The Falcon and the Snowman (35 page)

“Kenny, can you get me out? It's
really
important.”

The following day, Daulton looked up once again at the familiar face of Judge Burch Donahue. And once again, the judge granted Kahn's request for his client's freedom on bail. Daulton was released on January 4, after posting $2,500. The judge ordered him to return to court January 20, when he was to answer all the assorted charges that had piled up against him, including even the revoked probation stemming from his first arrest in 1971; six years later, it was still, amazingly enough, pending against him. When Daulton posted bail, he promised not to leave the Palos Verdes area. But the next day—January 5—he bought a ticket and flew via Mexicana Airlines to Mexico City.

“Now, remember, you get back here, you've got a court date,” his mother told him the night before.

“Don't worry,” Daulton said. “This is my last trip to Mexico.”

35

About eleven o'clock on the morning of January 6, 1977. Eileen Heaphy, a Foreign Service officer assigned to the United States Embassy in Mexico City, arrived at the Soviet Embassy in the Mexican capital for an appointment with Victor Kroptov. Like numerous members of the staff at the Russian embassy, Kroptov was a member of the KGB, although his official title was “political counselor.”

An attractive woman in her twenties, Miss Heaphy had been in Mexico City less than seven months. Before joining the Foreign Service four years earlier, she had been employed by the National Security Agency at Fort Meade, Maryland, the same agency that supervised the cryptographic systems in the Black Vault, as an information analyst and training instructor.

As a Foreign Service officer in Mexico, she was assigned to the Political Section of the U.S. Embassy. Her assignment was to monitor Mexican foreign policy as it related to nations other than the United States and to compile reports evaluating these diplomatic relationships. The main source of her information, besides official pronouncements and the newspapers, was personal contacts with diplomats from the other embassies in Mexico City. There were about sixty in the city, and Miss Heaphy, in the few months she'd been there, had become acquainted with someone at most of them, including Kroptov. Periodically she exchanged lunches with her counterparts at the other embassies, swapped gossip and otherwise kept in touch.

These were important times in Mexico. In December, the country had inaugurated a new president, José López Portillo, and the professional Mexico-watchers in the diplomatic community were still trying to get a fix on what his policies would be. To the United States, Mexico, a poor friend that had always been more or less taken for granted, was taking on a new, if still undefined, importance. Almost daily there were new reports of oil riches in Mexico, and it was becoming clear that Mexico might someday become a major alternative source of petroleum to the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries cartel. American diplomats were being forced to have some second thoughts about Mexico. The United States had neglected its southern neighbor for many years despite its proximity; moreover, American diplomats knew that Mexico, despite some gains in the development of a middle class, had a huge population of extremely poor people who might be easy prey for Communist agitators who might, someday, remove the oil from the reach of the United States.

Beginning in the fall of 1976, there had been several published reports of new agreements between the Soviet Union and Mexico, principally involving trade. Several days earlier, Miss Heaphy had called Kroptov and said she wanted to pay a call and discuss these agreements and Mexican–Soviet relations in general as part of her assignment to monitor third-country relations with Mexico. Kroptov had invited her to meet with him at 11
A.M.
The meeting went as planned, and about eleven forty-five, she passed through the gate of the Soviet Embassy and began searching for her car and driver.

As she did, she spotted a short man surrounded by a group of Mexican policemen in front of the embassy, who was gesturing animatedly with his arms; his face was flushed and he was shaking his head, apparently trying to deny whatever it was the policemen were saying to him. He looked like an American, and she walked over to the group to overhear what was going on.

“Do you speak English?” Daulton immediately asked her, and she said she spoke English and Spanish and was from the U.S. Embassy.

“Can I help you?”

“I was just walking by and stuck my head in the gate of this building to see what it was. Then I threw down an empty pack of cigarettes and a piece of paper—it was just a book jacket from an old dictionary!—and these guys came running after me and said I was under arrest.”

Daulton was heartened by the sight of the American woman who had come to his rescue and began to relax. As persuasively as he could, he dismissed the encounter as a silly mistake. He said he was an American tourist who had been visiting his former fiancée, who was now married to a Mexican who taught at the University of Mexico. His old girlfriend and her husband, he said, had been walking with him, but somehow they had become separated and he had gotten lost.

Miss Heaphy asked one of the policemen, a corporal who seemed to be in charge, what had happened, and he confirmed the chronology of events. But the corporal said he'd seen a Soviet guard pick up one of the items thrown by the American, and when he was asked for it the Soviet guard refused.

Miss Heaphy identified herself as an official of the U.S. Embassy and asked why it was considered so serious to throw a piece of paper on the ground. The policeman explained that his unit had been assigned to keep the embassy under surveillance because they had been alerted for visits by representatives of Mexican terrorist groups. Only recently, he said, a member of the Twenty-third of September Communist League—a violent Mexican antigovernment terrorist organization—had passed a message to a foreign embassy by throwing it through a gate.

For this reason, Daulton had to be detained for questioning, the corporal explained.

Overhearing their conversation, Daulton protested heatedly, saying again that he was merely an American tourist. Convinced that he was getting nowhere, Daulton, with a motion of his head, summoned the corporal to his side and said in the best Spanish he could muster, “I have five hundred dollars; if you forget this, you can have it.”

There was no response from the policeman, which surprised Daulton because he had long known the power of
mordida
in Mexico.

Two police cars arrived in front of the Embassy.

Miss Heaphy reentered the building and asked to speak to the Soviet chief of security. The Russian who greeted her said that while the American might have been rude in throwing trash on the grounds, he saw no need to press charges.

Using the radiotelephone in her car, Miss Heaphy called her embassy to report that an American citizen had been arrested at the Soviet Embassy and he needed assistance from an officer in the embassy's consular division who specialized in helping arrested Americans. A police sergeant was now on the scene, and he said he was willing to wait for the arrival of an American consular official. Miss Heaphy, deciding that he looked even more nervous now than he'd been before, then returned to Daulton, who was surrounded by policemen. He said he was outraged; here he was, an American tourist being manhandled by Mexican police. Then he whispered to her that he was afraid of being sent to a Mexican prison, where prisoners were tortured and starved. As they waited on the sidewalk, Daulton turned his back on the woman; he was trying to hide something in his jacket or pants, she suspected. But a few moments later she discovered what he had been doing.

One of the policemen had motioned Daulton toward a police car. When Daulton moved, the policeman spotted a half-smoked marijuana joint near one of his feet. He shouted to his associates that he had found contraband carried by the young man.

Until the reefer was discovered, Miss Heaphy thought some of the Mexican policemen had seemed to be wavering between taking this litterbug to headquarters and letting him go. But the discovery of the joint prompted the sergeant to order Daulton into the back seat of a patrol car.

They would wait, he said, for the
comandante
of police.

Within minutes, other cars drove up, some of them containing plain-clothesmen from the Mexican secret police, the Federal Bureau of Security.

Miss Heaphy went to the Soviet Embassy guardhouse and asked a guard to let her see the chief of security again. She said she wanted to use a telephone to try her embassy once more. The security man, another KGB agent whom Daulton had met, reappeared and was nasty. He accused her of trying to “penetrate” the Russian complex with a ruse. He did, however, consent to let her use the phone; but before the call went through, two Americans arrived from the U.S. Embassy: Thomas Ferguson, a vice consul whose assignment was to help Americans in trouble with the Mexican law, and Benito Iarocci, an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency who was attached to the U.S. Embassy.

Ferguson noticed that Daulton's fingers were shaking badly when they shook hands.

Daulton explained to Ferguson that he was an American, employed by a California advertising agency, on vacation in Mexico, and once again he protested the treatment he was getting. A Mexican policeman came up and showed Ferguson the joint; Iarocci, meanwhile, had gone to see the Soviet security chief inside the embassy. When he returned, he reiterated to the Mexican police
comandante
that the Russians didn't want to press charges against the young man.

The Mexican
comandante
then made a decision: they would
all
go to Metropolitan Police Headquarters, where they could iron out everything. Miss Heaphy returned to her embassy, and Ferguson said he'd follow the police car to Police Headquarters in the center of Mexico City.

Daulton was ordered by Inspector Reynaldo López Malváez to empty his pockets in a second-floor office in the huge, noisy complex, whose halls were jammed with uniformed policemen, citizens in trouble with the law and people filing complaints about other people's transgressions. He was a dark-haired, middle-aged man with smoked glasses, a thickening waist and dark bags under his eyes that suggested he worked long hours. Ferguson watched curiously as the nervous American complied with the order to put all his belongings on a desk.

Daulton laid out his passport, his wallet containing $340 in American currency and more than 1,000 Mexican pesos, a paperback book, a picture postcard and a business-size envelope sealed with plastic tape.

At first the only thing that seemed to catch the inspector's eye was the postcard. He stared at it for a long moment, then asked Daulton in Spanish what his occupation was. Ferguson translated the question.

“I'm a photographer,” Daulton replied in English. He explained that he worked for an advertising agency and had been vacationing in Mexico when, for no reason at all, he had been arrested by Mexico City policemen. Ferguson translated Daulton's reply into Spanish.

Without reacting to Daulton's protest, the inspector turned his attention to his other possessions on the desk. He picked up the envelope that was sealed with plastic tape, removed the tape and opened it. Inside he saw there was a stack of black filmstrips. He picked one at random and held it up to the light that was radiating from a ceiling fixture in the sparsely furnished room. Taking his time, the inspector tried to make out the images on the strip of celluloid. For a long time, López Malváez didn't say anything. Then he lowered the negative strip, looked at Ferguson and said:

“
Documentos
.”

“These are negatives for a commercial we're making,” Daulton shot back. His employer, the advertising agency he worked for, he explained hurriedly, was making a documentary film for the General Electric Company about communication satellites because G.E. was “trying to sell worldwide satellite-relay franchises.” Daulton tried to sound like a tourist who had just happened, almost accidentally, to have brought some of his work from home along with him.

López Malváez asked an assistant to find a magnifying glass. After one was located in an adjoining office, the inspector scrutinized the film again under the soft light in the small room. He was silent as he went from frame to frame on the thin black ribbon. Then he offered one of the shiny black strips to Ferguson along with the magnifying glass.

Squinting, Ferguson could make out two words printed on each of the frames: T
OP
S
ECRET
.

Ignoring Daulton, the two men looked at each other without smiling. Then López Malváez said he would send the negatives to a police laboratory where they could be blown up into prints. It would take an hour or two. He suggested that Ferguson come back to Police Headquarters in a couple of hours, and the American left.

Then the inspector turned his attention to the picture postcard that Daulton had been carrying when he was arrested, and he began speaking rapidly in Spanish. Daulton appealed to him to speak English so that he could understand. But Daulton
did
hear one word that he recognized—“
asesinato
”—and it stunned him. It was the Spanish word for murder.

López Malváez told Daulton he was being held for murder.

36

Daulton had landed at Benito Juárez International Airport at four o'clock the preceding afternoon, the first Wednesday in January. He was a day later than he had originally planned because of the arrest in Palos Verdes. But he had thought he could make up for the lost time and decided to expedite matters. In almost two years of commerce with the Soviet Union, this decision was his most foolish.

The schedule previously set for January called for a meeting either on the first Wednesday or, alternatively, on the first Saturday of the month at the Viva Pizza café at Coyoacán and Matías Romero avenues.