call the number at a specified hour—he gave them a day and time—if they had any messages. What Chris didn’t say to Daulton was that he was trying to set up an independent channel of communication so that he could deal with the Russians himself and not have his fate so wrapped up in the whims of his friend. He figured the Russians could easily crack the simple code, and later he found out that he was right.