Christopher John Boyce (born February 16, 1953) is a former American defense industry employee who was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union in 1977.
Boyce was raised in Southern California and began working for aerospace firm TRW Inc. in 1974. In 1977 he and a childhood friend Andrew Daulton Lee were discovered to have been passing classified documents to Soviet officials in Mexico City in exchange for cash payments. Boyce was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 40 years in prison. During his trial he attracted attention in Australia for his disclosures about joint Australian–American activities at the Pine Gap base in Australia, as well as allegations of CIA involvement in the 1975 dismissal of the Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam.
In 1980, Boyce escaped from the Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex. He subsequently carried out a series of bank robberies in Idaho and Washington, apparently with the intent of defecting to the Soviet Union. Boyce was recaptured in 1981 and the following year was convicted of escaping from a federal penitentiary and bank robbery offences, receiving a further 28-year prison sentence. He was eventually paroled in 2002. His espionage activities were dramatised in the 1979 Robert Lindsey book The Falcon and the Snowman and a 1985 film of the same name.
Early life
Boyce is the son of Charles Eugene Boyce, former Director of Security for McDonnell Douglas Aircraft Corporation, and Noreen, née Hollenbeck. Along with his three brothers and five sisters, Boyce was reared in Southern California, in the affluent community of Rancho Palos Verdes, a suburb southwest of Los Angeles.
Boyce 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. In a book he co-authored with his wife, Boyce wrote that he does not believe that the information was of much value to the Soviet Union.[3]
Exposure and conviction
Boyce, then 23, was exposed after Lee was arrested by Mexican police in front of the Soviet embassy on January 6, 1977.[4] His arrest was "almost by accident": Lee was arrested for littering.[4] 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 January 16, 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 April 28 1977, and sentenced by federal district judge Robert Kelleher on September 12 to forty years in prison, initially at Terminal Island, then the Metropolitan Correctional Center in San Diego.[5][6][7][8]
Allegations about CIA activities in Australia
At his trial, Boyce said 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 said 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.[9] 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 as well. 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]
Boyce testified at his trial that the CIA had "practiced deception against Australia during 1975" by covering up activities at Pine Gap, a notionally jointly administered defence facility in central Australia.[10] He stated that his duties at TRW had included sending "misleading communications to Australia" and that he had been told by TRW that the CIA was "manipulating Australian union leaders to try to suppress rail and airline strikes", and that his outrage at these operations was what had motivated his decision to leak information.[11]
Imprisonment and escape
On July 10, 1979, Boyce was transferred to the federal penitentiary in Lompoc, California.[citation needed] He escaped from Lompoc on January 21, 1980.[4][12][13] Boyce managed to evade the authorities and ended up in northern Idaho, where he found refuge in a cabin outside Bonners Ferry.[14] 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".[15] According to Boyce, he studied aviation, not to flee to the Soviet Union as some suspected, but to rescue Daulton Lee from Lompoc.[16] On August 21, 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.[17][18] Authorities had received a tip about Boyce's whereabouts from his former bank robbery confederates.
Return to prison
On January 26, 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.[19] 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.[20][21][22][23][24][25]
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.[32] After the attack, he was transferred to USP Marion in southern Illinois, where he was held in isolation.[33]
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.[35] Atthis 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.[36]
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.[37] In 2000, he was transferred to FCI Sheridan in Oregon, northwest of Salem.[38]
Release and subsequent life
Boyce was released from prison on parole on September 16, 2002, after serving a little more than 25 years, accounting for his time spent outside from the escape.[39][40] 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.[41] Boyce is on good terms with his father and eight siblings, and was with his mother as well until her death in 2017.[42]
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.[42] 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.[42]
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.
Boyce is name-checked in the lyrics of Luna's song, Moon Palace, on their 1995 album, Penthouse.
↑ "Testimony of Christopher J. Boyce, Convicted Spy"(PDF). Polygraph. Vol.14, no.2. American Polygraph Association. June 1985. p.129. Retrieved December 25, 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.
↑ Boyce, Christopher; Boyce, Cait; Font, Vince (2013). The Falcon and the Snowman: American Sons. Vince Font. p.240.
↑ "The Falcon and the Fallout". Los Angeles Times. March 2, 2003. Retrieved January 30, 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
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