Infamous America - SPIES LIKE US Ep. 1 | “California Dreamin”

Episode Date: November 16, 2022

In the 1960s, Chris Boyce and Daulton Lee grow up in the wealthy community of Palos Verdes in the greater Los Angeles area. Neither young man excels in school. Daulton becomes a drug dealer, and he runs afoul of the law early and often. Chris’s father helps him get a job at an airplane manufacturing company, but Chris quickly learns that the company does much more than make airplane parts. It has contracts with the CIA and the Defense Department to run Top Secret programs. In nearly the blink of an eye, Chris Boyce is working with highly classified materials, and he doesn’t like what he sees. Check out the Jordan Harbinger show today! jordanharbinger.com/start Join Black Barrel+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons: blackbarrel.supportingcast.fm/join Apple users join Noiser+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. On YouTube, subscribe to INFAMOUS+ for ad-free episodes and bingeable seasons. Hit “JOIN” on the Infamous America YouTube homepage.  https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCm4V_wVD7N1gEB045t7-V0w/featured For more details, please visit www.blackbarrelmedia.com. Our social media pages are: @blackbarrelmedia on Facebook and Instagram, and @bbarrelmedia on Twitter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

The federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles was mayhem. News vans from throughout Southern California lined the streets, making the already notorious L.A. traffic even more unbearable. It was a hotter-than-usual February day, and the equally notorious L.A. smog trapped the heat that radiated off the asphalt. Stringers from across the country and reporters from all the major networks clog the steps leading to the massive doors of the courthouse. Lawyers, witnesses, and members of the gallery could barely make their way inside.

Dozens of cases would go before the judge that day, but the media was only clamoring for one. And the madness was not even for the verdict or the sentencing. Two men, defendants in one of the most infamous cases of the 1970s, were only there for a formality, a basic evidentiary ruling in the run-up to the trial. The circus had descended on downtown L.A. because a few weeks of earlier, Christopher Boyce and Andrew Dalton Lee had been indicted on eight counts of conspiracy and espionage. They were charged with stealing classified intelligence, taking it across international borders, and selling it to the Soviet Union. If you sided with the narrative

being spun on the nightly news, they had, in the midst of the Cold War, betrayed their nation. They had endangered their fellow Americans and democracy itself by giving up top secret documents to the only other global superpower. But nothing about Boyce and Lee led on that they were spies. They weren't the suave, smooth-talking James Bond type from the Ian Fleming novels. They weren't the clever, calculating type

from the John Le Coray novels. And they certainly weren't the badass assassin type from Robert Ludlum's Jason Bourne novels. They were just two young men who were barely out of adolescence. They were in their early 20s. They were rich kids from good homes who had spent most of their teenage years divided blissfully between the beach, girls, and drugs.

They were smart. Each had a future of promise if they wished to pursue it. But the lure of fast money for one and the chance to change world events for the other snowballed into an international incident that would touch Washington, D.C., California, Mexico, Australia, and beyond. Some would call the story of Boyce and Lee the most infamous case of espionage since the saga of the Rosenbergs in the early 1950s. Experts in the government would blame the pair for the fact that international treaties fell apart. The intelligence community would hint that Chris Boyce and Dalton Lee risked the U.S. ability to protect itself from a possible nuclear war. The machinations they said in play would affect U.S. diplomacy and security for years.

And all of that begged the question, how in the world did two childhood friends with no college educations, no espionage experience, and no military experience, find themselves at the center of a conflict between the world's two superpowers? It's one of the craziest damn stories you'll ever hear. From Black Barrel Media, this is Infamous America. I'm your host, Chris Wimmer, and this season we're telling the wild story of how two friends ended up perpetrating one of the most notorious acts of espionage in the 20th century. This is episode one, California Dream.

Many people are familiar with the neighborhoods of the rich and famous in Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Bel Air, and the Hollywood Hills. Along the coast, there's Malibu in the north, and then Santa Monica, Venice, Manhattan Beach, Ramosa Beach, Redondo Beach, and finally, Palos Verdes. The Palos Verdez Peninsula anchors the, the southern end of the series of beaches that attract millions of people from around the world. Palos Verdes isn't as well known as some of its neighbors, but it's home to some of the richest

people in L.A. The peninsula is nicknamed the Hill, because it's a rocky outcrop that rises above the beach communities. On a clear day, you can see the Hollywood sign and downtown L.A. framed against the backdrop of the San Gabriel Mountains. And on the hill in Palos Verdes is where this story starts. The area where residential development dated back to the turn of the century grew rapidly after the Second World War. The gated communities on the hill didn't quite match the opulence of the neighborhoods like Bel Air and Beverly Hills, but there was no shortage of money in Palos Verdes. There were families of doctors and lawyers, and men and women of industry.

The driveways were full of BMWs, Porsches, and Alpha-Romeos, and the spacious ranch houses with orange Mediterranean tile roofs were a sign of prestige to the city that towered above. It was a country club lifestyle, pool parties, Saturday mornings on the golf course, and Sundays playing tennis. They took their tennis seriously on the hill. Three future world tennis number ones called the peninsula home in the 1970s. The adults of Palos Verdes in the 1970s bought into the post-war promise of the American

dream and were reaping the rewards. But their children, the young men and women of the era, viewed the world differently from their parents. The 60s brought the Vietnam War, assassinations, the civil rights movement, and the violence that came with it. From their parents' Spanish-style villas, the children of Palos Verdes would have been able to look down and see South Central Los Angeles burn during the Watts riots of 1965. They might have known someone who was downtown three years later when Sirius.

hands or hand shot and killed presidential hopeful Robert Kennedy at the Ambassador Hotel. And they certainly would have known some poor young man with a low draft number who came home fractured from Southeast Asia if he came back at all. The despondency that many young people felt, coupled with the affluence of where they had been raised, left them seemingly without ambition but with ample free time. Often they filled that time with surfing and partying in the Southern California sun. And increasingly, that partying included much more than coolers of beer on the beach. The drug culture first made its way up to the hill in the form of marijuana.

But as the 1960s progressed, harder drugs could be found everywhere in Palos Verdes. Prescription pills, cocaine, psychedelics, even heroin, made their way into the gated communities. This world of idle hands, lots of money, and no direction, was the world of Dalton Lee as he graduated. high school in 1970, and that of his friend Chris Boyce, who graduated a year later. For Chris and Dalton, a combination of greed and frustration and ambition and angst, were going to drive them to embark on an operation that would shock the seemingly charmed neighborhoods of their childhood. Charles and Noreen Boyce were certainly well-off and well-respected in Palos Verdes,

but by no means were they in the upper echelon of wealth. Charles was a reserved but likable man who served in the Second World War and then nearly pursued a career as a professional athlete. An elbow injury kept him from a chance to pitch for the New York Giants. Instead, the Colorado native pursued a career in the law. After he graduated from college, he joined the FBI. Boyce eventually took a post for the Bureau in the Northeast as McCarthyism was gaining traction in the country.

led by the Wisconsin Senator Joe McCarthy, a red scare swept the nation, and private citizens and public figures found themselves accused of being communists for merely saying anything that sounded remotely sympathetic to the ideology or the Soviet Union. Although outside of his purview, Charles Boyce would have been with the Bureau when it began investigating a couple from New York named Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. until Charles's own son joined the ranks of infamy, no other name was more closely connected with espionage against the U.S. than Rosenberg. The Rosenbergs were accused, tried, and convicted of spying on the U.S. government for the Soviet Union. In 1953, under provisions of the Espionage Act, the Rosenbergs were sentenced to death. This was the tenuous and contentious atmosphere in America as it began a face-off with the world's other remaining superpower.

Scholar Walter Lipman gave the tension between the two nations a name, the Cold War. Charles Boyce only remained in the Northeast and with the Bureau for a few years before making his way to Southern California. But in those years, he met and married Noreen Hollenbeck. Noreen was originally from Ohio, and until just before she met Charles, she had planned to become a nun. With Noreen's Catholicism and Charles' patriotism support.

for the military and the ideals of democracy, the two were the very definition of a traditional American family of the Truman era. The catalyst for the couple's move to Palos Verdes was a new job for Charles as the head of security for McDonnell Douglas Aeronautics in Long Beach. A year after their move, in February of 1953, Christopher Boyce was born, the first of nine boys' children. Soon enough, Chris would benefit from his father's years. of working for the FBI and the booming aviation and aerospace sector. But it would be in a way that his father could scarcely believe. As a boy, Chris Boyce was adventurous and curious.

He loved sports and nature, and his father instilled in him a love of history, a sense of service, and belief in American exceptionalism. The significance of these ideals was matched by his mother's Catholic faith. The family were devout attendees of St. John Fisher, a Catholic church in Palis Verdes. Like his mother, Catholicism spoke to Boyce on a deep level, and he too had thoughts of joining the cloth at an early age.

In his pre-teen years, Chris grew close with many of the Catholic leaders, including Father Glenn and Monsignor Thomas McCarthy. Monsignor McCarthy talked about Chris Boyce years later and said, I don't think I've ever known a boy with such idealism. He was one of the finest boys I'd ever met or taught. Chris attended St. John Fisher Elementary School. Like him, many of the students became altar boys, and it was as an altar boy that Chris Boyce met Andrew Dalton Lee. Dalton Bradley Lee earned the Flying Cross and the Croix de Guerre for flying combat missions

over Europe in a B-24 Liberator. He came home with the idea of studying medicine, settling down with his wife Anne and their baby girl, and living a life of American prosperity that so many believed was possible now that World War II was over. Lee did just that, graduating from USC medical school and pursuing the lucrative field of pathology. He and Anne settled in Palos Verdes, but slightly farther up the hill than the Boyce family. The Lees could have been the poster children

for the country club lifestyle of the estates of Palos Verdes. The couple's first child had been born just before Dalton Sr. went off to war, and when he returned, they discovered that Anne would not be able to have additional children. Although discouraged, the couple still wanted to grow their family. They adopted three kids. Mary Ann and David were numbers two and three. But the first was a newborn they named Andrew, Andrew Dalton Lee.

The parents knew Andrew would go by his middle name, Dalton, and Dalton enjoyed a nurtured and carefree childhood. He was thought to be a kind and generous kid, always willing to share the spoils of his affluent upbringing with other children. He enjoyed building things and enjoyed impressing others with his craftsmanship. Along with his parents and siblings, Dalton immersed himself in the community, revolving around St. John Fisher Church and School. On any given Sunday, a parishioner could sit through Mass

and watch Dalton or Chris Boyce holding the gospel in front of Father Glenn as they marched down the center aisle or holding the communion plate for those taking the sacrament. Within the parish, there was some status to being an altar boy, and status was something that interested Dalton immensely as he made his way into adulthood. But in many ways, Dalton always seemed to be behind his classmates. He struggled in the classroom,

never really having the patience or attention for his studies. He was determined to compete in sports, but he continuously struggled. Much of that had to do with the fact that Dalton didn't share the stature of his father. Dalton Sr. was over six feet tall. Dalton Jr. barely made it over five feet. Dalton entered adolescence with insecurities about who he was and how much he was respected that plagued him well into adulthood.

He often felt overlooked by his peers, and he became skeptical of the people around him. But that didn't apply to his new friend, Chris Boyce. The two bonded as altar boys and quickly became good friends. Chris appreciated Dalton's blossoming ability as a carpenter. Chris never made Dalton feel inferior. Chris was good at school and sports, but Dalton wasn't, and it was never a problem between them. Most teenagers on the hill who weren't playing sports

or mastering their backhand on the tennis court at the country club were doing two things, surfing or skateboarding. Surfing was a time-honored tradition but skateboarding was a fast-growing phenomenon in Southern California. Whatever they found themselves doing, few teenagers would say that they spent their spare time trying to master the ancient art of falconry. Maybe the only two were Chris Boyce and Dalton Lee.

The sport, which some believe dates back to ancient Mesopotamia, involved training birds of prey, most often falcons, to fly from the arm of a person, hunt live animals, and obediently returned to the person's arm. It was a sport that required near full-time care of the birds. The birds needed to be meticulously trained and acclimated to humans, other pets, and the sounds of man.

They had to be hooded whenever they weren't hunting and had to maintain a strict carnivorous diet. Even the most dedicated and caring falconers could show you their scars from when an anxious bird caught them with a beak or a razor-sharp talon. The two friends kept their own birds on perches in Dalton's backyard, between the pool and the personal putting green of Dalton's father. Together they took the birds to open ranges throughout California,

from near the border of Mexico, all the way north to the central coast. In the future, Chris and Dalton might very well look back on their school days as young falconers and call them the good old days. And the good old days never last. As the two friends made their way through high school, they staved off the boredom with falconry, beers on the weekend, and the more than occasional joint. The increasing availability of drugs and the culture around it had a growing appeal for Dalton. He began to make a name for himself as a low-level dealer before graduation.

His indifference to his studies as a boy didn't change as he grew older. He would barely meet the standards to graduate high school. His parents had dreamed of their oldest son attending a prestigious university like Notre Dame, but that clearly wasn't a possibility. Although Dalton had hobbies and interests that ranged from carpentry and falconry to reading and fine art, he wasn't destined for academia or even trade school. He lasted only one semester at a junior college after high school, and then the hill pulled him back. And when it did, the industrious Dalton Lee decided it was time.

to move up through the ranks of the drug business. He cultivated his own sources to buy in bulk, and soon Dalton stopped being a peddler or a pusher and became his own boss. It wasn't long before Dalton was the go-to source in the South Bay and Palos Verdes for marijuana and cocaine. It also wasn't long before he caught the attention of the authorities. He was arrested for the first time in late 1971.

Fortunately, the charge was only for possession of marijuana, and not intent to sell. While it would be more than four decades before marijuana would be legal in California, the penalties for having the drug for personal use had been greatly relaxed, especially for a first-time offender. Dalton avoided jail time, but a term of his probation was that he had to enroll in college full-time. He did enroll, but that was about it.

After just a few months at Whittier College, he was back in Palos Verdes and trying to stay out of trouble. He tried a variety of jobs, telemarketer, shipping clerk, carpenter, and even yacht repairman in the marinas of San Pedro. But Dalton was ambitious, and in none of those jobs could he make thousands of dollars in a single week. So it was back to dealing drugs. For a while, Dalton was able to avoid law enforcement and grow his operation. But two summers later, that changed. In mid-July, 1973, on the boardwalk of the boardwalk of,

Huntington Beach, a teenager with sun-bleached hair and a surfers tan was hanging out by the pier. He struck up a conversation with a burly beach bum with an unkempt beard. The beach bum was looking to score, and the kid was holding. At first, the bearded man scoffed at the price, more than $50 for a gram of cocaine. But the teenager insisted that it was pure, high-quality stuff from a respectable dealer in L.A. With the transaction complete, they were a transaction complete, they went their separate ways, but not before the teenager passed a contact number to his new customer. It turned out that the kid was right.

The cocaine was high-quality stuff, and the customer wanted more. The beach bum customer came back with $1,300 in cash, and the teenager met him with more than 20 grams of Coke. When the exchange was made, the customer asked how old the kid was. The kid said he was 14. The beach bum with 3.000. The unruly beard shook his head, flashed his police badge, and cuffed the terrified teenager. Almost before the kid was in the back of a squad car, he gave up his source.

He said he got the drugs from his brother and his brother's partner, Dalton Lee. Dalton Lee was arrested, and it was his second arrest in the summer of 1973. He was still on parole from his arrest two years earlier, but even with the parole violations, he was able to walk out of jail after his arraignment. He paid the $10,000 bond with cash. Dalton's attorney told the judge that Dalton was a fine young man from a devout, upstanding family in Palos Verdes. The lawyer assured the judge that this drug dealing thing

was just a passing phase. If the judge gave Dalton another chance, the young man would find a respectable job or pursue higher education. The lawyer pleaded the judge. for leniency because of the physical and psychological damage that prison could do to the fragile, diminutive Dalton Lee. But the judge didn't see Dalton that way. The judge saw a long-haired criminal who was turning people into addicts for profit while other boys his age were in Vietnam fighting

for their country. He saw a repeat offender who was corrupting teenagers by involving them in the drug trade. But in the end, the judge did show a little mercy. He didn't throw Dalton to the wolves of the L.A. County Jail system. He gave Dalton a one-year sentence at a minimum security work camp. Dalton served his time, and while he was at the work camp, he vowed to make a change. But he had no intention of giving up the drug trade. The change was that he needed to be smarter about his business. Chris Boyce remained close with Dalton in the years after high school,

but he watched his friends rise through the drug world from the sidelines. He certainly sampled Dalton's drugs, but he at least tried to move forward with his life in a more conventional manner. He tried a nearby community college, but was uninspired. He attended a Jesuit university with the hope of reconnecting with the faith that anchored him as a boy, but that was also short-lived. Chris's last shot at college was at California Polytechnic University, in a serene part of California's central coast. He stayed for a year and then returned to Palos Ville. Bertes. On the surface, Chris's lack of direction might have made him look like a slacker or just simply apathetic. But Chris was a young man who felt things deeply and cared for the world around him.

Like many his age, the war in Vietnam weighed on him. He lost faith in American institutions. He'd been raised to revere. After the assassinations of Robert Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Malcolm X, came the shooting at Kent State University, where National Guardsmen killed four students who were protesting the war in Vietnam. After that, came the Watergate scandal. Chris grew disillusioned, but he still tried to find a path forward in society. By the spring of 1974, he somewhat begrudgingly asked his father for help. Like Charles Boyce, many of his neighbors were employed at various aerospace and aeronautical companies that dotted the communities around Palos Verdes. Charles, the former FBI agent turned private security executive, was eager to help his oldest son.

He reached out to his connections. Later that summer, Chris met one of his father's former FBI colleagues who now worked at Thompson-R-R-W-Wldridge, Inc., TRW for short. It was an informal meeting, but Chris was well-spoken and up front. He made it clear that a job at TRW would be temporary. He eventually wanted to return to San Luis Obispo to finish college. The TRW representative saw something in Chris that he liked. The young man was self-aware and sincere. He seemed trustworthy.

The rep thought Chris Boyce could do big things at TRW. The application and interview process turned out to be a formality. Chris Boyce got a job easily. He accepted a position as a general clerk in the Classified Material Control Department. As the name made clear, he would be handling documents deemed classified by TRW and the United States of America. As Chris quickly learned, TRW did much more than make parts for airplanes. The company had contracts with the Department of Defense to research and develop secret projects. One of the most important was to build satellites with keyhole surveillance technology.

Basically, TRW made spy satellites that the U.S. government used to watch its communist adversaries. In an exceptionally short amount of time, TRW moved Chris to a job at a secure area that could only be accessed with the highest levels of security. Chris Boyce was an agitated, anxiety-ridden 21-year-old, working for 100, $40 a week and one week of vacation per year. He was a three-time college dropout and a daily pot smoker. And now, he was one of less than a dozen people at the company with access to the most top secret information on the premises. TRW called it the Black Vault. And whatever kind of atmosphere you're picturing in your mind of a super secret facility with an ominous name like

the Black Vault, I promise you, you're wrong. The Black Vault is where the Red Vault is where the real craziness starts next week. Next time on Infamous America, Chris Boyce makes troubling discoveries in his new world of top secret intelligence, and Dalton Lee dives back into the drug business. When they both reach crossroads in their lives, Chris proposes a plan that is so ludicrous it just might work. That's next week on Infamous America. Members of our Black Barrel Plus program don't have to wait week to week for new episodes.

They receive the entire season to binge all at once with no commercials. And they also receive exclusive bonus episodes. Sign up now through the link in the show notes or on our website, blackbarrelmedia.com. Memberships begin at just $5 per month. This series was researched and written by Jamie Lyko, original music by Rob Ballier. I'm your host and producer, Chris Wimmer. Find us at our website, blackbarrelmedia.com or on our social media channels. We're Black Barrel Media on Facebook and Instagram and B-Barrel Media on Twitter.

And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast. Thanks for listening.