Christopher Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee had been childhood mates, altar boys raised within the Catholic pews and affluent suburbs of the Palos Verdes Peninsula.
By the mid-Nineteen Seventies, Boyce was offended concerning the Vietnam Battle and Watergate. He was a liberal, a stoner and a lover of falcons. Lee, a health care provider’s adopted son, was a cocaine and heroin pusher who was spiraling into habit.
How they grew to become spies for the Soviet Union is a narrative emblematic of Nineteen Seventies Southern California, the place the state’s large Chilly Battle aerospace trade collided with its youthful anti-establishment currents.
Everybody agrees it ought to by no means have been potential.
In the summertime of 1974, Boyce, a shiny however disaffected 21-year-old school dropout, obtained a job as a clerk on the TRW Protection and House Techniques complicated in Redondo Seaside. He gained entree via the old-boys community: His father, who ran safety for an plane contractor and was as soon as an FBI agent, had referred to as in a favor.
On this collection, Christopher Goffard revisits previous crimes in Los Angeles and past, from the well-known to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the recollections of those that had been there.
Boyce made $140 per week on the protection plant and held down a second job tending bar. TRW investigators had carried out solely a perfunctory background examine. They skipped his friends, who might need revealed his hyperlinks to the drug tradition and to Lee, who already had a number of drug busts and a critical cocaine behavior — the white powder that might encourage his nickname.
In “The Falcon and the Snowman,” Robert Lindsey’s account of the case, the creator describes Boyce starting the day by popping amphetamines and winding down after a shift puffing a joint within the TRW car parking zone. Falconry was his greatest ardour. “Flying a falcon in precisely the identical manner that males had accomplished centuries earlier than Christ transplanted Chris into their time,” Lindsey wrote.
Boyce impressed his bosses and was quickly cleared to enter the steel-doored fortress referred to as the “black vault,” a categorized sanctum the place he was uncovered to delicate CIA communications pertaining to America’s community of espionage satellites. The satellites eavesdropped on Russian missiles and protection installations. Among the many targets was to thwart a shock nuclear assault.
Studying CIA communiques, Boyce didn’t like what he noticed. Amongst its different sins, he determined, the U.S. authorities was deceiving its Australian allies by hiding satellite tv for pc intelligence it had promised to share and meddling within the nation’s elections.
“I simply was in complete disagreement with the entire path of Western society,” Boyce instructed The Occasions a few years later. He attributed his espionage alternative to “synchronicity,” explaining: “What number of youngsters can get a summer time job working in an encrypted communications vault?”
Quickly he made his life’s “greatest, dumbest determination.” He instructed his buddy Lee they could promote authorities secrets and techniques to the Soviets. Lee talked his manner into the Soviet Embassy in Mexico Metropolis, the place Russians fed him caviar and acquired categorized paperwork with the toast, “To peace.”
Lee’s KGB handlers devised protocols. When he wished to satisfy, he would tape an X to lampposts at designated intersections round Mexico Metropolis.
For greater than a 12 months, 1000’s of categorized paperwork flowed from the TRW complicated to the Soviets, with Boyce generally smuggling them out in potted vegetation. In trade, he and Lee acquired an estimated $70,000.
At events, Lee confirmed off his miniature Minox digital camera and bragged that he was engaged in spycraft. In January 1977, determined for cash to finance a heroin deal, he flouted KGB directions and appeared unannounced outdoors the Soviet Embassy. Mexican police thought he seemed suspicious and arrested him.
He held an envelope with filmstrips documenting a U.S. satellite tv for pc challenge referred to as Pyramider. Below questioning, Lee revealed the title of his co-conspirator and childhood good friend, who quickly was additionally underneath arrest. Boyce had simply returned from a hawk-trapping journey within the mountains.
The espionage trials of the 2 males offered particular challenges for the U.S. lawyer’s workplace in Los Angeles. The Carter administration was prepared to drag the plug on the case if it meant airing too many secrets and techniques, however a method was devised: Prosecutors would deal with the Pyramider paperwork, which concerned a system that by no means really obtained off the bottom.
Joel Levine, one of many assistant U.S. attorneys who prosecuted Boyce and Lee, stated solely a fraction of what they bought to the Soviets ever got here out at trial.
“I used to be instructed these different initiatives shouldn’t be revealed. It’s too pricey to our authorities, and you may’t base a prosecution on them both in complete or partially,” Levine stated in a current interview. “You simply gotta keep away from it.”
For federal prosecutors in L.A., hanging over the case was the reminiscence of a current humiliation: the collapse of the Pentagon Papers trial, on account of the Nixon administration’s try and bribe the presiding decide with a job. It had caught prosecutors unexpectedly.
“We had been afraid it will wreck our fame ceaselessly if one thing like that had been to occur,” Levine stated. “So we made it very, very clear proper from the get-go that if we smelled one thing like that was afoot, we’d stroll into courtroom and have the case dismissed on our personal.”
The defendants had sharply totally different motives. Lee was in it for the cash, Richard Stilz, one of many prosecutors, stated in a current interview. However “Boyce was completely ideology. He wished to break the US authorities,” Stilz stated. “He simply hated this nation, interval.”
The defendants obtained separate trials. A rift that had been rising between them deepened with their mutually hostile defenses. Lee’s protection: Boyce had led him to imagine he was working for the CIA, feeding misinformation to the Russians. Jurors convicted Lee of espionage, nonetheless, and a decide gave him a life time period.
Boyce’s protection: Lee had blackmailed him into espionage by threatening to show a letter he had written, whereas stoned on cannabis, alleging secret information of CIA malfeasance. Jurors convicted Boyce as nicely, and a decide gave him 40 years.
In January 1980, at a federal jail in Lompoc, Boyce hid in a drainpipe and sprinted to freedom over a fence. He was on the run for 19 months. He robbed banks within the Pacific Northwest till federal brokers caught him outdoors a burger joint in Washington state.
He was convicted of financial institution theft and obtained 28 extra years. In 1985, the identical 12 months a well-liked movie adaptation of “The Falcon and the Snowman” was launched, Boyce testified on Capitol Hill concerning the despair attending a lifetime of espionage.
“There was no thrill,” he stated. “There was solely melancholy, and a hopeless enslavement to an inhuman, uncaring overseas forms…. No American who has gone to the KGB has not come to remorse it.”
He spoke of how simply he had been allowed to entry categorized materials at TRW. “Safety was a joke,” he stated, describing common Bacardi-fueled events within the black vault. “We used the code destruction blender for making banana daiquiris and mai tais.”
Cait Mills was working as a paralegal in San Diego when she learn the Lindsey e-book and have become fascinated by the case. She thought Lee had been unfairly maligned, and he or she spent the subsequent twenty years preventing to win him parole.
She obtained letters of assist from the prosecutors and the sentencing decide testifying that Lee had made strides towards rehabilitation. He had taken courses in jail and turn out to be a dental technician. He gained parole in 1998.
She turned her consideration to releasing Boyce, with whom she fell in love. She wrote to the Russians and requested how a lot worth there had been within the stolen TRW paperwork and acquired a fax claiming it was ineffective. He obtained out in 2002, they usually married. They later divorced however stay shut. Each dwell in central Oregon.
Stilz maintains the harm to America was “monumental.”
“In a homicide case, you’ve got one sufferer and an individual dies,” Stilz stated. “In an espionage case, the entire nation is a sufferer. We had been thus far superior over the Russians in spy satellite tv for pc know-how. They leveled the taking part in discipline. That’s most likely crucial level.”
He offers no credence to the Russian authorities’s declare that it derived no worth from the key info. “After all they’d say that,” Stilz stated. “What do you suppose they’d say? ‘Oh yeah, it allowed us to meet up with the US when it comes to spying.’ They’re not gonna say that.”
Cait Mills Boyce stated that Boyce and Lee, childhood finest mates, now not converse, and that the silence between them wounds Boyce.
“He stated, ‘I really like that man; I at all times cherished him. He was my finest good friend.’ It harm him so badly.”
She stated Boyce, now in his 70s, lives a solitary life and immerses himself on this planet of falconry. “His total life, and I child you not, is falconry,” she stated. “He’ll die with a falcon on his arm.”
A part of what pushed him into the world of espionage, she thinks, was the problem. “I believe his unusual smarts led him down a whimsical path that ended up being a disastrous path, not only for him however for everyone concerned,” she stated.
