The Falcon and the Snowman (27 page)

Daulton felt almost intoxicated by his power over the KGB agents; he loved this sense of power. “They wanted what I had and they wanted it like crazy,” he would recall later. He was convinced he could get away with almost anything. “I knew I had them by the short hairs; I had them hooked like junkies,” he recalled.

Despite the miscalculation over China, Daulton
knew
they would give him what he asked; he was certain they didn't want to lose their access to TRW. And so he pressed his demands—successfully. When he returned to Los Angeles the next day, he had $10,000.

Before he left Boris, he promised again to get the frequencies, the photos and the performance specifications Boris wanted about TRW's infrared sensors. As he said good-bye, his last words to Boris were “Next month!”

30

Chris had now been channeling secrets out of the Black Vault for a year.

He was certain that he was in love with Alana. They had talked about moving in together, but she had rejected the idea, saying she didn't want to hurt her parents. Their discussion turned to talk about marriage, but they decided tacitly to give their relationship more time. Instead, they spent as many nights together as they could at Chris's small rented house. In many ways, it seemed as if they were already married. Alana continued to nag Chris about his developing double chin and his fondness for junk food (he enjoyed the nagging, he would reflect later), but there was one subject on which he refused to budge:
big
breakfasts on Sundays.

“It's part of my Catholic heritage,” he said when Alana first protested, “not to mention my County Mayo heritage.” To stand in the way of an ample breakfast on Sundays, he said, would be to infringe on the sacred practices of his religion and his family, where big Sunday breakfasts were a tradition. When Alana stayed over on Saturday nights, there was an invariable ritual the following morning: About eight, Chris would start a charcoal barbecue grill and go out for sweet rolls and a newspaper. When he got back, he put two steaks over the hot coals, and Alana had hash-browns and scrambled eggs on the range and orange juice and cantaloupe on the table.

These had been happy moments for Chris. But by the spring of 1976, stresses had begun to tear at their relationship. Alana complained that Chris had changed: “You're so moody,” she said repeatedly. He was constantly breaking dates, she said. “Why? You snap at me all the time for nothing, and you're always so tense,” she told him on a Saturday night in March. They had their big breakfast, as usual, the following morning, but the fissures in their romance were widening.

Much of Chris's moodiness and short temper was rooted in the ambiguity that twisted his conscience. On the day he had met Robin, when he was only fifteen, Chris had discovered the rivalry for his conscience. And now, seven years later, two voices were still arguing over his soul. On one hand, there was the ghost of Robin and what he stood for urging him on—the voice of the rebel who rejected the scenario that society had written for him and who saw things as they
really
were, not as the hypocrites and the chieftains of the corrupt corporate state
said
they were. And on the other hand, there was the looming presence of his father and of Monsignor McCarthy and all the others who had left a tenacious residue of
their
morality in him.

And so Chris wavered, a boat pushed to starboard one day, to port the next. At times, he repeatedly encouraged Daulton to sell secrets to the Russians and coached him in how to keep them off balance, serving as the mastermind of their operation and thoroughly enjoying the results of his scheme to tweak the noses of the CIA and the Russians, just as he had enjoyed tweaking the nose of the limp, dead mink in a church years earlier; at other times, the enormity of what they were doing seized him, and then he decided to drag his feet when Daulton asked for more merchandise. At times during the first year of the espionage operation that had begun in a cocaine stupor—at the moments when Chris became enraged by some new discovery about the CIA, or disgust for all manifestations of nationalism welled up in him—he let flow a tide of data that included some of America's most sensitive secrets. But at other times, he became repelled by the greed of his friend and his descent into heroin and, at times, repelled even by himself. The distant remnants of his father's ideals crashed through, and Chris answered Daulton's pleas for more secrets by taking his next batch of pictures out of focus or refusing to deliver items the Russians requested or trying to avoid Daulton when he called him asking for more secrets from the Black Vault.

But he knew it wasn't only a contorted conscience that produced the moodiness and irritability that perplexed Alana; it was also fear—and a growing sense of desperation. He continued to wonder how they had managed to get away with the scheme for so long. And whenever he thought about it—and he thought about it often—Chris always came to the same conclusion:
They have to be on to us
.

Chris knew that his inconsistency bewildered Daulton, and, he admitted to himself, he rather enjoyed this aspect of the operation. And in terms of dollars and cents, he was right: even when Daulton went to Mexico City with fogged film, he returned to The Hill with a stack of new currency. He was perhaps as skilled a traveling salesman as the KGB had ever dealt with, Chris mused.

Chris had not entered their enterprise with financial motives in mind. But he accepted whatever money Daulton gave him. He spent it on cocaine and marijuana, on weekend trips with Alana to the desert country along the Colorado River between California and Arizona, on car repairs and other things that, years later, he could not remember.

Chris was tormented by his fears, and they grew whenever he saw Daulton and realized the hold that heroin had on him. Sooner or later, Chris knew, Daulton was going to get high on heroin and boast that he was a spy, and the whole thing would be over.

As Chris felt the trap he had set for himself squeeze tighter, he made a decision: he must wrest control of the operation from Daulton and deal
directly
with the Russians. With Daulton out of the picture, he would somehow manage to find a way to ease out slowly. So far, he admitted, he had not been very successful in developing his own link to the Russians. He had attempted to do so again with a coded message to the Soviets, but decided Daulton was probably not delivering the messages.

He knew the Russians had broken his simple code. Their first reply to him had not been very kindly: using the same code for a reply sent via Daulton, the KGB had thanked Chris for his service in the cause of socialism, but whoever had answered his note had said he hadn't liked his criticism about taking so long to establish a telephone link and had called him “rude.” Ignoring this complaint, Chris had responded with another coded message asking how much money Daulton had received so far for the material he'd sent with him. But it hadn't been answered, and Chris doubted if Daulton had delivered it.

Nevertheless, he continued to take information out of the vault, tape it to a wall in his house and photograph it. On occasion, to enhance the value of what he considered lesser documents, he typed
FLASH/SECRET
on them. Out of the vault went more ciphers and technical reports and spools of TWX messages rolled up like toilet paper. There were photographs of a study, several pages long, designated only as Project 20,030. It was TRW's concept for a new surveillance satellite system that, just as Argus had been an advancement over Rhyolite, was to be an advanced version of Argus. It was to be another precious buy for the Russians. Each trip out of the plant—and the return trip with the documents—was a risk. But Chris had always thrived on risk.

There was a moment, early in April, 1976, when Chris thought their whole adventure was over: Gene Norman announced that the National Security Agency had appointed a new senior administrator to oversee the communications vaults at various companies that held CIA contracts, and he was on his way to the Black Vault at that moment. They quickly removed a marijuana plant that was growing in the vault, as well as project I.D. badges showing a monkey's face that Norman had prepared as a joke; but otherwise, there was no time to prepare for his arrival.

Chris thought of an incident a few days earlier and smiled to himself: He had gone home after finishing his shift in the vault, but at about seven o'clock he had received a call from one of the guards in M-4. Gene Norman's wife, the guard explained, had called TRW and said she was worried because her husband hadn't come home from work; the guard had peeked through the partially opened vault door and discovered what he thought was the soles of two feet—apparently the feet of a man lying on the floor beyond the draperies that divided the vault. Because the guard wasn't cleared to enter the vault, he called Chris and asked him to drive to TRW as soon as possible. When Chris arrived, he learned the guard had decided there was a dead man on the floor of the vault, and several fellow uniformed security men were huddled outside. But when Chris went in, he found out that Norman was not dead, but drunk. He aroused Norman and told the guards that he had merely fallen asleep.

The crisis over the NSA man's visit was more serious.

In January, the agency had changed its encryption system; instead of making the daily change in ciphers with a keying machine, it had introduced a new kind of computer cipher card that was kept in sealed plastic envelopes in the vault's floor safe, with a new card removed for each day's use.

Previously, Chris had photographed the key cards while he was alone in the vault, usually before other employees arrived for work. But this became more hazardous after the new system was introduced: removing the cards from the sealed envelopes, and then returning them, took too much time. To make things easier, he began to take the packages of ciphers home with him, where he could remove the cards from the envelopes, photograph them and reseal the envelopes before returning them to the safe the following day. It was difficult to reseal the envelopes exactly as they had been. But he was usually the only one who opened the envelopes to pull out the cards, so this didn't matter.

The NSA official who was making the inspection was new on the job, and his surprise inspection was intended to assure him that the system he was taking over was in good shape. As soon as he entered the vault, Chris remembered that he had made a fatal mistake: he had replaced one set of crypto cards in its envelope
upside down
.

His heart pounded as the official crouched down near the open safe and checked the ciphers stored for use in future months. He watched as the visitor examined each one slowly. Chris tried to distract him by complaining about the reliability of the cipher machines—they were always breaking down, he said. The man was friendly, but painstaking. An hour passed, and then another hour, and Chris's head ached from the hopelessness of the situation. But he tried to seem relaxed as he waited for the NSA man to reach the questionable package of ciphers.

He saw it.

The man was holding it in his hand, and Chris looked down at it, helpless.

But nothing happened. The NSA executive's eyes passed over the package after a moment and went on to the next one.

Later that day, Norman reported that the inspector was unhappy because some components that were listed in the inventory for the code room were missing, but otherwise, he had no serious complaints about the operation.

Laurie Vicker had finally persuaded her boyfriend to marry her, but the marriage hadn't stopped her from pursuing Chris, nor her husband's suspicions that there was something going on between them. One night when she and Chris both had to work late, the black-haired systems analyst made a booze run and returned with a gallon of wine. By the time all the messages had been sent to Langley, most of the wine was gone, but Laurie said she didn't want to go home yet, and suggested they go over to Chris's house.

Chris still wasn't interested sexually in the plump, if sensuous, woman, whose advances he found vulgar. But he considered her a friend and didn't want to hurt her feelings. And so he suggested that she follow him in her van to his house, where they could smoke a joint. When they reached his place, Laurie telephoned a friend and discovered that her husband had learned from a TRW guard that the two of them had left together. The friend said that her husband had gone looking for them. Chris rushed her out of the house and they left for Daulton's.

Laurie's husband, a bartender, was substantially larger than Chris and had boasted to his bride that he had once killed a man in a fight—a fact that Laurie had repeated to Chris. They got into their respective vehicles and Laurie followed Chris to the Lee home, where they found Daulton, drank more wine and smoked two joints. Meanwhile, Chris wondered how he was going to get Laurie home. About midnight, he decided upon a strategy for dealing with Laurie's husband: she was too drunk to drive, so there was only one way to get her home, and that was with her husband.

He telephoned him at their apartment and said that Laurie was in Palos Verdes and was drunk; he said he would deliver her to him in twenty minutes at the Plaza in Palos Verdes Estates. It was a Spanish-style square near the ocean flanked by red tile-roofed buildings that housed mostly real estate offices, the main industry of the town. Next Chris called the Palos Verdes Estates Police Station, which was located at the edge of the Plaza, and offered an anonymous tip: within twenty minutes, there was to be a gang fight in the Plaza. Then Daulton called the police with the same message.

A few minutes later, Chris drove the very drunk Laurie to the Plaza in her van and left her inside. There were five police cars, engines running, parked around the Plaza, and the unhappy husband saw them.

“Here's your wife,” Chris jauntily said to her husband.

“You son of a bitch,” he said. “Don't you ever touch her; I killed somebody once for less.”