The report emphasized that advanced radio-frequency-interception equipment in aircraft and on the ground could pose a threat to the CIA’s goal of providing absolute secrecy for the agents during communications. But TRW outlined a technical strategy—such as constantly shifting the frequency on which messages were broadcast, a technique called “frequency-hopping”—that, it said, would provide large “safe areas” within cities where signals could be hidden among random urban radio transmissions. Such methods, it said, would also “reduce aircraft intercept radius in remote areas to twenty nautical miles.”
TRW designed a satellite that, more than anything else, looked like an umbrella for a giant man in space. Its most striking component was a one-hundred-foot-wide concave antenna; extending from the center of this “dish,” like the staff of an umbrella, was a long boom, and at the end of the boom, where the umbrella handle might be fitted, was attached a large package of electronic equipment. The satellite was to be launched from Cape Canaveral folded in the nose of a rocket booster; once in space, the antenna was to unfurl like a slender umbrella suddenly popped open in the rain.
By the time TRW had completed the design study, it had billed the CIA for $66,000.
It submitted its bid and waited for a decision to proceed.
But in the fall of 1973, the CIA made a decision: it realized it would not get the money from Congress for the next fiscal year to build Pyramider and so it shelved the project at least temporarily.
However, it continued exploring the use of similar covert-communications technology with other companies and in projects with other code names. Eventually, with certain variations, the CIA launched an alternative program to provide instantaneous communication with spies around the world using satellites similar to Pyramider.
After the Pyramider design was completed, a copy of TRW’s final report, containing more than thirty volumes of documents, was locked in a safe at TRW. According to the gossip in M-4, Pyramider was a dead project.
Not long after Chris submitted his resignation, the Pyramider documents were removed from the safe where they had been held, and they were left out in the open on a file cabinet in the Black Vault.
The clerk at the Hacienda Airport Hotel looked across the desk at the two young men who were registering to spend the night together on the evening of December 7, 1976, and tried to retain his poise.
The Hacienda was a popular trysting place for stewardesses and pilots during airline layovers in Los Angeles, but it didn’t attract many homosexuals. Chris said they needed the room only for the night and would depart the following morning, December 8. The clerk signed them in and watched from behind as the short, curly-haired youth and the tall, thin one walked away.
They had driven the Lees’ Cadillac to the motel and carried a six-inch-thick stack of papers to their room—the Pyramider papers.
It was by far their biggest night of photography—13 rolls of film, more than 450 exposures. (If either remembered that it was the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he did not mention it.)
Earlier that day, Chris had stuffed the papers into a satchel and left the plant at four thirty, attempting to lose himself in the throng of homebound employees. Chris spotted a guard looking at him; and when he didn’t look away and seemed ready to say something, Chris braced himself to run. But then the guard turned his attention to someone else, and Chris put the satchel in the back of his Volkswagen.
The following day, he went to work earlier than usual and placed the Pyramider documents back where they had been stored, unlocked, in the vault.
Meanwhile, Daulton had taken the film home and had already begun developing it.
“This is my last trip,” he told his brother, who saw him developing the film in the family kitchen. Daulton told Dave that he dreaded another confrontation with the Soviets after his run-in with Boris in November. But he said that Chris had told him the documents he would be delivering this time would be worth at least $75,000 and the Russians would jump at them. Daulton said he planned to parlay the payment into really big money; they could try again to find a legitimate enterprise and Daulton would be able to get out of the drug business for good.
Daulton placed a call to his friend in the Mexican Mafia and suggested they get together; he was about to come into a great deal of money, he said, and wanted to set up the heroin buy for early in January.
Chris felt certain now that the CIA had to be on to him: it was inconceivable, he thought, that it had not discovered Daulton’s latest visit to the embassy; and he thought: What about the NSA inspector? He must have noticed the improperly sealed ciphers; he had probably ordered a secret investigation. In November, Chris heard through the office grapevine that one of his supervisors had been called to Washington to discuss “problems in M-4,” and wondered what that meant for him. Three weeks before he quit, Chris would insist later, he was drinking with Norman and a friend of his, who told him, “You’re going to spend the rest of your life in jail.” Another friend from TRW approached him in a bar and said Chris was in trouble: “You’re on everybody’s list.”
I’m really getting paranoid, he told himself.
Chris left the Black Vault for the last time on December 17, 1976. There was a final sign-off to Pilot, followed by a lunch at Putney’s, a restaurant in Redondo Beach that was fabricated of old railroad boxcars and decorated with railroad memorabilia. Gene Norman, Laurie and others from the Project toasted his coming success in college and presented him with a gray sweater. As was the requirement at TRW, his supervisor made a final notation on Chris’ personnel folder after he quit:
Reason for termination: Chris has been accepted at Calif. State Riverside, where he will continue his studies toward his degree in History and Political Science.
Overall Evaluation: He has been a dependable, conscientious, capable employee. He has been an asset to this staff. Termination voluntary and he is definitely eligible for re-hire.
Chris’s salary when he left TRW was $163.50 per week.
It was common, if illegal, for California falconers to trap a passage in their own state, where trapping was rigidly controlled, and take the young bird to another state, such as Wyoming or Utah, where the laws were more lax and where more trapping permits were available, and then bring the bird back to California under a permit from the other state.
Chris trapped his last—and best—falcon, the one he was to call Mr. Pips, in the California Coastal Range mountains near Morro Bay. Shortly after he turned in his badge at TRW, he drove the bird to Wyoming to “legitimize” it. As he guided his yellow Volkswagen out of Southern California, across the deserts of California and Nevada, he was happier than he had been in more than a year. The burden was off his back. He returned home from Wyoming in time for Christmas, and he showed off his new bird.
Pips, he bragged, was as tame as a parrot when he was on Chris’s gloved wrist. But when he was on the wing, pursuing game, he could dive in a stoop probably—he estimated—at 150 miles an hour.
Despite Chris’s happiness over his new bird, his mother knew something bothered him. She noticed that he didn’t exchange Christmas gifts with Alana and wondered if his moodiness had something to do with a lovers’ quarrel. But she suspected it went deeper than that. She asked her son if there was anything wrong, and he said there wasn’t. But he said he wanted to talk with Monsignor McCarthy to ask his advice on how to handle a problem. “Well, call him up,” his mother, who recalled how much Chris had always respected the priest, said. But Chris never found the courage to lay out his problem to him.
His only choice was to wait. And from time to time his dark mood began to brighten. He was out of the vault; and most important: it seemed as if they had gotten away with it.
In the Lee family, other kinds of questions were being raised. Dr. Lee, the pathologist in whose practice he frequently analyzed the tissue of other physicians’ patients to determine if it was cancerous, had been troubled by certain symptoms in himsel
f. He elected, however, not to tell his family about his concern.
Shortly before the Christmas holidays, Aaron Johnson decided to visit his former partner; he knew Daulton was hiding out at his home because of the warrant issued the previous September and didn’t leave there often except to go to Mexico. Johnson parked his car in back of the Lees’ ranch-style house and went to the back door; he opened it and saw a middle-aged, muscular man talking to Daulton in a hallway. The man was unforgettable. At one time he had been handsome. But there was an ugly scar that swept from his right temple across his cheek in a broken curve all the way to the base of his jaw, and the white-and-pink swath of scar tissue contrasted grotesquely with the golden-bronze color of his natural complexion. He was dressed in a brown leisure suit, white patent leather shoes and a matching white belt that made Johnson think of a Chicago gangster, an impression enhanced by what he thought of as a sinister, thin moustache. When Johnson started moving toward them, Daulton looked up and seemed startled. He waved him back and led the Mexican into the living room.
“Wait in my room,” Daulton yelled at Johnson.
The door of the bathroom next to Daulton’s room was ajar. Johnson looked in and saw black strips of film hung almost like crepe paper from the towel racks, a mirror and the counter. Curious, he raised one strip of film up to a light and saw diagrams, tables of numbers and typing.
Daulton pushed open the door. Johnson knew Daulton; he knew that if Daulton had pictures hanging in his bathroom, it had something to do with making money. That was the way Daulton was. They were technical drawings, and Johnson recalled the vague boasts that Daulton had made about being a “spy.” But when Daulton came into the room, Johnson pretended he hadn’t seen what was on the negatives and asked, “What are you doin’, makin’ porno pictures?”
“I was just messing around with my cameras,” he said.
Johnson tried to change the subject: “Who was that guy?”
“He’s my uncle,” Daulton said with a sly grin, but explaining no further. He did not want to identify the Mexican with whom he was negotiating his biggest drug deal.
A few nights later, Daulton and Chris arrived for a party at the apartment in Redondo Beach that Johnson shared with Beverly Zyser, another refugee from Palos Verdes. One of the guests at the party was Larry Potts, the Palos Verdes sailor whom Daulton regularly tried to pump for information about his ship’s activities. Around midnight, he noticed Chris and Daulton huddling in a corner, and he was close enough to hear their conversation.
“It’s about time,” Chris said.
“For what?”
“Boris.”
“John,” Daulton corrected, but then agreed: “It’s time for Mexico.”
The sailor lost the drift of the rest of their conversation, but heard one of the friends mention a word that was unfamiliar to him: Pyramider. He wondered what it meant.
On New Year’s Day, Johnson and Beverly Zyser went out for dinner at El Toro’s, a Mexican restaurant near the Peninsula, and found Daulton dining with several other youths with long hair whom Johnson recognized from the drug trade. Chris wasn’t there, but that was no surprise to Johnson because he knew Chris tended to avoid Daulton’s buddies from the drug trade. As usual, Daulton was without wheels. After dinner he headed for a pay telephone to call a taxi; but Johnson offered to give him a ride home.
It was just after midnight when Johnson’s car passed into Palos Verdes Estates on the winding drive covered by a canopy of eucalyptus trees that links the Peninsula with the beach communities to the northwest. Suddenly, red lights of a police car flicked on behind him, 223 Johnson was pulled over for speeding. The policeman looked at Johnson’s passenger and noticed that he seemed nervous; after asking for Daulton’s identification, he placed a call on his radio to the Palos Verdes Estates Police Station and asked if there were any arrest warrants for either of the youths. After a minute, the dispatcher informed the patrolman of the warrant in Daulton’s name. There weren’t any outstanding warrants in Johnson’s name, and he got off with a speeding ticket. Daulton was immediately placed under arrest.
As Daulton rode to jail in the back seat of the black-and-white patrol car, he could think of only one thing: he had two appointments waiting for him in Mexico that were the key to his future—first with the Russians for cash, and then with his friends in Culiacán to consummate the deal that would extricate him from all of his troubles. From the police station he called his attorney, Ken Kahn:
“Kenny, can you get me out? It’s really important.”
The following day, Daulton looked up once again at the familiar face of Judge Burch Donahue. And once again, the judge granted Kahn’s request for his client’s freedom on bail. Daulton was released on January 4, after posting $2,500. The judge ordered him to return to court January 20, when he was to answer all the assorted charges that had piled up against him, including even the revoked probation stemming from his first arrest in 1971; six years later, it was still, amazingly enough, pending against him. When Daulton posted bail, he promised not to leave the Palos Verdes area. But the next day—January 5—he bought a ticket and flew via Mexicana Airlines to Mexico City.
“Now, remember, you get back here, you’ve got a court date,” his mother told him the night before.
“Don’t worry,” Daulton said. “This is my last trip to Mexico.”
35
About eleven o’clock on the morning of January 6, 1977. Eileen Heaphy, a Foreign Service officer assigned to the United States Embassy in Mexico City, arrived at the Soviet Embassy in the Mexican capital for an appointment with Victor Kroptov. Like numerous members of the staff at the Russian embassy, Kroptov was a member of the KGB, although his official title was “political counselor.”
An attractive woman in her twenties, Miss Heaphy had been in Mexico City less than seven months. Before joining the Foreign Service four years earlier, she had been employed by the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, the same agency that supervised the cryptographic systems in the Black Vault, as an information analyst and training instructor.
As a Foreign Service officer in Mexico, she was assigned to the Political Section of the U.S. Embassy. Her assignment was to monitor Mexican foreign policy as it related to nations other than the United States and to compile reports evaluating these diplomatic relationships. The main source of her information, besides official pronouncements and the newspapers, was personal contacts with diplomats from the other embassies in Mexico City. There were about sixty in the city, and Miss Heaphy, in the few months she’d been there, had become acquainted with someone at most of them, including Kroptov. Periodically she exchanged lunches with her counterparts at the other embassies, swapped gossip and otherwise kept in touch.
These were important times in Mexico. In December, the country had inaugurated a new president, José López Portillo, and the professional Mexico-watchers in the diplomatic community were still trying to get a fix on what his policies would be. To the United States, Mexico, a poor friend that had always been more or less taken for granted, was taking on a new, if still undefined, importance. Almost daily there were new reports of oil riches in Mexico, and it was becoming clear that Mexico might someday become a major alternative source of petroleum to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries cartel. American diplomats were being forced to have some second thoughts about Mexico. The United States had neglected its southern neighbor for many years despite its proximity; moreover, American diplomats knew that Mexico, despite some gains in the development of a middle class, had a huge population of extremely poor people who might be easy prey for Communist agitators who might, someday, remove the oil from the reach of the United States.
Beginning in the fall of 1976, there had been several published reports of new agreements between the Soviet Union and Mexico, principally involving trade. Several days earlier, Miss Heaphy had called Kroptov and said she wanted to pay a call and discuss these agreements and Mexican–Soviet relations in g
eneral as part of her assignment to monitor third-country relations with Mexico. Kroptov had invited her to meet with him at 11 A.M. The meeting went as planned, and about eleven forty-five, she passed through the gate of the Soviet Embassy and began searching for her car and driver.
As she did, she spotted a short man surrounded by a group of Mexican policemen in front of the embassy, who was gesturing animatedly with his arms; his face was flushed and he was shaking his head, apparently trying to deny whatever it was the policemen were saying to him. He looked like an American, and she walked over to the group to overhear what was going on.
“Do you speak English?” Daulton immediately asked her, and she said she spoke English and Spanish and was from the U.S. Embassy.
“Can I help you?”
“I was just walking by and stuck my head in the gate of this building to see what it was. Then I threw down an empty pack of cigarettes and a piece of paper—it was just a book jacket from an old dictionary!—and these guys came running after me and said I was under arrest.”
Daulton was heartened by the sight of the American woman who had come to his rescue and began to relax. As persuasively as he could, he dismissed the encounter as a silly mistake. He said he was an American tourist who had been visiting his former fiancée, who was now married to a Mexican who taught at the University of Mexico. His old girlfriend and her husband, he said, had been walking with him, but somehow they had become separated and he had gotten lost.
The Falcon and the Snowman Page 26
