Christopher Boyce - American Sons: The Untold Story of the Falcon and the Snowman

I am an old mannow, far older than my sixty years. A quarter century in federal prison willhave that effect on you. I was introduced the other day to another flyfisherman and I heard his wife whisper in the background, That old man cantbe The Falcon. In truth, I can hardly believe it myself.

When I look in themirror these days, a young voice in my head asks, What happened? Thisbook is an attempt to answer that question. It is for me also a catharsis. Ihave carried the weight of this thing upon my shoulders since I was a youngman. It has, at times, ground me down into the dust, and I cannot do itanymore. I must be done with it.

An introduction isa beginning. Let me try to begin there. When I was a young boy, my father and Iwould read his history books. He was an important part of the intelligencestate in its crude infancy and a lover of history. My father admired theaudacious and I admired my father. I read from his books that the ancient Gaelsjudged a man by the power of his enemies.

When I was offdoing boy things, running in the fields with my hawks or fishing in the tidepools, I would dream of these judgments of the ancient Gaels. One day, I toldmyself, I too would have powerful enemies. I believed that a mans life must bea quest worth living, but these sentiments would one day turn my life into aliving hell. Still, it is my life, the only life I have ever known, and thoughI would now change some of it, I would not change all of it.

When I was fifteen,my father took me to the Custer Battlefield National Monument on the LittleBighorn. I imagined George Armstrong Custer pitching his three hundred cavalrymeninto four thousand Sioux warriors and being annihilated. I stood on the groundwhere he fell. I breathed it all in, the dust, the despair and death, the wholegruesome fight.

I must confessthat I walked off that battlefield not thinking thoughts generally associatedwith baby boomers. I was an incurable quester. I was Don Quixote looking for awindmill. And not exactly a prime candidate to work for a National SecurityAgency subcontractor. In fact, I was their worst nightmare, a long-hair withtop secret clearance based on a joke of a background security investigation.This blew my mind. And one day, I meant it to blow theirs.

My enemy, Idecided, was the United States intelligence complex. I asked myself a dozentimes a day, What would Thomas Jefferson think of our current governmentthat had somehow morphed out of the limited, balanced, political institutionshe had designed? I decided that if Jefferson still possessed anyconsciousness at all, the poor old patriot must be spinning in his grave.

In late 1974, Iwas hired to work in TRWs Black Vault, which was actually an NSA encryptionoperation supporting satellite surveillance of Russia. The satellites used PineGap, in the Australian outback, as a communications foot. At my firstsecurity briefing, the project security director informed me that the NSA wasnot willing to live up to our agreement to share all information gathered atPine Gap with our Australian allies. I was told that we were also hiding thenew, more sophisticated, successor Argus Project of surveillance at Pine Gapfrom the Aussies in violation of the Executive Agreement between our twocountries.

I was told thatthe elected Labor Government of Australia was a threat to American interests;that the Whitlam Government was socialistic and that their inquiries about PineGap were compromising the security of the project. I later read encrypteddispatches discussing the infiltration of Australian trade unions by the CIA,and listened to our project CIA resident refer to the Governor-General ofAustralia, Sir John Kerr (the man who unconstitutionally sacked Gough Whitlamas Prime Minister) as our man Kerr.

I watched mygovernment deceive an ally, an English speaking parliamentary democracy who hadfought next to us in two world wars. I concede I was naive, that allies deceiveeach other every day, but still I was disgusted. Without giving it thedeliberation it deserved, I decided to do as much damage to the Americanintelligence community as I could possibly do. And nothing I could think ofwould bring greater horror to Americas spooks than to pass NSA codes to theRussians.

So began myself-destructive descent into hell. I was an army of one, out to damage what Isaw as the Great Rotten Republic at which point, I went to see my oldfalconry buddy and neer do well friend, a smalltime drug dealer named AndrewDaulton Lee. I explained to him what I had in mind. He looked at me indisbelief, but after a few moments I could see dollar signs dancing in hiseyes.

I cannot say thatat that point we did not often enter the realm of the absurd. We certainly did.We listened to Janis Joplin, ate marijuana brownies, and had clandestinemeetings with the KGB. We laughed at Cheech and Chong while photographingcrypto codes with a miniature Minox camera. If ever such a thing as longhair,amateur spies could exist, we were it.

One night, halfthe Palos Verdes police department chased Daulton in their squad cars for twentyminutes all throughout our wealthy neighborhood in what was undoubtedly thegreatest road rally of their lives. Meanwhile, my ear cocked to the approachingsirens, I frantically buried secret documents under my mothers daffodils. Thehijinks and shenanigans never ceased. Until, of course, they did. As they hadto.