Christopher John Boyce (born 16 February 1953) is a former American defense industry employee who was convicted of selling United Statesspy satellite secrets to the Soviet Union in the 1970s.[1]
In 1974, Boyce was hired at TRW, an aerospace firm in Redondo Beach, California. Due to his father's position at McDonnell Douglas, Boyce was able to obtain employment.
Espionage
Bldg. M4 at Space Park where Boyce committed espionage from March 1975 through December 1976.[2]
Boyce claims that he began getting misrouted cables from the CIA discussing the agency'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 US military bases in Australia, including the vital Pine Gap secure communications facility, and withdraw Australian troops from Vietnam. For these reasons, John Pilger, Australian journalist and author, has written that US 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 officers.[4] 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'état had not changed anything for the better.[citation needed]
Instead, he gathered a quantity of classified documents concerning secure US communications ciphers and spy satellite development and had his friend Andrew Daulton Lee, a cocaine and heroin dealer since his high school days (hence his nickname, "The Snowman"), deliver them 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. According to a book that Boyce and his wife co-authored, the information was not valuable to the Soviet Union.[5]
Exposure
Boyce, then 23, was exposed after Lee was arrested by Mexican police in front of the Soviet embassy on January 6, 1977.[6] His arrest was "almost by accident": Lee was arrested for littering.[6] During his harsh interrogation, Lee, who had a top secret microfilm in his possession when arrested, confessed to being a Soviet spy and implicated Boyce. Boyce was arrested ten days later on 16 January, when the FBI found him hiding out at the shack he was renting near Riverside, California. He was convicted on eight counts of espionage on 28 April 1977,[7][8][9] and sentenced by federal district judge Robert Kelleher on 12 September to forty years in prison,[10] initially at Terminal Island, then the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego. On 10 July 1979, he was transferred to the federal penitentiary in Lompoc, California.
Escape
On 21 January 1980, Boyce escaped from Lompoc.[6][11][12] While a fugitive, Boyce carried out 17 bank robberies in Idaho and Washington, hoping to pay for passage to the Soviet Union, and adopted the alias of "Anthony Edward Lester".[13]
According to Boyce, he studied aviation, not to flee to the Soviet Union as some suspected, but to rescue Daulton Lee from Lompoc.[14]
On 21 August 1981, Boyce was arrested by U.S. Marshals while eating in his car outside "The Pit Stop," a drive-in restaurant in Port Angeles, Washington.[15][16] Authorities had received a tip about Boyce's whereabouts from his former bank robbery confederates.
Return to prison
On 26 January 1982 in Los Angeles, Boyce was convicted of escape from federal prison in a nonjury trial before U.S. District Court Judge Lawrence Lydick, a proceeding which lasted three minutes.[17] The following week he was flown to Idaho and was arraigned in Boise, where he pleaded not guilty to charges related to multiple bank robberies.[18][19][20][21][22][23]
Later that year, Boyce gave a television interview to Ray Martin for Australia's 60 Minutes about the dismissal of Whitlam. After this he was assaulted by fellow inmates, an attack he believed was orchestrated by prison guards.[30] After the attack, he was transferred to USP Marion in southern Illinois, where he was held in isolation.[31]
With support from senators, he was transferred out of solitary confinement in 1988 to the Minnesota Correctional Facility – Oak Park Heights near the Twin Cities.[33] At this prison in January 1993, Boyce was almost killed by Earl Steven Karr, a mentally ill fellow inmate and convicted pipe bomber. Karr had planned to blind Boyce with a mace-like concoction after luring him into his cell, then electrocute him using a homemade electric shock prod fashioned out of a rod and newspaper. The plot failed when Karr slipped on a puddle of mace, allowing Boyce time to escape.[34]
Boyce was transferred in 1998 to ADX Florence, the supermax facility in Colorado west of Pueblo; he believed this was punishment for a newspaper article he had written.[35] In 2000, he was transferred to FCI Sheridan in Oregon, northwest of Salem.[36]
Release and subsequent life
Boyce was released from prison on parole on 16 September 2002 after serving a little more than 25 years, accounting for his time spent outside from the escape.[37][38] Shortly thereafter he married Kathleen Mills, whom he had met when she was working as a paralegal spearheading efforts to obtain parole for Lee. After her success with Lee, she turned her attention to securing parole for Boyce as well, and the two developed a personal relationship.[39] Boyce is on good terms with his father and eight siblings, and was with his mother as well until her death in 2017.[40]
In 2013, Boyce published a book titled American Sons: The Untold Story of the Falcon and the Snowman, which mainly discusses his time in prison and relationship with his wife, Kathleen, and writer Vince Font. At that time, he was living a relatively quiet life where he has resumed his participation in falconry as a frequent pastime.[40] When interviewed at the time his book was released, Boyce expressed support for the actions of Edward Snowden in exposing information about the United States government's surveillance programs.[40]
Lindsey's initial book was followed by The Flight of the Falcon: The True Story of the Escape and Manhunt for America's Most Wanted Spy (1983), an account of Boyce's escape from prison and subsequent bank robbing spree.
^"Testimony of Christopher J. Boyce, Convicted Spy"(PDF). Polygraph. Vol. 14, no. 2. American Polygraph Association. June 1985. p. 129. Retrieved 25 December 2023. Suffice it to say that from March 1975 through December 1976, I removed or photographed a sizeable number of classified documents from the highly secret "black vault" of TRW, a CIA contractor in Redondo Beach, California and sent them on with Daulton to the KGB in Mexico City. I was able to obtain those documents through my position as a specially cleared TRW employee, working in the black vault, located in building M4.
^Pilger, John, A Secret Country, Vintage Books, London, 1992, ISBN9780099152316, pp. 212-15, 230, 236, 252.
^"The Falcon and the Fallout". Los Angeles Times. 2 March 2003. Retrieved 30 January 2023. He needed money, and he found banks an easy mark. He hit a dozen of them throughout the Pacific Northwest, hoping to pay for passage to the Soviet Union. He would have friends there, he thought. He would be safe. But these would be mere flights of fancy.
^Boyce, Christopher; Boyce, Cait; Font, Vince (2013). The Falcon and the Snowman: American Sons. Vince Font. pp. 63–65, 80–86.
Robert Lindsey, The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of Friendship and Espionage, Lyons Press, 1979, ISBN1-58574-502-2
Robert Lindsey, The Flight of the Falcon: The True Story of the Escape and Manhunt for America's Most Wanted Spy, Simon & Schuster, 1983, ISBN0-671-45159-6
Christopher Boyce, Cait Boyce, Vince Font, American Sons: The Untold Story of the Falcon and the Snowman, Glass Spider Publishing, 2013/2017, ISBN978-0-9997070-3-6
