Stilz and Levine prepared to wait for Chelius and Dougherty to seek a deal. They couldn’t make the first move because they didn’t want to appear anxious; they didn’t want to tip the defense to the doubts they had about the case against Daulton.
In his cell in the Los Angeles County Jail, Daulton was preoccupied once again with survival. And with the help of Ken Kahn, a line of defense began to emerge: Daulton would argue that he had been a hapless puppet of the Central Intelligence Agency, used and discarded by a nation just like those he had read about in The Spy Who Came In from the Cold and other spy novels. Daulton told Kahn that Chris had never told him that they were working for the CIA to disseminate erroneous information. But, he asked, doesn’t everything point to that? Why else would Chris have proposed the plan in the first place? How had he been able to cross the border so often without being caught? The story he had prepared as an alibi if he was ever arrested began to take the shape of reality in Daulton’s mind. As he waited out his fate, he groped with Ken Kahn for a solution to his predicament and attempted to rationalize his choice of a defense:
Hadn’t Boyce said in his confessions that Pyramider was a dead project? That was exactly what he had told Daulton—and that was exactly what Daulton had told the Feds in Laredo. Wasn’t that proof that the whole thing was a disinformation gambit? “Now [Boyce] says we were fucking the U.S. But how, if Pyramider was a bogus project?”
Even Boyce’s agreement with the Russians to go back to college smelled. The CIA was probably planting him as a double agent. Boyce would learn what information the Russians needed and then go straight to the CIA and reveal weak spots in Soviet defenses.
“God, I wish I knew what the hell was really going down,” Daulton wrote to Kahn in a letter that went on for several pages. “Espionage is one of the human activities where truth and fiction are closely interwoven. Only someone with deep and mystic love for country can serve the way I have, or thought I was.”
Plea-bargaining talks on behalf of Chris had begun, and like the initial footwork in a prizefight, the first movements consisted of more style than substance.
The prosecutors had no interest in seeking a death sentence for the spies, realizing that there was little chance that any judge would order their execution, given public sentiment toward capital punishment, the circumstances of the case and the nature of the two young defendants. But for horse-trading purposes, the prosecutors did not immediately reveal this predisposition. In initial meetings with Chelius and, later, Bill Dougherty, they compared the espionage committed by the two youths to that of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the Soviet spies who were executed for giving American atomic secrets to the Russians.
The defense lawyers, rightly, concluded they were bluffing, and soon the prosecutors got to the threat they really intended to hold over Chris: life imprisonment. The defense lawyers maintained their composure at this disclosure. Dougherty ridiculed the quality of the prosecution’s case and said that he would subpoena former Secretary of State Henry A. Kissinger and a score of other high American officials to testify at the trial. Dougherty sensed that the prosecution needed Chris, and wasn’t going to plea-bargain totally from weakness; he claimed that Chris’s confession had been extracted from him involuntarily—that he had been too tired and overwrought to make a genuinely voluntary confession. Any judge could see that the FBI had, in effect, coerced him to confess, Dougherty charged.
The initial plea-bargaining talks ended inconclusively; the minimum prison sentence the prosecutors would accept for Boyce if he agreed to testify was forty years; the defense lawyers held out for ten.
The prosecution was having other problems. The State Department advised the Justice Department in early February that the Government of Mexico was resisting its request to allow the policemen who had arrested and interrogated Daulton to testify. The news was troubling. Their testimony was an important link in the prosecution’s case; it was vital to prove that Lee had had the contraband filmstrips in his possession when he was arrested. Stilz and Levine sent word to Washington that the policemen’s testimony was a must, and the Justice Department relayed this message to Brzezinski.
Meanwhile, the prosecutors had begun looking for other routes to link Daulton to the filmstrips. If they could prove that the Minox camera found in Daulton’s home was the same one that had taken the photographs of the Pyramider documents, they could build a separate route to link the microfilm to Daulton; the camera and the negatives from Mexico City were sent to the FBI Laboratory in Washington in hopes they could be matched.
Chris was finding it difficult to sleep as the first days of February came and went. It wasn’t the noise at the County Jail, although that might have been the reason: at night, the overcrowded jail was seldom quiet; it sounded incessantly with the hollow echo of drunken moans and anguished wailings, much of it a cacophony of Spanish that Chris didn’t understand. It wasn’t the noise that kept Chris awake; it was the throbbing despair in his heart that had taken the place of the perverse initial relief he had felt when the tension of waiting for the FBI was finally broken. He felt too ashamed to see his parents ever again; he had lost Alana; his conviction for espionage was certain, and so was the prospect of a long sentence in a wretched cell like the one he was in right now.
Chris weighed his options and concluded that death would be infinitely better than what lay ahead for the rest of his life.
42
“At least you could have bought Larks,” Chris tried to joke as he took the cigarette offered by Daulton at their first meeting since their arrests. It was during the middle of February in a police van en route from the Federal Courthouse in Los Angeles to the County Jail following hearings over the admissibility as evidence of the statements they had made to the FBI.
The meeting was not a warm reunion of old friends. By now, Chris and Daulton had embarked on a collision course: each had chosen a different path to survival, and if either was to succeed, it meant dynamiting the escape route of the other.
Except for the passing of the cigarette, their communication consisted of nervous glances at each other.
Daulton was amazed by Chris. He didn’t seem to be worried about anything.
“In no way did he seem troubled, or ill at ease,” he later told Kahn. “He wore a smile that could be interpreted as either complacent or idiotic. For a person who is accused of such gross implications, he seemed awfully reserved. His complacency could be attributed to knowing he’s backed by ‘the company’ [the CIA] or someone in his own company [TRW]. Or he could have the mind of a schizophrenic, possibly a psychopathic mind. Or fearing the worst, I could see him believing that he could buy his way into a Russian-US takeover. He’d want to be on top when Russia buries us.”
Joel Levine put down the phone in his office at the U.S. Attorney’s office and stared in amazement at Richard Stilz. “That was Kahn,” he said. “He wants to cop a plea for a misdemeanor!”
“I told him ‘no,’” he added sarcastically. That was as far as the plea-bargaining negotiations went for Daulton.
The prosecution continued to be much more interested in making a deal with Chris. But it was getting nowhere. Talks with Chelius and Dougherty were continuing on an almost daily basis, but the gap between the negotiators had narrowed only marginally. The prosecution was holding out for a minimum sentence of thirty years for Chris. The defense, which had attempted to sweeten its bid by offering Chris to the CIA for a “debriefing,” in which he could let the agency know exactly what information the Russians had purchased, was holding out for only ten to twelve years.
The case wasn’t going well for the prosecution in other ways either. The CIA had conducted its own investigation of the Boyce-Lee espionage operation and, apparently through secret sources in the Soviet Union and elsewhere, had gleaned information that confirmed the two youths’ commerce with the Russians. Stilz and Levine wanted to use part of the information to mount the prosecution. But the CIA was refusing. Levine made a trip to Lang
ley to discuss the problem. But senior officials of the agency refused to make public any of its secret files on the case. However, the CIA officials, with the concurrence of the National Security Council, agreed to consider an alternative to revealing the information in open court: They would release certain information to Levine and Stilz (who had received Top Security clearances from the agency) and would allow them to show it to the judge who would try the spies. But if the judge decided the defendants must also see the information for a fair trial, the prosecution of Boyce and Lee would be dropped.
Daulton decided to write another letter, this time to his maternal grandmother, with whom he had been close since his childhood. It was a gentle, tender letter which revealed a side of Daulton that his family knew well but that was seldom exposed to his associates in Culiacán and the drug underworld. He expressed his deep love for his grandmother and his sympathy for problems that she was experiencing as a result of her advancing age and noted that the Chinese revered the years between seventy and eighty as precious ones “to be savored and enjoyed, like fine wine.
“For what it’s worth,” he wrote, “I am sorry for all the trouble my problems have caused everyone. I think it quite inexcusable of me to have brought down havoc on my relatives and parents.” There was a brief prayer in the letter in which Daulton asked God for pity and to save him from death. He asked for his grandmother’s compassion and prayers and then said that he was confident that his attorney, Mr. Kahn, would help him. “He will bring out the truth, and the truth will make me free.
“Everyone should have the privilege of rewriting his youth, also reliving it; if not that, then at least rectifying it.”
He ended with another expression of love and gratitude to his grandmother for standing by him.
Every day during February, it seemed to Stilz and Levine, they were getting a different report from Washington regarding the testimony of the Mexican policemen. On one day, it was a communiqué from the State Department that the Mexican Government had approved their testifying; the next, a refusal; the next, a compromise proposal to submit written statements from the policemen for submission in court—a worthless proposal because in American courts defendants were entitled to challenge their accusers. In mid-February, a senior Justice Department official, after a conference at the State Department, told his colleagues, “The Mexicans are afraid to let ’em testify; they don’t want to get the Russians’ noses out of joint.”
Brzezinski, who had monitored the negotiations closely, sent word to the Justice Department that he had a plan that he hoped would break the impasse: President Carter would personally ask Mexican President José López Portillo for the cooperation of the Mexican Government in the prosecution of Christopher John Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee. López Portillo would be coming to Washington within a few days—it was to be the first major diplomatic visit for the new Carter Administration—and President Carter would make his request to the newly elected president of Mexico at this meeting.
Daulton, in one of several long, rambling statements to a friend on the outside, said Boyce had to be pressured to help get Daulton out of this nightmare. Boyce must testify in his behalf so that at least one of them got out of the mess. Boyce must be a Government agent. As he put down his thoughts in a torrent of scribbled words, Daulton mused about the nature of his friend:
“Is it possible Boyce is so obsessed with birds he lost touch with reality? Birds: Peregrine, Rhyolite, Argus?” he asked in one letter. In another communication he wrote, “I never pressed Boyce about his work. He used to lay it on me, like he was trying to clear his conscience.”
“You broached the subject of whether Boyce would accept a bribe and stand pat,” Daulton wrote in another long letter to the same friend. “One of two things would induce him. First and most, a prize falcon; or lots of money, so he could get his own falcon—in that order.”
Other times his thoughts turned to other sentiments:
The government we’ve got now—mealy-mouthed, milk-and-water socialists—are leading the last of capitalism and free enterprise to the grave. Our country now is besieged by ten cent politicians pushing socialistic measures to acquire votes from the masses. How irrational for our country to give it all away.…
To hell with socialism, long live free enterprise and capitalism. I will not equivocate. I will not retreat a single inch and I will be heard. The more I think about it, the more I see I’m a pawn in a game with no rules or morals. Boyce has manipulated me like a maniquen [sic]. God damn fool I am!
Daulton said the more he thought back on the past two years, the more he was convinced that Boyce was either crazy or covering up a secret operation. He was so flippant about the whole thing.
Boyce, he said, must be forced into helping him. He must be told that “they don’t divide the time—two into 20 years is not ten apiece but 40 total.… Men such as me have seen too much of life and considerable more of depression and destruction than the average man. Controlling my emotions is my chief stock in trade.…
“Does it make sense that an alcoholic and a Polack pot head could do this on their own?”
43
As February drew to a close, the prosecution’s case was ambushed twice, and the optimism of Richard Stilz and Joel Levine plummeted: President López Portillo rejected President Carter’s personal appeal for the help of the Mexican Government in prosecuting the two spies, and the plea-bargaining talks with Chris’s lawyers ended without an agreement.
The final negotiations were held on February 28. By now, stresses were appearing in the previously cordial professional relationship between the prosecutors and Boyce’s defense lawyers. During the pretrial hearings, Dougherty had repeatedly hinted that Stilz and Levine were concealing CIA reports of the case that might help his client; Levine interpreted the remarks as an attack on his personal integrity and had begun to smolder each time he heard the charge renewed. For their part, Boyce’s lawyers were convinced that the prosecution was in fact using the cloak of official secrecy and “national security” to impede fair access to information they might be able to use in defending Chris.
Thus, there were now deepening personal animosities at the lawyers’ bargaining table besides the fate of Christopher John Boyce. When the plea-bargaining talks finally broke down, the defense was still holding out for a maximum sentence of ten to twelve years, while the prosecutors said they wanted a sentence of thirty years. Secretly, the prosecutors, who still desperately wanted Chris’s testimony, were willing to settle for a twenty-year sentence. But they never got a chance to show their final card in the negotiations. Amid the mounting personal bickering between the two sides, the talks collapsed.
After the double setback of losing the testimony of Chris and that of the Mexican police officials, Stilz and Levine had to regroup and develop an alternative battle plan. They would have to link Lee to espionage without Boyce’s testimony and forge an indisputable link between him and the film without testimony from the police who had arrested him and seized the film.
To do so, they began what became, more than anything else, an anthropological expedition into the world Andrew Daulton Lee inhabited—his world of drug pushers and users, of smugglers and dropouts. For most of a month, often working twelve hours or more a day, they met with fellow pushers, Daulton’s friends and customers, and the hangers-on in his crowd from The Hill and its environs, searching for clues that would implicate him as a Soviet spy. They assured the young people that they weren’t interested in drugs or any transgressions they might have made against Federal or state narcotics-abuse laws. Whatever they said about drugs would not be used against them; the attorneys were interested only in Daulton’s possible involvement in selling American secrets to a foreign country. Some of those they approached refused to talk; others, after resisting for several days, gave in. After a while, Stilz and Levine began to sew together a case made up of strands of information from many of the young people. One of the first breakthroughs came at the end of two da
ys of questioning of Darlene Cooper. She spent most of the interview recalling bitterly how Daulton had turned on Palos Verdes girls to heroin and then “used” them. Stilz and Levine pressed for any memories she had of Daulton ever discussing anything about spying. Finally, she recalled a party, more than a year earlier, when Daulton had popped a tiny camera out of his breast pocket and bragged that it was a “spy” camera. Then she said, “Oh, I remember now; once he said he was working as a spy ‘for the Russkies.’”
Then came an admission by Barclay Granger, who was promised help by Levine and Stilz in having his sentence for cocaine trafficking reduced if he cooperated. He said he had accompanied Daulton during the purchase of the Minox-B camera, and he described their trip to Mexico and the mysterious tapings of lampposts, and Daulton’s joke about being a spy. Carole Benedict denied ever using drugs, but recalled the trip she had made with Daulton to Mazatlán and Daulton’s frequent furtive meetings with Chris. Carole—and virtually everyone else Stilz and Levine interviewed—told about the wads of money that Daulton seemed to have all the time.
The pieces began to fit together. Sometimes, after a long day of wading through this subculture, Stilz and Levine would have a drink together and wonder with amazement at what they had seen and heard. “It was so decadent,” Levine would say later. “Nobody worked. Everyone got up at ten or eleven, played a couple of sets of tennis and made drug deals. They all had so much money, but they never worked. They either got it from their families or through drug dealing. They were just aimless. I thought to myself, My God, what an empty life.”
Although the prosecutors were now lining up an effective battery of witnesses who could implicate Daulton, at least circumstantially, as a spy, there remained the critical need to prove beyond a doubt that he and Chris had photographed the Pyramider papers and that there had been an unbroken chain of custody linking the photographs and Daulton; President López Portillo’s refusal to cooperate with the prosecution meant that neither Inspector López Malváez nor the arresting officers would be available to testify. Aaron Johnson would testify he had seen film negatives drying in Daulton’s bathroom that appeared to have technical drawings on them, and Eileen Heaphy and Thomas Ferguson, the Foreign Service officers in Mexico City, could testify about observing, respectively, his arrest and the removal of an envelope containing microfilm from his pocket at López Malváez’ office. But that wouldn’t be enough; a more conclusive link between Daulton and the documents had to be found.
The Falcon and the Snowman Page 32
