He found Mexican justice different.
Daulton was led out of Metropolitan Police Headquarters with his jacket pulled over his head so that he could not see where he was going. Before he left, he had signed a statement that condensed his denial of the murder. A police official had said he would be released soon. Daulton had felt good, relaxed, thinking his detention was over. But without warning his jacket was yanked roughly over his head and he was bundled into a car and driven somewhere in Mexico City. He could hear traffic and the sounds of the city, but he didn’t know where he was headed. The car stopped and he was walked into a building where the jacket was replaced by a blindfold. His escorts during the trip had said only a few words in Spanish. Daulton as yet had no inkling that he was being turned over to the secret police.
The blindfolded murder suspect was led into an elevator, and soon Daulton knew that it wasn’t over. The elevator rose for a few moments, Daulton was escorted into an office and the blindfold was removed. He looked around and saw a desk with several phones, each a different color. Around the desk sat several Mexican men in civilian clothes. Others, grim-faced, stood behind it.
The new interrogators were disarmingly friendly at first, saying that they intended to let him go soon, but first wanted to ask him a few questions.
He repeated the story he had told López Malváez—he was an American disseminating worthless information to the Soviet Government in a scheme sanctioned by the United States. He told his story at length in his fractured Spanish. At 1 A.M. they let him go to sleep.
Four hours later, he was awakened and led back to the same office; this time there were more questioners and they were not as friendly.
A middle-aged Mexican who seemed to be in charge of the investigation said in Spanish that they had been soft with him the night before, but they had known all the time that he was lying about the murder.
“This is not the United States,” a man next to him said in Spanish. “This is Pancho Villa land.”
Angrily, standing around him in a circle, a half-dozen interrogators ordered Daulton to confess that he was a Communist agent working with subversive terrorist groups to overthrow the Mexican Government. He was a Russian agent, they said, an enemy of the Mexican people. One questioner, in fact, noting that his name was Lee, wanted to know if he was Chinese.
They showed Daulton photographs of Russians assigned to the Mexico City embassy, and he identified Boris Grishin as “John”—the man, he said, who had failed to meet him as planned and abandoned him outside the embassy.
Tightening their vise, the secret police officers began flinging questions at Daulton one after another in such rapid Spanish that he became hopelessly confused. But when he said he didn’t understand the questions, it only made his interrogators angrier. They shouted in Spanish that he was lying, that he did understand them. “We’re not stupid Mexicans,” one said. Amid the machine-gun fire of questions, Daulton felt like a man descending deeper and deeper into water in which he was unable to swim. After a while when he asked them to repeat a question, someone behind him began to bang him on both ears at once.
Slowly, a story emerged from the stormy interrogation: Daulton said that his mission in Mexico had begun in 1975 when a childhood friend, Christopher Boyce, had asked him to collaborate on a plan to sell secret information from his place of employment to the Chinese Government through its diplomatic missions in Africa. The information, he said, was to be deceptively changed to get the Chinese “to go around in circles on absurd projects.” After he rejected this proposal, Daulton said, his friend had persuaded him to sell “false information” to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. And indeed, he had begun doing so, and the process had gone on for almost two years until his arrest.
The answers were ridiculed by the Mexicans. They laughed and said he was lying, and the banging continued on his ears by someone he couldn’t see. His head was throbbing with pain, and the ringing in his ears was like a duet of sirens.
“Whom do you work for?” a Mexican asked in Spanish.
“The United States.”
“Doing what?”
“Disseminating erroneous information.”
“Who hired you?”
“The CIA through Christopher Boyce.”
“Where’s Boyce?”
“I don’t know.”
Daulton received another slap on his ears.
“Quit lying! Tell us why you murdered the policeman.”
“I didn’t.”
“Yes, you did. We have a witness who saw you.”
“No, I didn’t do it,” Daulton pleaded. “No, it’s not true.”
The questioning went on for three hours; then Daulton was blindfolded again, handcuffed and left lying on the floor of a storeroom. Three hours later, the questioning resumed:
“Why did you kill the policeman?” It began all over.
One of his interrogators said to another that the murdered policeman might have had a chance to fire a shot at his killer before dying.
“Take off your clothes.”
Daulton stripped naked and the men gathered around him, scanning every inch of his body. Aside from red and purple blotches of acne on his back, the Mexicans couldn’t find any wounds: there was no evidence of gunshot injuries, they agreed.
When Daulton started to put on his clothes, one of the Mexicans ordered him to stop. He went to a wall and removed a mounted sword, and with a flourish and a perverse giggle, he held the broad-bladed weapon three inches from Daulton’s genitals and said:
“Why did you kill our policeman?”
“I didn’t.” Daulton trembled.
Theatrically, the officer made a broad sweep with the sword, feigning a swipe at his penis, and shouted in Spanish that unless he talked and stopped lying they were going to “hang your testicles from a flagpole.”
At noon there was another respite from the questioning, but it resumed at 4 P.M. and lasted until after midnight.
His interrogators covered the same ground, and Daulton continued to say that he couldn’t understand some of their questions. This time, when he professed not to hear the question, someone behind him slammed him in the kidneys at each missed answer. And as the afternoon became evening, this person didn’t even wait until he missed an answer.
With Daulton continuing to deny any involvement in terrorism, the interrogators again left him alone, blindfolded, in the room. But after a short while, the guards came for him, and the questioning began all over again. When he repeated the same story, two of the secret policemen each grabbed him by a leg and carried him across the office upside down to an adjoining bathroom, and held him over the toilet with his head dangling a few inches above the foul-smelling white bowl.
“Tell the truth,” one of the agents demanded.
“I am, I am!” he shouted. “I am telling the truth! I didn’t kill anybody!”
The two men who gripped Daulton by his ankles let his head descend slowly into the stinking water in the toilet bowl, and the last thing he heard before his head was submerged was their derisive, taunting laughter. He screamed as his head went under.
“This will clean out your ears,” a voice shouted in broken English when he was lifted up a moment later. They lowered him into the toilet again. “This will help you understand the questions,” a second voice said. Then they did it a third time.
The questioning, with occasional intermissions, continued for four days; Whether representatives of the FBI or the CIA were invited to audit the interrogation is not known. Most of the questioning was done under the glare of bright lights, and Daulton couldn’t see everyone in the room.
Between the periods of questioning, Daulton was handcuffed, blindfolded and left alone on the floor of a closet. As he lay helpless in this black prison, he managed to find a little humor in his predicament: it occurred to him that he was manacled like a human pretzel—his right foot handcuffed to his left hand and his left foot handcuffed to his right hand.
Thirst was h
is biggest problem now, along with turbulent stomach pains. When his complaints of thirst were finally listened to, a guard brought him a glass of water. But Daulton refused it; he said he would get sick if he drank it. Despite all of his traveling in Mexico, Daulton still couldn’t consume untreated Mexican water without coming down with diarrhea; he always used bottled, purified water. The guard laughed at his appeal for bottled water, as if to say it was tap water or none at all. Daulton gulped down the glass of water to suppress the thirst that gnawed at him, and before long, as he had known he would, he had a severe case of diarrhea. And he stank from his own feces. Eventually, however, he persuaded a guard to escort him to the toilet when he asked to go. Not all the guards were so accommodating: one in particular enjoyed waking Daulton by sticking his pistol against his head as he lay blindfolded and clicking the hammer, and another came into his cell and kicked him at random.
After four days, Daulton sensed that the senior secret police officials were beginning to lose interest in him, and he guessed that they had given up on him as a suspect in terrorism and murder activities. Again and again, they threatened to bring a witness who would identify him as the murderer, but the witness never materialized.
On the sixth day, a doctor came to see him and gave him medicine to curb the bowel trouble and lessen the stomach pain. On the evening of January 14, Daulton, unshaved and sticky from not having showered since his arrest eight days earlier, was ushered into an office and introduced by a senior secret police official to two agents of the FBI who were legal attachés at the U.S. Embassy.
“Do you want to talk?” one inquired.
“Please get me out of here,” Daulton said.
The FBI agents said they thought they could help Daulton. But first, they said, they wanted to ask him some questions.
Daulton was not unsophisticated when it came to understanding the workings of American law. He could have recited by heart the text of the “Miranda Warning” carried by policemen, who, according to a mandate by the U.S. Supreme Court, must advise suspects after their arrest of their rights to remain silent and to consult a lawyer. Exhausted, ill and desperate to leave the Mexican interrogators, Daulton agreed to sign a waiver of his Miranda rights, and at 7:09 on the evening of January 14, 1977, he began to tell his story.
“My only desire is to get this straightened out,” he said. “I got in this to screw the Russians.…”
When the interview was over, one of the agents, Robert B. Lyons, closed his briefcase and said with a smile to Daulton, “We’ll see you in a couple of days.” He was sure, he added, that they would be able to get him out of Mexico.
Early the next morning, a coded teletype message was sent from the U.S. Embassy in Mexico City to the Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Clarence M. Kelley:
SUBJECT LEE INTERVIEWED BETWEEN 7:09 P.M.–9:39 P.M., JANUARY 14, 1977, AT MEXICO CITY HEADQUARTERS, MEXICAN FEDERAL SECURITY SERVICE (DFS) BY ASSISTANT LEGAL ATTACHES ROBERT B. LYONS AND WILLIAM J. HOY. LEE EXECUTED WAIVER OF RIGHTS FORM AND EXPRESSED DESIRE TO COOPERATE FULLY AND WILLINGNESS TO TESTIFY IN A U.S. COURT. DESPITE THIS, HIS ANSWERS SEEMED VAGUE OR EVASIVE REGARDING SOME FACTS AND MANY DATES. THEY DID NOT INSPIRE CONFIDENCE AS TO HIS COMPLETE TRUTHFULNESS.
IN THE COURSE OF THE INTERVIEW, LEE MADE THE FOLLOWING ADMISSIONS:
(A) HAS KNOWN SUBJECT CHRISTOPHER JOHN BOYCE FOR ABOUT TEN YEARS SINCE THEY ATTENDED HIGH SCHOOL TOGETHER IN PALOS VERDES, CALIFORNIA. THEIR ACTIVITIES REGARDING SOVIETS BEGAN IN SUMMER, 1975. DESCRIBED BOYCE AS A “COURIER” AT THAT TIME BETWEEN TRW AND CIA.
(B) SIX CONTACTS WITH SOVIETS BETWEEN MID-1975 AND NOVEMBER, 1976. FIVE IN MEXICO CITY AND ONE IN VIENNA, AUSTRIA. BOYCE ACCOMPANIED LEE TO MEXICO CITY DURING ONE OF THESE, IN AUGUST, 1976.
(C) RECEIPT OF OVER THIRTEEN THOUSAND SEVEN HUNDRED DOLLARS FROM SOVIETS AND DIRECT PAYMENT BY SOVIETS TO BOYCE OF AMOUNT DESCRIBED AS A “COUPLE OF THOUSAND.”
(D) DELIVERY TO SOVIETS OF VARIOUS DOCUMENTS AND MATERIALS, INCLUDING A PERFORATED COMPUTER CARD, A FIVE OR SIX INCH SEGMENT OF “TICKER TAPE” MARKED “TOP SECRET”; TEN “KW-7” CRYPTO PUNCH CARDS MARKED “TOP SECRET”; FIVE TO TEN TYPED PAGES OF MATERIAL DEALING WITH COMMUNICATION SATELLITE; SHEET OF PAPER APPROXIMATELY FOUR BY SIX INCHES CONTAINING EIGHT TO TEN LINES OF NUMBERS WHICH HAD BEEN DESCRIBED BY BOYCE AS A CODE WHICH WOULD BE RECOGNIZABLE TO THE RUSSIANS; MICROFILM OF “KW-7” CRYPTO CARDS; PICTURES OF BOYCE’S OFFICE; A QUANTITY OF MICROFILM DELIVERED BY BOYCE DURING AUGUST, 1976, MEXICO CITY VISIT.
(E) TRAINING IN VIENNA BY A SOVIET IN THE USE OF THE MINOX CAMERA AND, ESPECIALLY, DOCUMENT PHOTOGRAPHY.
(F) ON AT LEAST ONE OCCASION, MET BOYCE IN A LOS ANGELES AREA MOTEL WHERE DOCUMENTS IN POSSESSION OF LATTER WERE PHOTOGRAPHED BY BOTH. LEE LATER DEVELOPED THIS FILM IN HIS OWN HOME.
CORROBORATION:
LEE DENIED HAVING SIGNIFICANT SOCIAL CONTACT WITH BOYCE WHICH MIGHT BE SUBJECT TO CONFIRMATION BY THIRD PARTIES.
HE STATES HE HAS AT TIMES DISCUSSED HIS CONTACTS WITH THE SOVIETS WITH HIS BROTHER, DAVID, BUT THAT DAVID WAS IN NO WAY INVOLVED. DAVID LEE, AGE 21, RESIDES WITH SUBJECT LEE’S FATHER AND MOTHER, PALOS VERDES ESTATES, CALIFORNIA.
LEE STATES HIS FATHER IS DR. DAULTON B. LEE WHO IS AFFILIATED WITH SOUTH BAY HOSPITAL IN THAT AREA. IN DECEMBER, 1975, LEE MENTIONED TO HIS FATHER THE FACT THAT HE WAS INVOLVED IN DISSEMINATING “FALSE INFORMATION” TO SOVIETS. FOLLOWING LEE’S RETURN FROM VIENNA, BOYCE AND LEE TOGETHER PURCHASED A MINOX CAMERA AT A SMALL CAMERA SHOP LOCATED ON HAWTHORNE BOULEVARD ADJACENT TO THE SAN DIEGO FREEWAY.
TWO PRINTS FROM MICROFILM DELIVERED BY BOYCE AND LEE TO SOVIETS IN MEXICO CITY IN AUGUST, 1976, WERE TAKEN BY LEE SURREPTITIOUSLY BACK TO UNITED STATES AND NOW LOCATED IN BLACK CAMERA CASE IN THE CLOSET OF HIS BEDROOM AT HIS PARENTS’ HOME. OTHER BACKGROUND:
LEE’S MOTHER, ANNE CLARK LEE, ALSO LIVES AT THE SAME ADDRESS, LEE STATES HE HAS BEEN SELF-EMPLOYED FOR TWO YEARS AS A CUSTOM CABINET MAKER, AND PREVIOUSLY, WORKED PART-TIME REPAIRING BOARDS FOR THE SCUBA-DUBA COMPANY, NEWPORT AND LONG BEACH, CALIFORNIA.
LEE STATES HE IS SCHEDULED FOR A COURT HEARING AT TORRANCE, CALIFORNIA (SOUTH BAY COURT) ON JANUARY 20, 1977. HIS ONLY SPECIFIC REQUEST WAS THAT HIS ATTORNEY BE NOTIFIED THAT HE MIGHT NOT BE ABLE TO APPEAR. THE ATTORNEY IS KENNETH KAHN, 1003 MANHATTAN BEACH BOULEVARD, MANHATTAN BEACH, CALIFORNIA.
ADDITIONAL DATA:
THROUGHOUT THE INTERVIEW, LEE MAINTAINED THAT HE HAD DONE NOTHING WRONG DURING ANY OF HIS DEALINGS WITH THE SOVIETS BECAUSE HE UNDERSTOOD THROUGH DISCUSSIONS WITH BOYCE THAT HE WAS PERFORMING A SERVICE “AS A SUB-CONTRACTOR” FOR THE CIA IN DISSEMINATING FALSE AND MISLEADING INFORMATION TO THE SOVIETS. HE SAID HE HAD CONSIDERABLE CONFIDENCE IN BOYCE AND THAT DURING LATE 1976, BOYCE INFORMED HIM THAT HE, BOYCE, HAD BEEN ACCEPTED FOR EMPLOYMENT WITH THE FBI.
LEE LAST SAW BOYCE IN EARLY DECEMBER, 1976. BUT THEY SPOKE BY TELEPHONE IN LATE DECEMBER. IN THIS LATTER CONVERSATION, BOYCE TOLD LEE HE HAD “SOME MORE THINGS” AND NEEDED TO SEE HIM BEFORE LEE LEFT FOR MEXICO. THIS MEETING DID NOT TAKE PLACE AND LEE, THEREFORE, BELIEVES BOYCE HAS SENSITIVE OR CLASSIFIED ITEMS IN HIS POSSESSION AT THIS TIME.
LEE SAID HE WOULD BE WILLING TO FURNISH A SIGNED STATEMENT CONCERNING THE ABOVE.
DUE TO PRIOR FIRM WEEKEND COMMITMENTS, DFS SUB-DIRECTOR MIGUEL NAZAR HARO STATED THAT HE WOULD BE OUT OF THE CITY AND THAT LEE CAN BE MADE AVAILABLE FOR FURTHER INTERVIEW ON MONDAY, JANUARY 17, 1977.
Not all of the details in the report were accurate, and many were missing. But the official unraveling had begun of one of the most damaging espionage conspiracies against the United States in the postwar era—one perpetrated by two young men who had begun life with what seemed to be the best that America could bestow on its children.
Over the next few days a torrent of messages flowed between the FBI, the CIA, the embassy in Mexico City, the Pentagon and the White House as the magnitude of the loss became apparent. Among those who would be eventually apprised of the damage was the new American President Jimmy Carter, who would later play his own role in the dr
ama.
For Daulton, conditions at the secret police headquarters improved miraculously after the visit of the two FBI representatives. The doctor came more often, the meals were better and Daulton’s handcuffs were removed.
Two days after the visit, Daulton was summoned back to the office of the official who had led the marathon interrogation. He announced that Daulton was being deported from Mexico, and he asked whether he wanted to be deported to the Soviet Union or the United States.
“Los Estados Unidos,” Daulton answered.
FBI Agent Lyons came into the office and said he had arranged to get Daulton back to the United States. He shook Daulton’s hand and said they’d be seeing each other in a few hours. “He smiled like he was pulling me out of the fire and into the furnace,” Daulton later would ruefully recall of this meeting.
That evening he left for the United States.
Sandwiched in the back seat of a car between two policemen substantially larger than himself, and drowsy from codeine he’d been given to ease his stomach pain, Daulton tried to sleep. From time to time he regained consciousness in the dark automobile, and his mind drifted, accompanied by the rumble of the car’s engine and the babble of the policemen gossiping in Spanish about girlfriends and bosses.
He wondered if Chris had been caught, and then he thought of his parents and wondered if they knew about his arrest. He had always phoned home at least once a week, and Mom and Pops would probably be worrying by now. And he wondered what his associates had thought when he missed the meeting in Culiacán. But, he reassured himself, that deal might not be lost forever; he had survived crises before.
More than anything else, Daulton thought about survival. He puzzled over how he could get out of the mess—and about how he had gotten into it in the first place. For God’s sake, it had begun with a littering charge! He thought about Chris’s strange, unpredictable behavior—first insisting that he sell the stuff to the Russians, then holding back on him; giving the Russians some of the stuff they wanted, then telling ’em to “Go fuck themselves.”
The Falcon and the Snowman Page 28
