Solo Flight

A spy goes back into the cold

No one ever doubted that inmate 19437-148 had an inventive mind, but officials at the federal prison at Lompoc, Calif, 170 miles north of Los Angeles, had no idea how cleverly he had diagnosed their security system. Shortly after sunset one day last week, the prisoner approached the ten-foot chain-link fence with a pair of wire cutters, a crude ladder he had fashioned and an odd device made of a toothbrush taped to one end of a broom handle. Knowing that any sudden movement of the fence would set off an electric alarm, he propped the ladder near a gatepost for added support. He shinnied up and, with his hand as steady as a surgeon's, used his broom-handle-toothbrush apparatus to disconnect the alarm system. Then he cut through some strands of barbed wire. With a final leap, Christopher Boyce, 26, a spy convicted in one of the most important espionage cases in the past decade, disappeared into the night.

For Boyce, the road to Lompoc began in 1975 when, with the aid of his father, a former FBI agent, he was hired by TRW, a conglomerate that, among other things, makes surveillance satellites for the CIA. A communications clerk, Boyce soon got "top secret" and "crypto" clearances that allowed him to handle highly classified documents. The college dropout found himself assigned to a sensitive job: transmitting coded spy information from the TRW installation in Redondo Beach, Calif., to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.

At the time, Boyce later claimed, he was disillusioned with the U.S. because of the Viet Nam War, Watergate and what he learned of the CIA's activities. To get back at the U.S., said Boyce, he worked out a plot with Andrew Daulton Lee, 27, a teen-age chum from the affluent Southern California town of Palos Verdes who had been convicted of drug dealing and was then on the run. The two schemed to supply top secret material to an agent in the Soviet Union's Mexico City embassy.

For more than a year and a half, the two turned over what one CIA officer later called "the company store"--details of the nation's most secret surveillance satellite and cryptographic systems. The Soviets paid Lee $61,000 and Boyce $15,000 before Mexican police arrested Lee in January 1977. Boyce was arrested in California within days. By the end of the year, the two were found guilty on eight counts of espionage by a federal court in Los Angeles. Boyce was sentenced to 40 years in jail, Lee to a life term.

Although Boyce and Lee were both imprisoned at Lompoc, their collaboration had ended. Boyce occasionally saw his former partner, but their only communication was a quick hello in the prison yard.

Just a month ago, Boyce tried to get out of prison by writing a letter to U.S. District Judge Robert Kelleher. Pleading for a reduction in sentence, Boyce claimed that he was a changed man and that prison violence appalled him. "I am now finished with angry gestures," Boyce wrote. "They are self-destructive, they tear hearts, they accomplish nothing. The difference between Christopher Boyce who at 21 took matters into his own hands and the Christopher Boyce who composes this letter is that I have discovered a powerful, constructive vehicle to convey my criticisms." His stated ambition: to emigrate to Ireland and support himself as a writer. According to Boyce's lawyer, he was working on a book about prison conditions.

Judge Kelleher denied Boyce's plea, and the prisoner decided to take matters into his own hands once again. He had kept himself in excellent condition--a regimen of ten miles a day on the track, weight training and yoga--to be fit enough to flee through the rough, hilly terrain outside the prison. In addition, he must have been aware that Lompoc was in the process of converting to its new maximum security status. Within two months officials will install a sophisticated $67,000 alarm system along the inner fence that will sense the slightest pressure and would have detected his escape effort last week. Boyce made his move just in time. Says Chief U.S. Deputy Marshal James Propotnick: "All he had to do was be stealthy, secretive and gutsy." Like any good spy.

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