Infamous America - SPIES LIKE US Ep. 2 | “The Black Vault”

Episode Date: November 23, 2022

By 1974, Chris Boyce works in one of the most secretive spaces at his employer’s facility. He monitors highly classified Top Secret communications, and he becomes disgruntled. One day, he comes up with the plan: sell the Top Secret information to the Russians. He recruits his friend Daulton Lee, and together they embark on the craziest journey of espionage in American history. 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

A badge with corresponding clearance is required for entrance into all buildings on the TRW campus. Lost badges must be reported to supervisors immediately. Personal guests are not permitted in any building of the TRW campus under any circumstances. Official visitors must be approved and accompanied by security at all times. Any information about your job, including but not limited to your specific duties, security clearance, or project details should not be discussed with anyone without proper clearance in the company. Employees should never knowingly or willingly share, discuss, or transmit any classified information to any unauthorized person or agency, either foreign or domestic.

Those were the sorts of rules that greeted Christopher Boyce when he began to work for Thompson-Rameau-Woldridge Incorporated in 1974. Within months, he would move up quickly from a clerk who managed the movements of classified documents to working in what was ominously known as the Black Vault. There he would have his hands on transmissions, documents, and information that was critical to national security. Around the same time, Chris's friend Dalton Lee was being regulated by rules as well. Inmates must keep the cell clean at all times. Personal items will be kept neat and orderly.

Visitors are a privilege. Visits will be supervised. Visits may be terminated at any time at the guard or warden's discretion. Mail is a privilege. All mail flowing in or out of the facility will be subject to inspection. Prisoners must report any rule violations to guards or they will be punished. Dalton was finishing a prison sentence at a work farm 60 miles north of Palos Verdes. considering he'd had two arrests for drug dealing while already on parole, the sentence was lenient.

He told the guards as he was released that he planned to go back to school. But that was a lie. He would be dealing again in no time, and he was on the verge of getting deep into something much more sensational. His buddy Chris Boyce had demons that would soon get the better of his angels. And together the two boyhood friends would embark on a journey of espionage and treason that was almost too crazy to believe. 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 two, the Black Vault. By December of 1974, Chris Boyce had finished training to work in the area of his building at TRW, where the most secure information was kept. top secret communications from around the globe were monitored and then relayed from that area.

Oftentimes, their destination was Langley, Virginia, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency. Later, Boyce found out that although he was technically still a TRW employee, his pay now came from the CIA. Boyce knew he had been vetted by the agency. Agents poured over school records and interviewed his friends and teachers. teachers, and even his priests. He listened to hours of lectures on the insidious threats from the Soviets and the lengths that KGB might go to corrupt Americans. Boyce had been asked to memorize a seemingly endless list of procedures and protocols for handling documents, encrypted messages, and cipher cards. On his first day, as he walked to his new post in the so-called black vault,

he felt like he was on the cusp of the mythical secret chambers of the Vatican, or the fabled storage facilities for gold at Fort Knox. But what he found was the last thing he expected. Apparently, the wildest party, with the most exclusive guest list in Los Angeles, was happening in what was supposed to be one of the most secure rooms in the United States. Because only about 10 people at TRW had access to the Black Vault, the small roster of employees enjoyed the unfettered ability to work in what felt more like a frat house than a highly classified office. Empty bottles of beefeeder gin and Jose Cuervo tequila shared trash bins with unshreaded documents that might have technical information about government satellites.

A marijuana plant sat on a vault with a two-inch thick door where daily access codes to encryption machines were secured. It was not uncommon for one of Chris's coworkers to come back from lunch at a nearby tavern, half drunk, and sleep off the alcohol underneath his or her desk. If a lack of supplies became an issue, someone would take a liquor order and then head out carrying a special dossier for transporting top-secret documents, so top-secret that security guards at the building's entrances couldn't search them. They'd return with a dossier full of tiny liquor bottles. After all the sessions he sat through about TRW employee's responsibility to national security, Boyce watched booze and drugs flow in and out of the black vault. almost entirely unimpeded. Chris, who had never minded a good party,

fit into the office dynamic with ease. He loved to tell the story of how on a particularly hot day they used the industrial paper shredder to grind ice so they could enjoy frozen margaritas, complete with colorful little drink umbrellas. But while the party in the Black Vault raged, the reality was the information

these partygoers were responsible for was every bit as sensitive as Chris's training said it would be. One of his main responsibilities was to decrypt and relay messages from a U.S. facility in Australia to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Encrypted messages would arrive on a KW7 machine, something akin to an old TELX machine. The frequencies the machines transmitted on were routinely changed, and decrypting them required a code that changed every day.

Chris quickly realized these messages were data that were being collected by satellites, spy satellites, surveilling communications of the communist adversaries of the United States. The spy satellite program was known as Project Rialite. The messages that Chris Boyes handled concerns nuclear research and development, weapons test, and troop movements. And often they revealed how little or how much the Soviets or the Chinese knew about America. connectivity. Chris's superiors sold the job to him as a way that he could serve his country. But Chris was troubled. He was just 21 years old, and he was receiving a glimpse into his nation's clandestine services. He was seeing some of the secret maneuvers that really ran the world,

and some of the secrets bothered him. But for at least a time, he was content to keep his head down, collect his $140 a week, and think about a future that he believed was still bright with possibility. And then, his friend Dalton Lee was released from prison, and the future started to look much different. My relentless sleep problems have always come from an overactive mind. I lay in bed at night with my mind racing from one thing to another, and then, of course, I have a brainstorm about something new. That lights the fire, and then I'm in real trouble. To calm my mind, the only things that have ever worked with any consistency are sleep gummies. Sleepy Time Advanced Gummies from Mood.com come in various combinations of THC, CBD, and CBN.

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As Chris was navigating the secret waters of TRW's Black Vault, Dalton Lee was pleading for an early release from his sentence on the work farm. The pleas proved successful, and Lee was paroled. That parole was obviously contingent upon securing full-time legal employment. Lee had also persuaded the judge with promises to once again give higher education a shot. He promised to enroll at nearby Harbor College. He didn't keep that promise, nor did he find himself a reliable nine-to-five job with benefits in a pension like his friend Chris Boyce had.

Dalton Lee returned to what he knew best. He built back up his drug trade in the beach cities of Los Angeles. Soon he was focused on two things, cutting out the middlemen and diversification. First, he successfully connected with bigger drug suppliers in Mexico. He was now buying directly from a cartel. He could now bring in a lot more product, but more product meant more risk.

Lee mitigated that by having many of his big customers make their purchases in Mexico. In those cases, the customer dealt with the risk of transporting the drugs across the U.S. Mexico border. And then to diversify, Lee took on a new product, heroin. Like many who pushed marijuana and cocaine, Dalton had, at times, been adamant about staying away from heroin. He promised himself he wouldn't sell it, and he definitely wouldn't use. it. But the lure of the money and the great demand in Southern California was too much to keep the first promise, and eventually he broke the second as well. When Dalton left the prison work farm,

he and Chris Boyce fell back into their old routine. They enjoyed their time out in the Mojave Desert with their birds of prey. They enjoyed their lives of leisure at the beach and in the bars in the area. But most often, they enjoyed partying at Dalton's house. As always, being a dealer made Dalton feel like a big shot, and he didn't hesitate to talk about it. He loved to regale anyone who would listen, including Chris. Chris couldn't be talkative. His job required him to remain silent about the things he saw and did at TRW. But as time passed, it became difficult to stay silent.

The depth and scope of the secrets he was exposed to wore on him, and not everyone followed the rules like Chris tried to. One of Chris's coworkers in the Black Vault was a guy named Gene Norman. Norman was a Vietnam vet who had made the most of the paradoxical work environment in their secretive department. He drank as much as anyone and was the type of drunk who liked to talk. Whether he was in the office or out at a bar, Norman took great pleasure in educating Chris Boyce about the secret world around him in Southern California. The U-2 spy plane had been developed by the United States.

by the Lockheed Corporation's Skunk Works program, which was headquartered right up the freeway in Burbank. The Rand Corporation in Santa Monica had been working with the Pentagon to explore using satellites to spy on enemies since the conclusion of World War II. But if you were alive in the early 1970s, you knew about the Rand Corporation due to the seismic Pentagon paper scandal.

In 1971, Daniel Ellsberg, a Rand employee, copied hundreds of pages of documents about the secret history of the Vietnam War and gave them to the New York Times and other newspapers. Probably no other single event did more to turn Americans against the war in Vietnam than the release of the Pentagon Papers. But by 1974, when Chris Boyce was working in the Black Vault, the Vietnam War was nearly done. President Richard Nixon's downfall was nearly complete,

and much of the intelligence community was refocusing on its old communist adversary, Russia. The Rand Corporation's research led to programs like Pyrameter that used the first keyhole satellites, and Rialite, the program that Gene Norman and Chris Boyce were now tied to. Those programs and their resulting satellites were designed to spy on the Soviet Union. Norman had no problem rationalizing Rialite because they were all sure the Soviets had spy satellites watching Americans as well. Not only that, but Norman imagined there were Soviet spies walking around all over the place.

His fear of communist infiltration was ingrained in the American psyche during the Cold War. While Norman and Boyce and other TRW employees sat at a bar, Norman speculated out loud about the value of the information in the Black Vault. He said there could be a KGB operative in the bar that, very minute. If the TRW employees wanted to sell their information, they could make a fortune. Norman peered to his right and left as he spoke. They'd pay 20,000, maybe even 50,000 a month, a month for what we could get them. In the time it took Norman to take another drink of his beverage, he realized he had said too much. He grew silent. Luckily for Norman, most of his

co-workers didn't seem to hear him. His words, for the most part, fell on deaf or drunk ears. But Chris Boyce heard them, and he never forgot them. In early 1975, roughly 7,500 miles from the hill and the Black Vault, the Prime Minister of Australia stued over his prospects for his year's agenda. The Prime Minister, Gough Whitlam, was a socially progressive labor leader who spent his first years pushing to strengthen Australia's place in the world as a leading industrialized nation. Although Australia was a vital non-NATO ally of the United States, Whitlam was not popular with the Nixon administration. As Australia brought the last of its troops home from the Vietnam War in the early 1970s, Whitlam was very critical of further American action. That infuriated President Nixon.

Nixon went so far as to refuse to meet Whitlam when Whitlam traveled to the U.S. in 1973. Following his snub by Nixon, Prime Minister Whitlam's problems with the United States, and specifically its intelligence community, escalated. He had questions about a place called Pine Gap. It was an installation near a small town in the middle of the Australian outback. American intelligence used it to receive messages from its spy satellite. before relaying them back to the United States, specifically to the Black Vault at TRW. Those messages became extremely interesting to Chris Boyce. One day in the spring of 1975, after scanning his personal access card to enter the Black

Vault, Chris sat down at his desk to begin his work. He spun around in his swiveling desk chair and faced the safe where the cipher cards for the KW7 machines were kept. The machines received incoming encrypted messages from all over the world. And each day, Chris needed a new code to decipher the messages. He opened the safe, grabbed the list of codes, and entered the right one for the day. He wisely made the decision to wait a few hours before drinking his first screwdriver or Harvey Wallbanger. For now, he would just start his day off with instant coffee and top secret messages of serious importance to national security. As he scanned the message, certain words jumped out at him.

Rainfall, CIA, Union strikes, Whitlam interference. Organizers must be persuaded. The more he read, the more he realized what it all meant. The CIA, his employer, was, with or without the knowledge of the U.S. government, actively interfering with peaceful protests by labor unions and the operation of the government of a foreign ally. Chris later claimed that this wasn't the last time he saw evidence of those sorts of dealings. Apparently, Prime Minister Whitlam's pro-labor stances

equaled communism to some people in the American intelligence community. Chris had watched the nightly news through the Watergate investigations and trials. He had heard the rumors of CIA participation in the 1973 Chilean coup d'etat that overthrew the democratically elected Salvador Allende and put General Augustus Pinochet in power. Now, Chris thought he saw similar signs in Australia. It looked like the U.S. might be subverting the political process of one of its allies. As the messages continued clicking out,

Chris slouched back in his swivel chair. He was deflated and angry. He could hear his coworkers shouting and laughing about something they had seen on the Johnny Carson show the previous night. That day's party in the black vault was underway. But Chris needed to think. His country was withholding intelligence from its allies. It was interfering with their politics and trying to influence their policies. And it was all happening without the knowledge of the American people, and certainly the Australian people. He needed to think all right, but he was frightened about where those thoughts might lead him. As Chris grappled with troubling new realizations,

Dalton raked in the money from his new diversified business. Since he started dealing heroin in addition to marijuana and cocaine, his business was booming. But he was now back on the radar of local, state, and federal authorities. Lately he had fallen into the habit of giving free samples of his products to potential customers. In cold business terms, the upside was that he could turn those grateful new customers into addicts who would keep coming back for more. The downside was that he advertised his business to unknown users for free.

Dalton's greed was making him careless. On a morning in late March, 1975, his carelessness caught up with him. He sat in a Redondo Beach apartment that was rented by one of his associates. The two used the apartment for parties every once in a while, but mostly it was a chop shop for various drugs that were now on Dalton Lee's menu.

Dalton sat on the couch with his feet up, perusing the headlines of the LA Times. The evacuation of South Vietnam continued. The king of Saudi Arabia had been killed by his own nephew. New things called bar codes were catching on in retail stores, and clerks threatened to go on strike. And then there was a knock at the door. Even though there were drugs all over the kitchen table, Dalton's friend, who was remarkably stoned,

answer the door in a leisurely carefree way. The friend yelled cops, and Dalton bolted off the couch. He stumbled into the kitchen and swept up as much of the drug cash as he could and locked himself in the nearest bathroom. He dumped baggies of coke, marijuana, and heroin into the toilet. He slammed the handle to flush it and jammed his fist into the bowl to force the drugs to go down. He heard yelling and then shattering glass.

He watched the bathroom door, handle jiggle, and then seconds later it flew open. Dalton looked up to see a sheriff's deputy and the barrel of a 38 revolver. The cop cuffed Dalton and walked him back through the apartment. The cops were bagging the rest of his drugs as evidence. He was astonished to discover that the shattering glass he had heard was from one of the apartment's second-story windows. His friend dove through the window in an effort to escape. The friend crash landed on a parked car, and luckily sustained only minor injuries. But needless to say, he did not escape.

A few days later, Dalton stood in court at an arraignment hearing. He was charged with possession and distribution of narcotics, and his bail was set at $15,000. He managed to get the charges reduced to merely being present where marijuana was being smoked. His bail was reduced to $500. Dalton posted bail, but the cops weren't going to let him go that easy.

He had broken every requirement of his parole from the work farm, and he was clearly deeper in the drug business than ever before. So the cops gave him a choice, go to jail or become an informant. Now, Dalton was just as troubled as Chris, but for different reasons. The two friends sat on the edge of the pool at Dalton's parents' house and sipped gin and tonics and talked about their situations. Chris talked more freely than usual. In recent weeks, his frustration with knowing the kinds of work he was really doing

led him to open up to Dalton. And there, beside the pool at Dalton's house, Chris proposed an idea. Maybe he'd been thinking about it for weeks, or maybe it was just the spontaneous thought of a drunk 21-year-old. As Chris talked, Dalton thought his friend was joking. Then he thought Chris was just crazy. But the more Chris talked, the more Dalton thought the idea just might work. They were both struggling.

Chris's job tore at his conscience, and Dalton was looking at real prison time. They both felt like something needed to change. They both felt desperate. Chris's idea was borderline insane, and it had the potential for extreme, real-world danger, not movie danger. But, hell, Dalton knew danger. he'd moved hundreds and maybe thousands of pounds of drugs from Mexico into the U.S. He had dealt with Mexican drug cartels face to face. He carried a gun for security.

So, how much more dangerous could Chris's proposition really be? Dalton thought, well, what we're doing isn't working. Might as well try something else. So screw it. Let's be spies. In early April 1975, Dalton Lee boarded a Western Airlines flight out of Los Angeles for Mexico City. As he made his way down the aisle to his seat,

every nerve ending in every square inch of his skin felt like it was on fire. He couldn't remember being this nervous flying to or from Mexico. His anxiety probably centered on the large envelope that was stuffed into his breast pocket. The flight took off as normal. As the DC-10 banked out over the Pacific Ocean and turned south,

Dalton could see Palos Verdes from the plane, He could almost make out his house and Chris's house, and the campus of the St. John Fisher School, where the two had met and become friends. As Dalton impatiently waited for the liquor cart to roll down the aisle, he had plenty of time to sweat about the events that led him to this moment. Like most questionable plans, it started simple enough. Chris Boyce would find a way to leave the black fault at TRW with top secret information.

He would give it to Dalton. Dalton would take it to the embassy of a foreign nation that would find the information extremely valuable. He would start with the Soviet embassy, and if they weren't interested, he would try the Chinese embassy. But this couldn't happen in the U.S. Chris remembered something his co-worker Gene Norman had said. Gene figured that approaching an embassy in Los Angeles, or anywhere in the U.S., would be too risky. They would be closely watched. any repeat visitors would certainly raise suspicion.

So that was how Dalton Lee, 23 years old, ended up on a plane to Mexico City with an envelope that contained top secret transmissions and a cipher card to break the encryption. Compared to the steps that had led him to the point where he was sitting on a plane waiting for his first cocktail, the rest of the plan was simple. Dalton, a known drug dealer,

was going to walk up to the Soviet embassy, pound on the door and hoped someone would speak to him about committing espionage and treason. That was it. That was the master plan. The plane landed, Dalton gathered his belongings and navigated the airport in Mexico City. He flagged a taxi and asked to be taken to La Condeza, an area about five miles from the airport. Once there, he walked the tree-lined streets until he came to an imposing building surrounded by a steel, fence with a guarded gate. The Soviet embassy looked like a fortress. It was now or never, and Dalton didn't come all this way to back out now. He strode up to the gate, and against all

forms of logic, the plan worked exactly as he hoped. He identified himself as an American with information that would interest the Russians. A guard escorted Dalton inside and told him to sit in a nicely decorated waiting area. After a short time, a man with an intimidating appearance greeted him. The man said he was a clerk for the embassy, but Dalton had dealt with cops, detectives, and federal agents. He knew that Vassili Ivanovich Okana was not a clerk. He was an agent for the KGB, the infamous security agency for the Soviet Union. Dalton wasted no time. He told O'Connor that he was a courier, a representative of his friend in Southern California. The friend had access to classified, top-secret information.

Dalton leaned in toward his new associate. He whispered that it was all about spy satellites. O'Connor asked why Dalton's friend wished to share information with the USSR and why they both wanted to take such risks. Dalton assured O'Connor they both had communist sympathies. He rambled about the hypocrisy of U.S. foreign policy and the dangers of American exceptionalism. O'Connor nodded in silent agreement.

Then Dalton got down to business. He said the stuff his friend could get for them was so good that O'Connor and his comrades would pay big time for it. O'Connor smiled. He asked for Dalton's identification, which Dalton provided. O'Connor asked if Dalton had any information with him, and Dalton produced the envelope with the coded messages and the cipher card. The Russian accepted them and gestured to another man who looked like a waiter.

O'Connor said he would return shortly, and that Dalton would be taken care of while he waited. O'Connor disappeared up a staircase, and the waiter walked over to Dalton with a tray. It held two glasses, a bottle of vodka, and a bowl of caviar. Dalton helped himself. O'Connor returned with an envelope in his hand. He sat across from Dalton and poured himself a healthy splash of vodka. He gulped it down and refilled his glass. Then he gave Dalton the good news.

The people he represented were very interested in the information that Dalton's friend could provide. And yes, they were willing to pay for it. O'Connor handed the envelope to Dalton and told him it was enough money to cover the expenses of his trip home. The two men shook hands, planned another meeting, and said their goodbyes. Dalton Lee walked out into the hot, thin air of Mexico City, feeling invincible. Just like that, he was a spy. This was going to be easy, he thought. A cakewalk.

It was foolproof. Next time on Infamous America, the espionage operation kicks into high gear. The Russians teach Dalton some tricks of the spy trade, and Chris develops new tricks for stealing information from his employer. But that doesn't mean there aren't some terrifying clothes. calls along the way. 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. music by Rob Valier. 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-Barrell Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America podcast. Thanks for listening.