The Falcon and the Snowman

by Robert Lindsey

  In Washington, D.C., Kent Dixon looked through a microscope at an enlarged photograph for a long time. Someone who did not know what he was doing might have wondered about the state of his mental health: there seemed to be absolutely nothing on the photograph he was scrutinizing. It was a picture of white light.

  Dixon was a forensic scientist at the FBI’s National Crime Laboratory. He wasn’t interested in the glowing, blank center of the picture, where images of faces and scenery were usually savored by eager photographers. He was interested in the tiny, almost invisible permutations in the shape of the blank picture frame. It was one of hundreds he had taken with the Minox-B camera found beneath the tambour doors of the rolltop desk in Daulton’s bedroom. A criminalist who had worked eight years for the FBI, Dixon believed that virtually all mechanical devices have a personal signature unique to themselves and as individual as a fingerprint. They have defects left at their birth in a factory, whether they are automobiles, typewriters, cameras or computers, that make them different from other machines that appear to be identical. And once they leave the factory, each device is used differently, evolving an even more singular identity: daily wear and tear, time, weather, usage all leave their imprint. Dixon was looking for the distinctive fingerprint of the Minox that would link it to the film seized in Mexico City; if the link could be made, it would substantially bolster the prosecution’s search for an unassailable connection between Daulton and the Pyramider papers.

  From experience, Dixon knew of several places to look first for the unique character of the camera. There was the possibility of peculiarities in its lens and shutter; in the framing area where the film was held behind the shutter; in the sprocket wheels that advanced the film and sometimes left marks on the film itself; the pressure plate behind the film that can scratch the film or leave deposits of dirt. Dixon often looked first at the framing area of a camera in cases such as this. In his experience, many cameras had burrs or imperfections left during manufacture that affected the shape of the photograph made by the camera. Also, dirt tended to accumulate around the edges of the framing area after being forced there by film rolled through the camera.

  Dixon peered through the microscope at the photo he had made of the blank white image. He noticed that the edge of the frame at one corner was not perfectly square; there was a slight curvature. His eyes followed the edge of the frame of the picture and began to see small black dots and projections. They were barely as large as a pinhead sticking up into the edge of the photograph, but magnified, they appeared as enormous anomalies in the seemingly sharp lines of the picture. They could have been burrs in the metal, scraped there during manufacture, or just blobs of dirt, Dixon thought. He wasn’t sure. He noticed a tiny imperfection at another spot on the picture’s edge, then more tiny specks which he concluded were bits of dust or dirt. Dixon had found at least part of the unique character of the camera.

  Now he turned his attention to another set of pictures—blowups made from the strips of negatives seized in Mexico City. Scanning one of the photos through his microscope, Dixon ignored the center of the picture—the typewritten data, the technical drawings and the words TOP SECRET. He was interested instead in the outer edges of the picture.

  He found what he was looking for: there was a perfect match.

  Dixon had discovered the same pattern of irregularities and flecks of dirt on the photograph from Mexico City that he had found on the photos made with the camera found in Daulton’s rolltop desk.

  Stilz and Levine got the news and decided they were ready for trial.

  The trial was scheduled to begin March 15, 1977. But the defendants’ attacks on the constitutionality of their arrests and efforts to block use of their statements to the FBI caused Robert J. Kelleher, the Federal judge who had been assigned to handle the case, to order several postponements.

  If Superior Court Judge Burch Donahue had a reputation as a compassionate man ever willing to give a defendant still another chance, the reputation of Judge Kelleher probably leaned in the opposite direction. A tennis nut who was a former captain of the U.S. Davis Cup team and former president of the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association, Kelleher was considered implacably honest and evenhanded in his treatment of defendants, although a few defense lawyers who practiced in his court complained that he tended to side with the prosecution on toss-up calls. Kelleher was well known for his impatience in dealing with lawyers whose knowledge of the law was deficient according to his standards, and he seldom hesitated to tongue-lash lawyers who he decided were getting out of line. Educated at Williams College and Harvard Law School, Kelleher, aged sixty-four, had been a Beverly Hills lawyer for twenty years before being appointed to the Federal bench in 1971 by President Nixon. A tall man with graying hair, Kelleher was an aristocratic-looking figure on the bench, and there was never any doubt when he was sitting there who was running the courtroom.

  When, after weeks of on-again, off-again pretrial hearings, Kelleher ruled that the arrests, the seizure of evidence and the statements made by the youths were admissible at trial, few people who knew Kelleher were surprised. He said the FBI had acted lawfully and properly. His decision meant that the trial would proceed now with the prosecution’s large quiver of evidence against Chris and Daulton virtually untouched.

  Ken Kahn, arguing that his client’s interests were different from those of Christopher John Boyce, sought and received a severance of the cases; Judge Kelleher ordered that the two friends be tried separately.

  Daulton was still confiding his thoughts to a friend outside the jail. Boyce, he continued to insist, had to be convinced of his foolishness in dragging Daulton down with him. Boyce was the only one who really knew what had happened, the only one who could really implicate Daulton. “Boyce was the malevolence behind this entire nightmare,” he said. He had informed Boyce the previous November, after being ejected from the Russian embassy, that he didn’t want to continue the operation, but Chris, he maintained, had insisted on one more delivery.

  In the early stages of their operation, Daulton said, Boyce had told him they could squeeze the Soviets for $50,000 a month. When the Russians gave him only $5,000 for some of the codes, Daulton said, he had considered them a fraud. The Russians, he said, invariably wanted more and different information—details about infrared sensors, the names of company executives, photographs of the birds and other stuff that Chris refused to supply.

  “Infra red. That’s what the Russians wanted but didn’t get. They’re really paranoid about the superior quality of our Recon Birds. They must be in the dark ages (‘pun’) with their infrared cameras.”

  In effect, Daulton said, his role in the scheme had been to make the Russians believe that they could keep up to date on the accuracy of American infrared sensors. Yet, he said, they had sought this information for a year and still hadn’t received it. But he had managed to keep them on the hook. He said he had told the KGB agents that there were “thousands of birds” going over their country daily. “If they wanted to know what we knew,” Daulton said, “they’d have to play ball.”

  If nothing else, Daulton said, if his case was brought to trial he would make a “laughing stock” out of TRW. Here was a company, he wrote, that had sent the Viking probe to Mars and yet “can’t control alcoholism in their own internal security.”

  Daulton repeatedly returned to his theory of disinformation. It was commonplace in espionage, he insisted, for one country to leak erroneous data to its enemies, but in order to make the information believable, everything had to be done in a way that gave it credibility. “What better way to leak information than through an edifice like TRW, using a young clerk and a capitalistic pot head?” By leaking intelligence to the Soviets about the flock of reconnaissance birds secretly flying over Russian and Chinese territory, the United States quietly “makes it known to the Russkies that we’re hep to their charades of peaceful coexistence.…”

  If this wasn’t a carefully orchestrated plot by the CIA, he asked, then
why hadn’t Boyce given the Russians the information they wanted? “The Russians wanted photos of Argus and Rhyolite. Boyce had easy access, but he never would do it for them. In Mexico [after] Boyce and I left the embassy, Boyce said they’re never going to see pictures of Rhyolite or Argus. Joke: Boyce claimed Rhyo might see them instead.…

  “Obviously, there is a more complex and demented side of Boyce that alludes [sic] us. Or else why would he refuse the Russians any photos?”

  On one of his letters Daulton appended an afterthought. How, he asked, could he even be considered to be a Soviet spy? He had always voted Republican, he said, and he had never even taken a political science course.

  Judge Kelleher and the attorneys for the two defendants agreed Chris would be tried first.

  As his trial approached, he and Daulton saw each other only rarely, and briefly, when their paths crossed during pretrial court appearances. But the chasm between them was growing daily, and whatever remnants of their friendship had been left in January had all but withered by April under the heat of their respective efforts to survive. Chris blamed their arrest on Daulton’s foolishness in his frontal attack on the embassy, but, more, he was enraged that Daulton had turned on him now.

  He made the discovery during pretrial hearings: Daulton’s lawyers announced that their client intended to prove his innocence by showing that he had been enticed into spying by Christopher John Boyce under the pretext of working for the CIA—and that he had been abandoned by his friend and the CIA after his chance arrest by Mexican police. Chris was further antagonized against his old friend when a mutual acquaintance sent a message to Chris from Daulton urging him to take full blame for the espionage operation. Chris ignored Daulton when they saw each other, and when he did speak, his few words were a caustic denunciation of Daulton’s stupidity for getting arrested and his betrayal of him.

  Further pretrial hearings and other procedural delays consumed the final weeks of March and the first few days of April. Shortly before Chris’s trial was finally scheduled to start, Chris and Daulton encountered each other at the jail again, and afterward, Daulton told Ken Kahn about the meeting:

  “I managed to have a few preliminary words with Boyce to break the ice; it would have gone further, but a marshal stopped us,” he said. Boyce’s spirits, he added, seemed somewhat improved. “After court, in the transfer cells, I walked past and he said, ‘cheerio.’ He’s beginning to weaken.” He asked Kahn to counsel him on “what to say to him or what to ask him. Our present diplomatic aura is very shaky. I must tread carefully.”

  Daulton also revealed some doubts about the strategy for his defense:

  “If there is no CIA involvement, then aren’t we putting ourselves out on a limb? I mean, all this could be coincidence.”

  Since the night of his arrest, George Chelius had implored Chris to write to his parents. Chelius had known Chris’s father as an initially standoffish boss with a conservative point of view who, after a while, warmed up to his friends. He knew that he adored his eldest son, and he had known of the many trips they had taken together and the many afternoons he had spent coaching teams on which Chris played. And so he had been amazed to discover the depth of Chris’s philosophical estrangement from his father during the long night they had spent in his cell after Chris was arrested. Later, he had delivered a message to Chris from his parents: they loved him and would stick by him and wanted to see him and help with his defense. But Chris told his jailers he did not want any visits from his parents.

  Finally, on the eve of his trial, at Chelius’ continued urgings, Chris consented to write a letter to his father. In the letter, he wrote that he did not want any members of his family at the trial.

  44

  The espionage trial of Christopher John Boyce started at 10 A.M. on April 12, 1977, in the United States District Court for the Central District of California. A jury of seven men and five women was selected to hear the case in a wood-paneled courtroom on the second floor of the Los Angeles Federal Courthouse, an imposing monolith of concrete and glass a block from the city’s landmark City Hall tower.

  There were unusual aspects of the trial from the beginning. Judge Kelleher immediately ordered his bailiff to prevent spectators, except reporters with official credentials, from taking notes at the trial. Although the judge did not explain his reasons for the unusual order, it was evident that he anticipated that sensitive defense information would be discussed at the trial and wanted to prevent, as best he could, agents of hostile countries from recording the facts unraveled in his courtroom.

  Chris’s face was pale from life in the shadows of his cell. Nevertheless, as he was escorted into the courtroom, he looked, as ever, the scrubbed, all-American boy. He was dressed in a corduroy suit that was the color of polished copper and an open-necked sport shirt. He sat down at the defense table with Chelius and Dougherty, and a Federal marshal was nearby.

  At the prosecution table, Stilz and Levine sat with FBI Agent Jim White, the bureau’s case officer assigned to the prosecution; sitting near them were other Department of Justice lawyers and close behind, in the spectator gallery, a lawyer for the Central Intelligence Agency.

  Ken Kahn was auditing the trial in preparation for his defense of Daulton. Ken Kahn’s mother was there too. A petite woman with gray hair and intelligent eyes, Fay Kahn would remain throughout Chris’s trial as well as Daulton’s. “This is the biggest case Kenny’s ever had,” she replied proudly when a reporter inquired about her devoted attendance at the proceedings. Sitting near Mrs. Kahn on the opening day of the trial was a curious-looking man wearing what appeared to be a military uniform—a blue tunic similar to the kind Air Force officers wear and a matching cap. But on close examination it proved to be something else: the tunic and cap were festooned with toy rockets and plastic airplanes and a collage of badges issued by political candidates of years past and assorted commercial enterprises, and he introduced himself as “General Hershey Bar.” The general was a court buff, the kind of spectator who can be found in any major court around the country on any given day, monitoring the drama of other people’s lives.

  Several days before the trial began, Joel Levine had carried three large cardboard cartons into the chambers of Judge Kelleher. The boxes were stuffed with some of America’s most sensitive secrets, detailing how the Central Intelligence Agency and other agencies collected photos and other information about the Soviet Union, China and other countries from far out in space. There were documents about Projects Rhyolite and Argus and other reconnaissance satellites, and they described how much of the data from the satellites flowed through the Black Vault at TRW. There were also reports of the CIA’s own investigation of the Boyce-Lee case.

  The delivery had been a critical juncture for the prosecution: if the judge read the papers and then decided it was essential that the defense lawyers also be given access to them, the Department of Justice, on instructions from the National Security Council, planned to suspend prosecution of the two youths. But Judge Kelleher, after reading the documents and the CIA’s investigative reports, decreed that they were not vital to the defense. With that, the prosecution had gone forward, despite strident objections from lawyers for both defendants.

  It was now up to Stilz and Levine to prove that Chris and, by inference, Daulton had conspired to steal the classified Pyramider documents with the intent of selling them to the U.S.S.R., and then had actually done so. The CIA had declassified portions of the Pyramider papers for use as evidence and had allowed copies to be made available to each defendant.

  With Chris’s statement to the FBI on the night of his arrest now certain to be used against him, his lawyers began the trial with a pitifully thin hand of cards to play. They retreated to a strategy that they believed gave them their only chance of an acquittal: to argue that the Pyramider documents were “overclassified”; that they had no value to the Russians because the project had never been implemented, and moreover, that the technical data in the study were esse
ntially common knowledge available to any sophisticated electronics engineer. The strategy was to convince the jury that the material really didn’t deserve a top security label and that Chris had not sold secrets to the Soviet Union that would harm the United States. “We’ll have testimony that the government could have gone to any Radio Shack to get that kind of thing,” Dougherty confided to a reporter on the opening day of the trial.

  The trial began with a summary by Joel Levine of the prosecution’s allegations. In itself the opening argument was newsworthy: it was the first public admission by the United States Government that the CIA and TRW were involved in clandestine satellite operations. Levine told the jury that the case he would present involved a secret project called “Pyramider,” purloined secrets in potted plants, miniature cameras and other elements of intrigue that he made sound like a James Bond thriller. He told the jurors they would be hearing a lot about a man named Andrew Daulton Lee, a childhood friend of Christopher John Boyce. “From that friendship,” he said, “the seeds of an espionage conspiracy were born.”

  FBI Agent White was the first witness and presented a long review of Chris’s statement on the night of his arrest, including the damaging allegation “He told me that they had delivered to the Soviets the contents of thousands of documents.”