Chris said nothing. But when he was convinced they were calm enough so he wouldn’t be shot, he methodically placed the hawk trap on the seat beside him and got out of the car. As he did, one of the agents grabbed his shirt and spun him around.
“Get out, you fucking traitor!” he screamed.
“Do you know what you’re charged with? Espionage!” he said, and wedged Chris against the car and snapped handcuffs on his wrists behind his back.
“Where are the documents, you fucking traitor? Where are the documents?” he demanded.
And then he said it again and again: “You fucking traitor, tell us where the documents are!”
When the FBI agents entered the small house with their prisoner, Mr. Pips looked up from his perch on a dresser and began to screech wildly at the strangers’ intrusion. He flapped his long wings furiously and for a moment seemed ready to lift off and attack the intruders, before Chris talked to him and calmed him down. Later, as the agents ransacked the cabin and peppered him with questions, Chris sensed a presence behind him, and he looked around to discover the dark eyes of Pips boring into him like sabers. His eyes were wild with fury, and Chris translated instantly what his bird was trying to tell him: You betrayed me.
He felt ashamed and chastened by Pips’s angry stare. But at the same time, he felt proud of his best falcon—as wild and as defiant as it had been on the day he first trapped it.
39
“Is there anyone here from the CIA?” Chris asked as he dried his hands in the men’s room at the Los Angeles regional headquarters of the Federal Bureau of Investigation a few minutes after six on the evening of January 16, 1977.
“We don’t have any of those people here; why?” asked George J. Moorehead, an FBI agent who had helped arrest Chris at the turkey ranch three hours earlier. Moorehead had liked him, and had seemed to develop an almost paternalistic interest in the prisoner.
“I can’t discuss some things with you,” Chris responded. It was one of the more bizarre remarks in the records of espionage investigations: a young man who had just been arrested as a Soviet spy said that he couldn’t discuss with FBI agents the secrets he had sold to the Soviet Union because the agents weren’t cleared for the projects.
Moorehead was a big, beefy man in his middle forties with light-colored curly hair and horn-rimmed glasses that gave him a vaguely professorial look. There was a casual warmth in his personality that contrasted with the chilly efficiency of some FBI agents, and when Moorehead had seemed to extend an arm to lean on, Chris had accepted, and he gravitated to the soft-spoken agent who had seemed kinder than the other agents during the confrontation at the turkey ranch. Moorehead had been puzzled during the ride in from Riverside by the discovery that Chris’s father and uncle were former FBI agents. A twenty-five-year veteran of the FBI, Moorehead would later say that he hadn’t forgotten he was dealing with an accused Soviet spy. But he had been impressed by his quiet good manners—what some adults referred to as his “sweetness”—and he had wondered what forces had brought Chris to where he was now. Chris might have been his own son, Moorehead thought.
“We have agents here who are cleared for anything you were working on,” he replied when Chris said he couldn’t discuss certain information without violating the law. Chris didn’t respond. As they walked out of the men’s room, Chris said he needed time to collect his thoughts. “Is there some place I can sit and think for a while?”
“Sure,” Moorehead said, and he led him down a hallway, giving him a guided tour of the functions of the various specialized offices they passed.
The FBI headquarters in Los Angeles could have been designed by Kafka. Occupying most of the sixteenth story, and parts of other floors, of a high-rise building on Wilshire Boulevard not far from U.C.L.A., it is a big, sterile warren of rooms, many with partitions, that look out at a central bull pen of seemingly endless rows of desks lined close together, each with its own telephone. The several hundred rank-and-file agents assigned to the L.A. office used this central bull pen as their base of operations.
Chris had $744 in cash in his wallet when he was arrested in Riverside. His wallet was taken from him when he was booked, and he was photographed and fingerprinted. During the fingerprinting, a young woman clerk had such trouble rolling legible prints that Chris offered to do it himself, saying that in his last job he had fingerprinted lots of people. Joking that Chris was out of money now, Moorehead bought him a pack of cigarettes and a cup of coffee from vending machines, and he escorted him to the office of the FBI’s chief stenographer. It was empty on a Sunday evening, and Moorehead said he could collect his thoughts there. Before they reached the office, Moorehead asked Chris how many children were in his family, and Chris said there were nine, including himself. Moorehead shook his head and said he felt sorry for Chris’s father. “This will really rip him up,” he said.
“It’s inconceivable,” Charles Boyce told the two FBI agents who had knocked on the door of the Boyce home in Rancho Palos Verdes, about the same time that Chris was sitting by himself in the office of the FBI chief stenographer, and said that his son was under arrest for espionage. A newspaper reporter had already called the Boyce home with a report that Chris had been arrested as a Soviet spy, and his parents had been immobilized by disbelief when the agents arrived with a search warrant for the Boyce home.
They told the FBI agents that it was impossible Chris was involved in any way in espionage. If anything, Chris was a political conservative. “He voted for Gerald Ford last year,” his father said. And he had been considered a conservative for as long as anybody could remember. Mr. Boyce told the agents about the priest who, when Chris was a child, had said he was more conservative than Cardinal McIntyre of Los Angeles. It was true his son was interested in history and had talked once or twice about the Soviet Union and the future international balance of power, the father added, but “his attitudes on the surface were conservative—unless they were a subterfuge.
“It’s not a political act unless he’s really been fooling us for a long time,” the father said of the alleged treason. His wife agreed. “I have no idea what would have prompted it,” Mr. Boyce said. It couldn’t have been drugs. Although Chris had smoked marijuana once in high school, his parents said, it had made him sick, and he didn’t have a drug habit. The agent showed the Boyces a photograph of Andrew Daulton Lee; they identified him as a friend of Chris’s who they knew had had problems with the law as a drug pusher. But they said they’d urged Chris not to associate with him because of the drugs, and Chris had stopped bringing him to the house. But they agreed Chris was probably still seeing him because of a shared interest in falconry.
Six miles away on the other side of The Hill, shortly before the FBI agents had knocked at the Boyce home, four other agents rang the doorbell of the rambling Lee residence in Palos Verdes Estates. Dave Lee opened the door, and the agents showed their credentials and asked for his father.
“Do you have a warrant?” Dave asked. Agent George S. Bacon, as if he had never heard the remark, asked again if Dr. Lee was in. Almost instinctively, Dave slammed the door of the house. One of the agents quickly rang the doorbell again. After about thirty seconds Dave reopened the door and said his father would be there shortly.
Dr. Lee had been napping when the agents arrived. He was not surprised by the callers. Over the years there had been many policemen who arrived at the same door. But he expected such calls to deal with Daulton’s narcotics enterprises.
The agents informed Dr. Lee that his son had been arrested in Mexico, that he was being deported and that he was going to be charged by the United States Government with violation of espionage statutes; furthermore, he said that Daulton’s friend Christopher John Boyce had just been arrested for the same offenses. Before Dr. Lee could react to this news, Agent David Reid said Daulton had told U.S. officials in Mexico there were photographs in his bedroom which the FBI believed were related to the case and requested him to sign a consent allowing them to
search the home. Dr. Lee signed the statement. Then another agent produced a search warrant. Dr. Lee was annoyed. “If you have a search warrant why did you have me sign this?” he asked. The agents said it was the government’s policy that occupants of premises should first be allowed to give their consent to a search. In fact, Justice Department lawyers had decided to seek both the search warrant and Dr. Lee’s consent agreement to reinforce the legality of the search if evidence seized at the home was later challenged in court. The same strategy was followed at the Boyce home.
Like the Boyces, Dr. Lee said that it was impossible that his son was involved in espionage, although he knew he was involved with drugs.
“It seemed strange to us that he never worked but seemed to have money,” Dr. Lee said in the statement he gave Agent Reid and Agent Andre L. Knightlinger while Bacon and Agent David Smith began searching the house.
“Mrs. Lee and I questioned him about this,” he continued, “but he never answered our questions. I assumed that he’d obtained the money through his involvement in drugs.”
Asked if Daulton had ever said anything about furnishing false information to the Soviet Union, Dr. Lee said he hadn’t.
“A long time ago,” he said, when Daulton was in high school, “he told me that he was tired of doing things my way. He said that from then on he was going to do things his way.”
After that, Dr. Lee added, Daulton had simply refused to discuss his activities outside the home with his parents. “I suspected that when he went off somewhere, he was up to something illegal,” he said, “but I thought it was drugs.”
Despite his son’s frequent brushes with the law, Dr. Lee went on, Daulton was “still my son, and I wouldn’t kick him out of the house.”
Anne Lee, who had recently obtained a license as a real estate agent to occupy herself after her children were grown, walked in the door then, arriving home after a day of trying to sell property on The Hill. The length of time without a telephone call from Daulton had caused her to half-expect official callers inquiring about her son. But like her husband, she said she knew relatively little about her son’s recent comings and goings. When she’d asked Daulton about his trips to Mexico, she said in her statement to the FBI, “he told me not to worry about it.” Once, when she heard Daulton had made a trip to Vienna and she had asked about it, she said, “he wouldn’t tell me anything about the trip.” An agent inquired about the two youths’ friendship. Daulton and Chris Boyce, she explained, were best friends; the friendship went back many years and had continued because of their mutual love of falconry. Chris’s father had helped him get a job at TRW, she said, but Chris had called it a “flunky job.”
“He said he was involved in cleaning up after everybody,” she said.
David Lee was also interviewed. He told the agents that Daulton had told him months previously that he and Chris Boyce were involved in a scheme to sell false information to the Soviets. Daulton claimed to be working for the CIA, he said, and had shown him a Minox camera. “My brother said it was a misinformation program and he was doing it for the money; he said each roll of film he brought was worth approximately ten thousand dollars.” In a camera case in Daulton’s room, David helped the agents find the two photos of the encryption equipment Daulton had retrieved from the Russians in October.
Four hours after they had arrived, the FBI agents left the Lee home. They had a Minox camera found in a rolltop desk in Daulton’s room (a room they described on their official report for the day as “in extremely cluttered condition”) and so many other items from his room that it took twenty minutes to load their cars.
A half-hour after Chris asked to be left alone in the chief stenographer’s office at the Los Angeles FBI office, he asked Agent George J. Moorehead, who was waiting outside in a corridor, if he could ask a question.
“Sure,” Moorehead said. “I’ll do my best.”
“Has anybody else been charged with the same thing as me?”
Chris suspected that Daulton had also been arrested for espionage because of his call to the Holiday Inn, but he couldn’t be sure. It could have been a drug bust.
“Do you mean in the past or now, this case?” Moorehead asked.
“This specific case,” Chris said.
Moorehead said that he didn’t know.
In that case, Chris said, he would have nothing to say. He didn’t want to say anything because he didn’t know what Daulton had—or hadn’t—told the authorities. After his refusal to talk more, Chris was handcuffed again and led out of the room by Moorehead, who said they were on their way to the Los Angeles County Jail. In the hallway, they met James E. White, another member of the FBI’s Los Angeles Espionage Squad. Moorehead told White that Chris had asked if anyone else had been arrested in the case. White left them in the hall and checked via telephone with Richard A. Stilz, an Assistant United States Attorney who had already begun preparing the government’s case against Andrew Daulton Lee and Christopher John Boyce. Stilz advised him that Chris could be told of Lee’s arrest in Mexico and that his friend would soon be deported to the United States.
When he heard this news, Chris thought a moment, and shortly before seven o’clock, four hours after his arrest, he said:
“Let’s talk.”
The agents told Chris that if he wanted to say anything, he would have to sign a Miranda waiver of his rights. Earlier in the day—after the raid at the turkey ranch—Chris had refused to do so. This time, he agreed to sign the waiver. Moorehead asked him to write out a statement declaring he had not been coerced into consenting to interrogation. But Chris told Moorehead that his hands were shaking so much that he couldn’t write anything more than his signature.
His heart was pumping so hard that later he said he felt as if it were about to burst.
One of the agents said he would write a statement in longhand for Chris to sign, and he did so. The statement read:
I, Christopher John Boyce, requested from Special Agents G. J. Moorehead and William M. Smith that at 6:25 P.M. this date I be given a period to collect my thoughts regarding charges for which I was arrested today. At 7 P.M., 35 minutes later, I decided by my own free will, and without any promises, threats or inducements, to furnish a statement to the FBI regarding this matter. Any delay experienced at the Los Angeles Headquarters of the FBI, therefore, was specifically at my request and strictly voluntary.
Chris signed the handwritten statement, and during the next hour or so he surrendered any chance he might have had to avert what he had decided almost two years ago was inevitable.
As he began his monologue, Chris explained why he had asked about Daulton: “I just wanted to know if he was off the streets.”
40
“I worked in the Black Vault at TRW, handling encrypted communications for the Central Intelligence Agency,” he began.
On his first day on the job, he continued, a co-worker had joked with him about selling ciphers used to encode messages to the Soviet Union and speculated that they might be worth $20,000 a month. A few weeks later, after a night of drinking and pot, smoking with friends—“I was extremely high,” he said—he had hinted at the nature of the job. After a while, he continued, “it just kept rolling out,” and he and his friend Daulton Lee had begun joking about selling the material to the Russians. The idea that Chris had access to information worth a great deal of money, he said, “excited Daulton.”
“It just got more serious as the conversations kept going.”
“Whose idea was it to sell documents to the Soviet Union?” White asked Chris.
“It was a combination of seeking each other out,” he said. “Security was so lax you could walk out with hundreds of documents. I was always drunk.
“I worked on the Rhyolite project for the CIA,” he went on. “I handled all communications between the people who built the satellites and those who used them.” An agent asked how much information had been delivered to the Soviets. Chris said he wasn’t sure, but thought it “numbered t
housands of documents.” Most involved projects Rhyolite and Argus, he said, but there were others. “Sometimes,” he said, “the CIA fucks up and sends naval traffic and military traffic and stuff about other programs and projects with other companies, and about submarine activity.”
The agents asked who, besides Daulton, had been involved in the operation, and he said Daulton was the only one. They asked if Chris had a girlfriend and whether she knew about it. Chris refused to give them Alana’s name, but acknowledged that he had a girlfriend “who was aware that I had been given sums of money, and she knew I worked on a secret project.” But she didn’t know the whole truth, he said. “She is law-abiding, a Christian Scientist.” He said he had become fearful and distraught and moody because of his involvement with the Russians, and finally it had broken them apart.
“It was more than she could handle,” Chris said.
“Did you ever tell Andrew Daulton Lee or anyone else that you were in a project to furnish false information to the Soviet Union?” White asked.
Chris shook his head.
“Did Lee understand what you were doing?”
“Totally,” he said.
In considerable detail, he described Daulton’s meetings with the Russians in Mexico City, the purchase of the Minox camera, the booze runs, the surreptitious trips with secret documents in potted plants—and the day the NSA inspector had nearly tripped him up.
“He blew it; I was right in front of him, and he really blew it.
“I thought they were on to me long before now,” Chris told the agents. It “amazed” him that they had not been caught sooner. Chris recounted his long friendship with Daulton, which, he said, had begun in elementary school, and their mutual interest in falconry. “His parents were very wealthy.”
Daulton, he added, was a “hoodlum” who had “cheated” him—“he lied and would use me”—and kept samples of everything sold to the Russians to hold against Chris. After he described Daulton as a hoodlum, he was asked to describe himself. Chris said that perhaps he might be called “an adventurer.”
The Falcon and the Snowman Page 30
