The Falcon and the Snowman

by Robert Lindsey

  What was going down? Daulton asked himself. He thought again of Chris’s strange behavior. Maybe, he mused dreamily, Chris was working for the CIA all this time.

  After the guards on either side of him fell asleep, he retrieved six grams of hash that were hidden in his bag which had been saved for him at the Holiday Inn after his arrest. He swallowed the hash and let his thoughts wander some more before he drifted back to sleep.

  37

  A few minutes after 7 A.M. on January 17, 1977, the car reached the southern side of the international bridge that spans the Rio Grande River between Nuevo Laredo, Mexico, and Laredo, Texas. On their respective sides of the border the flags of Mexico and the United States were flattened against the wind by a strong breeze.

  One of the four Mexican secret police agents who had accompanied Daulton on the fourteen-hour drive from Mexico City shook his shoulders to wake him. As they let him out of the car, each said “Adiós” to their passenger.

  Carrying the small suitcase he had so often used on his trips back and forth over the border, Daulton walked alone across the bridge. He was a lonely figure. His mouth tasted like sour milk, he had a two-week growth of beard and he felt weary and haggard.

  Waiting for him with smiles and outstretched hands were FBI Agents Robert B. Lyons, Frederick A. Slight and John W. Smith. They shook his hand and said they hoped he had had a good trip.

  A few minutes later, the agents presented him with a typed statement recounting his interview of two nights earlier in Mexico City. Daulton signed the statement, and it was immediately stamped TOP SECRET. Then Daulton was offered breakfast.

  Nine days before Daulton crossed the bridge at Laredo, the telephone rang at the Lee home in Palos Verdes, and a man with a Mexican accent asked to speak to Daulton’s mother.

  The caller introduced himself to Mrs. Lee as “Rafael Vargas,” a friend of Daulton’s, and said he was calling from Mexico. He said Daulton had had an appointment with him in Mexico—an important business meeting—and had failed to appear.

  “Do you know where he is?” Vargas inquired.

  “As far as I know, he’s in Mexico,” she said. “He left several days ago.”

  The caller seemed satisfied and said he would continue waiting for Daulton. But Mrs. Lee was growing alarmed.

  “You know, this is the first time Daulton has ever been gone so long without calling,” she told her husband that evening. “I think Daulton’s in trouble.”

  Chris was also curious about what had happened during Daulton’s trip to deliver the Pyramider papers.

  On January 7, the day after his friend’s arrest, he placed a person-to-person call to the Holiday Inn in the Zona Rosa from Riverside, where he had moved for the beginning of the college term.

  The operator in California informed the hotel operator that the caller wanted to speak to a hotel guest, Andrew Daulton Lee.

  There was a click, then a pause, and a male voice answered in English.

  “Mr. Andrew Lee?” the Riverside operator asked.

  The man who answered said his name was Brown. Chris asked the operator to try again. The operator complied and Brown answered again. Growing apprehensive, Chris requested the operator in Riverside to ask the hotel operator to “try the right room.” The hotel operator agreed to investigate. After a long, empty pause on the international telephone line, the operator came back on and said there had been some confusion; Mr. Lee was no longer registered at the hotel. She said a hotel assistant manager told her that Mr. Lee had apparently been arrested. She said if the caller needed more information, it could probably be obtained at the American embassy.

  Chris thought: Finally, it’s over. They had caught Daulton. And then he thought: or did he get busted for dope? Either way, Chris calculated, it was a matter of time before the FBI found its way to him. Chris quickly evaluated his options: if he stayed, the FBI would almost certainly arrest him within a few days, perhaps a few hours; if he ran, where would he go? Time was too short to waste. He got into his Volkswagen with its oversized tires and off-road equipment and drove fifteen minutes to Ontario Airport, the nearest public airport. On the way, his mind groped for a possible escape route … he thought of Mexico; the wild mountains of Wyoming, where he had been last month; the desert he knew so well, where he could get lost for days without anyone’s finding him.…

  He parked his car outside the airport terminal and went inside. Aimlessly, he looked around. He paced in front of airline ticket counters, studying their flight schedules and the destinations they offered, then moved on to study the schedule of another airline. Dazed and indecisive, he strode back and forth, first selecting a destination and then rejecting it. Finally, he came to a decision; it really didn’t matter what destination he chose, the FBI would track him down wherever he went.

  Chris returned to his car. He started the Volkswagen and drove home. He had known from the first night, the night after Daulton made his first contact with the Russians, that eventually the sand would run out on their game. Now the sand was almost gone, and he knew there was nothing he could do about it. Indeed, he thought, once it had begun, there had never really been anything he could do to halt what was now inevitable. Chris went home to the shack he rented in Riverside and began to wait.

  Nothing happened.

  The weekend went by and it was eerily, inexplicably normal. He flew Pips in the foothills behind Riverside, and as he admiringly watched his bird practice the instinctive skills that tens of thousands of years of evolution had honed so superbly, Chris reached out for hope. He began to wonder if—hope that—somehow he had escaped. It seemed that way. But then, bitterly, he felt reality overcome hope. As he tramped through the brush, Chris added up the circumstances of Daulton’s arrest once again and decided that he had been attempting to fool himself, and once again, the pounding at his temples and the angry throbbing of his heart began.

  He returned to class on Monday. Sometime during the week, Chris noticed that there was a new student sitting two seats behind him in his class on Soviet Foreign Policy. Chris had never had any trouble spotting cops. He had grown up around them. Cops and FBI agents had been fixtures around his house when he was growing up—coming for dinner, smelling up the living room with their cigars, regaling each other with war stories from law enforcement. This new student, he decided, wasn’t a student.

  As his professor droned on about Russia’s place in world affairs, Chris raised an arm gently and held up his wristwatch and studied the face of the stranger reflected in the crystal of the watch. Every time Chris looked at him, the man was staring directly at the back of his head.

  Chris was aware now that time was running out on him rapidly, and he decided that there was something he needed to do: he wanted to see Alana one last time.

  He called her, and they went out dancing. Chris whispered to Alana that he had always loved her and still did, that he had been wrong when he’d said he didn’t love her.

  “I didn’t mean it.” His voice choked. Tears were brimming from his eyes. “I love you,” he said.

  “You stupid,” she said. “I know. I always knew.”

  As they danced, Chris held Alana tightly and he wanted to stop time. But the evening sailed by quickly. As he drove back to Riverside from her home, Chris realized that the memory of the evening was all he had left now to hold on to—except Mr. Pips. And he vowed to fly the socks off Pips until they came to get him.

  On January 12, five days before Daulton crossed the bridge and six days after his arrest, the Black Vault at TRW was shut down. That morning, two FBI agents called on Regis J. Carr, TRW’s director of security for Special Programs, and said that they wanted to discuss Project Pyramider; the arrest in Mexico of a man named Andrew Daulton Lee; and a friend of Lee’s, Christopher John Boyce, a former TRW employee.

  Carr was stunned. A former FBI agent and a respected professional in the small world of special-projects security, he told the agents that Christopher Boyce had had “access to Top Secret
intelligence information which would cause very grave damage to the United States if it were ever published or fell into the hands of a foreign country.” He asked the agents if they thought there was any chance that Boyce might have passed information from the vault to the Russians, and they said that, unfortunately, they believed he had.

  Then Carr gave the agents a detailed assessment of the potential damage to the United States. As an agent jotted down his comments, he said, “Christopher Boyce had access to the entire inner workings of the intelligence community, with daily access to intelligence communications, documents and hardware. He’s had this privilege for two years. He’s operated as a courier within the plant and outside, operated a secure voice communication system and an encrypted TWX network on line with government contractors and overseas stations, and he talked to the CIA directly by TWX.” As the investigation proceeded over the next few days, the realization of the enormity of the loss became even more apparent; copies of the pictures of the Pyramider documents furnished to the FBI by the Mexican Government were shown to Carr. The documents, Carr said, “were classified Top Secret, and the disclosure of any of the information could have very grave and irreparable damage to the national defense.”

  An agent asked where the Pyramider documents had been stored, and Carr said they were locked in a safe in the communications vault, where Boyce normally wouldn’t have access to them. Another TRW security officer was dispatched to the vault to retrieve them, and he found the Pyramider papers not locked up, but lying on top of a cabinet. Gloomily, TRW officials told the agents that Chris had had not only access to the Pyramider documents, but intimate knowledge about two very secret satellite programs, Rhyolite and Argus, as well as NSA encryption ciphers that the Soviets could use to decipher CIA messages. Carr said that Boyce had had access to the High Bay Area in M-4, where two satellites were in storage, and could have photographed these satellites, as well as new antennas that were being prepared for satellite launching. He urged the agents to find out if Boyce had taken photographs of this hardware, whether he had transmitted any data to the Russians “about lasers” and whether he had given the Russians copies of TWX messages from the vault or the list of “slugs” that were used to identify stations on the CIA’s Secret Communication Network.

  When the FBI agents first arrived at TRW, it was six days after the CIA had learned in Mexico City of Daulton’s arrest with the Pyramider papers. But Carr would testify later that he had not been told of the damaging security breach in the vault he supervised until the FBI brought him the news. Indeed, his first reaction after receiving the news was to tell the CIA. Instinctively, he started to use the encrypted voice link in the Black Vault to reach Pilot, but then checked himself. He feared that it might have been bugged by the KGB or that other TRW employees might have been compromised by Soviet spies. Still, he felt he had to get the word as fast as possible to Langley, and he elected to call CIA Headquarters over a conventional, nonsecure line. He informed the agency what the FBI agents had just told him, using the initial “P” to describe the missing Pyramider papers.

  Two days later, on January 14, two other FBI agents paid a call at the Redondo Beach apartment that Aaron Johnson shared with Beverly Zyser and inquired about their friend Andrew Daulton Lee. The couple figured the agents were investigating Daulton’s drug business, although they couldn’t understand the agents’ intense interest in Daulton’s relationship with Chris Boyce. Johnson told the agents he knew Daulton traveled often to Mexico but didn’t know why. He said Daulton was “into heroin,” a “hard core” criminal who made his living through pushing drugs, and always had lots of cash which he flashed around. He mentioned the scar-faced man he’d seen at Daulton’s house a few days before Christmas; as for Boyce, Johnson said he was Daulton’s best friend but that he didn’t see him as being involved in any of Daulton’s illegal dealings. “He’s straight; he doesn’t hang around the same crowd as Daulton,” he said. “I’m sure he’s not into anything illegal.”

  After the agents left, Johnson telephoned Daulton’s brother and told him FBI agents had just been at his apartment asking about Daulton and Chris. Dave Lee realized now why the family hadn’t heard from Daulton since he’d left for Mexico. Johnson then called Chris’s house and told his mother that it was urgent that he get in touch with him.

  Chris never got the warning.

  38

  On January 16, 1977, ten days after Daulton’s arrest, a yellow Mazda station wagon approached a small pink house made of concrete blocks on a turkey ranch 1,600 miles north of Mexico City. It was little more than a shack in the rural outskirts of Riverside, sixty miles south of Los Angeles, with a decaying old windmill beside it.

  A year earlier, the twenty-five-acre ranch had vibrated with the noisy energy of thousands of turkeys. But the owner had given up turkey ranching because it wasn’t profitable anymore, and he supplemented the family’s income by renting the small blockhouse for $100 a month to students from the nearby campus of the University of California.

  The same evening that Chris had gone dancing with Alana, Florence Carlson had remarked to her husband, Walt, that the new tenant who was sharing the cabin fifty yards from their own home was “very nice.” He was not only warm and polite, but quite intelligent, she said. The Carlsons had first met Chris two or three years earlier, when he’d knocked at their front door and asked if he might use their property to hunt sparrows with an air rifle. (Brown, rolling hills rose up behind the Carlson place, and they abounded in wildlife.) Chris explained that he needed the sparrows for his training of falcons, and the Carlsons had been impressed by the intensity of his interest in falconry, and they’d encouraged him to come back whenever he wanted.

  Around Christmastime, he had arrived at the Carlsons’ home again with news that he was going to enroll at the university, and he had inquired if they still rented the small cabin. They said they did, but that it was not available because another young man was staying there. But Mrs. Carlson suggested the tenant might be willing to share the place and divide the rent. Chris moved in a few days later.

  There were two young men in the Mazda that arrived at the Carlson place shortly before three o’clock on the afternoon of the sixteenth. But the eyes that followed the approaching vehicle from between cracks in the corrugated-steel walls of the turkey pens were interested only in the young man in the passenger seat.

  Chris, wearing Levi’s, a sport shirt and the sweater that had been given him as a good-bye gift by his friends at TRW, looked like any other college student on a Sunday afternoon. With his boyishly handsome face pinched slightly at the cheekbones, and his conservative short dark hair combed back over his forehead, Mrs. Carlson would say he looked more like a product of the fifties than of the seventies.

  That morning, Mrs. Carlson had spotted a car driving down the dirt road from the top of the knoll where her daughter and son-in-law had built a new home. This had puzzled her, because she knew they liked to sleep in on Sunday mornings.

  Mrs. Carlson hadn’t known it then, but FBI agents had moved into her daughter’s home the night before. They had politely asked if they could use the home while they looked down on the pink concrete blockhouse beside her parents’ house. The agents refused to explain their interest in the cabin, but the couple agreed.

  Shortly before 8 A.M., a half-dozen cars carrying FBI agents had careered down the steep hill and stopped outside the shack. Agents, guns outstretched, had burst into the room and found two young men asleep.

  “What’s your name?” one agent said as he roused one of the sleeping youths.

  “Joe Shmo; what’s yours?” Steve Rasmussen, Chris’s roommate, said into the muzzle of a revolver.

  “Where’s Boyce?” the agent had demanded, ignoring the remark.

  Chris wasn’t there because he had left the night before on a falcon-trapping expedition in the hills behind Riverside with George Heavyside, a falconer he knew from Palos Verdes. Steve had asked his brother, Gary, to spend the n
ight at the cabin; in the morning, they planned to drive to Lytle Creek, in the mountains beyond Riverside, to pan for gold. Finally, the brothers had convinced the FBI agents that neither of them was Christopher John Boyce, and they said they planned to go ahead with their trip. Okay, the agent who was in charge of the raiding party had said; but he assigned two of his agents to go with them. The other agents had remained, resuming a vigil from atop the knoll, which looked down on the Carlson property and the twin concrete ribbons of the Riverside Freeway beyond it. Some of the agents had moved into the old turkey pens, and they were there, watching, when George Heavyside and Chris arrived, joking about the night and day they had spent and the wise hawks they had tried—and failed—to entice into the trap resting on Chris’s lap.

  As the station wagon pulled to a stop next to the shack, one of the FBI cars that had been waiting at the top of the hill suddenly raced up from behind, passed the windmill and skidded with an abrasive slide on the sandy driveway. Two agents lunged out, and each pointed a revolver at the head of one of the two youths in the Mazda.

  “Freeze!” they shouted at once as other agents cascaded out of the turkey pens and surrounded the car. Chris had lived with stories of arrests such as this for as long as he could remember. He had heard about stakeouts and FBI busts from his father, his uncle and all their friends who used to visit the Boyce house, and the thing he remembered most was not to move; if he did, one of the trigger-happy agents might shoot him.

  “Who’s Boyce? Who’s Boyce?” one agent shouted.

  Heavyside, trembling and trying to gather his senses so that he could fathom the bizarre events that were happening all around him, raised his hands in shocked semiparalysis. He was led away and searched, and once the agents established that he was not Chris, they let him go.