The Falcon and the Snowman (25 page)

They cleared Customs at Tucson, got aboard the same plane two hours later, retrieved the cocaine and landed in Los Angeles. Daulton, who had already missed two appointments, had a date with his psychiatrist.

But as he walked through the crowds of people at Los Angeles International Airport, he was less concerned about the meeting with his shrink than he was in making sure that Chris got some good stuff for the trip to Vienna.

28

“Vienna?” Chris said, surprised.

“Those are my orders.”

“Don't give me that bullshit; since when do you take orders from anyone except yourself?”

“Since they told me they were going to give me lots of cold, hard cash,” Daulton said in a happy mood. They had also promised him, he added, a carpet from the Caucasus. The conversation in the living room of Daulton's home in Palos Verdes was typical of those the old friends were having these days—cordial, but increasingly shaded by sarcasm and mistrust. “Why Vienna?” Chris asked.

“I'm not authorized to tell you,” Daulton said.

“Then why tell me in the first place? They want you there so they can stroke you.”

“Just so they do it with Benjies.”

Daulton poured Chris a glass of Moselle wine and brought up the question that was most important on his mind:

“What about the frequencies? That's what they're going to ask me. When am I going to get 'em?”

Chris shook his head.

“I bet they're not going to put up with that shit any longer,” Daulton said. “They're getting sick of waiting, and I'm running out of excuses. I'm telling you, man, it's getting worse and worse every time.”

Chris passed Daulton a plate of cheese.

“Fuck the cheese! Man, I'm serious,” Daulton said.

Chris didn't say so, but he
couldn't
get the list of radio frequencies on which the encrypted CIA messages were sent. In order to limit opportunities for a security breach, the list of frequencies for the CIA transmissions was in the custody of the Western Union company, a contractor to the National Security Agency, and Western Union kept it in a special safe under NSA surveillance until the frequencies were needed to program computers used to scramble the communications.

“There's too much riding on this, asshole,” Daulton said. “Can't you just get part of it?”

“Tell 'em it takes time.”

“What do you think I have been telling the clods?”

“Well, tell 'em again; they paid you for junk before and they'll pay for junk again,” Chris said. “They're stupid.”

“It can't work forever,” Daulton protested.

“Keep your voice down. Your brother is in the hall,” Chris complained.

“Don't worry about it,” Daulton said. He said that he was thinking about inviting David into the enterprise.

“Insanity,” Chris said. “You'd do that to your own brother?”

“How long do you think
I
can keep up this back-and-forth, back-and-forth routine without getting busted?”

“How long could
he?
You're sick,” Chris said.

Daulton flared at the remark: “This is a business. Get it into your head!”

Attempting to change the subject slightly to ease the tension, Chris urged Daulton to drop another plan he had mentioned—the recruitment of Larry Potts, a Palos Verdes sailor who was serving on the U.S.S.
Midway
, an aircraft carrier. Daulton had talked about recruiting him as a kind of subcontractor to take photos of the carrier, the planes it carried and military facilities it visited around the world. Indeed, Daulton had already given Okana some details of the ship's complement of planes on the basis of comments by the sailor at a party.

“What else can I do? I've got to diversify; you could ruin me,” Daulton joked.

“You could quit,” Chris replied.

“I can't quit.”

“Why not?”

“This is my living now,” Daulton said.

“You mean you don't want to quit,” Chris said.

In the fog of his heroin trip, Daulton then outlined for Chris a grand design for the business: he would recruit Potts for military information and David could serve as a courier-subcontractor assigned to Russian customers, and Barclay Granger would be brought into the operation to be a subcontractor selling secrets to the Red Chinese embassy in Tanzania.

It was like old times. Once again, Daulton's business mind was planning, organizing, expanding; his grand design was very much like the strategy he applied to expanding his drug business, collecting commissions off the top and passing part of the risks to couriers.

“If the Russians find out you're playing with the Chinese, God help you,” Chris said. “
No
one else will.”

“I've got to expand; besides, how are they going to find out?”

“It's inevitable, you idiot,” Chris said.

“Wrong. They won't catch us; look what we've already done; look how much money we've made already.”

In truth, Chris did not know how much money they had made. The Russians had not yet answered his coded message. By this stage of their commerce with the Soviet Union, Daulton was keeping about four dollars for every dollar Chris received and was spending most of it on drugs—for his own use as well as others'.

“These are only the beginnings; in ten years …”

“In ten years you'll be dead,” Chris said. “More like ten months.”

Daulton was getting high from the combined effects of heroin and wine, and made an admission to Chris:

“By the way, I had to give 'em your name.”

The disclosure didn't surprise Chris, because he figured Daulton had probably done so months earlier.

“I bet you were drunk when you did it,” he said.

“I had to tell them. They forced me.

“Look, I've got to bring something to Vienna,” Daulton continued. “
Please
make it worth their while this time. Something flashy.…”

“Leave your brother at home? And Barclay?”

“They stay.”

“I'll think about it.”

“Will it be important? Please.”

“It's
all
important,” Chris said.

“I know, but these idiots I have to deal with don't understand how important it is.”

Chris said, “They pay like all the rest of the addicts you've hooked. They won't stop.”

It was quiet in the underground garage near Fourth and Mission Streets in San Francisco on the last Saturday of February, 1976. Chris and Daulton found the telephone booth; Daulton checked the number on the phone—(415) 362-9727—and confirmed they were at the right place. Chris was certain they were being watched; he sensed the presence of others in the garage and wondered if the KGB had sent any agents from the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco to watch them.

Their voices echoed loudly across the garage as they spoke, and they tried to lower their conversation to whispers, wondering if the Russians would call. Six o'clock came and the phone was silent.… At two minutes past six, it rang.

“This is Luis,” Daulton answered.

“This is John.” Standing close to the phone, Chris could hear a voice with a heavy foreign accent.

“We have your carpet,” the voice continued. “Will you come and get it?”

“Yes,” Daulton said.

“My
amigo
, Cristobal, is here. Would you like to talk to him?”

There was a brief pause.

“No,” the Russian said.

The telephone call to the San Francisco phone booth was the final confirmation: Daulton would fly to Vienna.

29

Ever the generous host, Daulton, saying he had important business to look after in Europe, asked Betsy Lee Stewart and Carole Benedict to go with him to Vienna. But both turned him down, and he went ahead with his plans to make the trip alone, disappointed that he wouldn't have a lovely girl beside him to share what promised to be an adventure like the ones he devoured in spy novels.

On March 10, 1976, Daulton applied for a passport under his own name; on the application, under a section that asked
PURPOSE OF TRIP,
Daulton answered, “Pleasure—Business.” He gave the expected length of his trip as a week and the countries he planned to visit as Switzerland and Germany. After telling a travel agent in Palos Verdes that he was an “art dealer,” he bought a round-trip ticket via TWA to Vienna and paid $1,040 in cash for it. There'd been a minor dispute with Chris about the cost of the ticket. Chris had seen an advertisement in the newspaper for a $600 round trip to Vienna and said Daulton ought to buy one of those discounted special fares. But Daulton prevailed. “Jesus Christ,” he said, “if I use an excursion fare I'll have to stay in Vienna three weeks, and it'll cost three thousand dollars just to stay over there.”

After stops in London, where he changed planes, and Frankfurt, Daulton landed at Vienna's Schwecht Airport on the morning of March 16. He had arrived a day earlier than his scheduled rendezvous with the Russians in order to see some of the city that was so often the setting of the espionage novels he loved. After clearing Immigration and Customs inspection, he took a taxi to the Inter-Continental Hotel in the center of Vienna, checked in and went sight-seeing.

As the cab made its way into the heart of the city, Daulton felt vulnerable so close to Eastern Europe and the Communist bloc. The reason the Russians had given for wanting him to make the trip was to meet some Soviet representatives who could not go to Mexico as well as take some specialized training in espionage: “tradecraft” was the term Daulton knew from his novels. Before leaving Palos Verdes, Daulton told his brother that he feared the Russians might try to kidnap him for some motive he couldn't figure out—why else Vienna? Daulton remained suspicious even as he boarded the airplane in Los Angeles. But he was going because of the lure of money—and the excitement.

Now, as he walked the streets of the old city, Daulton's fear ebbed and was replaced by a euphoria that reminded him of a high from heroin: The people who glanced at him as he walked through Vienna couldn't have any idea about the nature of his mission, and this thought excited him. And the realization that he was a spy on his way to meet Russian spies in an exotic city also excited him. Even when a light shower sent other pedestrians off the street, Daulton kept going, enjoying his adventure. He made it a point to inspect the Rembrandts and other Old Masters in the Kunsthistorisches Museum, spent a relaxing few minutes in a Viennese coffeehouse and, like any other tourist, toured Schönbrunn Palace, the old seat of power of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Chris had kept his promise and given him a large load for this delivery, although Daulton didn't know the nature of the documents he was carrying. It didn't really matter; to Daulton, it could just as easily have been a package of heroin. They were merely goods to be marketed, and his only concern was that they would “turn on” the Russians. He had ten rolls of film, each with thirty-six exposures. There were a month's worth of KW-7 ciphers; scores of Rhyolite messages between TRW, Langley and Australia and a long TRW technical report describing plans for the new Argus system. Chris had taken the documents from the vault in the large case designed to hold the camera that was used to make employee badge identification pictures. He took the camera case from the vault on the pretext of making a booze run. That night, the friends had taped the documents to a wall at Chris's home and photographed them. Chris had returned them the following day, some of them concealed in a plastic bag buried in the dirt of a potted plant that drew an admiring glance from a guard.

The evening after Daulton's arrival in Vienna, he took a cab to Donaupark as instructed. A lush preserve of lawn and old-growth trees covering almost half a square mile northeast of the Ring, the center of Vienna, Donaupark was on the Danube.

From his taxi, Daulton looked out at the lights of the
Riesenrad
, the city's towering 210-foot Ferris wheel, which was becoming more prominent on the horizon as dusk approached. The taxi crossed the muddy Danube, and he got out at the park. Daulton didn't know it was the Danube and asked the driver, who spoke a little English, “what canal” it was. It was chilly, and Daulton regretted he had not brought warmer clothes as riverboats chugged along beside him in a steady stream.

In the distance, beyond the river, he saw the lights of the city, and he heard the sound of traffic and music playing far away. Above him the Danube Tower, a landmark of the park, loomed like a precarious spire. Beyond the trees were the shadows, under a distant moon, of the Balkans and Eastern Europe.

A familiar figure approached from the darkness. Daulton recalled the meeting later this way:

“It was my old friend The Colonel with steel teeth; no code was necessary. He was my mentor.”

“Es goot to see you, comrade,” the Russian said.

A limousine found the two men as they walked near the river, and Daulton learned that the Soviet chauffeurs in Vienna drove just like the ones in Mexico—rapidly.

The driver threaded his way into and out of alleys and narrow streets, doubling back, checking his mirror to be sure they weren't followed. Daulton had no idea where they were when the car finally stopped at a low-slung building, within sight of the Ferris wheel, that vaguely reminded Daulton of a barracks. It was a KGB “safe house,” apparently in a Vienna suburb.

Daulton's uneasiness continued to wane in the friendly atmosphere of reunion. A woman brought the two men caviar and three bottles of vodka; then she brought a stew of beef, potatoes, carrots and cabbage while Steely Teeth sent out the film to another part of the building to be developed.

As the drinking and eating continued, Daulton became ill and asked for a bathroom. Steely Teeth showed him the way and stood by him as he used it.

Little work was necessary tonight, the Russian said, and Daulton was driven back to the Inter-Continental Hotel after midnight. They met the next morning near St. Stephen's Cathedral, the seven-hundred-year-old Gothic masterpiece that is the spiritual center of Vienna.