The Falcon and the Snowman

by Robert Lindsey

  Miss Heaphy asked one of the policemen, a corporal who seemed to be in charge, what had happened, and he confirmed the chronology of events. But the corporal said he’d seen a Soviet guard pick up one of the items thrown by the American, and when he was asked for it the Soviet guard refused.

  Miss Heaphy identified herself as an official of the U.S. Embassy and asked why it was considered so serious to throw a piece of paper on the ground. The policeman explained that his unit had been assigned to keep the embassy under surveillance because they had been alerted for visits by representatives of Mexican terrorist groups. Only recently, he said, a member of the Twenty-third of September Communist League—a violent Mexican antigovernment terrorist organization—had passed a message to a foreign embassy by throwing it through a gate.

  For this reason, Daulton had to be detained for questioning, the corporal explained.

  Overhearing their conversation, Daulton protested heatedly, saying again that he was merely an American tourist. Convinced that he was getting nowhere, Daulton, with a motion of his head, summoned the corporal to his side and said in the best Spanish he could muster, “I have five hundred dollars; if you forget this, you can have it.”

  There was no response from the policeman, which surprised Daulton because he had long known the power of mordida in Mexico.

  Two police cars arrived in front of the Embassy.

  Miss Heaphy reentered the building and asked to speak to the Soviet chief of security. The Russian who greeted her said that while the American might have been rude in throwing trash on the grounds, he saw no need to press charges.

  Using the radiotelephone in her car, Miss Heaphy called her embassy to report that an American citizen had been arrested at the Soviet Embassy and he needed assistance from an officer in the embassy’s consular division who specialized in helping arrested Americans. A police sergeant was now on the scene, and he said he was willing to wait for the arrival of an American consular official. Miss Heaphy, deciding that he looked even more nervous now than he’d been before, then returned to Daulton, who was surrounded by policemen. He said he was outraged; here he was, an American tourist being manhandled by Mexican police. Then he whispered to her that he was afraid of being sent to a Mexican prison, where prisoners were tortured and starved. As they waited on the sidewalk, Daulton turned his back on the woman; he was trying to hide something in his jacket or pants, she suspected. But a few moments later she discovered what he had been doing.

  One of the policemen had motioned Daulton toward a police car. When Daulton moved, the policeman spotted a half-smoked marijuana joint near one of his feet. He shouted to his associates that he had found contraband carried by the young man.

  Until the reefer was discovered, Miss Heaphy thought some of the Mexican policemen had seemed to be wavering between taking this litterbug to headquarters and letting him go. But the discovery of the joint prompted the sergeant to order Daulton into the back seat of a patrol car.

  They would wait, he said, for the comandante of police.

  Within minutes, other cars drove up, some of them containing plain-clothesmen from the Mexican secret police, the Federal Bureau of Security.

  Miss Heaphy went to the Soviet Embassy guardhouse and asked a guard to let her see the chief of security again. She said she wanted to use a telephone to try her embassy once more. The security man, another KGB agent whom Daulton had met, reappeared and was nasty. He accused her of trying to “penetrate” the Russian complex with a ruse. He did, however, consent to let her use the phone; but before the call went through, two Americans arrived from the U.S. Embassy: Thomas Ferguson, a vice consul whose assignment was to help Americans in trouble with the Mexican law, and Benito Iarocci, an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency who was attached to the U.S. Embassy.

  Ferguson noticed that Daulton’s fingers were shaking badly when they shook hands.

  Daulton explained to Ferguson that he was an American, employed by a California advertising agency, on vacation in Mexico, and once again he protested the treatment he was getting. A Mexican policeman came up and showed Ferguson the joint; Iarocci, meanwhile, had gone to see the Soviet security chief inside the embassy. When he returned, he reiterated to the Mexican police comandante that the Russians didn’t want to press charges against the young man.

  The Mexican comandante then made a decision: they would all go to Metropolitan Police Headquarters, where they could iron out everything. Miss Heaphy returned to her embassy, and Ferguson said he’d follow the police car to Police Headquarters in the center of Mexico City.

  Daulton was ordered by Inspector Reynaldo López Malváez to empty his pockets in a second-floor office in the huge, noisy complex, whose halls were jammed with uniformed policemen, citizens in trouble with the law and people filing complaints about other people’s transgressions. He was a dark-haired, middle-aged man with smoked glasses, a thickening waist and dark bags under his eyes that suggested he worked long hours. Ferguson watched curiously as the nervous American complied with the order to put all his belongings on a desk.

  Daulton laid out his passport, his wallet containing $340 in American currency and more than 1,000 Mexican pesos, a paperback book, a picture postcard and a business-size envelope sealed with plastic tape.

  At first the only thing that seemed to catch the inspector’s eye was the postcard. He stared at it for a long moment, then asked Daulton in Spanish what his occupation was. Ferguson translated the question.

  “I’m a photographer,” Daulton replied in English. He explained that he worked for an advertising agency and had been vacationing in Mexico when, for no reason at all, he had been arrested by Mexico City policemen. Ferguson translated Daulton’s reply into Spanish.

  Without reacting to Daulton’s protest, the inspector turned his attention to his other possessions on the desk. He picked up the envelope that was sealed with plastic tape, removed the tape and opened it. Inside he saw there was a stack of black filmstrips. He picked one at random and held it up to the light that was radiating from a ceiling fixture in the sparsely furnished room. Taking his time, the inspector tried to make out the images on the strip of celluloid. For a long time, López Malváez didn’t say anything. Then he lowered the negative strip, looked at Ferguson and said:

  “Documentos.”

  “These are negatives for a commercial we’re making,” Daulton shot back. His employer, the advertising agency he worked for, he explained hurriedly, was making a documentary film for the General Electric Company about communication satellites because G.E. was “trying to sell worldwide satellite-relay franchises.” Daulton tried to sound like a tourist who had just happened, almost accidentally, to have brought some of his work from home along with him.

  López Malváez asked an assistant to find a magnifying glass. After one was located in an adjoining office, the inspector scrutinized the film again under the soft light in the small room. He was silent as he went from frame to frame on the thin black ribbon. Then he offered one of the shiny black strips to Ferguson along with the magnifying glass.

  Squinting, Ferguson could make out two words printed on each of the frames: TOP SECRET.

  Ignoring Daulton, the two men looked at each other without smiling. Then López Malváez said he would send the negatives to a police laboratory where they could be blown up into prints. It would take an hour or two. He suggested that Ferguson come back to Police Headquarters in a couple of hours, and the American left.

  Then the inspector turned his attention to the picture postcard that Daulton had been carrying when he was arrested, and he began speaking rapidly in Spanish. Daulton appealed to him to speak English so that he could understand. But Daulton did hear one word that he recognized—“asesinato”—and it stunned him. It was the Spanish word for murder.

  López Malváez told Daulton he was being held for murder.

  36

  Daulton had landed at Benito Juárez International Airport at four o’clock the preceding afternoon, t
he first Wednesday in January. He was a day later than he had originally planned because of the arrest in Palos Verdes. But he had thought he could make up for the lost time and decided to expedite matters. In almost two years of commerce with the Soviet Union, this decision was his most foolish.

  The schedule previously set for January called for a meeting either on the first Wednesday or, alternatively, on the first Saturday of the month at the Viva Pizza café at Coyoacán and Matías Romero avenues.

  Normally, to summon the Russians for a meeting on Wednesday, Daulton placed his X marks on one of the currently designated rows of lampposts on the day before, the first Tuesday of the month. The Russians would drive by the designated intersections (the location was changed periodically) on Wednesday to learn if Daulton was in town.

  Arriving so late on Wednesday afternoon meant Daulton had little time to place the marks, and even less for the KGB agents to see them. But Daulton had been in a hurry and had been anxious to arrange a meeting that night even though he had made a late arrival. He didn’t want to wait until Saturday: he needed the money, now.

  Daulton had taken a taxi from the airport to the intersection of Patriotismo and San Antonio streets, at the end of the Miguel Alemán Highway. It was a busy intersection about fifteen minutes’ drive from Reforma. He had affixed the tape marks and, promptly at eight o’clock that evening, had been waiting at the Viva Pizza, thinking with amusement about the incongruity of meeting Soviet agents in an Italian pizza parlor in Mexico City. Boris hadn’t shown up, so after fifteen minutes Daulton had left. An hour later, he had come back, eaten a pizza and drunk two beers. But again, no one was there to meet him. He had tried a third time at ten the next morning, but no one had appeared. Thinking that Boris might be at the Bali Restaurant instead, he had taken a cab there, but no one from the embassy was at the Bali either. He snorted a pinch of coke and wondered what to do next.

  Friends were waiting for him in Culiacán the next day to sew up the heroin buy, and he desperately wanted the money from the Russians. So he had decided to go after it. He had hailed a cab near the Holiday Inn and directed the driver to a side street near Chapultepec Park, gotten out and walked three blocks to the embassy, planning to wait nearby until he spotted someone he knew. Daulton stood near the gate in front of a plaque with a hammer and sickle and the identity of the building printed in Spanish on it. There was a similar plaque with the building’s identity printed in Russian as well.

  A curtain at one window moved and he thought he saw a face at the window, but it vanished. Then he saw an embassy car approaching, and he shaded his eyes with one hand and tried to identify who was inside. It was Boris.

  Daulton began walking faster, and was almost jogging as he tried to intercept the car. It slowed and Daulton looked squarely at Boris, but Boris kept his head fixed straight ahead. The car went into the embassy compound and the gate was closed quickly, leaving Daulton outside the gate, alone. He was furious. Maybe Boris hadn’t seen him, he thought.

  Still hopeful of drawing someone’s attention, he had marked “K.G.B.” on the cover of the Spanish-English dictionary he carried and thrown it defiantly inside the iron bars. Then he had walked on.

  About thirty yards away a Mexican policeman—one of three or four visible in the immediate vicinity of the embassy—had been watching the short man curiously, wondering why he was lingering so long outside the building. Then he saw him toss something through the bars. (Afterward, he said he hadn’t been sure whether it was a big wad of paper, an envelope or a small incendiary bomb.) The policeman sprang into action and ran after Daulton—and at that moment Daulton’s long, quixotic business relationship with the Soviet Union came to an end.

  Whether any Russians were looking out at the awkward American while he loitered so conspicuously in front of their embassy is still not known. But if they were, they made no response. After all, a member of the U.S. Embassy staff was in the building at the time.

  “You murdered a policeman,” Inspector López Malváez said angrily in English (not much better than Daulton’s Spanish) after Ferguson had left and the microfilm had been sent out for processing.

  Startled, Daulton denied killing anyone.

  “Turista,” he said.

  The inspector was unmoved. On December 28, 1976, just a week or so before, he said, a uniformed Mexico City police officer had been murdered. The assassination, he continued, had occurred at the intersection of Patriotismo and San Antonio streets, the very same intersection pictured on the simulated postcard that Daulton carried. There was a knock on the door and the interrogation was interrupted by the return of Vice Consul Ferguson. López Malváez left Daulton, and in another office he handed Ferguson a stack of 8-by-10 glossy photographs.

  On each was a reproduction of a page of typewritten information, graphs, tables and the words TOP SECRET and PYRAMIDER.

  Daulton was brought into the office by two armed policemen. When he was shown the glossies, he repeated his claim that they were unimportant, just films for use in an advertisement.

  “This material is classified; it could never be used in advertisements,” Ferguson said, ridiculing Daulton’s defense.

  Daulton then lowered his voice and gave a look to Ferguson which meant that what he was about to say was intended only for the two of them.

  “There’s more here than meets the eye,” he whispered. “A lot is riding on this. Here we are trying to do a service for the free world and now we get in trouble.”

  Ferguson couldn’t fathom what Daulton was trying to tell him, but it was clear that something serious involving U.S. national security had occurred. López Malváez dismissed Ferguson, saying he would investigate the matter further, and Ferguson returned to his embassy and told Benito Iarocci about the photographs he had just seen.

  After Ferguson left, López Malváez renewed his charge of murder and outlined what he claimed had happened: Daulton was a Soviet agent who was funding operations of the Twenty-third of September Communist League and had killed a policeman who had found him out.

  “I wasn’t even in Mexico City on December 28,” Daulton tried to explain in Spanish. The inspector ignored him and repeated the charge.

  Daulton didn’t like the shape of what was coming down. The charge was stupid, but the policeman wouldn’t listen to his story. So, as effectively as he could in a flawed hybrid of Spanish and English, Daulton then told the story he had prepared for such an occasion: he said he was an American agent who was part of an operation to spread false and misleading information—“disinformation”—to the U.S.S.R. He was on assignment, he repeated, for the United States Government, participating in a scheme to deceive the very country that he was now accused of helping. He tried to make López Malváez laugh at the irony. The postcard, he said, had no connection whatsoever with the dead policeman. It had been given to him by the Russians—it was the method they used to advise him where to make markings with adhesive tape and let them know he was in the city and ready for a meeting. López Malváez, upon hearing more about the Russians, listened on.

  That very night, Daulton lied, he was scheduled to meet them, and he would be able to prove the postcard had nothing to do with the policeman’s murder. Daulton pleaded with the inspector to go with him to the Viva Pizza Restaurant so that he could show him—he’d also prove what he had said about the X marks he’d placed on the lampposts. López Malváez quickly agreed to his request, and they went in a police car to the intersection of Patriotismo and San Antonio streets, where López Malváez saw for himself Daulton’s signal to the Russians.

  At eight o’clock that evening, Daulton was waiting outside the Viva Pizza. He seemed to be a lone American patiently awaiting an appointment with a friend for dinner, but Mexican plainclothesmen were staked out inconspicuously all around him.

  The small figure of Andrew Daulton Lee fidgeted nervously under the glow of neon lights for almost half an hour that night. No one approached him. Then López Malváez called the endeavor off.
Daulton was returned to Headquarters for more questioning about the murder, and at midnight he was still denying that he was involved. The following morning, he begged López Malváez to let him try just once more. At ten o’clock they went to the Bali Restaurant and Daulton stood near a bus stop, hoping in vain to see one of the familiar embassy cars while Mexican detectives watched. Again, no Russians.

  After twenty minutes, they returned him to the police station, and López Malváez said he was now certain that Daulton had killed the policeman and was a member of the Twenty-third of September Communist League.

  Daulton struggled with his poor Spanish to answer the charges.

  “Bueno, es precisamente en ese lugar,” the inspector said. The scene of the murder was the exact spot shown on the postcard.

  “Sí, entiendo, es muy, muy, muy, ah … ah,” Daulton replied; he understood the inspector’s concern, but he had nothing to do with the murder.

  “Unas personas, ah—two people—iguales a tí mataron a un agente de la policía.” Two people just like you killed a police officer, the inspector insisted.

  “Pero, pero yo no tengo pistol,” Daulton lied, trying to explain he owned no guns.

  “Todo misión aquí es vender la información a los rusquis,” Daulton continued, saying his whole mission in Mexico was to sell information to the Russians. “No tengo tiempo para más problemas; es necesario para mí todo tiempo con los rusquis y los Estados Unidos.” Daulton said he didn’t have any time for more problems; he was too busy working with the Russians part of the time and pursuing his duties in the United States at other times.

  The interrogation continued through a second day, with the police inspector going over the same ground again and again. On the third day, Daulton was turned over to the Federal Bureau of Security—the Mexican secret police—and its interrogators proved to be pointedly less tolerant of Daulton’s heated denials.

  During the preceding six years, Daulton had been arrested seven times in the United States and had served less than seven months in jail. He had become a master at avoiding jail by exploiting constitutional safeguards of civil liberties, the mistakes of arresting officers and a sympathetic court.