The Falcon and the Snowman (20 page)

But Daulton was not finished. His courage mobilized by wine, brandy and cocaine he had snorted before the meeting, he took the offensive: attempting to be his most persuasive, he said the Russians were paying him too little for the risks he was taking. True, his friend was motivated by ideology, he reiterated. But he was a fugitive from the law—on a phony, trumped-up drug charge, to be sure, but he was still a fugitive—and he deserved more cash for the risks he was having to take.

Steely Teeth laughed and brushed off his protests as if to say, “Don't worry. You'll get all the money you can spend.” The Soviet Union was very generous with people who helped it, and there would be great rewards, he said glowingly.

Daulton, now more confident than ever, made a new proposal: on a future trip, he would exchange some information for an agreement by the Russians to carry ten kilos—twenty-two pounds—of cocaine from Lima, Peru, to the United States. There was no risk to the Russians, he said, speaking quickly, and it would augment what he considered his inadequate payments from them.

The two Russians exchanged blank looks with each other and responded to the proposition with silence. Daulton pressed the idea aggressively. The Russians had “nothing to lose.” After a few more moments of silence, The Colonel said they would think it over.

Changing the subject, Okana expressed concern over Daulton's continuing practice of bringing actual documents and cipher cards from the code room. He said there would be much less risk if Cristobal photographed the documents, returned them and then passed the film to Daulton. He suggested that Daulton buy a miniature camera, a Minox-B, which was smaller than a package of cigarettes. Such a camera, he said, could be purchased in California; its negatives were small, but they could be blown up as large as the original documents.

The long evening ended after midnight, and Daulton arranged to see them again the following day.

Karpov dropped him off at the Holiday Inn—a transplanted bit of America located in the
Zona Rosa
, the Pink Zone, of Mexico City. A rectangular area of a dozen blocks or so off the Paseo de la Reforma, the Zona Rosa was to Mexico City what Picadilly was to London and King's Cross was to Sydney—a neon-bathed hub of nightlife, restaurants, bars and shops.

As he entered the lobby, Daulton would recall later, he spotted a brunette woman who looked European standing at one side of the cavernous room, and he admired her dark good looks and her figure, which was shown off to good advantage by a white sweater. It was not unusual to see women alone at night in Mexico City, but they tended to be streetwalkers who didn't loiter inside the better hotels. Daulton thought he might have seen the woman earlier in the day, but he couldn't remember where, and he wondered if she had been following him. As Daulton moved toward an elevator, she began to walk in the same direction, and as the elevator door opened and he went in, the woman picked up her stride so that she could get in before the door closed. She smiled at Daulton, and when he reached his floor, the woman grabbed his arm and went into his room with him. Years later Daulton said of this incident: “I guess the Russians sent her to keep an eye out on me, but she didn't say anything and we just enjoyed ourselves in bed.”

The next morning Daulton was sitting on a bench in the Parco Popular when he heard the loping stride of a runner behind him on the grass. He looked around and saw a smiling Okana in a blue jogging suit, his face flushed and moist from perspiration.

Daulton didn't mention the woman and Okana didn't either.

The Russian walked with Daulton and expounded the rewards of jogging, a calling for which the American did not have much enthusiasm, but he listened patiently. Then the agent turned to business.

He said the latest delivery had been analyzed, and while some of the information was excellent, the Russians needed the frequencies on which the messages were broadcast.

“I know, I know,” Daulton said. “I'm working on them; I'll have them next month.”

Perhaps it would be a good idea, Okana added, if Cristobal made a trip to Mexico City so that they could all confer and experts in the field of communications could discuss his work. The last thing Daulton wanted to do was bring Chris to Mexico City. Then, he realized, the Russians wouldn't need
him
anymore. But he didn't express his concern; he said he would speak to his friend about a visit. But he added that he doubted if he would want to take the risk. Then perhaps, Okana added, he could go to California and visit his friend. Daulton did not reply to that.

There was one more thing, Okana said. He needed receipts to prove that he had paid money to Daulton. Okana gave Daulton several pieces of paper with cash figures on them, and Daulton initialed them, wondering if all government bureaucracies were the same, whether the Russian (like some Americans) would cheat on his expense account and doctor the receipts to get some extra money for himself.

Using an alias to get through Customs and Immigration formalities at the airport, Daulton returned to Los Angeles. He divided the $5,000 he had received with Chris and debriefed him on the trip. Daulton was more enthusiastic than ever about their joint venture; Chris said he was surprised it was still going on. “Man, they love this stuff,” Daulton said. “They're crazy for it.”

Daulton said the Russians wanted him to photograph the documents—and were beginning to put more pressure on him for the frequencies and for answers to some of the questions he'd brought back for Chris earlier. Casually, Daulton mentioned something Chris hadn't known: before the earlier deliveries, he had made copies of some of the documents that he'd sold to the Russians. They were stored in a secure place, Daulton said; maybe they could sell them again—to China. Chris said nothing, but did not miss the meaning of this disclosure to himself: somewhere there were copies of documents from the Black Vault that could implicate him in espionage.

Chris agreed that it would probably be safer to use a camera to photograph material in the future. But as for sending the frequencies, he said the Russians would take what was delivered.

“Fuck 'em,” he said. “We'll give them what we want to give them and that's all.”

22

“I've got to buy a spy camera,” Daulton said to Barclay Granger as they cruised in Barclay's car along Hawthorne Boulevard. The spine of the Palos Verdes Peninsula, the boulevard began at the ocean and rose over The Hill to the flatlands and the edge of the vast urban sprawl of the Los Angeles basin.

“You're crazy,” Granger said.

“No, I mean it; I need a baby camera,” he said. He muttered that it had something to do with his new business—selling stolen securities—but wouldn't answer any questions from Barclay about his intended purpose for the camera. Granger suggested that they check a shop in the Peninsula Shopping Center in Palos Verdes, Finley's Jewelry Store. When they got there, there was a Minox-B right in the window.

A clerk at Finley's explained that the camera had belonged to one of the partners in the store, had hardly been used at all and was being sold at a cut-rate price of $155. The clerk couldn't find the instruction book for the camera, but said he would look for it. Daulton paid cash for the camera and left his telephone number so that he could be called when the instruction manual was found.

After the youths left the store, the clerk noticed that one of the accessories he had shown them—a stand for copying documents—was missing. Puzzled, he called Daulton's home, but Daulton said he didn't know what had happened to it.

Daulton liked gadgets, and during the next few days he spent hours playing with the tiny camera, photographing snowlike piles of cocaine and whipping it out of his shirt at parties and taking a picture of surprised friends, saying, “Look at my spy camera.” Daulton had always loved to boast about his adventures—real or imagined—and began to drop hints that he was leading a double life. The pothead who had bragged about gunrunning and the Mexican Mafia now hinted that he was dealing with the Russians, working as an agent for the CIA.

When he told his story, it was often to friends who, like himself, were floating on coke or horse or pot, and for some of them his tales became integrated into the fantasy of their drug trips. Years later, several could not recall whether Daulton had actually told them about the Russians or if the story was something they had imagined while high.

Friends not submerged in the drug culture believed his stories even less. A neighbor whom he had grown up with on Paseo del Mar, the oceanfront street where the Lees lived, and who had gone East to college dropped by to see Daulton, and was immediately presented with an espionage novel,
The Matlock Paper
by Robert Ludlum. Daulton insisted his old playmate should read it. “It's all real,” he said with a knowing expression. The neighbor, recalling the little boy who had told tall tales almost all his life, laughed it off. “A small-man complex” was the excuse he later gave for disregarding Daulton's hints of intrigue and danger.

Betsy Lee Stewart was one of the few girls in Palos Verdes who had a genuine affection for Daulton—a sisterly kind of affection. Betsy was twenty, a tiny blonde with blue eyes who dreamed of becoming an airline stewardess. She and Daulton had become acquainted in high school, and although they never dated, they shared an affection for the outdoors and took long walks together on the high bluffs overlooking the ocean. They remained close after high school—close enough for each to be able to confide troubles to the other.

There was a touch of the protective mother bear in Betsy Lee. She was troubled by how some of the Palos Verdes girls—including Darlene Cooper and some of her other friends—manipulated Daulton to get free drugs. She was annoyed when they came on to Daulton, sweet and feigning interest in him to get pot or other drugs, and then ridiculed him behind his back, calling him a “creep,” or “the Polack shrimp.” When he didn't have drugs, they simply ignored him. But Betsy didn't ignore him.

Following graduation, she watched his descent into a life-style orbiting around narcotics and the rootless fraternity of long-haired louts and drug pushers who gravitated to the older beach communities north of Palos Verdes, and she took on Daulton as a sometime rehabilitation project. Believing she could do something for him, she spent countless hours trying to boost his ego and tame emotional stresses that she attributed to his size, his adoption and his fear of being used.

Shortly after Daulton returned from a trip to Chicago to buy new identification papers, Betsy and Daulton met at a party at the home of a mutual friend in Palos Verdes. The party, in October, 1975, would last two days, and the refreshments would include all of the illicit narcotics available on the Peninsula in those days.

Betsy Lee hadn't seen the Minox yet, so Daulton pulled it out of his shirt pocket and told her with a conspiratorial expression that he had a new job—spying on the United States for the Russians. Betsy Lee loved the little camera, and Daulton said he would buy her one for Christmas, but she ignored the claim he was a spy as another of his coke-induced fantasies.

“You don't believe me?” he said, almost in a whisper.

“Sure I do, sure,” she said.

Then he said, “I'm only kidding. I made it up.”

A few moments later, Daulton seemed to get angry and reversed himself again.

“It's
true
—you don't believe me; I
am
a spy; I see the Russians all the time.”

The party rolled on; more postadolescents from Palos Verdes High, along with more beer and drugs, arrived at the sprawling bluff-top home that looked out at the island of Catalina.

After midnight, Daulton was thoroughly stoned on cocaine. He said he badly needed to talk to Betsy Lee, and they went off by themselves.

Daulton confessed to her that he was afraid he was addicted to heroin. He said he was putting on a front: he told his friends that he could take it or leave it—but in fact, he couldn't.

“I don't want to be a junkie,” he said, grabbing Betsy Lee in a way that frightened her.

He broke into tears and said he desperately needed someone to love; he embraced her and said it again and again, the tears rolling down his face. He said none of the girls except Betsy Lee cared anything about him except for his dope, and he repeated that he needed someone to love and to love
him
.

Betsy Lee had always suspected Daulton had a crush on her, but she wasn't prepared for the avalanche of affection and emotion that cascaded out of him. Kindly, she said she would work with him to kick the heroin and no matter what happened, she would always be his friend.

But she made it clear that she was talking about friendship, not love.

Daulton said he couldn't possibly get off drugs without her help; he said he couldn't live without drugs unless he had someone to lean on. Touched, Betsy Lee said, “We'll do it together,” wondering if his addiction might not be as much psychological as it was physical.

For the next few days, they met several hours a day at her house or his, and talked over his problems. And as they did, he began to spill out more about his new business operations in Mexico City. But Betsy Lee still couldn't believe the crazy picture of this sad friend working as a spy, and she ascribed it to madness induced by narcotics.

After a few weeks, Betsy Lee gave up the effort to liberate Daulton from his addiction; it was just taking too much of her time, she said, and just stopped calling him.

Many months later, however, after Betsy Lee knew that many of Daulton's ramblings about spies and Russian agents and stolen documents had been true, she would look back on the period when he was trying desperately but unsuccessfully to get off drugs, and say:

“It was so sad. He had really heavy emotional problems. He was confused; and I don't think he knew what he was doing. I think he just thought he could get away with something, make some money and feel important.”