Infamous America - SPIES LIKE US Ep. 6 | “The Falcon and the Snowman”

Episode Date: December 21, 2022

The story of Chris Boyce and Daulton Lee isn’t done when they arrive at federal prison. They become international celebrities when the book “The Falcon and the Snowman” gets released. The book leads to a Hollywood movie, and their celebrity status rises. Then Chris executes another audacious plan and spends nearly two years on the run as an outlaw. Chris and Daulton survive prison and begin new lives, but their friendship will never be the same. 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

On the evening of January 21st, 1980, Chris Boyce was curled up in a concrete hole just a few feet deep in the recreation yard of Lompoc Federal Prison. The hole housed a pump underneath a heavy metal grate. Chris was waiting for the sun to set and hoping for a moonless night so he could begin a daring escape attempt. A few weeks earlier, he had discovered a weak point in the fence around the prison that could be exploited. Then, in a lucky accident, he had tripped over the grate that was now just inches above his head. He realized he'd found a hiding spot. He charmed his way on to a landscaping detail so that he could dig the mud and filth out of the hole without attracting attention. He had shoved a bunch of stuff under the covers of his bed so it looked like he was still sleeping.

He got the idea because the warden had, for some reason, shown Escape from Alcatraz as the Saturday Night movie. A friend who worked in the prison shop, fashioned a ladder, and stole a pair of sharp gardening shears. As far as Chris knew, none of his actions had raised suspicion. Now he prayed his luck would continue. He timed the guards as they walked their rounds. He studied the rotation of the searchlights in the guard tower. When the moment was right, he lifted the grate as quietly as he could and slithered out. He laid flat on the ground and waited for the lights to make another sweep of the prison.

yard. He pulled out the ladder and hurried to a corner by the main gate where two sections of fence met. It was the only spot an inmate could get to without facing a double fence and two rows of razor wire. He scurried up the rickety ladder and used the gardening shears to break the wire. He had maybe 90 seconds to cut a hole that would allow him to slide over the fence without slicing himself open. He chopped frantically at the wire. Any second, he could hear the shouts from the guards or shots from their rifles or barks from the guard dogs. Then he'd be caught or dead. But none of that happened.

He cut the wire and threw himself over the fence. For a second, he lay in the wet grass and listened and watched. Then he was up, on his feet, and sprinting for the tree line. He needed to cover a stretch of open ground that was a little longer than an American football field. If he could make it to the darkness of the woods beyond the open ground, The guards wouldn't realize he had busted out until the next morning. He had daydreamed that the headlines in the morning newspapers would read, The Falcon flies the coop.

And as his legs pistoned and his feet pounded the grass, he was just yards away from making that daydream come true. From Black Barrow 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 six, The Falcon and the Snowman. Chris began his prison sentence in a new facility in San Diego, but soon transferred north to Longpoke.

He was anxious about the move. At Longpoke, he was reunited with Dalton Lee. At first, their relationship was icy, but both felt resigned to their futures behind bars. There was a chance that they could be stuck with each other for the next four decades. Soon, they were cordial enough to share a cigarette and even a conundated. contraband miniature bottle of liquor. They played long games of chess like they had so many years ago, outside by the pool at Dalton's house, though the games now had few laughs and a great deal of silence.

Neither believed he had the Constitution to survive the sentence that lay ahead. Dalton's small size made him a target, and their crimes brought them a unique level of infamy. Even killers and rapists found the act of treason deplorable. Dalton's plan to survive was to keep his head down, be as invisible as possible, and take it one day at a time. Chris had other ideas. At Lompoc, Chris Freed connected with an inmate named Calvin Robinson, whom he'd met at Terminal Island prison in Los Angeles. Chris had shared his concern that prison would break him. By the time they reunited, he was sure of it.

Robinson would soon be out on parole, but he agreed, against his better judgment, to help Chris with an insane escape plan. Chris decided on his night to make his break. He had everything he needed, a hiding place, a ladder, and the gardening shears to cut the razor wire. He had checked everything off his list, except for one item. He had to talk to Dalton. Though each man still blamed the other for their situations, Chris felt some small responsibility to not abandon his friend. He was certain of Dalton's answer before he asked, but he knew he couldn't leave. without at least proposing that the two old friends team up one last time. When Chris approached Dalton about the escape, Dalton said no, as expected.

Chris pleaded, but Dalton was firm and angry. You put me here, he said. You put me here, and I don't need you to look out for me now. They stood in silence for a few minutes outside Dalton's cell. Chris tried not to imagine a scenario where his friend revealed the escape plan to the guards. He tried not to believe that Dalton might want him to get shot in the back while trying to climb the prison fences. Finally, Chris said, well, take care of yourself. Wish me luck. Dalton nodded and replied, try not to get yourself killed.

They gave each other one final look and then Chris left. When the alarm blared through the prison the next morning, Dalton realized that Chris had made it out. Chris Boyce had been housed in a rough part of Longpoke, but Dalton had been housed in a rough part of Longpoke, but Dalton had somehow ended up in an area that inmates referred to as the Honor Unit. Typically, the facilities were better and newer. It was generally safer, with less violence and fewer incidents that might make the guards reach for their clubs. But the unit had not lived up to its reputation for Dalton. He was unpopular with his fellow inmates, and though he had avoided serious bodily harm,

he was consistently harassed. The worst of it was having his cell torch. Some sort of flammable liquid had been sprayed through the bars, and then a lighter or a match had been thrown in. His books and personal items were burned to a crisp, and his bed became a mess of twisted metal. By the time he passed on his chance to escape with Chris, that had already happened twice. Thankfully, he hadn't been in the cell either time. Dalton's minor bit of relief came through his work detail as an assistant to the prison's chaplain. He had a desk in an office where he did clerical work and kept the chaplain's schedule.

The best part of the job was that he was often left to work alone. The chaplain seemed to like him, or at least take pity on him, and never turned him in when he found the office smelling of marijuana smoke. Chris's escape drew questions from the guards and unwanted attention from other inmates, but Dalton said he knew nothing about it. Their celebrity status ticked up at the end of 1979. when the LA Bureau Chief for the New York Times published an account of their story. Chris and Dalton both contributed to Robert Lindsay's book, Chris more so than Dalton,

and it was published under the memorable title, The Falcon and the Snowman. The book was a bestseller and solidified the nicknames that would follow the two young men for the rest of their lives. For the most part, Dalton had no wish for added notoriety. But one positive thing did come from the publication of the book. In July of 1981, a year and a half after Chris escaped from prison, Dalton received a visit from a young paralegal named Kate Mills. After reading the popular book and researching the case, Mills reached out to Dalton and asked if they could speak.

Kate had been struck by the show-trial atmosphere of the legal proceedings. She knew Dalton was guilty of a crime, many, in fact. She understood that his drug dealing was hard to ignore on top of selling secrets to the Soviets. She knew that the political climate between the two superpowers had not eased in the four years since Dalton's trial. But Kate couldn't accept

that the bad decisions of a drug-addled young man, decisions that led to non-violent crimes, should warrant life in prison. She was prepared to dive deep in an effort to free Dalton Lee. Kate and Dalton had one thing working in their favor. Life in prison didn't mean life in prison. At the time of their convictions, the now controversial mandatory minimum laws

had yet to gain the popularity that they would in 1980s America. Under California law, Dalton was allowed to ask the Parole Commission for a hearing after he had served just four years, and he could ask again every year after that. Dalton was understandably distrustful of the young woman who breezed into his life with thoughts of setting him free, so he was also understandably reluctant to allow himself to hope. He hadn't seen a lot of reason for it since the minute he'd been arrested by Mexican police

blindfolded and thrown into a basement. And he certainly hadn't seen any evidence of it at Long Polk Federal Prison. But eventually, he began to trust the paralegal from San Diego. And while Dalton Lee's belief in justice, rehabilitation, and freedom would constantly waver through the years, Kate Mills' belief did not.

She would fight tirelessly for more than 15 years to set Dalton free. And for the first year and a half of that time, Dalton's friend Chris was free. Chris Boyce lost count of the number of nights he spent in the wilderness beyond the fences and razor wire of longpoke. But when he emerged weeks after his escape, he was able to contact his former prisonmate, Calvin Robinson. Robinson had been paroled not long before Chris pulled off his prison break. Calvin knew that even answering a call from Chris could send him back to prison, but he had given his word. With Calvin's help, Chris was able to move north and bounced around small towns in the Pacific Northwest. For a time, he resided in and around Bonner's Ferry, Idaho. There, he was known as Sean Hennessy.

Then he moved west to the state of Washington. In Beaver, Washington, he used the name Sean Boyce. In Port Angeles, Washington, across the border from Victoria, Canada, he called himself Tony Lester. No one in the fishing and logging communities of the Pacific Northwest suspected the polite, laid-back young man was the infamous convicted spy and prison escapee. As stories hit newspapers nationwide, claiming that the authorities had picked up Chris's trail in Los Angeles or even Europe, Chris lived quietly in Northern California, Washington, or Washington, or. Oregon and Idaho. Or so it seemed. It was discovered later that Chris fully embraced the lifestyle of an outlaw to pay for his time on the run. He became a bank robber. In a year and a half, Chris robbed a dozen banks at gunpoint. He got away every time, and authorities never suspected that the serial robber was the same man who was on the U.S. Marshals' most wanted list. For 19 months, Chris evaded

capture, but it came to an end on August 21, 1981. Chris sat in his Osmobile in the parking lot of a burger joint known as the pit stop in Port Angeles, Washington. A task force of 20 members of federal law enforcement surrounded him and arrested him. Chris enjoyed the life of a celebrity prisoner while in custody in Washington State, but early the following year, it became clear he was headed back to federal prison. A judge added three years to his sentence for his escape from Long Pope. Chris pleaded guilty on five charges of armed robbery.

He felt bad for scaring people in the banks, and the judge found him sincere. Nevertheless, the judge gave Chris five years for each robbery. With time served, the 28-year-old was now looking at 65 years in prison. If the weight of that was not enough to crush his spirit, Chris's destination, would do its best to finish the job. He was headed to Leavenworth. The monolithic maximum security facility in Kansas is the oldest federal prison in the United States.

Through the years, it was home to William Hale, the suspected mastermind of many of the Osage murders in Oklahoma in the 1920s, the gangsters of the 1930s, James Earl Ray, the man who assassinated Martin Luther King, Whitey Bulger, the notorious Boston criminal Kingpin, and Robert Stroud, who was better known as the Birdman of Alcatraz. Chris spent six years in solitary confinement at Leavenworth and barely survived a brutal attack. From there, he was transferred to a federal prison in Minnesota.

He spent 10 years in Minnesota and then transferred to the only remaining Supermax prison in America, ADX Florence in Colorado. He arrived in 1998 and shared his new home with other celebrity criminal like Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bomber, and Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. But before the transfers, while Chris was still at Leavenworth, he received a letter from a young woman named Kate Mills. It was on behalf of Dalton Lee. It asked if the CIA had ever been involved in their sale of secrets to the Soviets. It asked if Dalton had really threatened to blackmail Chris, and if so, had Chris really believed him. The letter pleaded for any

information that could help Dalton in his efforts to be heard by the parole commission back in California. Chris's response was very sad at times and quite funny at others. He answered the questions, but he couldn't provide much help. He encouraged Kate to write again and keep him updated. He was curious about appeals and parole commissions, and most likely he was curious about Kate herself. It wasn't the last time he heard from her. Chris Boyce received a brief respite from Leavenworth Prison in April of 1985. He accepted an invitation to travel to Washington, D.C., to testify before the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations. In the past, the committee led investigations and heard testimony about everything from defense contract malfeasance to wartime

atrocities. A trip to sit before anyone in Congress might have turned Chris off immediately, but when he found out that the hearings would deal with the security measures that were, or in many cases were not in place at the national level, he was all in. On that, he had a great deal to say, and he looked forward to a chance to say it with cameras rolling. At the hearing, he outlined the shortcomings and deficiencies of the security of his former employer, Thompson-Ramo Waldridge. He repeated the consistent failings of government oversight at a company that handled the nation's most top-secret communications. He spared no details. He talked. He talked to He talked about the drinking and drug use in the Black Vault,

the space that was supposed to be one of the most sober and secure at TRW. It was the processing facility for top secret communications from around the world, but it had the atmosphere of a college party. He talked about how easy it was to take things from the Black Vault. He talked about the laziness and apathy of government inspections. At least one of those inspections should have led to his arrest. At the time, he was shocked that it hadn't. He excoriated the government and TRW, and he made sure to include himself as well.

He confessed to being a contemptuous young man who had made horrible choices. But he warned that real change was needed to protect the nation's secrets. The senators were stunned. And Chris's cooperation, candor, and contrition earned him a ticket out of Leavenworth and up to the federal prison in Minnesota. And the hearings weren't Chris's only brush with fame that year. Robert Lindsay's book, The Falcon and the Snowman, had been adapted into a Hollywood movie.

It starred Academy Award winner Timothy Hutton as Chris and eventual Academy Award winner Sean Penn as Dalton. Chris was allowed to watch the film in prison, with Timothy Hutton by his side. Cold War hysteria spiked in the early 1980s. In that atmosphere, Dalton Lee and his legal warrior Kate Mills knew that it would be virtually impossible for a parole commission to grant the release of a man who was convicted of selling secrets to the Russians.

But Mills continued to fight, and as the decade ended, the tenor of the world changed. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989. Two years later, the Soviet Union collapsed. The terror of nuclear annihilation at the hands of the Russians that had gripped America for so long, began to fade. By 1994, Kate Mills believed she, she had a real shot for Dalton Lee's case to be heard. That year, she had finally received the item that could help Dalton's case more than any other,

a letter from the judge who sentenced Dalton to life in prison. The letter stated that the judge believed Dalton had served his time and should be a free man. When the parole commission read the letter, the members agreed. Dalton Lee would not die in a federal prison. He wouldn't be leaving right away, he would still have to wait four more years, but on July 22nd, 1997, Dalton walked out of Lompoc Federal Prison.

It had been 16 years since he first met with Kate Mills. Her commitment never wavered, and she did what she said she'd do. And now, as Dalton Lee tried to restart his life, Kate turned her attention to Chris Boyce. Dalton wasn't thrilled that Kate was also working with Chris, but he couldn't be too angry. She had helped him walk out of prison after serving 20 years of. a life sentence. He wasn't in a position to make demands. Kate had a strong feeling that she could help Chris as well, even with the additional sentences for the escape and the robberies. But that strong feeling wasn't just in the legal sense. She and Chris Boyce had fallen in love. Chris and Kate

didn't meet face-to-face until 1997, but she had fallen in love with his wit and charm and intelligence through his letters, and he had fallen in love with her humor and sense of justice and her fighting spirit. And that spirit didn't just apply to helping Chris and Dalton. She battled breast cancer while she fought to get Chris out of prison and for years afterward. Her resilience inspired Chris to stay hopeful. Their commitment to the cause and to each other finally paid off in September of 2002. Chris had been transferred to federal prison in Sheridan, Wyoming, and and Kate succeeded in getting him released to a halfway house in San Francisco. The couple were married within a month.

Chris's parole ended in 2007, and in 2012, Kate was pronounced cancer-free. After that, the couple settled in central Oregon. Today, Chris takes advantage of the wide-open spaces in the region to continue his lifelong passion for falconry. When asked, Kate has joked that Chris's obsession with falconry was one of the few things that the book and the movie got right about him. She credits his connection to the birds for his rehabilitation and readjustment to the world outside of prison.

In 2014, in a rare interview with the Australian news program Dateline, Chris talked about his remorse over robbing banks after he escaped from prison. He talked about what he recalled of his mindset when he decided to steal top secret information 40 years earlier. He said, you're not so smart when you're 21 years old. I was mad as hell, full of myself, and decided to wage a one-man war against central intelligence. He regretted his actions, but he didn't regret speaking up about American intervention and subversion in Australia's politics. He said, I thought the government betrayed me, long before I betrayed it.

But beyond voicing his displeasure with the situation in Australia, Chris no longer has any interest in discussing what he did or what he saw at TRW. When Chris and Kate Boyce, along with friend and biographer Vince Font, published a book in 2013 titled American Sons, The Untold Story of the Falcon and the Snowman, it was not meant to be a revelation about the inner workings of the intelligence community. In Chris's words, it was a follow-up about the things that happened after the trials, the convictions, and the Hollywood movie. Chris has achieved a kind of peace, and he's found a partner in Kate, but he lost one of his oldest friends.

Kate hasn't spoken to Dalton Lee since 1999, although she sends him well-wishes on social media every year on his birthday, January 3rd. Chris hasn't spoken to or had any direct contact with Dalton since 1980, the day before Chris escaped from prison. In a letter that was only published in his book, Chris wrote, The only thing I do know with any certainty is that, despite all the bad choices, all the mistrust, and all the years of our lives we lost as a result, the greatest tragedy of all was the death of our friendship and the loss of that short, funny-looking kid I loved so much when we were boys. By his own account, Chris burned the letter before ever sending it.

Next time on Infamous America, we move from a story of stolen secrets to a story of stolen jewels. In New York, just a couple years before Chris and Dalton began their adventure, a group of burglars were at the top of their game, and they pulled off one of the largest jewelry heists in American history. This one features the mafia, movie stars, and mayhem. It starts in January, here 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 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-Barrel Media on Twitter. And you can stream all our episodes on YouTube. Just search for Infamous America Podcast. Thanks for listening.