Narrator (5:27)
The nine mile stretch of coastline in south Southern California known as Palos Verdes is home to some of the wealthiest Los Angeles families. It is hardly the place you would expect a true Cold War spy thriller to be born. Yet it was here that childhood friends Christopher John Boyce and Andrew Dalton Lee would meet and move on from their privileged upbringings to betray their country. Together, they plunged headfirst into the dangerous world of espionage. Their story, a blend of misplaced idealism, greed, hedonism and recklessness, would ultimately expose a shocking breach of national security and leave a lasting mark on the annals of Cold War history. This is the tale of the falcon and the snowman. The eldest of nine siblings, Christopher John Boyce was born on 16 February 1953. He grew up in a household where patriotism and Catholicism were pillars of daily life. His father, Charles Boyce, was a former FBI agent who had transitioned to corporate security in the aerospace industry. Chris excelled academically, testing with an IQ of 142 and and showed natural leadership, winning election as his 8th grade class president. But it was his passion for falconry that truly defined young Chris. His father had given him a book on the subject. And after a family friend who owned a falcon gave him a flying demonstration, Chris was hooked. By age 14, he had earned certification as a master falconer, spending countless hours in the rugged canyons around Palos Verdes Trail, trapping and training birds of prey. Andrew Dalton Lee, on the other hand, entered this world through different circumstances. Born on 3 January 1952, he was adopted by Dr. Dalton Bradley Lee, a successful pathologist and decorated World War II pilot, and his wife, Anne. Andrew preferred going by Dalton after his adoptive father. Unlike Chris, Dalton struggled academically and socially. He seemed to stop growing in fifth grade, leaving him at just 5 foot 2 inches tall with severe acne. Compounding his insecurities during his teenage years, where Chris naturally commanded respect, Dalton fought for attention through increasingly desperate means. As the years went on, the two boys met as altar servers at St. John Fisher Catholic Church and their friendship grew stronger during high school at Palos Verdes High, where they both played football for the C team. What truly cemented their friendship was their shared love of birds of prey. One day, Dalton showed off the owls, hawks and falcons he kept at home near to the family. Putting green as one does, and it was from that point that Chris and Dalton became best friends. But as the 1960s gave way to the 1970s, the social upheaval transforming America began to crack the foundation of their privileged world. The Vietnam War and Watergate scandal created fissures in American society that reached even into Palos Verdes insulated community. Chris, initially a fervent supporter of the war effort, began questioning everything he had been taught about American righteousness. Trips to rural Mexico with his family exposed him to grinding poverty that starkly contrasted with his comfortable upbringing. The cognitive dissonance was jarring for a young man raised on absolute moral imperatives. Dalton's rebellion took a more direct path through drugs. Southern California's high schools were awash with marijuana and even cocaine in the early 1970s, and Dalton embraced both enthusiastically. The drugs offered him something he had never possessed social currency. Girls who had ignored the short, awkward teenager with bad skin scratch suddenly sought him out when he offered free samples. By his senior year, Dalton had discovered that drug dealing provided not just attention and sexual favors, but serious money. Chris's grades suffered under Dalton's influence, dropping from superior to mediocre. Concerned parents transferred him to Rolling Hills High School, hoping distance would break the friendship's destructive dynamic. But their bond, forged in the wilderness with hawks and falcons, proved stronger than parental intervention. After graduation, both young men drifted. Dalton dropped out of junior college within months, fully embracing drug dealing as his profession. By 1973, he was moving significant quantities of marijuana and cocaine, earning between 1 and $2,000 weekly. And his reputation grew as someone connected to serious dealers in Mexico. Chris struggled to find direction. Mononucleosis, or glandular fever, delayed his college entry, and he bounced between three different institutions. He briefly considered entering the priesthood, but after a year spent at Loyola University in 1972, he suffered a spiritual crisis of belief and dropped out. When a federal grant to study the history of falconry at California Polytechnic State University was rejected, Even his passion seemed to offer no clear path forward. By the start of 1974, Chris was floundering. In June of that year, his father, Charles Boyce, used his aerospace industry connections to secure his son a temporary job at trw, a major defence contractor based in Redondo Beach. Chris viewed it as stopgap employment. While he figured out his future, starting as a general clerk at $140 per week, his intelligence and work ethic left his supervisors suitably impressed. By August, Chris was being considered for upgraded responsibilities requiring secret security clearance. Background checks revealed no red flags, his admitted occasional marijuana use not being enough to raise alarm Unknown to Chris at the time, he was being prepared for assignments to one of America's most closely guarded secrets. The Rhyolite system was a network of sophisticated surveillance satellites designed to electronically gather intelligence from space. These black satellites could eavesdrop on telephone conversations, intercept microwave transmissions and photograph military installations with extraordinary clarity. Their primary targets were missile launch sites in China and the Soviet Union. While he remained a private contractor employee of trw, his salary was to be paid by the CIA. Chris's new workplace was called the Black Vault, a secured communications centre linking TRW with CIA headquarters in Langley and Pine Gap, a joint Australian US satellite surveillance and intelligence base near Alice Springs in Australia. Each morning he would navigate multiple security checkpoints, deactivate alarms and unlock safes containing daily cipher codes for encrypted teletype machines. His responsibilities included processing overnight messages from Langley and distributing copies to specific TRW and CIA officials. One of the first things to shock Chris when he started his new role was the casual security within this highly classified environment. He saw his colleagues regularly smuggle alcohol into the facility and briefcases, treating the vault, in his words, like a non stop cocktail lounge. But it was the content of the communications that truly disturbed Chris. He discovered the CIA was actively infiltrating Australian labour unions and agitating against the left leaning Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, funding opposition parties to oust him from power. Most shocking for Chris was learning that much of the intelligence gathered was being deliberately withheld from Australia, despite agreements that all satellite intelligence would be shared with the Australian government. TRW was even designing a newer, more sophisticated satellite system called Argus, about which the Australians were to be told nothing. Why was the CIA looking to interfere in Australian politics? In short, the US didn't like the cut of Gough Whitlam's left leaning jib. Whitlam had withdrawn Australian troops from Vietnam and publicly criticised the American bombings of Hanoi in 1973. There was a concern that Gough Whitlam's government might expose the true function of the secret US bases in Australia, which at that point in time had never been publicly acknowledged. Pine Gap was vital to US intelligence gathering operations and they could not risk Whitlam terminating the agreement to operate it. There was also a worry that a left wing government would be easier to penetrate by the kgb. What's more, the spy satellites weren't just targeting Cold War adversaries like China and the ussr, but were also surveilling American allies including Israel, Japan and France. Chris believed this went too far and couldn't be justified as protecting US national security. The corporate military intelligence complex that served as his work environment to him reeked of hypocrisy and senseless nationalism. For a young man already disillusioned by events like the war in Vietnam and Watergate, what he considered as the betrayal of US Allies and treaty obligations felt like a moral corruption at the heart of American power. Chris's disillusionment deepened through 1974 and early 1975. At weekend parties, his tongue loosened by alcohol and cocaine, he began sharing details about his work with Dalton. He spoke of the CIA's deceptions, the lack security in the black vault, and his growing contempt for the entire operation. Meanwhile, Dalton's legal and financial troubles were mounting. His $500 a week drug habits had resulted in multiple arrests, he had violated his probation conditions many times, and he was facing the possibility of serious prison time. One evening, Chris made a fateful suggestion to Dalton. Why not sell classified information to a foreign government? The idea emerged from Chris desire to wage what he would later call a one man war against the government he had come to despise. For him, it was a form of protest, a way to strike back at the system's hypocrisy. For Dalton, dollar signs must have appeared in his eyes. He thought this could be the windfall he needed to solve his drug and legal problems. Yet Dalton could hardly believe what his longtime friend was suggesting. Espionage was a little more serious than a bit of dope slinging. But as his court date approached and prison loomed, the idea gained appeal. In early April of 1975, just days before his scheduled court hearing, Dalton fled to Mexico City. With that, the Spy Games began.
