THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN by Robert Lindsey
Simon & Schuster; 358pages; $12.95
A spy story need not be fiction to tax credulity. Take the absurd story of Christopher Boyce and Daulton Lee. Christopher was a thoughtful, well-behaved boy with a passion for falconry and ambition for the priesthood. Daulton was a young “snowman,” a dealer in cocaine and other drugs to the bored and coddled youth of Southern California.
Their espionage career began in 1974 after Christopher’s father, an FBI man turned electronics executive, got his son a $140-a-week job with TRW Defense and Space Systems Group near Los Angeles. The young man’s duties included handling coded messages from the CIA about spy satellites. He worked in a room called the Black Vault, off limits to all but half a dozen TRW employees. The group found plant security so lax that they spent their days getting drunk on booze smuggled in via a CIA pouch, mixing daiquiris in a document shredder and selling Amway household products over the secure telephone line. Chris was sometimes sober enough to be appalled by the messages he was handling: the CIA was spying by satellite on friendly nations like France and Israel and trying to topple the new leftist government of Australia.
When Boyce confided his concern to his pal, the drug dealer suggested a way to retaliate: hand over some incriminating TRW documents to peddle at the Soviet embassy in Mexico City. To Boyce, writes New York Times Reporter Robert Lindsey, “his job in the Black Vault became an opportunity to take a saber stroke at both the world’s superpowers at once … and Daulton had had the greed to serve his purpose.”
Over the next year they sold thousands of messages, diagrams and computer codes to the resident Soviet agents, including a KGB colonel with steel teeth. The Soviets wound up unwittingly bankrolling Daulton’s drug operation, and the pair came to grief only after an unannounced delivery to the embassy to raise cash for a big drug deal. The friends turned against each other at their trials, Christopher saying he had been blackmailed into stealing the secrets by his former friend, Daulton insisting that all along he had been told they were working for the U.S., spreading false information. Judge and jury were unimpressed: the spies will not be eligible for parole until about 1995.
The Falcon and the Snowman omits no telling detail — about falconry, the drug trade, spy satellites, the duo’s stoned bum-bung, and their torturous legal battles after capture. But there are enough tantalizing loose ends in the book to make it clear that Lindsey is describing life, not art. Why, for instance, did TRW put a 21-year-old, $140-a-week college dropout in such a sensitive post? Did the leaks really damage U.S. security? Perhaps Boyce and Lee actually were being used by the CIA to spread false evidence. If not, concludes Lindsey, then “the affair of the snowman and the spy who called himself Falcon was an episode that demonstrated amazing ineptitude on the part of the Central Intelligence Agency.” Even the most casual readers of newspaper headlines will recognize the allegation as pure nonfiction. — Donald Morrison
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