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The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of Friendship and Espionage

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Of all the major spy stories to break open in the last thirty years, the case of John Boyce and Andrew Dalton Lee has to take the prize and the most troubling in its larger implications. Other spies like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen were disillusioned middle aged bureucrats whose spying was an outlet for their frustration as well as a source of additional income. Boyce and Dalton, however, were young men who blundered into the spy game mostly because of boredom with their comfortable upper middle class upbringings. Their betrayal of the country that allowed them to live such an easy life is as baffling, if not as horrific, as the later actions of the shooters at Columbine High School.

Those who enjoyed the popular movie starring Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn based on this book will particularly enjoy the details that the movie had to leave out. Of the two, Boyce's story is the most tragic. He was highly intellegent with a potentially bright future, and secured a position at defense contractor TRW with a Top Secret security clearance because of his retired FBI agent father's connections. Lee, on the other hand, was a dropout and a drug dealer whose life was spiraling downward toward the inevitable bad conclusion. One of the astonishing facts revealed in the book is just how many second chances Lee squandered along the way. A child of less affluence would have ended up in prison long before he even had the chance to join Boyce in his spying.

Author/journalist Robert Lindsey is an excellent writer and he tells the story in such a way that it reads like a fiction thriller. Lindsey reports astonishing facts such as the incredibly lax security at TRW without editorial comment, letting the events speak for themselves. Lindsey's extensive interviews with all of the principals, including Boyce in particular, make for particularly compelling reading.

Overall, a well-written journalistic account of one of the most unfortunate of America's spy cases.

I read this book about four or five years ago, after I saw the film with Timothy Hutton (also very good). I'm only 20 so this story was a little before my time but... In any event I found it fascinating. Lindsey portrays these men honestly and without judgement butwith great insight. You won't be able to put it down. Also good, if not better, Lindsey's Flight of the Falcon, about Boyce's brief escape from prison.

Read this book 15 years ago (in '83). Found it so captivating that ...you know, one of those that unable to put down. For whatever reason of its good balance, or exceptionally well-written true intrigue, or savvy description of the Minox toys of the game - I still hold this work as the benchmark of spy stories. Though decades old now, still, the consequences of the Boyce/Lee crimes do have a present day saliency. Moreover, does explain very significant events of the 70s; so is also most valuable as historical insight to some present day conditions. Good read.

A TRW defense research facility occupies a plain but sprawling glass and concrete box on Route 91 in the bustling Los Angeles seaside community of Redondo Beach, a building that most wouldn't notice while driving to the nearby sun and shore. Yet, in early 1977, a spy scandal rocked this firm and the nation, the nature of which seriously compromised the USA's secure defense satellite communications system.

Although not as culturally convulsive as the Rosenberg atomic spy ring of the early 1950s or as astounding as the activities of the Walker family spy cadre in the next decade--this incident's most shocking aspect is that two inexperienced young men barely out of their teens easily penetrated presumably tight security, successfully stole and then quickly sold to the Soviets much of US Defense Department's latest and most crucial secure satellite communications plans and crypto data. Childhood friends Christopher Boyce and Daulton Lee are the central figures in Robert Lindsey's compelling book, "Falcon and the Snowman."

Boyce, a former Catholic seminarian and low-level TRW code room clerk and Lee, a drug dealer, decide on a whim to sell classified material to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, with Boyce's motivation a confused residue of near-dead `60s-style idealism and Lee's just another stop in the endless quest for the fast and easy dollar. Lindsey effectively portrays the pair as privileged products of a highly materialistic society with little useful work to do; whose comfortable lives insulated them from many of the struggles and challenges their parents and their less-fortunate peers had to face, eventually leading them into another form of hedonistic excess which ended up gravely jeopardizing the safety of our country.

A good spy story, but not quite as exhaustive as Howard Blum's later work on the Walker family of spies, "Falcon and the Snowman" is also a useful look into the aimless, consumption-oriented upper-class Southern California lifestyle of the 1970s where everything and anything went as long as one had enough useful contacts and plenty of cash. The ultimate irony of Boyce and Lee's story is that they received only an estimated $50,000 for their nearly three years of spying, hardly a good "deal," cynically speaking, in the eyes of their peers and in the values of their community.

THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN: A TRUE STORY OF FRIENDSHIP AND ESPIONAGE by Robert Lindsey is a very engaging story of two well-off young men who become spies for the Russians in the years after they graduated high school in an elite community in southern California.

Daulton Lee and Christopher Boyce were the men who found themselves as unlikely secret agents in their early 20s, but for very different reasons. Lee was a drug dealer (the "Snowman") trying to stay out of prison as charges against him kept adding up and Lee was a defense-industry worker who had lost his Catholic faith in high school and struggled to find his way in the world. (Lee was an avid falconer.) Lindsey traces their families back to their parents' early relationships and their family lives before the pivotal time in their lives when they made the decisions that made them infamous -- for these two young, aimless men created one of the United States' greatest security breaches and cost their government more secrets than any espionage operation before them.

I was engaged by Lindsey's crisp and concise writing, as he reports on the lives of Lee and Boyce, and he presents two individual portraits of the men, their personalities and their actions, helping the reader understand how this situation took shape. The book reads like a highly plot-driven novel and was hard to put down, but knowing that it was a true story made it even more engaging -- that these two men, essentially kids, could engineer this espionage scheme is amazing (and not very complimentary of security measures in place at the time!).

I really enjoyed this book, not only for its topic but for the study it provides on the state of the world in the 1970s when these events took place. I highly recommend it!

At the southern tip of L.A. there's a bridge across the harbor. On one side it's beautiful, the other leads to Terminal Island, a federal prison. Boyce and Lee grew up on the beautiful side and ended up in the hell of a prison cell. Lindsey's book tells how. They did it, but to read of their journey downward is frightful when one considers the extreme differences the two sides of the bridge represent. And the book is much much better than the movie.

This movie is a classic! While Timothy Hutton is excellent in his role as the "Falcon", it is Sean Penn who commands respect for his incredible ability as a young actor. "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" is a contemporary of this movie and it is fascinating to see the range of Sean Penn's abilities. (A few short years before this role, Penn was playing small parts on the TV series "Little House on the Prarie" -- small parts that already hinted of the iconic actor he would become.}

Young actors would surely benefit from studying the career of Sean Penn. This movie is a cornerstone of his career. Compare and contrast his range in this movie with "Fast Times", "I am Sam", and "Dead Man Walking" to fully appreciate the brilliance of Sean Penn as an actor.

Robert Lindsey's "The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of friendship and Espionage" was a true story about Chris Boyce and Andrew Dalton and how they were selling secrets to the Soviets in the middle of the cold war. You see how simple this was, how they did it, and why they did it. I can't tell you much more with out giving something away. Once you pick it up you can't put it down.

This tale of young white males with connections, brains and some despair shows just how those qualities can generate WMD's. Drinking, drugging and sexing at the innermost hubs of the worlds' satellite data centers - taking and returning top secret documents barely concealed in potted plants and searching always searching for a reason to care- these kids went over the edge. They sold secrets- incomparable ones- to Soviets without a sense of humor, one boy coincidentally captured falcons and flew them in what were probably the last of the open areas on the California peninsula. They were clueless, their families were clueless and they had barely the sorts of trauma and alienation that the average street hustler has on a good day.

Now that I've read quite a few of these US spy things, it seems, and this is no surprise to others, I'm sure, that we Americans are as dogged in destroying ourselves as we are the environment and those who keep us rich. Then, we have systems that compete with each other and do the same to us by acting unaccountably and keeping these sorts of alienated criminals from being found out and prosecuted to the fullest.
Well, was it the 70's, the wealth or the post- Vietnam era? None, if we look at the current state of affairs, its human and we still haven't seemed to find a way to factor for that in our security and our passions for those who 'seem on the surface to be like us.' Read it.