Christopher John Boyce
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Christopher John Boyce (born 1953) is a convicted American armed robber and Soviet spy. He was arrested in January 1977 for selling U.S. spy satellite secrets to the Soviet Union.
Boyce, the son of a security chief at McDonnell Douglas, along with childhood friend Andrew Daulton Lee, were raised in the very affluent seaside community of Palos Verdes Peninsula near Los Angeles. In 1974 Boyce was hired at TRW, a Southern California aerospace firm in Redondo Beach, California. His father, in his position as an aerospace security officer, was able to help get his son a job at TRW. Boyce was eventually promoted to a sensitive job in TRW's "Black Vault" (classified communications center) with a top secret security clearance.
Boyce began getting misrouted cables from the Central Intelligence Agency discussing the CIA's desire to depose the government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam in Australia. Boyce claimed the CIA wanted Whitlam removed from office because he wanted to close U.S. military bases in Australia, including the vital Pine Gap secure communications facility, and withdraw Australian troops from Vietnam. Whitlam had also begun making diplomatic overtures to China, as President Nixon had previously done. For these reasons, some people claim that U.S. government pressure was a major factor in the dismissal of Whitlam as prime minister by the governor general Sir John Kerr, who, according to Boyce, was referred to as our man Kerr by CIA agents. Through the cable traffic, Boyce saw that the CIA was involving itself in such a manner not just with Australia but with other democratic, industrialized allies. Boyce considered going to the press, but believed the media's earlier disclosure of CIA involvement in the 1973 Chilean coup d'etat, which had resulted in the overthrow and killing of Chilean president Salvador Allende, had not changed anything for the better.
Andrew Daulton Lee, a cocaine and heroin dealer since his high school days (hence his nickname, "The Snowman") delivered classified documents concerning secure U.S. communications ciphers and spy satellite development to Soviet Embassy officials in Mexico City, returning with large sums of cash for Boyce (nicknamed "The Falcon" because of his longtime interest in falconry) and himself.
Boyce, then 24, was exposed after Lee was falsely arrested by Mexican police in front of the Soviet Embassy in December 1976 on suspicion of having killed a police officer. Under torture, Lee (who had top secret microfilm in his possession when arrested) confessed to being a Soviet spy and implicated Boyce. Boyce was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 40 years in prison at the federal penitentiary in Lompoc, California.
In January 1980, he escaped from prison. While a fugitive, Boyce carried out several bank robberies in Idaho and Washington state. He was arrested in Washington in August 1981 after the authorities received a tip about Boyce's whereabouts from the fugitive his own former bank robbery confederates.
Boyce was released from prison on parole in May 15, 2003.
The story of their case was told in novelist Robert Lindsey's best-selling 1979 book The Falcon and the Snowman. The book was turned into a film of the same title in 1985 by director John Schlesinger starring actors Timothy Hutton as Boyce and Sean Penn as Lee.
[edit] Further reading
- Transcript of television broadcast Sixty Minutes (Australia), May 23, 1982, A Spy's Story: USA Traitor Gaoled For 40 Years After Selling Codes of Rylite and Argus Projects
- statement by Peter Staples, Member for Jagajaga in Australia, November 20, 1986
- Robert Lindsey, The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of Friendship and Espionage, Lyons Press, 1979, ISBN 1-58574-502-2
- Robert Lindsey, The Flight of the Falcon: The True Story of the Escape and Manhunt for America's Most Wanted Spy, Simon & Schuster, 1983, ISBN 0-671-45159-6
