The Falcon and the Snowman

by Robert Lindsey

  Five days after Chris put the application in the mail, Daulton caught a Mexicana Airlines flight from Mazatlán to Mexico City with plans to shake down the Russians again.

  Following the routine that was now familiar, he checked in at the Holiday Inn, taped X marks on a row of lampposts in one of the designated streets and arrived at the Bali Restaurant at ten o’clock the following morning.

  The Russians did not appear.

  After smoking a joint, Daulton went to a souvenir shop and purchased a picture postcard showing the Pyramid of the Sun. He printed three letters on the card—“K.G.B.”—and then addressed it to “John.” He signed “Luis” at the bottom of the card and went to the embassy, where he threw it past the iron bars into the compound.

  At 6 P.M. on November 2, he was at the Bali, hoping Boris had gotten the message.

  He was a no-show again.

  Daulton decided to confront the situation head-on.

  He flagged down a taxi and gave the driver directions to an intersection near the Russian embassy. En route, he sniffed a pinch of cocaine he had slipped into his right nostril, and again, the marvelous sense of self-confidence it gave him cascaded over Daulton.

  As the cab moved slowly through dense early-evening traffic, Daulton looked out the window and saw small bands of adults and children in processions, some of them carrying candles that lit up the early-evening shadows with a soft flickering glow. He realized it was El día de los muertos—the Day of the Dead, one of Mexico’s major holidays. It was a blend of Halloween, All Saints’ Day, All Souls’ Day, even a bit of Easter. El día de los muertos was rooted in Spanish and pre-Columbian traditions, a time to show reverence to the dead. In shops around the city, windows were filled with miniature human skulls made of white sugar and decorated with frosting and tinsel; bakeries had produced thousands of sweet breads called pan de los muertos (the bread of the dead), and pastries shaped like human bones; special altars had been prepared and were laden with photographs of deceased family members. Samples of their favorite foods had been left on the altars beside the pictures. And throughout the city, there were processions of families flocking to cemeteries bearing candles, incense and more servings of dead family members’ favorite foods, which were to be left at their graves while the family sang traditional songs of the holiday.

  Daulton paid the driver and made his way through several processions of celebrants before reaching the high fence of iron bars outside the embassy. Deciding that there was just one way to accomplish his goal, he positioned himself near the front gate and waited. When his chance came, he followed a car that entered the gate. He introduced himself to a guard and said in his poor Spanish that he wanted to see Boris Grishin.

  Boris was furious.

  The tight expression that Daulton had learned to be wary of twisted the muscles around the KGB officer’s mouth, as he angrily denounced Daulton for violating orders not to enter the embassy unannounced and for throwing the card through the fence. He accused Daulton of being incoherent because of drugs. “You’re stupid,” he said in Spanish.

  In defense, Daulton whipped out several strips of microfilm ciphers given him months earlier by Chris, and demanded $10,000. Boris ridiculed the demand. The material was worthless, he said, and scolded Daulton for again failing to bring information he had promised. Daulton stood his ground; he said again he was tired of risking his life for the Russians and getting nothing for the risk and began to wave his finger at Boris and raise his voice. On this occasion, however, Boris was sober and not in a mood to debate his undisciplined spy: without any warning, he grabbed him by the back of his jacket and pulled the garment over his head, and with the help of two embassy chauffeurs, he marched Daulton to a limousine with the jacket draped over his face like a blanket. Daulton was pushed into the back seat and ordered to lie on the floor so he couldn’t be seen. Within seconds, the car roared out the embassy gate with the KGB man Igor Dagtyr at the wheel, Karpov in the back seat and Daulton crouched on the floor. From the sounds of the streets, Daulton knew they were moving away from the center of Mexico City, but he couldn’t tell in which direction they were headed. Sitting above him, Karpov told Daulton not to speak.

  He had been lying on the floor of the back seat of the limousine for perhaps fifteen minutes when, suddenly, it began to slow. Daulton’s confidence was still buoyed by the drugs. But he retained enough of his inherent sense of cunning to be panicked by the tug of inertia he felt as the car began to slow. In his last words to Boris before he was escorted out of the embassy, Daulton had promised to return soon with some of the data the Russians had wanted all these months. But now he was disoriented; he wasn’t sure whether he had his former power over the Russians. As the car slowed, he wondered: Had his promise been enough to plant seeds of hope in Boris? Or had they at last called his hand and decided to eliminate him? The car continued to slow; Daulton heard the familiar squeak of the limousine’s brakes and braced for it to stop. But then he began to realize Dagtyr didn’t plan to stop. He heard the two men conversing in Russian. Something in their voices suggested they weren’t going to stop. Then Karpov opened the backseat door next to him and suddenly pushed Daulton out.

  Daulton fell out on what felt like a cobblestone street.

  The car sped off and disappeared into the evening traffic. The car had been going slowly enough so that Daulton wasn’t hurt. He caught a cab and returned to the Holiday Inn, where he wondered if the scam had finally run its course.

  Chris, meanwhile, had discovered a new field, and it was to provide him with a few minutes of escape from the sense of doom that weighed him down the remaining hours of each day. It was fifty acres, spared somehow by the subdividers and the shopping-center builders, in the city of Compton, a twenty-minute drive from the beach and TRW.

  Chris was eating little these days and, he told himself, drinking too much. There had been no response to his letter about the job in Colorado. There had been no reply to his application to the university. He was sure of one thing: he would leave TRW now. But it would be a miracle if he got a chance to go to the university or make a new start in Colorado. Whatever would happen now was inevitable.

  How insane the world had become, he reflected; he thought of ancient Greece and Rome, about the great cities man had built, his great works of art, and then he thought of the cities smoldering in the darkness of a civilization that had snuffed itself out in atomic warfare. What madness man had created!

  His mind focused on the silos that pocked Siberia and the base of the Urals and other areas of the Soviet Union; he thought of identical silos dug into the plains of Wyoming, North Dakota and Arizona and other stretches of the prairie, where, less than a century before, American Indians had fought for survival with bows and arrows. Each silo on both sides of the world had a missile with enough energy to destroy several cities. These were not abstract illusions, he thought, but reality. They were there. In each silo was a missile with a nuclear warhead; each missile was alive, with the gyrocompass in its guidance system spinning relentlessly twenty-four hours a day, awaiting a signal to carry the warhead to a target that had already been chosen by men and their computers.

  How had man come to this brink? Civilization was so close to annihilation. Why weren’t other people as panicked as he was? The missiles were in the silos, ready to be launched at an instant … ready to extinguish in minutes what man had taken thousands of years to build. Didn’t people know that?

  As Chris looked at the field, he wondered where the missile was that was targeted for this piece of earth. It was crazy! How had man arrived at this moment where a mistake, a false move or a fragile human ego had the capability to turn everything into ashes?

  He thought again of the crazy quest for manhood that war fulfilled for so many men, that blindness he had first discovered in Lee’s Lieutenants, the blindness he had seen in the eyes of Boris, which he could see every day in the eyes of the CIA spooks at Pedal and Banjo. They were adolescent boys trying to prove thems
elves to one another. But didn’t other people realize what this mindless groping for manhood was going to do to the world?

  There was talk in the papers about the SALT negotiations to limit nuclear weapons. There’s no hope, he thought. Hadn’t the generals always used every new weapon they acquired? Hadn’t all of the wars for at least a century been preceded by just such disarmament negotiations?

  In the field in Compton, Chris managed to forget some of his fears, because of Nurd. Nurd was a tercel—a male hawk—that Chris had trapped on a weekend trip to Arizona, and in the shortening days of early November, Chris brought Nurd often to the field to hunt rabbits. He set his alarm clock for 4 A.M., went to the plant, set up the coding machines for the day, accepted whatever traffic had accumulated from CIA headquarters and then went home, picked up Nurd and drove to the field with him for an hour or so. Almost every day Nurd got a cottontail, and one morning he caught two.

  How long, he wondered, would it be before he was caught?

  On November 12, Chris was advised by the University of California at Riverside that he had been accepted for admission in the winter quarter, beginning in January, 1977. He informed TRW that he was returning to college and requested termination on December 17, after the company had had time to train a successor.

  Now that he had made this decision, Chris decided to make one final gesture. There was no pressure from Daulton, no threats of blackmail. But he had promised Boris to make one last delivery, and he intended to keep it.

  “They’re catching on, I’m telling you, man, it’s getting spooky,” Daulton said when Chris told him they should make a final delivery. “They say the recent stuff isn’t any good,” he said. Chris said he shouldn’t worry and then motivated Daulton with the kind of words that, as always, he knew would do the job: he said he had access to documents that he knew would be worth at least $75,000 to the Soviets. Daulton listened and agreed. The documents were about a project, Chris said, that sounded as if it were “something out of the movies.”

  34

  The essence of running an espionage network in a foreign country is communications. Whether an agent is recruited or planted in an unfriendly nation, whether his mission is to obtain secret information or to bring down a government, reliable communication between the agent and his intelligence service is essential. What good is the work of a spy who gleans warning of a coup d’état or an invasion if he can’t transmit the information to his control? What good is an agent whose supervisor cannot control the spy and direct an espionage operation?

  Spies during the Napoleonic Wars used invisible ink to write messages concealed on harmless-looking public documents. German spies during World War I used hollowed stones to leave messages. Hidden radio transmitters in the Low Countries of Europe flashed reports of Nazi research on rockets during World War II.

  The cameras, infrared heat sensors, radio antennae and other instruments on spy satellites revolutionized the collection of strategic intelligence information during the nineteen-sixties. But the science of communicating with individual agents remained rather primitive. The KGB gave Daulton a spool of adhesive tape to place on lampposts; it sent him coded postcards at a mail drop and gave him a schedule of prearranged telephone calls.

  Late in the nineteen-sixties, the CIA began to fashion a scheme for a global grand design of espionage communications. It was to be the ultimate method of controlling and exchanging information with operatives working undercover in what the agency, euphemistically, called “denied areas of the world.”

  Earlier in the decade, the agency had begun using Pentagon communication satellites to exchange information with agents. With portable radio gear, spies could broadcast and receive information via the satellites. But these systems were only partially satisfactory. Agents in some regions of the world did not have access to them because, geographically, they were out of range of the satellites. Agents in other areas could use them only at limited times of the day, and the technology was such that a sophisticated counterintelligence service might eavesdrop on the signals and discover the spy.

  The grand design that began to take shape within the Central Intelligence Agency was a new kind of satellite system designed for, and dedicated solely to, espionage—a push-button system of communications that was to enable agency officials in Langley, Virginia, a suburb of Washington, to maintain, twenty-four hours a day, undetected communications with a spy anywhere in the world.

  A spy was to be given a miniature, portable transceiver disguised in any number of ways: as a wallet, a pocket calculator, a cigarette case, an ashtray, a flashlight or something similarly mundane. No matter where he or she was located, the agent would be able to communicate secretly and instantaneously with Langley.

  It was a concept with ingenious possibilities: a CIA officer could come to work after a morning round of golf in Virginia and hold a two-way conversation of encrypted telegrams with an agent located on a roof in Cairo, then switch to an exchange of data with agents in Kiev, Peking or Entebbe.

  In November, 1972, the CIA sent Lockheed, TRW and several other companies a Top Secret letter disclosing that it was considering implementation of a series of research studies aimed at developing a “world-wide cover communication satellite system.”

  In the language of the aerospace industry, such a letter is called an RFP—a Request for Proposal.

  TRW responded that it would submit a proposal in an effort to win a CIA study contract on the project.

  The CIA’s RFP read:

  The principal requirements for the satellite network are as follows:

  * Provide maximum protection of the user against signal detection and direction finding leading to determination of user location.

  * Minimize dependence upon overseas ground stations.

  * Provide multiple simultaneous access capability to users employing different types of traffic, data rates, modulation techniques and radiated power levels.

  * Provide communications on demand with essentially no waiting time regardless of type and location of user.

  * Provide protection against traffic analysis, which could imply numbers, types, purpose and location of users.

  The CIA said it wanted a design that could not only provide a clandestine avenue of communication with agents, but also relay information from robot transmitters that were to be dropped secretly on foreign soil to transmit intelligence information by remote control—seismic measurements, for example, disclosing the incidence, time and magnitude of nuclear-weapons tests. There was also a third desired capability—the capacity to serve in an emergency as a conduit for communications between Washington and American embassies around the world.

  The intelligence agency dictated that the system had to be able to handle up to about one hundred agents at one time, a daily volume of some fifty messages to Langley and about twenty messages sent from Langley to agents. Some of the transmissions would be as long as two hundred words, but most would be in short bursts, the equivalent of about ten words.

  There was to be one fundamental requirement for the system, the CIA told TRW: the chance of transmissions’ being detected was to be less than I percent.

  The CIA letter stated:

  This study effort is classified TOP SECRET and has been assigned a code-word designator, “PYRAMIDER.”

  All contractor personnel working on this study effort must have a current TOP SECRET clearance and must be approved by Headquarters prior to being briefed on PYRAMIDER.

  Contractor personnel proposed for clearance access to this study must qualify by holding a currently valid BYEMAN security access approval.

  While this study effort will be conducted within the contractor facilities as TOP SECRET, and while only those personnel holding active BYEMAN access approvals are eligible for consideration, the effort is not a BYEMAN study, but is to be conducted in all aspects of document control, physical security standards, communications within Headquarters, and the like, as if it were BYEMAN.

  Sec
urity officers will assure documents within the contractor facility are stamped TOP SECRET/PYRAMIDER only, and are not entered into the BYEMAN system.

  The highly sensitive nature of this effort cannot be emphasized enough. Personnel submitted for access approval will be submitted via cable message which shall fully outline their need-to-know. No Form 2018 will be submitted to Headquarters. A list of those persons approved for access to PYRAMIDER shall be maintained by Headquarters Security Staff. Cable messages shall be sent via secure TWX and shall be slugged PYRAMIDER on the second line. PYRAMIDER shall enjoy limited distribution within Project Headquarters.

  In February, 1973, a Top Secret TWX arrived at the Black Vault from Langley notifying the company that it had been selected to develop a design for the Pyramider project. A few weeks later a formal contract arrived from the CIA. It was signed in a broad scrawl with the name James Cranbrook, a pseudonym assigned to a CIA official to give him anonymity. The initially authorized spending for the study was only $50,000. But as was common in the aerospace industry, TRW would invest considerably more than this in the study in the belief that it would lead to a CIA production contract worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

  Sketches of the proposed TOP SECRET Pyramider satellites.

  A specially cleared team of forty engineers and technical specialists, working in a sealed area in M-4, was assigned to design the global covert-communications network in the spring of 1973, a year before Christopher Boyce became an employee of TRW. In July, the team submitted its plan for the system.

  It concluded that the CIA’s ambitions for the espionage switchboard were realistic: such a system, it said, could be provided between Langley and its far-flung agents at a price of between $355 million and $442 million, depending on technical variables to be decided later as development proceeded.

  The plan envisaged launching three satellites 22,000 miles from the earth in so-called “stationary” orbits, in which their movement through space would be synchronized to the earth’s own rotational speed and, thus, seem to remain over the same point on earth. One satellite, positioned over the Indian Ocean, and another, over the Pacific, were to be always within broadcast range of Langley; the third was to be positioned on the other side of the globe above Southeast Asia. The messages it handled would be relayed by one of the other two satellites or by an earth station on the Pacific island of Guam.