Chris stared hard at the three-dimensional plaque on the wall and decided he couldn’t see anything suspicious. But Daulton insisted there were eyes in the walls monitoring them, and to prove his point, he stood up on a chair and removed an outer shell from the coat of arms. Behind it there was some kind of electronic apparatus that Chris didn’t recognize.
“This place has got to be bugged,” Daulton said shakily. Quickly, he started feeling the walls and examining the furniture. With a yelp of triumph, he said he had discovered a microphone beneath an end table. With a firm tug, he ripped it out and proudly held it up for Chris to see, its wires dangling limply in the air.
“I’ve had it with this fucking hocus-pocus,” he said.
Boris returned, and Daulton, surprising Chris, pulled an envelope from his shirt, thrust it at Boris and demanded money. Chris picked up the envelope and saw two strips of microfilm with photographs of documents that he thought he had given Daulton months before; Chris realized Daulton had kept back some of the data to squeeze extra money out of the Russians.
Boris looked at the microfilm and called it “garbage”—useless without the frequencies. Once again, Daulton jumped to his feet and started yelling at Boris, screaming that he’d been cheated. Boris rose to his feet. He shouted back at Daulton, reiterating his earlier theme that Daulton had not delivered what he had promised. Both periodically interrupted their debate by swilling down another glass of vodka.
Chris stared at the two men, who were now oblivious to him. They were standing perhaps two feet apart. Daulton was sticking the index finger of his right hand into Boris’ chest like a hard-sell merchant in a Moroccan bazaar, and Boris was waving his finger right back at Daulton.
My God, Chris thought, it’s like a Charlie Chaplin movie. They seem to enjoy it.
After a while, the debate subsided, and Daulton sat down and resumed his solitary drinking. Boris had brought with him blowups of pictures taken of the interior of the KG-13 machine showing the cipher circuit boards, which Daulton had brought on a previous trip, and Boris showed them to Chris to illustrate a point he had tried to make earlier: that some of the photographs had been faulty. The circuit boards of the machine were discernible in the pictures, he acknowledged, but the image was too fuzzy. Chris looked at the pictures and tried to act surprised. A few minutes later, Boris turned his attention to other matters, while Daulton sat in his chair and studied the pictures lying on the table. When he thought Boris was distracted in conversation with Chris, he grabbed them and shoved them beneath his shirt. It was a speculative urge: perhaps he could sell the pictures to another embassy, he thought.
When Chris saw the newest list of questions, he decided that whoever had compiled the list probably knew a good deal about satellites—a good deal more than he knew. There were more questions about the Pilot-Pedal communications link and the cipher equipment, plus a lengthy list of queries about Rhyolite, Argus and other TRW reconnaissance satellites, about infrared sensors and on a variety of other technical subjects. When he gave him the new list of questions, Boris also returned Chris’s wallet to him. Writing in longhand, Chris answered some of the questions. But others either were too technical or applied to projects that he did not know about, and some he simply ignored.
On one of the sheets of blank paper Boris gave him to answer the questions, Chris wrote a note to the KGB agent: He said that Daulton was so addicted to heroin that he was jeopardizing their whole operation. Furthermore, he said, Daulton had spent much of the money sent to both of them to support his heroin habit and was too unpredictable to trust. “He’s threatened to blackmail my father,” Chris wrote, “and if he does my father will go straight to the FBI.”
Boris scanned the note, and Chris wondered what the KGB agent would make of it. He looked over at Daulton and decided that the vodka, wine, cocaine and pot had finally conquered him: he was slumped back in his chair in the shadow-filled cell. But then he seemed to regain consciousness; he nibbled at a piece of cheese, chugalugged another glass of vodka and sat back again. Daulton’s stomach had been giving him trouble again in the past few days, and the rich food and drink that night had turned it into a painful caldron of sour bile. He announced that he had to go to the bathroom. While he was gone, Chris said again that his friend was a heroin addict; he said Daulton had to be removed from their operation or he would blow it. Boris was nodding agreement when Daulton returned.
Once again, Boris asked if there was any possibility of Chris’s obtaining the frequencies.
“They want to listen from their trawlers,” Daulton interjected. Boris glared at Daulton and ignored the remark. He reiterated that Daulton had assured him repeatedly that Chris could obtain the frequencies. Despite everything, Boris apparently still didn’t believe what Chris had told him earlier.
Chris repeated that he didn’t work with the frequencies and that the list was kept by Western Union and the CIA. He said he was willing to try, but there would be a high risk that he would be caught if he tried. Boris responded quickly: No, don’t try. Chris should not expose himself to such a risk. He apologized for even asking, saying that he had brought up the question only because he had been assured by Daulton that he could get the frequencies.
Boris was still slurring his words, but Chris suspected that he still had his wits about him; there was something solicitous in the KGB agent’s behavior toward him now, and he wondered why.
His motives soon began to be obvious.
Boris asked casually if Chris had ever thought about seeking a job elsewhere within the CIA or the American government. Chris answered that on two occasions he had been offered jobs by the CIA, but he had felt he wouldn’t be able to pass the lie-detector test required of all agency employees.
There were ways to fool the operator of a polygraph machine, Boris said, and added that they could take up this matter later.
“How much would it cost for you to complete your education?” he asked.
Chris thought a moment. “About forty thousand dollars, including graduate school.”
Boris then outlined his proposal:
Chris should quit his job and return to college to prepare for a career in the State Department or the CIA. Chris should take university courses in Russian and Chinese history and political affairs, become a specialist in one or both of these countries and master the Chinese and Russian languages if he could.
At some time in the future, perhaps years away, Boris hinted, Chris might have another opportunity to serve the Soviet Union. Suddenly, Chris realized what Boris had in mind: he was attempting to plant a mole in the United States Government—a young man with promise and good credentials who would join a government agency at a modest level and then begin climbing the bureaucratic ladder, perhaps to a high level of government, where he would be a Soviet spy in situ, waiting for orders to come someday from Moscow.
Chris would claim later that he had had no choice but to accept the Soviet offer that night. The trap he had set for himself in an impulsive swipe at what he viewed as a corrupt, cancerous system had sprung again. This time he knew it might grip him for the rest of his life. Wherever he went, whatever he did—whether he became a lawyer, a priest, a government employee, a teacher, whatever—he realized he might always be called on to work for the KGB.… They could find him. By threatening to disclose the secret of his youth, the KGB could blackmail him into doing its bidding for the rest of his life.
He hated Boris and what he stood for as much as he hated the CIA spooks on Rhyolite. He despised them as one and the same—fools pursuing the senseless nationalism that would ultimately end in a cataclysmic nuclear holocaust. They were fools, all of them.
Why not let the Russians pay for his education? There would be opportunities later, he told himself, to decide his ultimate plan. How would they find me? he asked himself.
Chris accepted the proposal, and Boris was delighted.
Meanwhile, Boris said, Chris should keep up the friendships he had made at TRW and be a
lert to the possibility of recruiting other employees to help the cause, adding that he should pay special attention to weaknesses of these people that might be open to blackmail. Chris said he would not recruit any of his associates, but Boris overlooked this insubordination and urged Chris to return once more to Mexico City in January.
The meeting broke up shortly before 1 A.M. All three of them were drunk. The anger between Boris and Daulton earlier in the evening had now shifted into the camaraderie of drunks the world over, or so it seemed to Chris.
Boris gave Daulton an envelope containing $1,000, and Chris an envelope with $5,000. When he gave the money to Chris, Boris waited until Daulton was looking elsewhere and whispered that there was an address written on the envelope where he should meet him the following day. But when Chris later tried to read the message, he discovered that the KGB agent had been so smashed that his writing was indecipherable.
The two friends were dropped off at the hotel by the embassy car. Daulton, still feeling snubbed, asked Chris to share their take from the Russians equally, but Chris refused. Daulton was even angrier the next morning when they checked out of the Holiday Inn. Chris made Daulton pay the entire bill because of his admission in front of Boris that he had indeed received more money than he had admitted to Chris before.
They reviewed the meeting over breakfast, and Chris told Daulton that he had agreed to one more delivery.
33
“Disinformation.”
The idea was intriguing to Daulton. He had wondered what story he should tell if ever he and Chris were tripped up, and the idea seemed promising. It wasn’t a new idea; he’d first thought about it months earlier. But as he lay stretched out with a book on a chaise longue beside the pool at the Oceana Palace Hotel in Mazatlán, where he had gone after the meeting in Mexico City with Chris and Boris, it began to seem more and more attractive. Perhaps it was the book he was reading, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence, by Victor Marchetti and John D. Marks. Disinformation was wrong information leaked to an enemy that was camouflaged as the truth. “Disinformation is a special type of ‘black’ propaganda which hinges on absolute secrecy and which is usually supported by false documents,” the authors had written.
Both the CIA and the KGB, he read, routinely used agents to feed false information to each other and to penetrate the other’s intelligence service. It was a cat-and-mouse operation. Daulton read on and became further intrigued by the plan that was taking shape in his mind. It was common, the authors wrote, for the CIA to encourage Americans involved in espionage “to cooperate with the Soviets in order to learn more about what kind of information the KGB wants to collect, to discover more about KGB methods and equipment or merely to occupy the time and money of the KGB on a fruitless project. CIA counterespionage specialists do not necessarily wait for the KGB to make a recruitment effort, but instead may set up an elaborate trap, dangling one of their own as bait for the opposition.”
Daulton laid down the book and wondered. It would make an excellent defense if he ever needed one, he decided. Then a further thought flashed through his mind and it delighted him: maybe, he fantasized, his idea for a defense was even true.
From across the pool, two friends from Colorado who were also trying to convert the Mexico sun’s rays into autumn tans had seen the American who was about their own age reading a paperback book that had something to do with spies. Bob Herbert and Larry Smith had decided in early October that they needed a vacation, and on October 20, 1976, they had checked into the high-rise Oceana Hotel on the beach at Mazatlán. They saw the American put down his book, get up from his chaise and walk along the edge of the pool toward the two Coloradans. He introduced himself as “Alex Lee” and said he was recuperating from minor injuries in a traffic accident. Smith hadn’t known Daulton long before he decided that he had a distaste for him. “He’s a cocky punk,” he later told his companion; Smith was unimpressed that first day by Daulton’s ostentatious offer each time a bill arrived for cocktails or food to pick up the tab, and when Daulton began to boast of exploits in the drug trade, Smith wrote him off as a bore and a phony.
Herbert, though, was less put off by the stranger; Daulton struck up a friendship with him, and they spent many hours together during the next few days, at the pool and in the hotel bar, with Herbert alternately fascinated by and suspicious of the stories spun by the diminutive stranger who was constantly scanning the faces of people around him, declaring that he was worried about Federal drug-enforcement agents’ putting him under surveillance.
On the first day they met, Daulton informed Herbert that he was a member of the “Mexican Mafia.” He described himself as a major-league drug dealer whose base of operation was Culiacán, up the road from Mazatlán. He hadn’t meant to get involved in drugs, Lee continued. It had all started by accident because his sister had gotten in trouble with Mexican drug dealers and he’d had to go to work for them to get her out of a jam. Daulton said he was “a lot of dead babies”—a man of many identities, with several passports and credentials for several people. The way to do it, he explained, was to obtain birth certificates of deceased children and use them to procure false identification. That was how he managed to travel back and forth between Mexico and California without being arrested, he said.
After three or four days, Daulton began to tell his new friend of riches he had been mining besides drugs. He said he took photographs of ships in American harbors and sold them to a foreign government for $50,000. “You don’t go to the country where you’re going to sell the film,” he explained, “but to their embassy in another country.”
Herbert feigned belief, but Daulton decided that he really didn’t believe him, so he added more details to convince him.
“Come to my room; I’ll show you,” he said, as if challenged.
The first thing Herbert noticed about Daulton’s room was a stack of spy novels on a dresser, along with so many containers of Valium and other pills that he wondered if he was a hypochondriac. He noticed several cameras on a table near the room’s window wall that offered a spectacular view of the Pacific.
Daulton picked up one of the cameras and said he’d obtained it in a trade with one of his customers for cocaine. He showed Herbert a hiding place inside the leather case and pulled out long strips of film negatives.
“This is the kind of stuff I sell,” he said.
Herbert held it up to the light, and on the first frame he noticed two words in large print: TOP SECRET.
Daulton said it was a photograph of a document he’d received from the Swiss Government and he was going to sell it to the highest bidder.
Actually, he added, this material wasn’t all that good. “I’ve got better stuff to sell,” he said.
Acting like a tutor, Daulton explained how easy it was to get into the business. “You can go to a public library and take pictures of stuff in books and sell it to foreign embassies.”
When Herbert suggested it was a gold mine and asked why Daulton didn’t do more of it, his new friend said he could make more money dealing in drugs with the Mexican Mafia.
“Aren’t you taking a chance telling me about all this?” Herbert asked.
“All you know is that I have a real nice camera and took pictures of a shipyard,” Daulton said.
When the Coloradans’ six-day vacation was up, Daulton said he’d foot the bill if they wanted to stay on a few more days. They declined, however, saying they had to get back to work.
Before they departed, they noticed that Daulton was visited twice by a young, well-dressed Mexican. On the day they left, Daulton rented a car and drove to Culiacán for another meeting with the same man. He placed an order for the heroin buy. Now he had to pay for it.
On October 27, 1976, Chris completed application for admission to the University of California at Riverside. He wrote that it was his intention to major in history and minor in political science.
In the essay that was required with the application, Chris outlined his aspirati
ons:
After twenty-three years of existence, it is possible to divide my life into two distinct periods. First, my childhood and adolescence were dominated by a sense of searching. My attractions switched from monastic Catholicism to social protest to athletics. Most movements, fads and causes of that time held my complete if short-lived attention. I was continually groping in search of a purpose with which to direct my energy.
In 1974 I interrupted my education in San Luis Obispo in exchange for employment at TRW in Redondo Beach, California. It was here that I formulated the concepts which color my “second phase.” I am extremely fortunate in that my daily responsibilities include interaction with middle level management of the federal bureaucracy. These working relationships have allowed me the opportunity to narrow my focus concerning my social role. It is from this group of mainly young, ambitious achievers from which I derive my direction.
Their ultimate goal is to accumulate the maximum amount of personal power through advancement within the bureaucracy. These drives are motivated by self-achievement yet they serve to further the public interest. Herein lies my aspirations. The completion of my education is the next logical step in pursuit of these aims.
My free time is spent dabbling in falconry, fresh water fishing and historical study. Through these interests I am aware of America’s continued deterioration in the areas of environmental preservation and global politics. I perceive major altercations in the world at large in my lifetime due to population increases and food and energy shortages.
As the United States faces these massive challenges in the years to come, it will take competent performance within the intelligence community and foreign service to safeguard the national integrity. For this purpose I seek admission to the University of California at Riverside.
It was the essay of someone declaring his intention to work for the United States as an intelligence specialist or in the foreign service. It was just as Boris had requested. Chris mailed the application and waited for a decision.
The Falcon and the Snowman Page 24
