The Falcon and the Snowman (11 page)

Another person whom Chris could not help getting to know better was Laurie Vicker. She was apparently a whiz at computers, but she didn't seem too bright to Chris. Whenever her work load was light, or she just got a whim to do so, she came into the vault and tried to make conversation with him. Laurie wanted more than anything else to get married and move out of the home of her parents. She liked marijuana, Valium and amphetamines; the last, she said, were necessary to dampen her appetite so that she could lose weight.

During these first few weeks Chris learned other things about Laurie: she liked her sex in threesomes and, sometimes, accompanied by pain, and she delighted in talking about it. She said she enjoyed wearing black leather outfits during her sex and flogging men who got their sexual kicks that way. Chris wasn't sexually interested at all in the lusty, overweight girl; she was too coarse for him, and her graphic invitations to join her group-sex sessions embarrassed him. But, as he discovered, he was clearly in the minority.

Each station in the Central Intelligence Agency network of which Chris was now a part had a designator, or “slug,” that identified it. It was an address cited on each message. For instance, CIA Headquarters in Langley, Virginia, appropriately was called “Pilot”; TRW was “Pedal”; Canberra, the capital of Australia, was “Casino.” Chris learned that he was to operate two cryptographic systems between TRW and the CIA headquarters and, with Langley as an intermediate relay point, to Australia and other stations around the world.

The first of the machines was the KW-7. It worked exactly like a teletype machine except for one thing: when Chris typed a message on the keyboard, a computer scrambled the sequence of letters, words and sentences he typed into an incoherent stream of electronic pulses. Conversely, when messages arrived from Pilot, the machine reversed the process, transforming incoherent pulses from the CIA into plain English. The messages sent over this encoded teletype system were called TWX's, like ordinary teletype messages. The second machine he operated, the KG-13, scrambled voices into meaningless gibberish to prevent eavesdropping on telephone and radio conversations between TRW, Langley and any other stations plugged temporarily into the circuit. When TRW or CIA representatives needed to hold what they called a “secure” conversation, certain not to be penetrated by the KGB or other foreign agents, they spoke over the KG-13 from the vault or from an upstairs command post in M-4 called the War Room. It was the room where day-to-day operations of TRW satellites built for the CIA were directed and where executives and CIA representatives congregated during crises. In both machines, the ciphers had to be changed daily. It was one of the systematic precautions taken to prevent enemies from getting access to the messages. Every so often, usually every three to six months, a new supply of ciphers arrived. The National Security Agency dispatched an armed courier to TRW with the ciphers, and they were locked in the Diebold floor safe. Chris learned how to change the ciphers each day by repositioning key settings on the machines. Soon, he was told, the NSA would be changing to a new system of computer punched cards. Under the new system, the cards were to come in booklets of thirty-four—thirty-one cards for successive days in the month and three for emergencies or other contingencies.

Chris's life in the vault began to settle into a routine. A few minutes before 7:30
A.M.
each weekday, he showed his Special Projects badge to a guard, then passed two more guard checkpoints before reaching the outer office in front of the vault. Before attempting to open the vault, he telephoned a TRW guard to announce his intention to do so, so that the guard could temporarily disconnect the main vault alarm. Then he worked the combination, opened the vault door and, using a key, opened the inner door. He switched off another alarm, opened the Diebold and then chose the designated cipher for the day. After he set the cipher and turned on the machines, there was a “good morning” contact with the CIA operator at Pilot. Then he tore up the previous day's ciphers and placed them in a bag, where they would be stored for several weeks before being ground up into pulp by a high-speed electrical blender in the vault.

His next step was to collect the messages for TRW that had accumulated during the night and then make copies for the CIA resident officers at the plant and senior TRW project officials. One copy of each message—about fifty or sixty flowed through the vault each day—was retained in the vault for a year. Anyone with access to the code room could thus look back on a full year of the CIA's decoded secret mail.

After copying and distributing the TWX traffic, Chris began sending outgoing messages and arranging conversations via the secure voice link. His was a job more or less like that of a switchboard operator who linked callers in telephone conversations around the world.

As the days went on, the young man who had grown up on the Palos Verdes Peninsula intent on becoming a Roman Catholic priest, and who had found his happiest days walking in the woods near Morro Bay, plunged deeper into the new world that had been revealed to him—the CIA espionage and its deception, Gene Norman's tales of butchery in Vietnam, and Laurie's continued attempts at seduction.

Chris disliked Norman, but kept his aversion to himself. They had to work closely together and their shifts coincided, and inevitably, circumstances brought them together a lot. They began to lunch regularly at The Hangar or The Buckit, where Norman's favorite subject of conversation—aside from the Vietnam War, of course—was a hypothetical plot to sell some of the ciphers to a foreign country. It was a joke, but they fantasized how they might pull off the caper as they went through successive pitchers of beer. The best approach, they agreed, would be to sell the stuff to a Russian or Chinese embassy in a foreign country.

Chris occasionally rode with Norman on courier runs to the CIA's West Coast Office, which, unmarked, filled the basement of a high-rise office building near Los Angeles International Airport, and Norman occasionally dropped by the bar and pool hall where Chris worked at night. Chris was supposed to close the bar at 2
A.M.
, but he got so tired of breaking up fights among the patrons on some nights that he sometimes closed early. After a while, even amphetamines didn't keep him awake when he arrived for work in the vault, and on the day before Christmas, 1974, he quit.

Because the vault was off limits to guards and even to most senior executives at TRW, Chris discovered it was used as a kind of private playpen by the select group that was allowed inside. When traffic with Pilot was slow, Norman, Laurie and a handful of their friends came in for cocktails, or to gossip or play Risk, a game distantly related to Monopoly. When the liquor they hid in the vault ran out, Chris or somebody else went on what they all called a “booze run” to a nearby liquor store, carrying the liquor into the plant in a briefcase or other container as if it were classified data bound for the code room. The guards never asked any questions. Morning visitors to the vault could expect vodka–and–orange juice; afternoons, there was often peppermint Schnapps, red wine or daiquiris whipped up in the CIA's document-destruction blender. The vault became an increasingly popular place.

As 1975 began, the domestic political pot was reaching a boil in Australia, the destination for many of the messages from Pedal. And in certain components of the United States Government, uneasiness was mounting about the political heat Down Under.

In 1968, Australia and the United States had signed an agreement providing for the establishment of CIA bases at Pine Gap and Murrunger, near Alice Springs in Central Australia, about two thousand miles northwest of Sydney. The bases sprawled over more than four square miles of bush country. Their function was to control and gather data sent back from space by spy satellites. But the Australian public had never been informed that this was the purpose of the bases. Although there had been occasional speculation in the Australian press that they had a military function that might invite a Soviet attack on Australia in the event of a U.S.–U.S.S.R. war, officially the Australian Government described the bases as “space research stations” operated by the U.S. Defense Department jointly with Australia. The impression was left—purposefully—that these remote bases were dedicated to the peaceful pursuit of knowledge about the universe.

Despite probings by the Australian press, no one had ever publicly made a connection between the CIA and the facilities. This was highly satisfactory to the CIA, which regarded the listening posts as crucial to American intelligence operations.

An upset victory in 1972 by the Australian Labour Party and the election of Gough Whitlam as prime minister sent jitters through the CIA. The agency feared that a left-leaning government in Australia might reveal the function of the bases or, worse, abrogate the agreement and close down the facilities.

Because of these fears and apprehension that the KGB might find it easy to penetrate a labor government, the CIA decided to limit the information it made available to the Australian Security and Intelligence Service, the Australian CIA. To the American CIA, there were high stakes involved in the bases, and not surprisingly, it meant to keep them. Despite professions of loyalty from Whitlam to the American-Australian alliance, apprehension about an anti-U.S. shift in Australian policy continued to grow within the Central Intelligence Agency.

And in the minds of certain officials within the CIA, these fears were soon validated. One of Whitlam's first acts after becoming prime minister was to tweak the United States by withdrawing Australian troops from Vietnam, and in 1973 he publicly denounced the American bombing of Hanoi, enraging President Nixon.

Meanwhile, strident demands for official explanation of the American bases were being voiced increasingly by some members of the Labour Party. The CIA, convinced that the future of facilities vital to the security of the United States was jeopardized by a potentially unfriendly government, placed the highest priority on ensuring the survival of the bases and secretly poured money heavily into the opposition Liberal and National Country parties. The CIA wanted Whitlam out.

As he worked at his new job, Chris wasn't aware of such machinations more than eight thousand miles away. But one day, while looking over encrypted TWX traffic from Langley, he read with fascination the details of one slant of the American intelligence offensive in Australia. Telex messages reported that several strikes were threatened in Australia that, it was feared, might disrupt movement of equipment and personnel to Alice Springs, and thus delay improvements being made at the CIA bases. In the messages, Chris made the discovery that the CIA was planning to block the strikes. Its agents had infiltrated the leadership of Australian unions, and Pilot reported that it expected agents working for the CIA to be able to prevent the strikes or, as they had done in the past, at least minimize their potential damage to the intelligence agency's operations.

The discovery that America was tinkering with the internal affairs of a friendly country was another shocker for Chris.

It would not be the last one.

As further messages flowed back and forth before him, Chris realized Australia wasn't the only ally being deceived by the agency. And he realized that U.S. spy satellites were used to spy not only on potential enemies such as Russia and China but on “friendly” countries such as France and Israel.

Chris decided he hated the CIA, its projects and its dishonor in the name of “national security.” He saw its operations as part of a
pattern
. It was a pattern that included Vietnam, Spiro Agnew, Richard Nixon and more. In Chris's mind, it was part of a pattern that went back centuries, to every other senseless battle of national states. If the CIA was doing this to Australia, Chris asked himself, wouldn't it have engineered Allende's death in Chile?

The spooks whom Chris knew in the CIA accepted Chris as one of their own: he was now part of what they called “the intelligence community.” But he was repelled by any thought that he shared in the guilt, and he began to think carefully about how he might strike back.

11

For Daulton the new year had also begun with a discovery, but of a different kind. After almost five years of trying, he had finally found a contact in the Mexican Mafia, a mother-lode source of drugs operating out of Culiacán in the Mexican state of Sinaloa. Culiacán was the hub of Mexico's booming trade in marijuana, cocaine and heroin. It was a violent and savage place that almost overnight had begun to enjoy a gold rush rooted in brown gold—brown Mexican heroin. The gold rush had been triggered unintentionally by Richard M. Nixon.

In 1974, under intense pressure from the Nixon Administration, Turkey, which, via France and Central America, had been America's principal source of heroin, prohibited the cultivation of opium poppies. The crackdown in Turkey crimped the supply, and sent prices soaring on the streets of New York, Detroit, Los Angeles and other cities.

The owners of great expanses of land in the Sierra Madre mountains of Mexico east of Culiacán, who had been supplying America with much of its marijuana, began to help fill the breach. Later on, Thailand, Cambodia, Burma and other countries in Southeast Asia would also help meet the demand; but for now, Southeast Asia was in a state of upheaval left by the Vietnam War, and there were not yet any substantial lines of supply for opium from these areas to the United States. Addicts regarded the brown heroin from Mexico as inferior to the refined white heroin from Turkey. But it was available when the Turkish supply dried up—and it was relatively easy to smuggle into America over the little-guarded U.S.–Mexico border.

Daulton had made a good, if unspectacular, living selling marijuana and cocaine. Now, like the growers in the Sierra Madre, he decided to move into the heroin trade.

Unfortunately, he also became addicted to his product.