The Falcon and the Snowman (45 page)

Skillfully, the defense began to lay out its meager cards. Dougherty and Chelius presented a witness from Stanford University, an engineering professor named Martin Hellman who asserted that much of the information in the Pyramider documents was common technical data known to any well-informed electronics engineer. William Florence, a onetime Pentagon classification expert who had presented effective testimony along similar lines at the trial of Ellsberg and Russo four years earlier, claimed that the Government routinely overclassified documents. And Victor L. Marchetti, the former senior CIA staff officer and coauthor of
The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence
, was called to provide an unusual look at the internal CIA planning process.

He testified that a covert communication system for spies similar to Pyramider had secretly been proposed by the agency to Congress in 1968. But he claimed it was only part of a “dog and pony show” meant to impress the members of a Congressional subcommittee that monitored the agency with an insincere, exotic proposal from science fiction. There had been resistance in the agency to actually developing such a system, he added, because it would have been a violation of a tacit agreement with the Soviet Union that the espionage satellites both countries used were to be restricted to passive missions like reconnaissance and were not to play an active role such as communicating with spies.

On cross-examination, however, Marchetti acknowledged that he had not been privy to CIA decision-making processes for more than five years and admitted he might be unaware of more recent work on such projects.

Alfred J. Oliveri, a public-school teacher who lived near the Boyces in Palos Verdes, was called as a character witness, and he testified that he had known Christopher Boyce since 1959, and “his reputation has always been one of honesty and integrity; it was above reproach.”

The next person who took the witness stand also knew Chris very well.

“I've known Christopher Boyce since he was an altar boy and a student of mine,” Msgr. Thomas J. McCarthy said in the gentle Boston-Irish voice that was one of his trademarks. Asked by Dougherty to describe Chris's reputation in the community, the gray-haired priest said, “To my knowledge, he has the highest reputation for truth, veracity and integrity.” That was the end of his testimony.

A reporter intercepted the priest in the hallway outside the courtroom and asked him if he had any explanation of why Chris and Daulton were both now accused of being Soviet spies.

“For idealism? I don't know. When I heard about their arrest on the radio in my car, I had to pull to the side of the road and stop,” he said. “I couldn't believe it. And then I thought about it: These kids have come through a revolution. They had tremendous pressure on them, peer pressure; there were drugs; they had the moral filth of Watergate, the war; they went through that whole era when national leaders were playing footsie with crooked people. Chris is most surprising; he always loved the underdog. I admired him so much. But he grew up in a different ambiance than I did. Maybe he was disillusioned.”

Monsignor McCarthy died less than a year later. Two weeks before his death, he told an acquaintance that he still prayed for his two former altar boys.

45

“Kenny, I'm scared,” Daulton wrote to Ken Kahn as Chris's trial appeared to be winding up and his own loomed closer. “If our defense is based in its entirety on CIA involvement and this assumption should prove wrong, what is left for defense?”

Kahn reassured him again that the defense they had agreed on—that Chris had enticed him into a CIA scheme to spread false information—was the best they had. Furthermore, he said he believed it was true; he was convinced, he told Daulton, that Chris was a CIA agent.

On the afternoon of April 25, 1977, George Chelius and Bill Dougherty decided to make a final attempt to make a deal with the prosecution.

They agreed they'd probably not scored enough points for the defense to undermine the strong prosecution case anchored in Chris's own admission of guilt. They still maintained from a constitutional standpoint that Chris's confession had not been voluntary according to the Supreme Court's
Miranda
decision, and therefore shouldn't be admissible as evidence; but this was now a moot point. It appeared that Chris was going to be convicted, and his only hope now was a deal.

They met with Stilz and Levine in the offices of the U.S. Attorney on an upper floor of the same building where the trial was being held. The defense lawyers proposed that if the prosecution agreed to a maximum sentence of ten years, Chris would plead guilty, testify against Daulton and tell everything he knew about their espionage operation to the CIA. Otherwise, they said, Chris would take the stand the following day.

“Ten years!” Stilz said sardonically.

“We already turned that down,” Levine said.

Things were different now, the defense lawyers suggested. Unless there was a deal, they hinted, Chris might say embarrassing things from the witness stand the next day.

“No deal,” Levine said. “We told you we wouldn't take that deal two months ago!”

“You weren't going to lose a ground station in Australia before,” one of the defense lawyers snapped.

“Get the fuck out of here,” Levine said, and that ended the final round of plea-bargaining negotiations for Chris.

While this scene was being acted out by the lawyers at the courthouse, Chris was being transported back to the Los Angeles County Jail.

The trial had confirmed what Chris had expected from the moment he saw the carloads of men swarm around him at the turkey ranch—indeed, what he had expected from the moment he got the call from Daulton on the night of his first contact with the KGB. Chris
knew
that he was going to be convicted—and he had decided to make a final stab at the system he hated now more than ever. He had decided to plot his own murder.

Many times during the past few weeks, in the solitude of the tiny isolation cell, he had told himself suicide was the only reasonable ending to what had begun two years before. But if he was going to commit suicide, shouldn't he give his death some meaning? Why not stick it to them where it would hurt when he did?

It really didn't matter, he mused, who got the blame for his murder. Some people would blame the CIA, others the KGB. To Chris, they were one and the same. Most people, he thought, would probably blame the CIA. He was going to kill himself and make it appear that he had been murdered by someone who didn't want him on the witness stand the next day.

The basic plan had taken shape in his mind over the past week: He would hang himself with the electric cord from the radio in his cell. But before he did, he would arrange the cell like a stage set bristling with clues to murder—a murder committed by someone attempting to make his death appear like suicide. His resources to carry out the plot were slim, he thought, but they would be enough.

The first thing that occurred to him was to leave an ample amount of toothpaste in his mouth when he placed his makeshift noose around his neck—who would commit suicide with a mouthful of toothpaste? He would throw his toothbrush under the bed to make it appear that it had been flung there when Chris was overpowered while brushing his teeth; he would leave notes in the pockets of his pants, written to a friend and to Bill Dougherty, saying he was extremely optimistic about the way the trial was going and expressing hopes for the future.

Methodically, Chris began arranging the set in the small cell: He pulled out the edge of the blanket on his bed so it looked as if it had been yanked out during a struggle; he ripped open a package of cigarettes and stomped on it to make it appear as if it had been smashed during a fight; he laid out the toothpaste and toothbrush like a craftsman neatly arranging his tools before starting a job; and then he wrote the letter to his friend on fancy tissue-paper stationery and got ready to carry out the simulated murder sometime after midnight.

Midnight approached and passed. In the dim light of the jail, Chris stared at the materials he had assembled to stage his murder and cursed himself for procrastinating. Was it the old dichotomy that had haunted him for as long as he could remember?

He tried to resist the doubts that were keeping him from his final step of preparation—pulling the wire from the radio and tying his noose. But he couldn't fend off the doubts; they taunted him, and his mind groped for alternatives: perhaps, he thought, there was still a chance of acquittal; if he was convicted, wasn't there a chance he could escape?

Chris thought at length about a conversation he had had with Victor Marchetti. He had sensed in Marchetti the same disgust he felt for the dirty tricks of the agency; perhaps, he had told Marchetti, the way to get his revenge on the agency was to say in public something the CIA spooks did not want to hear.

Chris didn't go to sleep that night. As the implements of his suicide/murder plot lay beside him, he read and reread the statement he had made to the FBI on the night of his arrest, memorizing it so that he would not trip himself with inconsistencies. Then he prepared a list of questions that he would give Bill Dougherty to ask him the next day.

From time to time as he wrote the questions and rehearsed his answers, Chris's thoughts went back to suicide and he scolded himself for lacking the final measure of courage to implement his plan. But ultimately this sense of guilt was overpowered by a different kind of guilt: he realized he could not shake off the belief that he felt planted deep somewhere in him, that it was a mortal sin to commit suicide—and to die with a mortal sin on his soul meant burning in the eternal fires of hell.

Besides, he admitted to himself, he wanted to live.

But, it was more than that: he had decided he could hurt the evil he hated more by taking the stand than by killing himself.

Since his years at St. John Fisher, Chris had loved public speaking and debate. He had never minded taking a risk. Now he had a chance to speak for his life.

After his night without sleep, Chris took the stand shortly after 9
A.M.
on April 26, 1977, and was sworn in.

Under gentle questioning by Dougherty, Chris began by sketching the details of his life until the middle of 1974: his youth in Palos Verdes; his attendance at Harbor College, Loyola and Cal Poly. In July, 1974, he said, his father had helped him obtain a job at TRW; he traced the first few months on the job, his introduction to “black projects” and his assignment to the Black Vault.

And then Chris got ready to give the story that he had sketched out the night before of how—and why—he had become a Russian spy.

“Do you know Andrew Daulton Lee?” Dougherty asked.

“Yes.”

“How long have you known Andrew Daulton Lee?”

“Since I was a child. A long time.”

Dougherty asked Chris if he could recall a conversation he had had with Daulton shortly after he took the job in the Black Vault, and Chris said he could.

“I was at a party over at his house. Not too many people—a fairly small party.” After everyone else had left, “we were sitting down in the back of the house and we were drinking, smoking pot, and he began to talk about … He was on—he had violated his probation—and …”

“Well, were you discussing politics before he got into this?”

“We were discussing problems with the government in general and his particular problems.”

“Were you discussing any major problems of national interest?”

“We were discussing Watergate and Richard Nixon, and he had read a book and he was talking about how the Central Intelligence Agency had killed President Kennedy, and that I didn't believe. You know, it was just up for discussion, and we talked about Chile, and he said he was leaving the country to escape arrest. He didn't want to go back to prison, and he said that his probation officers were really giving him a raw deal, that they were really giving him the shaft.”

The conversation turned back to Chile, he continued. “A democratic government had been overthrown,” he said, and they agreed the CIA had probably been behind it.

“He said that the government, as he knew it, was really giving him the shaft, and I said, ‘If you think that's bad, you should hear what the Central Intelligence Agency is doing to the Australians.' And he asked me what, and I told him that—”

Stilz lunged from his seat.

“Your Honor, at this point, I'm going to object. That conversation is irrelevant.”

“Sustained.”

Chris continued to try to make a point about Australia, but Stilz battled to keep him off the subject. Slowly, however, in his interrupted answers and Stilz' hurried objections, it was becoming apparent to spectators in the courtroom that Chris knew something sinister about America's dealings with Australia.

What wasn't yet apparent was that Chris was establishing the foundation for the defense he hoped would keep him out of prison: he was about to charge that he had been an unwilling spy, that he had been blackmailed by Daulton into being a spy.

Chris continued his testimony under Dougherty's probing. Shortly after the initial discussion with Daulton, he said, the subject of Australia had come up again. Once again, Stilz recognized possible disaster ahead and started to rise. But he was too late. Chris said:

“And I informed him that part of my daily duties … I worked in a communication room … part of my daily duties were to continue a deception against the Australians.”

There was a stir in the courtroom. The television-network artists and reporters seated at the press table looked at each other as if to say, What did he mean by
that?

“Your Honor,” Stilz said urgently, “at this point I'm going to object. Irrelevant.”

“Sustained.”

There was a banging noise in the back of the courtroom, and heads turned instinctively to see who it was. It was General Hershey Bar in full regalia pushing open the doors of the courtroom and reclaiming his seat after visiting the rest room. The tension of Chris's testimony was broken momentarily.