The Falcon and the Snowman (43 page)

Thus, there were now deepening personal animosities at the lawyers' bargaining table besides the fate of Christopher John Boyce. When the plea-bargaining talks finally broke down, the defense was still holding out for a maximum sentence of ten to twelve years, while the prosecutors said they wanted a sentence of thirty years. Secretly, the prosecutors, who still desperately wanted Chris's testimony, were willing to settle for a twenty-year sentence. But they never got a chance to show their final card in the negotiations. Amid the mounting personal bickering between the two sides, the talks collapsed.

After the double setback of losing the testimony of Chris and that of the Mexican police officials, Stilz and Levine had to regroup and develop an alternative battle plan. They would have to link Lee to espionage without Boyce's testimony and forge an indisputable link between him and the film without testimony from the police who had arrested him and seized the film.

To do so, they began what became, more than anything else, an anthropological expedition into the world Andrew Daulton Lee inhabited—his world of drug pushers and users, of smugglers and dropouts. For most of a month, often working twelve hours or more a day, they met with fellow pushers, Daulton's friends and customers, and the hangers-on in his crowd from The Hill and its environs, searching for clues that would implicate him as a Soviet spy. They assured the young people that they weren't interested in drugs or any transgressions they might have made against Federal or state narcotics-abuse laws. Whatever they said about drugs would not be used against them; the attorneys were interested only in Daulton's possible involvement in selling American secrets to a foreign country. Some of those they approached refused to talk; others, after resisting for several days, gave in. After a while, Stilz and Levine began to sew together a case made up of strands of information from many of the young people. One of the first breakthroughs came at the end of two days of questioning of Darlene Cooper. She spent most of the interview recalling bitterly how Daulton had turned on Palos Verdes girls to heroin and then “used” them. Stilz and Levine pressed for any memories she had of Daulton ever discussing anything about spying. Finally, she recalled a party, more than a year earlier, when Daulton had popped a tiny camera out of his breast pocket and bragged that it was a “spy” camera. Then she said, “Oh, I remember now; once he said he was working as a spy ‘for the Russkies.'”

Then came an admission by Barclay Granger, who was promised help by Levine and Stilz in having his sentence for cocaine trafficking reduced if he cooperated. He said he had accompanied Daulton during the purchase of the Minox-B camera, and he described their trip to Mexico and the mysterious tapings of lampposts, and Daulton's joke about being a spy. Carole Benedict denied ever using drugs, but recalled the trip she had made with Daulton to Mazatlán and Daulton's frequent furtive meetings with Chris. Carole—and virtually everyone else Stilz and Levine interviewed—told about the wads of money that Daulton seemed to have all the time.

The pieces began to fit together. Sometimes, after a long day of wading through this subculture, Stilz and Levine would have a drink together and wonder with amazement at what they had seen and heard. “It was so decadent,” Levine would say later. “
Nobody worked
. Everyone got up at ten or eleven, played a couple of sets of tennis and made drug deals. They all had so much money, but they never worked. They either got it from their families or through drug dealing. They were just aimless. I thought to myself, My God, what an
empty
life.”

Although the prosecutors were now lining up an effective battery of witnesses who could implicate Daulton, at least circumstantially, as a spy, there remained the critical need to prove beyond a doubt that he and Chris had photographed the Pyramider papers and that there had been an unbroken chain of custody linking the photographs and Daulton; President López Portillo's refusal to cooperate with the prosecution meant that neither Inspector López Malváez nor the arresting officers would be available to testify. Aaron Johnson would testify he had seen film negatives drying in Daulton's bathroom that appeared to have technical drawings on them, and Eileen Heaphy and Thomas Ferguson, the Foreign Service officers in Mexico City, could testify about observing, respectively, his arrest and the removal of an envelope containing microfilm from his pocket at López Malváez' office. But that wouldn't be enough; a more conclusive link between Daulton and the documents had to be found.

In Washington, D.C., Kent Dixon looked through a microscope at an enlarged photograph for a long time. Someone who did not know what he was doing might have wondered about the state of his mental health: there seemed to be absolutely nothing on the photograph he was scrutinizing. It was a picture of white light.

Dixon was a forensic scientist at the FBI's National Crime Laboratory. He wasn't interested in the glowing, blank center of the picture, where images of faces and scenery were usually savored by eager photographers. He was interested in the tiny, almost invisible permutations in the shape of the blank picture frame. It was one of hundreds he had taken with the Minox-B camera found beneath the tambour doors of the rolltop desk in Daulton's bedroom. A criminalist who had worked eight years for the FBI, Dixon believed that virtually all mechanical devices have a personal signature unique to themselves and as individual as a fingerprint. They have defects left at their birth in a factory, whether they are automobiles, typewriters, cameras or computers, that make them different from other machines that appear to be identical. And once they leave the factory, each device is used differently, evolving an even more singular identity: daily wear and tear, time, weather, usage all leave their imprint. Dixon was looking for the distinctive fingerprint of the Minox that would link it to the film seized in Mexico City; if the link could be made, it would substantially bolster the prosecution's search for an unassailable connection between Daulton and the Pyramider papers.

From experience, Dixon knew of several places to look first for the unique character of the camera. There was the possibility of peculiarities in its lens and shutter; in the framing area where the film was held behind the shutter; in the sprocket wheels that advanced the film and sometimes left marks on the film itself; the pressure plate behind the film that can scratch the film or leave deposits of dirt. Dixon often looked first at the framing area of a camera in cases such as this. In his experience, many cameras had burrs or imperfections left during manufacture that affected the shape of the photograph made by the camera. Also, dirt tended to accumulate around the edges of the framing area after being forced there by film rolled through the camera.

Dixon peered through the microscope at the photo he had made of the blank white image. He noticed that the edge of the frame at one corner was not perfectly square; there was a slight curvature. His eyes followed the edge of the frame of the picture and began to see small black dots and projections. They were barely as large as a pinhead sticking up into the edge of the photograph, but magnified, they appeared as enormous anomalies in the seemingly sharp lines of the picture. They could have been burrs in the metal, scraped there during manufacture, or just blobs of dirt, Dixon thought. He wasn't sure. He noticed a tiny imperfection at another spot on the picture's edge, then more tiny specks which he concluded were bits of dust or dirt. Dixon had found at least part of the unique character of the camera.

Now he turned his attention to another set of pictures—blowups made from the strips of negatives seized in Mexico City. Scanning one of the photos through his microscope, Dixon ignored the center of the picture—the typewritten data, the technical drawings and the words T
OP
S
ECRET
. He was interested instead in the outer edges of the picture.

He found what he was looking for: there was a perfect match.

Dixon had discovered the same pattern of irregularities and flecks of dirt on the photograph from Mexico City that he had found on the photos made with the camera found in Daulton's rolltop desk.

Stilz and Levine got the news and decided they were ready for trial.

The trial was scheduled to begin March 15, 1977. But the defendants' attacks on the constitutionality of their arrests and efforts to block use of their statements to the FBI caused Robert J. Kelleher, the Federal judge who had been assigned to handle the case, to order several postponements.

If Superior Court Judge Burch Donahue had a reputation as a compassionate man ever willing to give a defendant still another chance, the reputation of Judge Kelleher probably leaned in the opposite direction. A tennis nut who was a former captain of the U.S. Davis Cup team and former president of the U.S. Lawn Tennis Association, Kelleher was considered implacably honest and evenhanded in his treatment of defendants, although a few defense lawyers who practiced in his court complained that he tended to side with the prosecution on toss-up calls. Kelleher was well known for his impatience in dealing with lawyers whose knowledge of the law was deficient according to his standards, and he seldom hesitated to tongue-lash lawyers who he decided were getting out of line. Educated at Williams College and Harvard Law School, Kelleher, aged sixty-four, had been a Beverly Hills lawyer for twenty years before being appointed to the Federal bench in 1971 by President Nixon. A tall man with graying hair, Kelleher was an aristocratic-looking figure on the bench, and there was never any doubt when he was sitting there who was running the courtroom.

When, after weeks of on-again, off-again pretrial hearings, Kelleher ruled that the arrests, the seizure of evidence and the statements made by the youths were admissible at trial, few people who knew Kelleher were surprised. He said the FBI had acted lawfully and properly. His decision meant that the trial would proceed now with the prosecution's large quiver of evidence against Chris and Daulton virtually untouched.

Ken Kahn, arguing that his client's interests were different from those of Christopher John Boyce, sought and received a severance of the cases; Judge Kelleher ordered that the two friends be tried separately.

Daulton was still confiding his thoughts to a friend outside the jail. Boyce, he continued to insist, had to be convinced of his foolishness in dragging Daulton down with him. Boyce was the only one who
really
knew what had happened, the only one who could really implicate Daulton. “Boyce was the malevolence behind this entire nightmare,” he said. He had informed Boyce the previous November, after being ejected from the Russian embassy, that he didn't want to continue the operation, but Chris, he maintained, had insisted on one more delivery.

In the early stages of their operation, Daulton said, Boyce had told him they could squeeze the Soviets for $50,000 a month. When the Russians gave him only $5,000 for some of the codes, Daulton said, he had considered them a fraud. The Russians, he said, invariably wanted more and different information—details about infrared sensors, the names of company executives, photographs of the birds and other stuff that Chris refused to supply.

“Infra red. That's what the Russians wanted but didn't get. They're really paranoid about the superior quality of our Recon Birds. They must be in the dark ages (‘pun') with their infrared cameras.”

In effect, Daulton said, his role in the scheme had been to make the Russians believe that they could keep up to date on the accuracy of American infrared sensors. Yet, he said, they had sought this information for a year and still hadn't received it. But he had managed to keep them on the hook. He said he had told the KGB agents that there were “thousands of birds” going over their country daily. “If they wanted to know what we knew,” Daulton said, “they'd have to play ball.”

If nothing else, Daulton said, if his case was brought to trial he would make a “laughing stock” out of TRW. Here was a company, he wrote, that had sent the Viking probe to Mars and yet “can't control alcoholism in their own internal security.”

Daulton repeatedly returned to his theory of disinformation. It was commonplace in espionage, he insisted, for one country to leak erroneous data to its enemies, but in order to make the information believable, everything had to be done in a way that gave it credibility. “What better way to leak information than through an edifice like TRW, using a young clerk and a capitalistic pot head?” By leaking intelligence to the Soviets about the flock of reconnaissance birds secretly flying over Russian and Chinese territory, the United States quietly “makes it known to the Russkies that we're hep to their charades of peaceful coexistence.…”

If this wasn't a carefully orchestrated plot by the CIA, he asked, then why hadn't Boyce given the Russians the information they wanted? “The Russians wanted photos of Argus and Rhyolite. Boyce had easy access, but he never would do it for them. In Mexico [after] Boyce and I left the embassy, Boyce said they're never going to see pictures of Rhyolite or Argus. Joke: Boyce claimed Rhyo might see them instead.…

“Obviously, there is a more complex and demented side of Boyce that alludes [
sic
] us. Or else why would he refuse the Russians any photos?”

On one of his letters Daulton appended an afterthought. How, he asked, could he even be considered to be a Soviet spy? He had always voted Republican, he said, and he had never even taken a political science course.

Judge Kelleher and the attorneys for the two defendants agreed Chris would be tried first.

As his trial approached, he and Daulton saw each other only rarely, and briefly, when their paths crossed during pretrial court appearances. But the chasm between them was growing daily, and whatever remnants of their friendship had been left in January had all but withered by April under the heat of their respective efforts to survive. Chris blamed their arrest on Daulton's foolishness in his frontal attack on the embassy, but, more, he was enraged that Daulton had turned on him now.