The Falcon and the Snowman

by Robert Lindsey

  Solicitously, Kahn asked her if Daulton, during the summer of 1976, had ever mentioned to her his plans to make a trip to Mexico. She said he had. “And did he tell you that he worked for the government?” Kahn asked.

  “Yes, he did,” she replied. Kahn sat down, certain he had made a point supporting the theory that Daulton worked for the CIA.

  Levine rose to cross-examine Mrs. Clarke.

  As he did, Stilz, sharing a lawyers’ joke over having to interrogate the kindly-looking woman, smiled at him and said, “Go get her, Tiger.”

  “I’ll eat her alive,” Levine grinned, uncomfortable with his assignment.

  “Did defendant Lee ever tell you which government he was working for?”

  “No, he didn’t,” Mrs. Clarke said.

  Daulton’s future was placed in the hands of the jury in midafternoon on May 12, 1977.

  Stilz and Levine had studied the jury’s response to the testimony, and they expected a conviction within a few hours.

  But the day ended without a verdict. The jury had sent a note to Kelleher requesting copies of the original indictment against Daulton, so that jurors could review them in their hotel rooms. Kelleher granted the request.

  The following morning, at 9:15, another note arrived from the jury:

  Good morning your honor!

  Thank you for the copies of the indictments. Is it permissible to make notations, etc., on our individual copies of same? If possible we would like copies of your instructions to the jury.

  Are parts or all of the trial transcripts available to us? Are we able to make enquiry of you without generating action by yourself … I suppose an “off the record” type inquiry?

  We would appreciate it if something could be done about the total lack of ventilation in the Jury Room. We have no air conditioning, nor do the windows open.

  Thank you

  Jane Lyon

  Foreman

  Los Angeles was in the midst of a modest spring heat wave, and temperatures were in the eighties. But that was only one reason the atmosphere in the jury room was so warm. The second reason was that the jury was engaged in a pitched battle.

  Before adjourning the night before, the jurors had taken an informal straw ballot. It was 8 to 4 in favor of convicting Daulton. They had decided to get some rest and try again the next day. The following morning, after Kelleher denied the request for the transcript, jury instructions and off-the-record advice, the foreman conducted a review of the testimony and evidence, and the jury took its first formal vote; the decision went against Daulton 10–2.

  The majority then went to work on the holdouts, both women. Within an hour, one changed her mind and voted to convict. But Peggy Fuller, the prelaw student, refused to change her vote.

  “There are grounds for reasonable doubt to believe he’s innocent,” she insisted.

  It was obvious, she continued, that the CIA could have been manipulating the two young men. “You can’t believe what they say,” she said when other jurors pointed out the CIA’s denial that Daulton had been in its employ.

  Outside the jury room, the lawyers waited impatiently.

  Stilz and Levine were puzzled and starting to worry; Kahn and Re offered hope to Daulton. “The longer they stay out, the better chance you’ve got,” Kahn told Daulton. “You may be home free.” Daulton’s lawyers also encouraged Dr. and Mrs. Lee, who were keeping a vigil at the courthouse, to have hope.

  Miss Fuller now found herself alone at one end of the jury table looking out at eleven unhappy faces—antagonists who were beginning to lose their patience and raising their voices. When the jury took its lunch break, some of the jurors seemed to want to avoid her; at dinner, the other eleven jurors refused to sit with her and she dined with one of the Federal marshals who were guarding the jury. Again and again, the other jurors reviewed the evidence and argued that Daulton’s guilt was obvious. But Miss Fuller stood her ground, unrelenting, through the second day of deliberations and into the third. She would recall later: “I wanted to hold out forever; I was under terrible pressure; you’re cut off from all contact with other people; you’re alone, and they refused even to listen to my arguments. They were cold and laughed at me. They just didn’t understand the concept of reasonable doubt.”

  “Finally, I said, ‘All right, I’ll say he’s guilty,’ but I didn’t think he was.”

  At 11 A.M. on May 14, 1977, a Saturday, the jury reentered the courtroom.

  Without looking in Daulton’s direction, the foreman handed a note to the court clerk, who in turn showed it to Kelleher and then announced the verdict:

  Guilty on all counts of espionage and conspiracy to commit espionage.

  Daulton shook his head in bitter disbelief. And then in a gesture that recalled his tormented glances toward his father years before when he had dropped a fly ball or swung at a third strike, he looked quickly in the direction of his parents, both of whom had tears in their eyes.

  47

  After his conviction, Chris had been transferred from the Los Angeles County Jail to the Federal Correctional Institution on Terminal Island, a prison fortress set on a rocky jetty that thrust into Los Angeles Harbor near the southern foot of the Palos Verdes Peninsula. As Chris traveled to Terminal Island along the Harbor Freeway in the back of a prison car, he could look out the window and see the rolling hills where, not many years before, he had first met Robin and Mohammed.

  He was assigned to D Block, T.I.’s maximum-security wing, where prisoners were locked in individual cells, measuring eight feet by five feet, around the clock, except for weekly two-hour exercise periods. Prison administrators told Chris he was being isolated because they feared other inmates might try to murder a man convicted of treason. His only regular communication with the prisoners was through the bars of his cell—a shout across a corridor or quieter words with an inmate in one of the cells next to him. Prison guards warned him not to accept food from the other prisoners: they had picked up reports of a plot to poison him from their informants, they said. But Chris thought the inmates were friendly, and he didn’t worry about the warning.

  Lonely, Chris groped for ways to use up his many hours by himself. He began reading six and even seven books a week from the prison library—mostly history and biographies—and worked to keep in good physical shape by doing 1,200 pushups a day. The subject that was on his mind now more than anything else was escape.

  One morning there was a commotion in the corridor outside his cell, and Chris looked out inquisitively; the arrival of a new inmate was one of the few happenings that broke the lonely monotony in D Block; and he saw that the new prisoner was being moved into a cell beside his.

  Vito Conterno was a husky man with olive skin and silver hair at his temples. From that first day, Chris was fascinated by him: he was utterly self-confident, and seemed to be completely in command of himself, maintaining his dignity even in a prison cell. Here he was in a Federal penitentiary, where the prisoners wore denim uniforms, and Vito had a silk robe and leather slippers. To Chris, the robe and slippers were somehow equivalent to papal finery that elevated him above the other inmates. Through their respective walls of prison bars, Chris began to learn about his new neighbor. Vito said his parents were from Sicily; they had emigrated to America more than sixty years before, and because there was no other line of work as lucrative, his father had gravitated into the Mafia, and Vito had followed later. Chris was fascinated by his stories of growing up in a big-city Italian neighborhood, of running numbers when he was still in grade school, of later graduating to bigger money with work in bookmaking parlors, of killing his first man when he was eighteen. It was like a novel, and Chris was spellbound.

  Vito said he was in prison because of a minor parole violation. He’d been locked up in D Block, he said, because other Mafiosi in the prison had heard of his reputation as a hit man and he had prevailed upon the warden to isolate him.

  As the hours shared in isolation by the young man and the old Mafioso wore on, V
ito tutored Chris on prison ethics and how he’d learned them himself at the Federal prison in Leavenworth, Kansas. The lowest scum in a prison, he said, was the stoolie; he told about a snitch at Leavenworth who had gotten a shank stuck in his chest and bled to death in front of Vito’s cell; about another who had had gasoline thrown into his cell—“burned to death in his own grease”; and about still another whose charred bones had been found in a prison incinerator.

  Vito fretted about being in prison again; it was bad for his heart condition, he said, and he had business deals to look out for on the outside. He lived in a big home in Beverly Hills, he explained, and he’d pumped some of the money he’d made in the rackets into buying liquor stores which, he said with a twinkle, would support him handsomely as he advanced into old age. The only reason he was in the joint now, he said, was that he’d gone to Las Vegas without telling his parole officer, and the Feds had been lying in wait for him when he’d landed at the airport—waiting for an excuse to lock him up.

  “Fuckin’ Feds,” he said. “You’ll never leave the fuckin’ prison system alive. You ought to think about getting out of here. I have a friend—my lawyer; he can do some things, maybe.

  “Think it over,” Vito said. “Maybe I can help you.”

  Chris’s lawyers had pressed him to cooperate with the CIA in its efforts to pinpoint exactly what information the Russians had obtained from the Black Vault. At first Chris had rejected the request and refused to even discuss it. But Chelius and Dougherty said that if he was to have any chance of getting a light sentence, he had to do it. On May 18, Chris and the lawyers met with Stilz; Rodney Leffler, an FBI agent who served as a liaison officer between his agency and the CIA, and a pipe-smoking man in his early forties who introduced himself as “Jerry Brown of the CIA.” The meeting was in a starkly furnished office in a Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department building. Also present were a polygraph-machine operator and a Federal probation officer who had been assigned to formulate a report on the defendant to guide Judge Kelleher when he sentenced Chris.

  The debriefing was almost aborted before it began: Chris had been ordered to the meeting wearing his denim prison uniform, but he refused to go unless he was allowed the dignity of wearing his corduroy suit. He was allowed to do so.

  For eight hours, under persistent questioning by Brown, Chris recounted his experiences as a spy. He told essentially the same story he had given the FBI on the night of his arrest, but offered more details, including as much as he could remember about the nature of the data he and Daulton had sold to the KGB. This day was to be the first of six such sessions, spaced over several weeks, that Brown (not his real name) called a “damage assessment debriefing.”

  Chris labored to recall everything he had transmitted to Daulton and the Russians, but said he simply couldn’t remember everything. He said he had been so intoxicated sometimes that he couldn’t remember everything he had photographed. But he volunteered an idea he said would help the CIA solve part of the mystery: he said that he and Daulton, in the later stages of the espionage operation, had taped the TWX message traffic they sold to the Russians to a wall and photographed the messages before returning them to the vault in a potted plant or other conveyance. Chris suggested that the CIA assign a technician to test the rolls of TWX messages that were still in the vault for residue of adhesive from the tape; this would help identify some of the TWX messages that had found their way to Moscow, he said.

  The CIA man liked the idea and did what Chris suggested. The test helped the agency discover that Chris had photographed the teletype messages from the vault for at least two full months; there was a spool of messages—as thick as a roll of toilet paper and twice as wide—for each month. Brown said grimly that the CIA had discovered, among other things, that one message on the spool included details of most American intelligence-collection satellites and their performance capabilities.

  Chelius and Dougherty told Chris they thought his willingness to participate in the debriefings would probably help him when the time came for his sentencing. But Chris wasn’t counting on a light sentence now. He had made other plans.

  Back at Terminal Island, he decided to write a response to Vito Conterno:

  I have been turning over what you said in my mind. Thinking back over the last five months and listening to your conversation, you appear the most-together inmate I have come to know so far. I know nothing about you other than what you say. I don’t think you would bullshit me. I intend no insult with the following, but you’re not just trying to bolster my morale and give me hope by mentioning your lawyer, are you? I mean no insult but you came off the wall rather fast with it. Seriously, the heat would be intense with that type of action concerning a Soviet spy. I hate the Feds as much or more than you do. Your problems with them appear to cover a broad spectrum of activity while I specialized in a narrow scam. No doubt your connections have a varied assortment of skills.

  I am a realist. I am going to get more time than I can handle. Furthermore, I have no hope of action on appeal with my case. I would wait until that was resolved, which my lawyers tell me would be finalized within a year and a half before I would seek an alternate solution. I cannot end up like poor Tim. I would rather be dead.

  Chris was referring to a wretched prisoner in D Block who had been returned to the block after a liver operation in a nearby public hospital. He had made the mistake of attempting to escape from the hospital, and when he was caught he was returned to the prison, rather than the hospital, to recover from the operation. As Tim twisted in pain on his bunk, moaning, the sutures on his wound popped open and he began to bleed. Prison doctors sewed the wound, but the same thing happened again. Chris listened to Tim’s groans at night and watched flies swarm around the wound. Time and again, Tim ripped pus-and-blood-soaked bandages off the wound and threw them out of his cell into the corridor. From his own cell Chris watched a column of ants a half-inch wide feed on the bloody matter adhering to the bandages.

  I have no qualms about taking risks. This would just be one more. If you mean what you say, I am interested as hell. Again, please don’t take that as an insult. I don’t mean it as such. I am just feeling you out.

  What you suggest would put my life in hands of people with whom I have no experience. I would have to go forward on trust alone. I would be out on a limb with my cash on the line. But anything would be better than the life the Feds have planned for me. You don’t sound like a person who stabs in the back unless crowded first. All I could do is rely on my judgement that you are a honorable man and that those with who you do business are of a like kind.

  Once again, to be honest, it does not seem to me that O.C. [Organized Crime] would want to cross CIA. I would have everything to lose, nothing to gain, in a double cross. I once prevented a termination on a courier by the KGB for his duplicity because he was a boyhood friend and I had a big heart. I now regret it. I don’t think I would be here now if I had let them go ahead. I totally am aware of the implications you mention. Meaning no insult, I would be acting completely on trust and would be open to rip-off.

  Either one of us could be moved at any time and after that we will never see each other again. Believing you are sincere I will rely on your word. You are probably wondering where does this brat get off questioning me. It’s just that I was burned bad and here I sit. This is to me a new ball game. I would imagine espionage operates on the same principles.

  No way are the Feds going to give me any slack. I am not a socialist and the Soviets no doubt would feel safer with my mouth closed permanently. I am between a rock and a hard place with both systems. My only hope would be to go into deep cover. You mentioned the availability of an initial set of I.D. I am interested as hell. I hope you mean it. I would put all my resources on the line.

  Once again, I mean no offense.

  In May, five months after his arrest, Chris held a reunion with his parents. His only communication with his family since the arrest had been the letter to his father
on the eve of his trial asking his family not to attend and a brief, inconclusive phone conversation with his mother shortly after his arrest. But Chelius had not stopped urging him to see his parents, and they had repeatedly sent messages through the lawyer saying they wanted to see him. Chris, now that the ordeal of the trial was over, consented to see his parents.

  The reunion took place in a small office at the Terminal Island prison, and it was the beginning of a precarious truce.

  His mother hugged Chris and almost immediately broke into tears of love and sympathy for her eldest son. His father extended his hand, and Chris did the same.

  “How are you, sir?” Chris asked.

  “Fine,” he replied.

  It was a meeting with about as much overt affection as the father and son ever showed.

  They visited for more than an hour, and after a while some of the stiffness thawed. His parents brought Chris up to date on family news, and Chris asked about his dog, Magyar.

  During the next few weeks, there would be frequent meetings between Chris and his parents, brothers and sisters. Once his father even brought Magyar to the prison, and Chris visited with him through a chain-link fence. It appeared that the wounds in the relationship between Chris and his family were healing.

  Meanwhile, the thoughts of all the members of his family turned to his sentencing, which was scheduled for the middle of June.

  48

  Chris lay back on his bunk and remembered the first time he had seen Fawkes.

  They had met on a December morning in 1973 in the California coastal range near San Luis Obispo. One of her blue feet had been tucked in her belly feathers as she peered out from atop a perch on a high-voltage-transmission-line tower. As he watched, she twisted her head around and looked down the brown mountainside at the sparkling reflection of his binoculars, then lifted off the wire with a defiant snub and rose higher and higher until she was only a black speck in the sky and Chris lost her in a cloud.