The Falcon and the Snowman (8 page)

“Russians use all sorts of gimmicks to get acquainted with Americans,” she said. “They cultivate their friendship and then use them in whatever manner possible.” She told the new employees about a woman who worked “at a local defense plant” who went to West Germany on a vacation in 1966 and was befriended by a “local German boy when she stopped into a local beer garden to sample the beer.” When the woman returned to Los Angeles, the security-briefing officer continued, a Russian exchange student in this country tried to contact her, but “fortunately the girl reported the incident to Security.”

When the lecture was over, the new TRW employees watched a film reinforcing the warnings of Communist agents:
Security Is Your Responsibility
. Chris then signed another document acknowledging that he had seen the film and had been advised of America's espionage laws and of the menace of Communist agents.

On the day Chris was hired, TRW granted him access to “confidential” defense information, as was the standard procedure for new employees in the defense industry. Confidential is the lowest of the three basic levels of classification used by the United States to guard military information. It is information deemed less sensitive than “Secret” or “Top Secret” data.

Although his father's friend had still not told him, he had bigger things in store for Chris than a Confidential clearance.

Chris received a new set of forms to complete in early August, asking for further information about his past. Once again, he listed his name, his place and date of birth and his parents' place and date of birth. But this time he gave a detailed description of each of the jobs he had held. He gave his physical description—five feet eight inches tall; 150 pounds; brown hair, blue eyes; he noted that he was a member of no organizations, that he had never traveled outside the United States and that he had no relatives residing out of the country. It was the biography of a young high school graduate without anything very distinctive about it.

On August 8, unbeknownst to Chris, these forms and copies of other papers collected in his file during the processing of his application were placed in a pouch and sent to Langley, Virginia. The destination was the Central Intelligence Agency.

Federal investigators had already begun to look into Chris's childhood, his high school years and his tentative tries at college. Government agents interviewed neighbors of the Boyces' in Palos Verdes and sent questionnaires to his former employers. Except for indications of drift in his life—three colleges in three years and seven jobs in two years—there wasn't much to draw attention to the young man for those preparing his security-clearance file.

The investigation uncovered no criminal record and determined that Chris had a good credit rating. A neighbor who taught school in Los Angeles was interviewed and, the investigator reported, gave Chris the highest praise. “He has known subject Boyce approximately 18 years” and “vouches for subject's integrity and knows of no reason why subject could not get a Government clearance.”

Apparently, no one during the investigation mentioned Chris's affection for marijuana. Or if anyone
did
mention it, perhaps the investigators concluded that occasional use of marijuana had become so common that it was not enough reason to deny a security clearance to an otherwise qualified young man. The investigation of Christopher John Boyce was perhaps as thorough a look into the background of a twenty-one-year-old from one of America's most privileged environments that his country could expect, except for one thing: it did not look into his mind and discover the conflicts and disillusionment that were bedeviling him.

Judge Burch Donahue, who had been crippled as a youth, rolled his wheelchair into a courtroom in the Los Angeles County Superior Court annex in Torrance on September 6. Before him was Daulton's hand-printed note from the Wayside Honor Rancho. Trying to look harmless, Daulton was sitting with his lawyer, Kenneth Kahn, who quickly launched into a persuasive appeal to the judge on behalf of his client: Daulton had spent six months at Wayside, he said, and he had no bad marks on his record. Now he deserved a second chance and wanted to enter Harbor College, the junior college below The Hill that Chris had attended for a semester. He reminded the judge that he had said at Daulton's last hearing that he might be released early if his behavior was good in prison.

“I did indicate that back in February, with reference to schooling, as long as the conduct was satisfactory,” Donahue acknowledged.

“I want the young man to understand this: I want a copy of his class schedule at Harbor, and I expect fifteen units
plus
. Do you understand that, young man? Some fellows enroll and quit as soon as I let them go to school.…”

“Yes,” Daulton replied.

“So the modification will be granted as to time served. All other terms and conditions are to remain the same.”

The months at Wayside hadn't been wasted, Daulton told his parents. He said he'd made some new friends and had had some time to work with his hands in the prison woodshop.

Once Daulton was out of jail, however, he lost no time in going back to his old business.

The same week Daulton was released from jail, Chris passed his initial security check at TRW.

A few days later, while he was visiting the Lee house on a Saturday night after a day of flying hawks in the desert, Mrs. Lee asked Chris what he was doing on his new job. “I push papers around and sweep the floors,” he said.

On the job, Chris's politeness and intelligence and his willingness to work were already impressing his superiors at TRW. On September 24, the company was informed by the Department of Defense that it had approved Christopher John Boyce, Badge No. 6944S, for access to Secret information.

This broadened the contributions Chris could make in Classified Material Control, but he still regarded the job as boring. Besides, it wasn't yielding as much money as he wanted. He wanted more money—not only for school the next year, but to buy a sports car, a British Triumph roadster. In mid-October, a friend told him about a part-time job that was open in Westchester, a community on the edge of Los Angeles International Airport not far from Loyola University. The job, tending bar in a pool hall, paid only $60 a week for four hours a night or so. But figuring this would bring his total weekly pretax income to a respectable $200 a week, he took it.

Chris was a quick study and a good listener. He deduced from remarks made by one of the secretaries in the office that TRW had a different job in mind for him eventually, but nobody would give him the details when he brought up the subject.

Early in November, TRW received a classified message from the CIA. It said that Christopher John Boyce had been cleared for a Special Projects Briefing.

On November 15, he was summoned to Building M-4, and for the first time he heard about Project Rhyolite and the Black Vault.

9

“Rhyolite is a multipurpose covert electronic surveillance system.…”

Chris's head felt ready to burst. His muscles tingled, and every neuron in his body was supersensitized to what was happening around him. Before leaving home he had swallowed two amphetamine tablets. “Whites” had been a casual element of his life since high school. But lately he wasn't using pep pills only to get high; he needed them to stay awake. Without the pills, he couldn't keep alert after a long night of tending bar. His moonlighting job was becoming more and more tiresome; some nights he spent more time breaking up fights among the customers than he did drawing glasses of beer for them.

That morning, he had been told that he was being given another assignment and would have to undergo a special briefing for the new position. He had been instructed to report to Section 1986 in Building M-4—a building conspicuously off limits to most TRW employees. Situated between a big expanse of parking lots and rolling green parkland, the M-4 complex consisted of a low, mint-green-colored building and a towering concrete-gray annex topped by one of those big white igloos that mystified Chris.

He was about to discover what was under the igloo.

He obtained a special pass to show at two guard checkpoints before reaching Section 1986, a cluster of offices in M-4. The briefing began, 54 Chris struggled to dampen the drug-induced sense of euphoria. The briefing officer was Larry Rogers, whose comings and goings around the plant had had a quality of mystery; something to do with a classified project.

In a voice that lowered noticeably as he began, Rogers told Chris that the work in this section of the plant involved secret projects, and he explained that Chris had been specially cleared by the government to work on them.

Chris, noticing what he thought was a curious glint of suspicion in Rogers' eyes, wondered if Rogers knew he was high; he tried to look straight ahead and concentrate.

Rogers ordered Chris never to discuss with anyone the briefing he was about to give; never to divulge to anyone the existence of the projects of which he was about to hear, or discuss with anyone the kind of work he was to do; and never to mention to anyone not cleared for the projects their code names or the fact that they were clandestine operations of the Central Intelligence Agency.

In fact, he ordered, never mention to anyone—his family, his girlfriends, any outsiders—that the CIA had any relationship whatsoever with TRW, or that his salary was being paid by the CIA under a contract with TRW.
What the hell is he talking about?
Chris wondered.

Rogers then introduced Chris to what he called “the black world.…”

Orbiting satellites, he went on, were to a large extent taking over much of the work of human spies for the United States. And, he continued, TRW was one of a handful of American companies in the business of developing and manufacturing the satellites used by the CIA to collect secret intelligence information from space. Chris, he said, had been selected to serve on the team that operated some of these satellites.…

Chris had stumbled into one of the most secret of all American espionage operations—an invisible intelligence bureaucracy supervised from the White House by the National Security Council and entrusted with the responsibility to ferret out and analyze secrets about the Soviet Union, China and other countries. Cameras carried in the satellites could photograph missile bases, airfields, submarine pens, harbors and other defense installations from a hundred miles or more in space with such clarity that they could pinpoint a single man walking alone on a vast desert. Sensors in the satellites were not blinded by the dark; radar eyes and heat-sensing infrared sensors penetrated clouds and dark skies and made photos almost as sharp as those made during a clear day by normal cameras.

The espionage bureaucracy of which Chris had become a part was officially invisible because the United States did not admit it existed. Thousands of people worked on this national program to gather strategic intelligence information, each with a special security clearance more exclusive than Top Secret, and with special security apparatus designed solely for the satellite systems to ensure that Russian agents or spies of other countries couldn't penetrate it. Men and women assigned to the operation were forbidden to admit to anyone without a similar clearance—including their wives and husbands—that they worked on the program or, indeed, that such satellite surveillance even occurred. There were occasional discreet official references to some of the agencies that were involved in the operation, such as the National Reconnaissance Office or the Committee of 40, a group of senior government officials with authority to order espionage operations and plan satellite missions. But such mentions were rare and usually purposefully opaque. It was the position of the CIA that in an era when annihilation of the United States was potentially only minutes away—the time it would take for a fusillade of nuclear missiles to lunge from Russia, arc through the fringes of space and rain H-bombs on America—no intelligence operation was more vital than the satellite patrols in space, because they enabled the National Security Council and the President to maintain minute-by-minute surveillance of Soviet military operations and preparations for war and, hopefully, prevent a surprise attack. (The satellite eyes were not turned off after they passed over the Soviet and Chinese borders; indeed, they could—and did—take photos of activities in any country of interest to the NSC.)

A new breed of spy—a robot in space—had been created, and Chris was now about to help operate it from the earth.

There were essentially three components in the national satellite intelligence-collection system that, to enhance secrecy, were narrowly compartmentalized so that specialists working in one area wouldn't, under normal circumstances, have access to secrets involving the other elements. One component was assigned to build and operate the satellites; the second was responsible for collecting and initially processing the data (the “product” in CIA parlance) sent to earth by the satellites; the third was a massive, on-the-ground program to analyze the data to measure their military, economic or political significance. There were more than a dozen different types of satellites, each with its own project code name, mission and method of operating; each system might have three or four or more different satellites peering down from space at any one time, each sending back “product” for analysis. The code name that was applied to encompass the extraordinarily tight security procedures for all of these different systems was “Byeman.”

During the briefing, Chris smiled after Rogers kept referring to the satellites as “birds.” The word was like a switch. It made his thoughts drift as if they had been lifted up on the wings of his falcon with its darting eyes that could spot a rabbit trying to find shade beneath the flimsy shadow of a desert cactus; and then he thought of the satellite: men watching men using eyes in space. It was Big Brother, a 1984 world. A “byeman” is a man who works underground—and that was what Chris had become.