Chris was tormented by his fears, and they grew whenever he saw Daulton and realized the hold that heroin had on him. Sooner or later, Chris knew, Daulton was going to get high on heroin and boast that he was a spy, and the whole thing would be over.
As Chris felt the trap he had set for himself squeeze tighter, he made a decision: he must wrest control of the operation from Daulton and deal directly with the Russians. With Daulton out of the picture, he would somehow manage to find a way to ease out slowly. So far, he admitted, he had not been very successful in developing his own link to the Russians. He had attempted to do so again with a coded message to the Soviets, but decided Daulton was probably not delivering the messages.
He knew the Russians had broken his simple code. Their first reply to him had not been very kindly: using the same code for a reply sent via Daulton, the KGB had thanked Chris for his service in the cause of socialism, but whoever had answered his note had said he hadn’t liked his criticism about taking so long to establish a telephone link and had called him “rude.” Ignoring this complaint, Chris had responded with another coded message asking how much money Daulton had received so far for the material he’d sent with him. But it hadn’t been answered, and Chris doubted if Daulton had delivered it.
Nevertheless, he continued to take information out of the vault, tape it to a wall in his house and photograph it. On occasion, to enhance the value of what he considered lesser documents, he typed FLASH/SECRET on them. Out of the vault went more ciphers and technical reports and spools of TWX messages rolled up like toilet paper. There were photographs of a study, several pages long, designated only as Project 20,030. It was TRW’s concept for a new surveillance satellite system that, just as Argus had been an advancement over Rhyolite, was to be an advanced version of Argus. It was to be another precious buy for the Russians. Each trip out of the plant—and the return trip with the documents—was a risk. But Chris had always thrived on risk.
There was a moment, early in April, 1976, when Chris thought their whole adventure was over: Gene Norman announced that the National Security Agency had appointed a new senior administrator to oversee the communications vaults at various companies that held CIA contracts, and he was on his way to the Black Vault at that moment. They quickly removed a marijuana plant that was growing in the vault, as well as project I.D. badges showing a monkey’s face that Norman had prepared as a joke; but otherwise, there was no time to prepare for his arrival.
Chris thought of an incident a few days earlier and smiled to himself: He had gone home after finishing his shift in the vault, but at about seven o’clock he had received a call from one of the guards in M-4. Gene Norman’s wife, the guard explained, had called TRW and said she was worried because her husband hadn’t come home from work; the guard had peeked through the partially opened vault door and discovered what he thought was the soles of two feet—apparently the feet of a man lying on the floor beyond the draperies that divided the vault. Because the guard wasn’t cleared to enter the vault, he called Chris and asked him to drive to TRW as soon as possible. When Chris arrived, he learned the guard had decided there was a dead man on the floor of the vault, and several fellow uniformed security men were huddled outside. But when Chris went in, he found out that Norman was not dead, but drunk. He aroused Norman and told the guards that he had merely fallen asleep.
The crisis over the NSA man’s visit was more serious.
In January, the agency had changed its encryption system; instead of making the daily change in ciphers with a keying machine, it had introduced a new kind of computer cipher card that was kept in sealed plastic envelopes in the vault’s floor safe, with a new card removed for each day’s use.
Previously, Chris had photographed the key cards while he was alone in the vault, usually before other employees arrived for work. But this became more hazardous after the new system was introduced: removing the cards from the sealed envelopes, and then returning them, took too much time. To make things easier, he began to take the packages of ciphers home with him, where he could remove the cards from the envelopes, photograph them and reseal the envelopes before returning them to the safe the following day. It was difficult to reseal the envelopes exactly as they had been. But he was usually the only one who opened the envelopes to pull out the cards, so this didn’t matter.
The NSA official who was making the inspection was new on the job, and his surprise inspection was intended to assure him that the system he was taking over was in good shape. As soon as he entered the vault, Chris remembered that he had made a fatal mistake: he had replaced one set of crypto cards in its envelope upside down.
His heart pounded as the official crouched down near the open safe and checked the ciphers stored for use in future months. He watched as the visitor examined each one slowly. Chris tried to distract him by complaining about the reliability of the cipher machines—they were always breaking down, he said. The man was friendly, but painstaking. An hour passed, and then another hour, and Chris’s head ached from the hopelessness of the situation. But he tried to seem relaxed as he waited for the NSA man to reach the questionable package of ciphers.
He saw it.
The man was holding it in his hand, and Chris looked down at it, helpless.
But nothing happened. The NSA executive’s eyes passed over the package after a moment and went on to the next one.
Later that day, Norman reported that the inspector was unhappy because some components that were listed in the inventory for the code room were missing, but otherwise, he had no serious complaints about the operation.
Laurie Vicker had finally persuaded her boyfriend to marry her, but the marriage hadn’t stopped her from pursuing Chris, nor her husband’s suspicions that there was something going on between them. One night when she and Chris both had to work late, the black-haired systems analyst made a booze run and returned with a gallon of wine. By the time all the messages had been sent to Langley, most of the wine was gone, but Laurie said she didn’t want to go home yet, and suggested they go over to Chris’s house.
Chris still wasn’t interested sexually in the plump, if sensuous, woman, whose advances he found vulgar. But he considered her a friend and didn’t want to hurt her feelings. And so he suggested that she follow him in her van to his house, where they could smoke a joint. When they reached his place, Laurie telephoned a friend and discovered that her husband had learned from a TRW guard that the two of them had left together. The friend said that her husband had gone looking for them. Chris rushed her out of the house and they left for Daulton’s.
Laurie’s husband, a bartender, was substantially larger than Chris and had boasted to his bride that he had once killed a man in a fight—a fact that Laurie had repeated to Chris. They got into their respective vehicles and Laurie followed Chris to the Lee home, where they found Daulton, drank more wine and smoked two joints. Meanwhile, Chris wondered how he was going to get Laurie home. About midnight, he decided upon a strategy for dealing with Laurie’s husband: she was too drunk to drive, so there was only one way to get her home, and that was with her husband.
He telephoned him at their apartment and said that Laurie was in Palos Verdes and was drunk; he said he would deliver her to him in twenty minutes at the Plaza in Palos Verdes Estates. It was a Spanish-style square near the ocean flanked by red tile-roofed buildings that housed mostly real estate offices, the main industry of the town. Next Chris called the Palos Verdes Estates Police Station, which was located at the edge of the Plaza, and offered an anonymous tip: within twenty minutes, there was to be a gang fight in the Plaza. Then Daulton called the police with the same message.
A few minutes later, Chris drove the very drunk Laurie to the Plaza in her van and left her inside. There were five police cars, engines running, parked around the Plaza, and the unhappy husband saw them.
“Here’s your wife,” Chris jauntily said to her husband.
“You son of a bitch,” he said. “Don’t you ever touch her; I k
illed somebody once for less.”
Chris just smiled, and Laurie drunkenly said, “Please take me home.”
Under the eyes of the watching policemen, they all left then. But it wasn’t the last time that Laurie went after Chris.
Carole Benedict had returned from Hawaii and was living with her mother, who had remarried, and she was now dating Daulton regularly; it was an expensive courtship in terms of the gifts and expensive dinners he lavished on her, but it gave him access to her wonderful body. Although his drug habit was also expensive, the Russians were providing him with a steady income, and there was every reason to think this income would continue for a long time: the Russians were panting as never before.
The only problem Daulton saw—and it was growing more and more frustrating—was Chris. He had begun to sense that Chris was becoming uncooperative again; in fact, he was so unpredictable it was impossible to figure him out sometimes. It was bad for his drug business, Daulton knew that. Several times, Chris had promised him an important load of merchandise that he claimed would be worth at least $20,000 to the Russians, but the Russians said the material wasn’t worth anything—either the photographs were fogged or their value fell short of Daulton’s asking price for other reasons. Daulton always managed to bargain a few thousand dollars beyond what Boris offered. But it wasn’t what he expected, and this caused problems for Daulton in his drug trade because he usually planned in advance how the money would be spent. Once, for example, before making a trip to Mexico City with a load that Chris said ought to bring $20,000, he placed an order for two tons of marijuana. The weed was waiting for him in Jamaica at $30 a pound; he should have more than enough money for the deal. But that delivery brought only $5,000, and it was an embarrassment for him with the dealer who had set up the buy.
There were other problems, too. Barclay Granger had borrowed $18,000 from him to front a cocaine buy, but he’d lost it to a rip-off artist. Barclay said he’d pay it back, but that had been three months ago, and Daulton decided that he was through with his old friend.
“Why don’t you fly up to San Francisco with me for dinner?” Daulton told a group of friends who had gathered at his home for a party on a Saturday night late in April. Carole was there, along with George and Margie Fein. Daulton—he was called “Daultonomous” by the Feins in joking affection—had met George in a high school woodworking class and they had remained friends. It was the birthday of Margie Fein, and Daulton had invited them over to celebrate. Now he was proposing that they extend the party to San Francisco, with him picking up the tab; he said he had to be in San Francisco to catch a telephone call.
Before inviting them to San Francisco, Daulton explained to Fein that he was conducting a profitable new business selling stocks and bonds to an “uncle” in Mexico City. He boasted that he had made $100,000 from it, and that he made a new delivery each month, picking up an additional $5,000 or $10,000. He had to go to San Francisco, he explained, to arrange his next trip, and he showed Fein a sheet of lined yellow paper that bore a list of scheduled appointments in Mexico City and other places. Fein noticed that it seemed to be in some kind of code, and noticed “S.F.” marked under the current day’s date. The group all rejected his invitation to fly to San Francisco, so Daulton flew off by himself to take a call from Boris.
When Daulton returned, after setting up his next meeting in Mexico City, he faced yet another crisis in his efforts to stay out of jail.
His psychiatrist had been scheduled in March to report the results of Daulton’s hospital examination—the report that could decide whether he went back to jail or not. But the psychiatrist sent a note to Judge Donahue saying that he had been ill and apologizing for having to postpone submission of the report.
Because of the delay, Attorney Kahn managed to put off the court hearing to decide Daulton’s future repeatedly during the early spring. But in May, the psychiatrist finally finished his evaluation, and Judge Donahue scheduled a new hearing on Daulton’s future on May 18, 1976.
After noting he had found no evidence of drug addiction during the hospital stay, the psychiatrist offered his analysis of the forces that had shaped Daulton and thrust him into trouble with the law so frequently:
Mr. Lee demonstrated anxiety, tension and considerable depression but was cooperative and responsive to the daily intensive exploratory and psychotherapeutic interviews with him during the hospitalization. These revealed the persistence of unresolved conflicts which date back to childhood and especially the adolescent years. As the oldest son he felt an obligation to fulfill what he felt were his physician father’s ambitions for him, which entailed acceptance at Notre Dame University and athletic and academic success. Unfortunately for him his only average grades and below average stature frustrated these aspirations and left him with a deep sense of failure and a feeling of paternal rejection. This led to adolescent rebelliousness and acting out which entailed drug dealing and, again unfortunately for him, he was only too successful in this pursuit and it became a way for him to become a “big shot” in a delinquent way and at the same time triumph over and get revenge on his father.
The uncertain success of work and study have never matched for him his illegal endeavors which have persisted with the same neurotic component, as well as much guilt and alienation in relation to his Roman Catholic upbringing and rather harsh but ineffective conscience.
In addition then to establishing that although having used drugs he is not an addict, the hospital studies led to confirmation of the initial impression that the extra-legal behavior pattern had a neurotic substructure which would potentially be amenable to psychotherapy.
Course since Discharge from Hospital:
The hospital stay led to some symptomatic improvement but more importantly the beginning of a therapeutic relationship to be developed on an outpatient basis.
He was discharged to his family to arrange a rehabilitation period of several months, living and working as free of stress as possible while he continued in therapy. Plans were made to work with an elderly craftsman to further his experience in the manufacture of custom furniture and in due course obtain his own apartment near a bus route.
The psychiatrist added that psychotherapy continued “approximately twice weekly throughout February and early March,” but then had to be suspended because of the psychiatrist’s illness, a serious case of influenza. He said psychotherapy had resumed intermittently since then and added:
During the treatment sessions it was felt that continuing progress has been made towards better self-understanding and the difficult but not impossible task of rehabilitating himself with family, friends and society, possibly as a legitimate business entrepreneur or in custom furniture manufacture.
This young man has made a good start towards rehabilitating himself and should in my opinion be given the chance to continue along this road, which though neither short nor easy, offers hope for salvaging someone with good potential from a criminal identity, which might otherwise be further and perhaps irrevocably ingrained.
There is no question that he is neither from an anti-social background, nor basically psychopathic, but rather belongs to that minority of offenders whose behavior have a psychoneurotic basis.
He is therefore amenable to individual psychotherapy and should continue it for many months. There is good support from his family, and although no guarantees of success can be given there seems to be an excellent result possible here. It is strongly urged that he be allowed to continue these treatments under probation supervision as part of his probation program.
At the May 18 hearing, Judge Donahue allowed Daulton to remain on probation until he evaluated the psychiatric report, even though the Los Angeles County Probation Department, citing Daulton’s consistent failure to submit to supervision by probation officers since 1972, was less favorably inclined toward him than the psychiatrist. It had recommended that he be returned to jail. The court ordered a new probation evaluation based on the psychiatrist’s report. Daulton
could be free at least until early September, the judge ruled. Ken Kahn had scored another victory.
Daulton was, again, out of immediate danger of being sent to prison. After the hearing, he boasted to friends that he had fooled both the psychiatrist and the judge and predicted he would never have to return to prison.
Meanwhile, he wasted no time in resuming his twin businesses, selling drugs and selling defense secrets. He had plenty of time to see Carole, and once Barclay Granger was sentenced to Federal prison for cocaine trafficking, he inherited another one of his girlfriends—Darlene Cooper.
31
Daulton sensed a change in Boris Grishin beginning in June. When they exchanged the passwords, his greeting wasn’t as warm, and there was a coolness during their meals. Boris complained more than ever about the quality of the material and insisted on meeting Cristobal. An uneasiness that the Russians might be trying to get rid of him began to trouble Daulton. As usual, each delivery was paid for, but Boris was becoming increasingly impatient with Daulton’s excuses.
Still, Daulton remained certain that they were hooked, and he continued his pattern of gilt-edged promises. Whenever Boris squeezed too much, Daulton did what he had always done with a troublesome junkie: he threatened to withhold the goods. He tacitly let the Russian know that he might not ever hear again from him or his friend if he pressed too hard. And that was enough to make Boris back off for the moment.
Daulton tried not to let Boris’ change of mood bother him. After all, they were still paying. When he returned from Mexico City in June he got high at a party and hinted to one of the cocaine dealers who traveled in his crowd in Redondo Beach that he was doing business with the Soviets. Without giving any details, he said in an optimistic boast, “The Russians are so dumb they’ll buy anything.”
The Falcon and the Snowman Page 21
