The Falcon and the Snowman

by Robert Lindsey

  Chris, as he lay on his prison bunk, would muse that he had made fools of both the Russians and the Americans. He would lie back and study the ceiling of his cell and think of Robin resting in his grave, a foolish grin on his face.

  To Chris, the man-boy who rejected nationalism and dreamed of One Nation, the nation of man, his job in the Black Vault became an opportunity to take a saber stroke at both the world’s superpowers at once. It was, he told himself, a flimflam against the Russians and a nonviolent protest against what he believed was the corruption of his own country. And Daulton had had the greed to serve his purpose.

  Or was there more to it than that? There is no evidence that his father was anything but a loving, attentive and devoted parent who idolized Chris. But somehow, the chemistry between father and son didn’t work. Somehow, Chris failed to assimilate from his history books the same sense of patriotism that was instilled in other Americans by the legends of Valley Forge, Pearl Harbor and Iwo Jima. During the years he was reaching manhood, Chris embraced different ethics from those of his father, who believed in the purity of patriotism that had galvanized his country in World War II and who stoutly defended its presence in Vietnam. When he rebelled against the CIA and his country, perhaps Chris was also rebelling against the man who ruled the home in Palos Verdes where he had grown up.

  Chris continued to receive visits from his parents after his final sentencing; but after a time, their precarious rapprochement ruptured again. The break occurred over what his father considered a small matter—a suggestion that if Daulton managed to win a new trial through an appeal, Chris testify against him. Chris, fearing that other prisoners would hear the conversation and brand him a snitch, refused; there was a dispute, and finally, Chris sent word once more that he did not want to see his parents again.

  After the trial, prosecutors Levine and Stilz entered private law practice together.

  George Chelius developed a lucrative law practice in Orange County catering to businessmen and land developers.

  Bill Dougherty resumed his criminal law practice, as did Donald Re.

  Ken Kahn returned to defending drug pushers and began a business teaching members of the public how to represent themselves in court.

  Gene Norman was transferred out of the vault and eventually left TRW.

  Laurie Vicker also quit the company and moved with her husband out of California.

  Betsy Lee Stewart, the girl whom Daulton loved, realized her dream and became an airline stewardess.

  Darlene Cooper went to New York to pursue her dream of becoming a fashion model, but, it was rumored, she didn’t make it and became a topless go-go dancer instead, before returning to California, where she entered Harbor College and joined the tennis team.

  Alana McDonald dropped out of Chris’s life and went away to college.

  Barclay Granger’s sentence in Federal prison was reduced after he testified against Daulton, and his former girlfriend, Carole Benedict, drifted away from The Hill.

  Daulton has found a kind of peace at the Federal penitentiary at Lompoc, where, sometimes, late at night, darkness is turned into day by the brilliance of a white-hot rocket booster lunging upward from Vandenberg Air Force Base, carrying another spy satellite into space.

  Other inmates gave Daulton a nickname—“Spy”—and in prison, Daulton finally kicked his drug habit after months of torturous deprivation.

  Although Daulton received a life sentence and Chris was sentenced to forty years, both, under Federal statutes, could become eligible to be considered for parole about 1995 or shortly after that.

  In a conversation at Lompoc, Daulton was asked if he had any regrets about his original decision to choose drug pushing as his vocation—the decision that, over time, would eventually lead him on a circuitous road to espionage.

  He thought a long moment and replied:

  “To tell you perfectly honestly, no. I always had more money than any of the people I knew who played by the system. I was intellectually as sharp or sharper than they were. I traveled extensively. I was in a better position to know what was really happening; I got to the point where I was enjoying the finer things in life, and I didn’t have to go out and rob and steal for what I needed … and the drugs I used were no different than someone sitting home and guzzling Scotch.”

  After his sentencing, Chris was sent to the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego, where a curious thing happened not long after he arrived.

  An urban penitentiary, the prison is a skyscraper that rises twenty-four stories on the edge of the San Diego downtown business district. Chris was looking out a window one day at the San Diego harbor, which was crowded with Navy ships, when he saw something that amazed him.

  It was a peregrine falcon, one of the rarest of falcons.

  The peregrine made a spectacular stoop at a pigeon that had nested at the nearby San Diego City Hall; it seized it in midair in an explosion of feathers, and then disappeared somewhere above Chris.

  He knew that there were perhaps a dozen or two, no more, in all of California, including the pair he had studied on the big rock in Morro Bay through his binoculars.

  The spectacle of such a bird—a bird officially classed by the Federal Government as an endangered species—hunting in the heart of a city startled him. Chris saw the peregrine again the next day, and the next, and each time it vanished above him. Finally, he realized that the falcon was living in the same building that he was! It had established an eyrie in a concrete niche in the prison tower and was using the side of the building as if it were a cliff in the wild.

  A San Diego newspaper heard about the rare bird and the prisoner’s unusual love for birds, and it sent a reporter over to the prison to interview Chris. His story was headlined BIRD’S FREEDOM BRIGHTENS SPY’S IMPRISONMENT.

  But one day Chris looked out from his cell and discovered the peregrine was gone.

  At night, in the lonely confinement of his cell, Chris lives with memories of Fawkes, Pips, Nurd and his other falcons.

  When he can’t sleep, he closes his eyes and sees the long wings of the falcons rising gently on thermals of air, their elegance still the most beautiful thing he knows in the world. He thinks of climbing down rocky cliffs at the end of a taut rope to the eyrie of a falcon and sampling its rage as it hurtles past him as he twists in the wind. He recalls the defiant look in the eyes of Pips the last time he saw him and wonders what happened to his last and best falcon after a friend, at his request, released him back into the wild after Chris’s arrest at the turkey ranch.

  Chris thinks also of Alana and what might have been. He had released her too. It was best, he sent word to her after his arrest, that they not see each other again; he said he did not want her to wait for him; and the last he heard, she had found a new boyfriend. But Chris could not forget the sight of her face framed in her blond curls, and long after he was sentenced to prison, it lived with him in his cell.

  Yet if Chris has any regrets, he does not express them.

  Perhaps he best summarized his feelings in the letter he wrote to his father on the eve of his trial:

  Dear Dad:

  I thought of you all long and hard today and have decided I owe you an explanation of my feelings. In reality I owe you so much more than that, but at this point it is all I can give.

  I wish I could bring myself to convey my love to my family from this place but I cannot and so I leave it up to you. I realized many dozens of months ago that there could be no coming back from the decisions made and I do not propose to pick up the pieces now. I regret none of my actions except for the deceptions I played upon you and any subsequent loss of face. For that I am truly sorry, more now than ever. If we never understood each other, the fault is mine.

  I was never a socialist. I do not support their actual society any more than I support that found here in these times. I reject both equally.

  To my perceptions, the foundations of this country are a sham. It was designed by the few for the few and
so it will remain. Western culture is in decline now and the trend cannot be reversed. We are grasping along in a headless insanity that will continue to consume until nothing is left.

  Time and time again I watched the destruction of those things and places I love and I was disgusted. I believe we are on the edge of a poisoned horrible darkness. Industrialism and technology are dragging humanity toward universal collapse and will take most life forms with it.

  I used to sit on Silver Spur Road [looking out at the view] and shudder at the enormity of the lights of Los Angeles at night. To me it was always an infected spectacle. I lived in it and I breathed in it. It was not the people I hated. It was what had been blindly created, and so I just turned my back on it all.

  I ran my dog through the fields and I flew my hawks and falcons and I did everything I could to shake things at their roots. I just do not accept the direction of this society. I could not sit still for what we are leading to. I didn’t think so then, I don’t now.

  There is no possibility of my fitting back into a normal life style, if indeed I ever had one. Nor will I spend the rest of my life in prison. I will continue to fight in court till George and Bill advise me otherwise. My legal position is precarious through no fault of theirs.

  Your attendance in court or any family would hinder my rationality and thus my case. I ask that you not come to court. Thank you for not coming so far. I appreciate greatly the books you’ve sent me and I will return them through George.

  I would give anything to be out of this place and be able to feel sunshine and to just even run again. I think there is small chance of that now so I have detached myself from what goes on here.

  Being alone all the time leaves one much time to turn thoughts inward. As I think back upon my beliefs that put me here in the first place, they are strengthened more than ever. I could never make of my life that which you would have wanted.

  That is no reflection on you. I chose freely my response to this absurd world, and if given the opportunity again, I would be even more vigorous. Please give all my love to mom and Kathy and everyone and tell them for me to see them would just make a bad situation worse.

  Respectfully,

  Chris

  As Chris lies awake in his cell and thinks of his falcons, of Alana and of his walks alone in the mountains, he sometimes worries about growing insane because of the empty solitude of his existence.

  “I am beginning to talk to myself again,” he said in a letter to the author. “Slowly at first, a word here, a word there, it grows. The sound runs with itself across this cube and then bounces back at me before the final syllable has even left my throat. To read out loud is a concert. The prisoner next to me recites Dickinson in the late afternoon. His muffled tones remind me of long ago days and standing under cottonwoods with wet earth underfoot. When I sit very still I can hear my heart thumping in my chest and my stomach churning. That and my lungs pulling for breath, it makes the hair on my arms stand on end. What a simple thing life is. You can almost hold it in your hand. How very peaceful it is to be alone and silent and conscious of one’s own body.

  “I am not a complex man and my tenets are quite simple,” Chris wrote. “I have always abhorred the national patriots and can dismiss them because their days are numbered just as surely as were those of the primordial leviathans. A century must sound to you like an age but it is actually a mere moment in the history of man. Your great-grandchildren will enjoy the birth of the tranquil millennium, the one world. The evolution of a global society devoid of competing militarisms will be a green house of worthful development.

  “If I am mad they are all the madder for the thousands of nuclear weapons they are prepared to unleash on each other.

  “I have made my life a study of aggression and the carnivores, and humanity is the most self-predatory species in existence. I am ashamed of the history of the nations and of my own origins and someday so will all of united humanity. To believe otherwise is to bankrupt pessimism. Not in your lifetime, nor mine, nor any living man’s, but someday they will all understand. The past shall be judged as ignorant and grisly barbarity. That someday will be the dawn of mankind’s redemption and the new treason is the rejection of nationalistic society and its exploitive and butchering adjuncts. These were my dreams, alone with my falcons. Do you think me deranged, too?

  “Like Camus,” Chris wrote, “my subconscious is plagued with life’s purposelessness and therein lies my inner peace. I am neither conservative nor socialistic. I cherish friendships with the back country, wind and rain, the seasons, and the spontaneous hazards of the wilds.

  “I have always viewed myself a spectator of the great human void racing towards what it knows not. I long ago excused myself from the mad dash, to find my own sanctuaries. Thus falconry and history have always attracted me.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  The roots of this book began in the spring of 1977 when David R. Jones, the National Editor of The New York Times, assigned me to cover the espionage trials of Christopher John Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee. I want to express my gratitude to Mr. Jones and other editors of The New York Times for their patience in originally allowing me to pursue the story.

  It is impossible to describe adequately all of the many contributions made to this book by Jonathan Coleman of Simon and Schuster; not only did he first propose a book on the story, but as its editor, he was a constant source of inspiration and good judgment that was felt on every page. My thanks also to Deborah Katsh, Lynn Chalmers and Vincent Virga of Simon and Schuster, and to Carole Zahn and Jean Brown.

  This book could not have been written without the generous assistance of the lawyers in the case, and I thank especially Kenneth Kahn, William Dougherty and George Chelius. I express my deep gratitude also to the families of Christopher Boyce and Daulton Lee.

  There are others to whom I would like to extend my appreciation publicly, but unfortunately, to do so would violate my pledges of confidentiality to them, and so I must pass on my gratitude anonymously.

  Finally, I say thanks to the two protagonists of this story, whom, over a period of more than two years, I came to know almost as well as the members of my own family.

  R.L.

  A Biography of Robert Lindsey

  Robert Lindsey is a journalist and the author of several award-winning true crime books. He won the 1980 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime for The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of Friendship and Espionage, which the New York Times called “one of the best nonfiction spy stories ever to appear in this country.”

  Lindsey was born on January 4, 1935, in Glendale, California, a suburb of Los Angeles, and grew up in Inglewood near the Hollywood Park racetrack. His parents divorced when he was a child, and his mother, Claire Elizabeth Schultz, worked as a bookkeeper to support herself and her son. Lindsey’s father, Remembrance Hughes Lindsey Jr., also known as Robert Lindsey, fought a long battle with alcoholism. During his brief periods of sobriety, he would live with his family, but until he became completely sober later in life, his addiction hindered their relationship. Due in part to his father’s alcoholism and in part to his mother’s gambling habit, Lindsey was mostly raised by his two sisters, Catherine and Jean. He explores his turbulent childhood in his 2012 memoir, Ghost Scribbler.

  Lindsey first dreamed of being a reporter in elementary school after listening to a radio soap opera about the newspaperman “Front Page Farrell.” A self-described rebellious “greaser” in high school, Lindsey still joined the school newspaper, El Centinela. Later, he attended San Jose State with aspirations of joining their journalism school but ultimately decided to study history.

  After graduating from San Jose State, he married his college sweetheart, Sandra Wurts, and started a job as a country correspondent for the San Jose Mercury-News, where he covered Gilroy, a small farming town with only 5,000 residents. The newspaper eventually promoted him to report “North Country” news, which included a chain of small towns north of San Jose. Lindsey started wr
iting about the wave of technology companies moving into this central California region, making him one of the first journalists to report on Silicon Valley.

  In the early 1960s, Lindsey began working as an aviation reporter and was invited by airlines to fly around the world and cover their inaugural flights. He traveled to London, Munich, Copenhagen, Zurich, Prague, Tokyo, and many other destinations, and was a national officer of the Aviation Writers Association.

  His work caught the attention of the New York Times editors, and in 1968, they hired Lindsey as the Times’ aviation reporter. After several years, he was relocated to California upon his request, and became the Times’ LA Bureau Chief. The Times didn’t limit his topics of reportage: He interviewed celebrities from Jack Nicholson to silent screen actress Mary Pickford, and wrote about whatever interested him at the moment, such as California’s economy and agriculture.

  In 1977, Lindsey began covering a spy story about two Californians, Andrew Daulton Lee and Christopher John Boyce, who were arrested for selling government secrets to the Soviet Union. Boyce worked inside the CIA communications vault, also known as the “Black Vault,” full of confidential government papers. As the inside man, Boyce smuggled thousands of documents out of the building, and Lee then transported them to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. This news story inspired Lindsey’s most famous work, The Falcon and the Snowman, which achieved major commercial and critical success and was adapted into a feature film of the same name in 1985. During his research, Lindsey developed a close friendship with Boyce, and when he escaped from prison in 1980, Boyce called Lindsey from a payphone to let him know he was safe. This infamous prison break was the basis for Lindsey’s 1983 book, The Flight of the Falcon.

  Lindsey wrote a number of other books, including Irresistible Impulse and A Gathering of Saints: A True Story of Money, Murder and Deceit, which won the CWA Gold Dagger Award for Nonfiction in 1989. He also assisted both Ronald Reagan and Marlon Brando, a close friend, in writing their autobiographies, Ronald Reagan: An American Life and Brando: Songs My Mother Taught Me.