The Falcon and the Snowman (36 page)

Normally, to summon the Russians for a meeting on Wednesday, Daulton placed his X marks on one of the currently designated rows of lampposts on the day before, the first Tuesday of the month. The Russians would drive by the designated intersections (the location was changed periodically) on Wednesday to learn if Daulton was in town.

Arriving so late on Wednesday afternoon meant Daulton had little time to place the marks, and even less for the KGB agents to see them. But Daulton had been in a hurry and had been anxious to arrange a meeting that night even though he had made a late arrival. He didn't want to wait until Saturday: he needed the money, now.

Daulton had taken a taxi from the airport to the intersection of Patriotismo and San Antonio streets, at the end of the Miguel Alemán Highway. It was a busy intersection about fifteen minutes' drive from Reforma. He had affixed the tape marks and, promptly at eight o'clock that evening, had been waiting at the Viva Pizza, thinking with amusement about the incongruity of meeting Soviet agents in an Italian pizza parlor in Mexico City. Boris hadn't shown up, so after fifteen minutes Daulton had left. An hour later, he had come back, eaten a pizza and drunk two beers. But again, no one was there to meet him. He had tried a third time at ten the next morning, but no one had appeared. Thinking that Boris might be at the Bali Restaurant instead, he had taken a cab there, but no one from the embassy was at the Bali either. He snorted a pinch of coke and wondered what to do next.

Friends were waiting for him in Culiacán the next day to sew up the heroin buy, and he desperately wanted the money from the Russians. So he had decided to go after it. He had hailed a cab near the Holiday Inn and directed the driver to a side street near Chapultepec Park, gotten out and walked three blocks to the embassy, planning to wait nearby until he spotted someone he knew. Daulton stood near the gate in front of a plaque with a hammer and sickle and the identity of the building printed in Spanish on it. There was a similar plaque with the building's identity printed in Russian as well.

A curtain at one window moved and he thought he saw a face at the window, but it vanished. Then he saw an embassy car approaching, and he shaded his eyes with one hand and tried to identify who was inside. It was Boris.

Daulton began walking faster, and was almost jogging as he tried to intercept the car. It slowed and Daulton looked squarely at Boris, but Boris kept his head fixed straight ahead. The car went into the embassy compound and the gate was closed quickly, leaving Daulton outside the gate, alone. He was furious. Maybe Boris hadn't seen him, he thought.

Still hopeful of drawing someone's attention, he had marked “K.G.B.” on the cover of the Spanish-English dictionary he carried and thrown it defiantly inside the iron bars. Then he had walked on.

About thirty yards away a Mexican policeman—one of three or four visible in the immediate vicinity of the embassy—had been watching the short man curiously, wondering why he was lingering so long outside the building. Then he saw him toss
something
through the bars. (Afterward, he said he hadn't been sure whether it was a big wad of paper, an envelope or a small incendiary bomb.) The policeman sprang into action and ran after Daulton—and at that moment Daulton's long, quixotic business relationship with the Soviet Union came to an end.

Whether any Russians
were
looking out at the awkward American while he loitered so conspicuously in front of their embassy is still not known. But if they were, they made no response. After all, a member of the U.S. Embassy staff was in the building at the time.

“You murdered a policeman,” Inspector López Malváez said angrily in English (not much better than Daulton's Spanish) after Ferguson had left and the microfilm had been sent out for processing.

Startled, Daulton denied killing
anyone
.

“
Turista
,” he said.

The inspector was unmoved. On December 28, 1976, just a week or so before, he said, a uniformed Mexico City police officer had been murdered. The assassination, he continued, had occurred at the intersection of Patriotismo and San Antonio streets, the very same intersection pictured on the simulated postcard that Daulton carried. There was a knock on the door and the interrogation was interrupted by the return of Vice Consul Ferguson. López Malváez left Daulton, and in another office he handed Ferguson a stack of 8-by-10 glossy photographs.

On each was a reproduction of a page of typewritten information, graphs, tables and the words T
OP
S
ECRET
and P
YRAMIDER
.

Daulton was brought into the office by two armed policemen. When he was shown the glossies, he repeated his claim that they were unimportant, just films for use in an advertisement.

“This material is classified; it could never be used in advertisements,” Ferguson said, ridiculing Daulton's defense.

Daulton then lowered his voice and gave a look to Ferguson which meant that what he was about to say was intended only for the two of them.

“There's more here than meets the eye,” he whispered. “A lot is riding on this. Here we are trying to do a service for the free world and now we get in trouble.”

Ferguson couldn't fathom what Daulton was trying to tell him, but it was clear that something serious involving U.S. national security had occurred. López Malváez dismissed Ferguson, saying he would investigate the matter further, and Ferguson returned to his embassy and told Benito Iarocci about the photographs he had just seen.

After Ferguson left, López Malváez renewed his charge of murder and outlined what he claimed had happened: Daulton was a Soviet agent who was funding operations of the Twenty-third of September Communist League and had killed a policeman who had found him out.

“I wasn't even in Mexico City on December 28,” Daulton tried to explain in Spanish. The inspector ignored him and repeated the charge.

Daulton didn't like the shape of what was coming down. The charge was stupid, but the policeman wouldn't
listen
to his story. So, as effectively as he could in a flawed hybrid of Spanish and English, Daulton then told the story he had prepared for such an occasion: he said he was an American agent who was part of an operation to spread false and misleading information—“disinformation”—to the U.S.S.R. He was on assignment, he repeated, for the United States Government, participating in a scheme to deceive the very country that he was now accused of helping. He tried to make López Malváez laugh at the irony. The postcard, he said, had no connection whatsoever with the dead policeman. It had been given to him by the Russians—it was the method they used to advise him where to make markings with adhesive tape and let them know he was in the city and ready for a meeting. López Malváez, upon hearing more about the Russians, listened on.

That very night, Daulton lied, he was scheduled to meet them, and he would be able to prove the postcard had nothing to do with the policeman's murder. Daulton pleaded with the inspector to go with him to the Viva Pizza Restaurant so that he could show him—he'd also prove what he had said about the X marks he'd placed on the lampposts. López Malváez quickly agreed to his request, and they went in a police car to the intersection of Patriotismo and San Antonio streets, where López Malváez saw for himself Daulton's signal to the Russians.

At eight o'clock that evening, Daulton was waiting outside the Viva Pizza. He seemed to be a lone American patiently awaiting an appointment with a friend for dinner, but Mexican plainclothesmen were staked out inconspicuously all around him.

The small figure of Andrew Daulton Lee fidgeted nervously under the glow of neon lights for almost half an hour that night. No one approached him. Then López Malváez called the endeavor off. Daulton was returned to Headquarters for more questioning about the murder, and at midnight he was still denying that he was involved. The following morning, he begged López Malváez to let him try just once more. At ten o'clock they went to the Bali Restaurant and Daulton stood near a bus stop, hoping in vain to see one of the familiar embassy cars while Mexican detectives watched. Again, no Russians.

After twenty minutes, they returned him to the police station, and López Malváez said he was now certain that Daulton had killed the policeman and was a member of the Twenty-third of September Communist League.

Daulton struggled with his poor Spanish to answer the charges.

“
Bueno, es precisamente en ese lugar
,” the inspector said. The scene of the murder was the exact spot shown on the postcard.

“
Sí, entiendo, es muy, muy, muy
, ah … ah,” Daulton replied; he understood the inspector's concern, but he had nothing to do with the murder.

“
Unas personas
, ah—two people—
iguales a tí mataron a un agente de la policía
.” Two people just like you killed a police officer, the inspector insisted.

“
Pero, pero yo no tengo
pistol,” Daulton lied, trying to explain he owned no guns.

“
Todo misión aquí es vender la información a los rusquis
,” Daulton continued, saying his whole mission in Mexico was to sell information to the Russians. “
No tengo tiempo para más problemas; es necesario para mí todo tiempo con los rusquis y los Estados Unidos
.” Daulton said he didn't have any time for more problems; he was too busy working with the Russians part of the time and pursuing his duties in the United States at other times.

The interrogation continued through a second day, with the police inspector going over the same ground again and again. On the third day, Daulton was turned over to the Federal Bureau of Security—the Mexican secret police—and its interrogators proved to be pointedly less tolerant of Daulton's heated denials.

During the preceding six years, Daulton had been arrested seven times in the United States and had served less than seven months in jail. He had become a master at avoiding jail by exploiting constitutional safeguards of civil liberties, the mistakes of arresting officers and a sympathetic court.

He found Mexican justice different.

Daulton was led out of Metropolitan Police Headquarters with his jacket pulled over his head so that he could not see where he was going. Before he left, he had signed a statement that condensed his denial of the murder. A police official had said he would be released soon. Daulton had felt good, relaxed, thinking his detention was over. But without warning his jacket was yanked roughly over his head and he was bundled into a car and driven somewhere in Mexico City. He could hear traffic and the sounds of the city, but he didn't know where he was headed. The car stopped and he was walked into a building where the jacket was replaced by a blindfold. His escorts during the trip had said only a few words in Spanish. Daulton as yet had no inkling that he was being turned over to the secret police.

The blindfolded murder suspect was led into an elevator, and soon Daulton knew that it
wasn't
over. The elevator rose for a few moments, Daulton was escorted into an office and the blindfold was removed. He looked around and saw a desk with several phones, each a different color. Around the desk sat several Mexican men in civilian clothes. Others, grim-faced, stood behind it.

The new interrogators were disarmingly friendly at first, saying that they intended to let him go soon, but first wanted to ask him a few questions.

He repeated the story he had told López Malváez—he was an American disseminating worthless information to the Soviet Government in a scheme sanctioned by the United States. He told his story at length in his fractured Spanish. At 1
A.M.
they let him go to sleep.

Four hours later, he was awakened and led back to the same office; this time there were more questioners and they were not as friendly.

A middle-aged Mexican who seemed to be in charge of the investigation said in Spanish that they had been soft with him the night before, but they had known all the time that he was lying about the murder.

“This is not the United States,” a man next to him said in Spanish. “This is Pancho Villa land.”

Angrily, standing around him in a circle, a half-dozen interrogators ordered Daulton to confess that he was a Communist agent working with subversive terrorist groups to overthrow the Mexican Government. He was a Russian agent, they said, an enemy of the Mexican people. One questioner, in fact, noting that his name was Lee, wanted to know if he was Chinese.

They showed Daulton photographs of Russians assigned to the Mexico City embassy, and he identified Boris Grishin as “John”—the man, he said, who had failed to meet him as planned and abandoned him outside the embassy.

Tightening their vise, the secret police officers began flinging questions at Daulton one after another in such rapid Spanish that he became hopelessly confused. But when he said he didn't understand the questions, it only made his interrogators angrier. They shouted in Spanish that he was lying, that he did understand them. “We're not stupid Mexicans,” one said. Amid the machine-gun fire of questions, Daulton felt like a man descending deeper and deeper into water in which he was unable to swim. After a while when he asked them to repeat a question, someone behind him began to bang him on both ears at once.

Slowly, a story emerged from the stormy interrogation: Daulton said that his mission in Mexico had begun in 1975 when a childhood friend, Christopher Boyce, had asked him to collaborate on a plan to sell secret information from his place of employment to the Chinese Government through its diplomatic missions in Africa. The information, he said, was to be deceptively changed to get the Chinese “to go around in circles on absurd projects.” After he rejected this proposal, Daulton said, his friend had persuaded him to sell “false information” to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. And indeed, he had begun doing so, and the process had gone on for almost two years until his arrest.