Friendship and espionage

Press, 3 October 1985, Page 24

Friendship and espionage

Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn star in “The Falcon and the Snowman,” a true story of friendship and espionage which will start at the Regent tomorrow. It was on January 6,1977, that Daulton Lee (Penn) was arrested outside the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City, charged with murdering a police officer — a crime that he was not aware had taken place. He first identified himself as an American tourist, a photographer with a California advertising agency whose photos of satellites were needed for a television commercial.

After days of interrogation and torture, he admitted selling “erroneous information” to the Russians, under orders from “C.I.A. agent Christopher Boyce.” Finally, confronted with an unsigned “confession of murder,” Lee blurted out the truth.

“I’m not a communist,” he said. “I’m not an assassin. I’m just a spy.” Boyce (Hutton) was captured a few days later, after freeing his falcons in the Joshua National Forest.

On April 12, 1977, Boyce went on trial in the United States Federal District Court Judge Robert J. Kelleher presiding. On April 28, while the jury was still considering Boyce’s fate, the case of the United States vs Andrew Daulton Lee began. Both trials were covered by Robert Lindsey, the Los Angeles bureau chief of the “New York Times,” an acknowledged aerospace expert. As he sat through weeks of testimony, Lindsey became intrigued by one question: How had two such different human beings as the brooding idealist who had assumed the code name, ‘Talcon,” and the strung-out drug pusher known as the “Snowman,” became friends — let alone conspirators in the most daring act of espionage of the post-war era?

The search for the answers took two years of meticulous research during which Lindsey came to know the convicted spies “as well as the members of my own family.” The result was “The Falcon and the Snowman,” in which Lindsey expressed amazement that a “5140-a-

week college dropout, still three months away from his twenty-second birthday” could possess “a Top Secret Clearance from the Depart-

ment of Defense, a Strategic Intelligence Clearance from the C.I.A. and a ciypto clearance from the National Security Agency.”