Chris continued to try to make a point about Australia, but Stilz battled to keep him off the subject. Slowly, however, in his interrupted answers and Stilz’ hurried objections, it was becoming apparent to spectators in the courtroom that Chris knew something sinister about America’s dealings with Australia.
What wasn’t yet apparent was that Chris was establishing the foundation for the defense he hoped would keep him out of prison: he was about to charge that he had been an unwilling spy, that he had been blackmailed by Daulton into being a spy.
Chris continued his testimony under Dougherty’s probing. Shortly after the initial discussion with Daulton, he said, the subject of Australia had come up again. Once again, Stilz recognized possible disaster ahead and started to rise. But he was too late. Chris said:
“And I informed him that part of my daily duties … I worked in a communication room … part of my daily duties were to continue a deception against the Australians.”
There was a stir in the courtroom. The television-network artists and reporters seated at the press table looked at each other as if to say, What did he mean by that?
“Your Honor,” Stilz said urgently, “at this point I’m going to object. Irrelevant.”
“Sustained.”
There was a banging noise in the back of the courtroom, and heads turned instinctively to see who it was. It was General Hershey Bar in full regalia pushing open the doors of the courtroom and reclaiming his seat after visiting the rest room. The tension of Chris’s testimony was broken momentarily.
“All right,” Dougherty continued. “Did you tell him you wanted to do something about this information?”
“I said I would like to make it known, but that I didn’t want to get in trouble for it. I didn’t want anything to come back to me. And he said his father knew many influential people.…”
“At this point did you have any intent or desire to hurt the United States in any way?”
“No, sir, not at all.”
Chris then lied that he had agreed to write a letter documenting the still undefined grievances about Australia and that Daulton had volunteered to have his father make it public through unnamed influential friends, thereby exposing official shenanigans as Ellsberg and Russo had done. Subsequently, Chris claimed, Daulton informed him that he had not passed the information so that it could be made public, as he’d promised, but that instead, he had sold Chris’s letter to the Russians in Mexico City, and demanded more information from the Black Vault under the threat of exposing Chris. If he didn’t give him more secrets, Daulton had threatened to blackmail his father, he said. Chris said that he had agreed to go along with Daulton’s demands—but only because of his threats—and he had responded by giving him worthless, outdated information.
“I never—never planned for this to happen,” he asserted.
“Did you ever willfully transmit information relating to the national defense to anybody at all with the belief that it would be used by—to an advantage by a foreign nation?” Dougherty asked.
“No, sir,” Chris lied. He spoke surely, decisively. There was a plaintive, boyish aura to his testimony that gave it verisimilitude. At times, he seemed on the verge of tears. He seemed to some in the courtroom a child trapped by forces he could not comprehend or control.
“And did you ever willfully or knowingly act as an agent for a foreign government?”
“Not willfully, but I knew that’s what I had become.”
The interrogation had lasted more than two hours, and it left the courtroom in shocked silence.
Stilz’ cross-examination was brutal. He started by getting Chris repeatedly to admit that he knew he was transmitting classified information to the Russians in violation of the law and secrecy pledges he had signed. Stilz showed him signed copies of his project-briefing security pledges from the CIA archives.
“You admitted to the FBI that you received fifteen thousand dollars?”
“Yes, sir.”
“And did he [Lee] coerce and pressure you into taking this money, Mr. Boyce?”
“Coerced me and pressured me into the whole organization, the whole system,” Chris answered.
“Including receiving money for the classified materials given to the Russians?”
“No, he did not.”
The trial was recessed after a full day with Chris on the stand.
The next day, the morning newspapers carried his allusions to mysterious deceptions against Australia, and when the trial resumed, the press gallery had grown to include a delegation of correspondents from the Australian press.
Stilz brought up Chris’s acceptance of $5,000 from Boris during his trip to Mexico City.
“Mr. Boyce, isn’t it a fact that the reason they thought that you were valuable is because you were going to go back to school and study Soviet history and policy with the eventual aim of working in the State Department?”
“I said I was going back to school,” Chris answered, “and they suggested that I study that, and they said that it would be a good idea to go to work for the State Department. And I agreed to do that, knowing that there was absolutely no way I could ever go to work for the State Department; and I was accomplishing not having access to classified documents; I was getting out of TRW, and what possible good would I be to them?”
“Did you not begin to take a course in Soviet policy requested by the Soviets?”
“It was a Soviet foreign policy class,” Chris said. “I had just gone through an experience with them, and there it was. I took it. It’s not illegal to take that. What if they checked up on me, Mr. Stilz?”
“Mr. Boyce,” the prosecutor hammered back, “you knew that your actions over the two-year period, by causing classified materials, Top Secret materials, to be transmitted to the Russians … you knew you were doing an extreme disservice to your country, didn’t you?”
“I dragged my feet the whole time and I don’t think I gave them anything they could use.”
Stilz had finished his cross-examination. Dougherty moved in for one last attempt to demonstrate the defense’s theory that Chris had had compelling, ideologically motivated reasons for his behavior. Recalling his earlier testimony about the party at which Chris claimed to have discussed with Daulton the possibility of making public a letter, Dougherty asked Chris to recount the conversation.
“We talked about—” Chris began. Stilz jumped up.
“Your Honor, if I may interrupt for a moment, may counsel approach the bench?” he said urgently.
“No,” the judge said. “You may answer.”
“You talked about politics, you talked about Lee’s arrest warrants,” Dougherty said. “Now, what else did you talk about?”
“Labor unions.”
“Specifically, what labor unions?”
“Australian labor unions.”
Stilz and Levine looked at each other, puzzled and surprised. They had been prepared for the possibility that Chris might attempt to talk about certain facets of the Australian CIA operation; but labor unions? They didn’t know what he was talking about.
“In what sense did you talk about Australian labor unions?” Dougherty continued.
Stilz rose to his feet. “Objection. Irrelevant.”
“Overruled,” Kelleher said.
“The suspension of strikes—the suppression of strikes by the Central Intelligence Agency of Australian labor unions.”
Stilz was now on his feet shouting his objections. But Kelleher had allowed Chris to make his point: he had been revulsed by the discovery of American manipulation of Australian unions and unspecified deceptions against the same country.
That ended Chris’s testimony.
For the next month, reports of CIA activities in Australia dominated the front pages of several Australian newspapers. Using Chris’s disclosure of CIA tampering in Australia as a springboard, the newspapers initiated investigative series which suggested that the ouster of Prime Minister Whitlam might have been orchestrated by
the American intelligence service, and there were fresh reports almost daily of different alleged CIA manipulations of political, economic and labor affairs in the country. None of the Australian journalists managed to discover the “deception” that Chris had alluded to—the Rhyolite-Argus deception. Nevertheless, the close Australian–American alliance that had been cemented in World War II was suddenly buffeted by a political tornado, and the incident touched off day after day of stormy sessions in the Australian parliament. There were demands for a complete investigation of the CIA’s role in Australia. But the government managed to ride out the storm. It simply remained aloof from the crisis, refusing to respond to the allegations and biding its time until they subsided.
Precisely what transpired in hurried talks between Australian and American diplomats in the aftermath of Chris’s testimony has never been disclosed. But a few months later, the two governments announced that they had renegotiated and renewed the Executive Agreement under which the American bases were operated on Australian soil. No details of the new agreement were ever made public.
The political storm was suppressed for the moment. But perhaps for decades to come, the long shadow of the CIA would loom over relations between two old allies.
46
“We request no lunch today,” the jury foreman wrote on the torn scrap of yellow legal-size notepaper sent to Judge Kelleher at 11:21 A.M. on April 28, 1977, shortly after the fate of Christopher John Boyce had been placed in the hands of the jury. On the Boyce defense team, there was a glimmer of hope that Chris’s eloquently told story of blackmail and coercion might have swayed at least one juror. “All you need is one woman on that jury who’d like to mother that nice kid,” a reporter speculated, and Dougherty agreed.
As soon as the Boyce jury left the courtroom to begin deliberations, the jury that had been chosen to hear the case against Daulton was ushered into the room, and his trial began before Chris’s was over.
In his opening argument, Kahn broadened further the rupture between the two friends:
The defense in the case of The United States of America v. Andrew Daulton Lee, he said, would prove that Daulton had been employed by the Central Intelligence Agency to disseminate false information to the Russians as part of a calculated intelligence scheme, and that Christopher Boyce had recruited the defendant for the mission. His client, he said, was not a spy. “He is an outright capitalist—he’s a right-on American.”
Sitting near the front of the spectator gallery were Dr. Daulton Bradley Lee, who looked thin, extraordinarily gray and very tired, and his wife, Anne. The mysterious Pole did not appear for Daulton’s trial.
At 1:17 that afternoon, the foreman of the Boyce jury sent another message to the judge, scrawled on yellow paper: “We would like a definition of ‘willfully and knowingly’ in reference to Count One and the admonition of duress in reference to Count One.”
The note paralyzed the court. Testimony against Daulton, which had been scheduled to resume after the lunch recess, was suspended as Stilz and Levine fought to convince Judge Kelleher that no further directions need be given the jury. Dougherty urged compliance with the request, seeing a message of hope in the sheet of yellow paper.
Whether the information should be provided the jury was still being debated heatedly at 2:40 P.M. when the question became moot. The jury sent another note that read:
“In regard to our previous request, please disregard it.”
Eleven minutes later, there was a fourth note: “We have reached a unanimous verdict.”
Chris was ordered to the courtroom from a holding cell on a lower floor. He entered the courtroom with a U.S. marshal, and the verdict came quickly:
Guilty on all eight counts of espionage and conspiracy to commit espionage.
It had taken the jury less than three and a half hours.
Chris listened to the verdict at the defense table. The muscles of his cheeks tightened when the jury filed back into the room, but when the bailiff read the verdict, there was absolutely no expression on his face. He turned to his attorneys and said resignedly, “C’ est la vie.”
After the jury was discharged, Judge Kelleher declared a recess until the Lee trial could be resumed. Chelius and Dougherty shook Chris’s hand and said they were sorry. Chris managed a smile and thanked the lawyers, and he was escorted out of the courtroom, now emptying of reporters and spectators. Daulton was outside, waiting for his trial to continue; he had heard the news of Chris’s conviction from another marshal. When he saw Chris leave the courtroom, Daulton’s face was empty and grim. The two old friends passed but did not speak.
Then Daulton’s trial resumed.
The prosecution’s case against Daulton was essentially a rerun of the one against Chris. The main exception was that it elected not to use Daulton’s statement made in Mexico City containing his claims of working for the CIA. Instead, it offered a case based on the testimony of witnesses linking him to espionage and forensic evidence from the FBI.
Eileen Heaphy described the scene outside the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City and pointed out Daulton, who was sitting in the same seat that Chris had occupied a few minutes earlier, and said he was the man she had seen being arrested by Mexican policemen.
Vice Consul Thomas Ferguson described how Daulton had removed a white 4-by-8-inch envelope from his pocket at the Mexico City Metropolitan Police Headquarters and recalled the removal of ten to fifteen strips of photographic negatives from it and his inspection of the negatives marked PYRAMIDER and TOP SECRET. Under cross-examination by Kahn, Ferguson acknowledged that Daulton had told him he was involved in doing something for the “free world,” but he said he didn’t believe him.
The FBI agents who had searched Daulton’s home in Palos Verdes described their discovery of the Minox camera, airplane tickets between Los Angeles and Mexico City, and photographs of Chris and Daulton taken in Mexico City.
Darlene Cooper, Carole Benedict, Barclay Granger and others from The Hill recalled his boasts of making big money in Mexico by selling what he said were stolen securities; they described him brandishing what he called a “spy camera” and wads of money, and his frequent requests that they fly with him to Mexico to serve as couriers of cash.
Leslie Dirks of the CIA and Regis Carr reiterated the testimony they had given at the Boyce trial, and Kent Dixon of the FBI gave his damaging testimony again that linked the Pyramider microfilm to Daulton’s Minox camera.
Stilz and Levine had affidavits from CIA personnel officers asserting that Daulton had never had any working relationship with the agency; but the prosecution lost ground when Kahn succeeded in impeaching the testimony of another CIA representative who first denied Daulton’s connection with the agency and then admitted that he didn’t know the identities of all the CIA’s secret operatives. Re and Kahn hammered away at the prosecution witnesses, claiming that there was nothing in the government’s case that was inconsistent with Daulton’s claim that he had been duped into spying for the CIA by one of its agents and had been abandoned when the espionage agency no longer needed him.
Frequently and sarcastically, Stilz and Levine scoffed at the theory, and from the frequency of objections made by Kahn and Re that were overruled, so did Judge Kelleher. But one person in the courtroom appeared to be paying attention to the theory—a woman in the front row of the jury box named Peggy Fuller. A twenty-two-year-old college student who had plans to become a lawyer, she watched and listened to Kahn carefully as he ridiculed the affidavits from the CIA. The word of the CIA, he sneered again and again, was “worthless.” It would be expected to leave its spies out in the cold. Andrew Daulton Lee was nothing more than an American patriot who had felt he was serving his country and was being thrown to the wolves, Kahn said. A spy, he said, doesn’t go to his neighborhood travel agency to buy tickets for an espionage rendezvous in Vienna. A spy doesn’t brag about selling secrets while sitting around in Mazatlán or developing espionage pictures in the family kitchen.
Wh
en the defense opened its phase of the trial, there was a surprised murmur in the spectator gallery: the first defense witness was an FBI agent.
Robert Lyons, one of the agents who had interviewed Daulton at the Mexican secret police offices on January 15, acknowledged that one of the first things Daulton had said that night was that he worked for the CIA as a “subcontractor” to Christopher John Boyce. John Foarde, the second agent, then corroborated this; thus, the defense had managed to salvage the one point favorable to Daulton from the Mexico City interview that the prosecution had elected not to use against him. However, under cross-examination by Levine, the two agents said that when they had investigated Daulton’s claims, they had been told by the CIA that the agency had never heard of Andrew Daulton Lee prior to January 6, 1977.
Kelleher invited the defense lawyers and prosecutors to a conference near the bench; as he did from time to time, he asked the lawyers for an estimate of how long they expected the trial to continue. Kahn and Re said they expected to be able to wind up the defense in a day or two. It was the first indication that Daulton would not testify. They had decided that he wouldn’t make a good witness; they were afraid he might cross himself up under the heat of cross-examination, and had decided there was nothing he could offer that would justify the risk. The lawyers, of course, didn’t give any reasons to the judge; they just said Daulton would not be called to testify.
The defense began its final efforts to save Daulton the next day.
Borrowing an idea from the Boyce defense team, Kahn and Re decided to try to persuade the jury that the Pyramider documents were worthless—not the prize defense secrets claimed by the government. Professor Martin Hellman of Stanford reprised his testimony from the Boyce trial, but Kelleher refused to permit William Florence, who had been one of the star witnesses in the Ellsberg-Russo trial, to testify as he had in the Boyce trial; the judge ruled that Florence was not qualified to give expert opinion on the matter of whether the Pyramider documents were properly classified.
“The defense calls Myrtle Clarke.” Stilz and Levine looked back in the rear of the courtroom and saw a gray-haired woman who appeared to be in her seventies walking slowly down the aisle, seemingly barely able to walk. It was Daulton’s grandmother.
The Falcon and the Snowman Page 35
