TREASON AS A TRIVIAL PURSUIT

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000605740006-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 1
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: May 3, 2012
• Sequence Number: 6
• Publication Date: January 24, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605740006-7
WALL STREET JOURNAL
24 January 1985
Treason as a ri vial Pursuit.
In 1977, 22-year-old Christopher Boyce
was convicted -of treason. Only a few
months earlier, he'd decided to stop hand-
ing over U.S. military secrets to the Soviet
Union. At that time, the Soviet spy to
whom Boyce had been regularly delivering
the goods for two years urged him to con-
tinue his treachery. Boyce sneered in re-
sponse: "I'm not like you. This isn't a ca-
reer for me. It was an impulse."
Later, when some Mexican policemen
tried to force Boyce's accomplice, Andrew
Daulton Lee, to confess to a trumped-up
murder rap by beating him and sticking
his head down a toilet bowl, Lee squealed:
"I'm not a communist. I'm not an assas
sir,. I'm just a spy."
And so was the crime of treason re-
duced to a trivial pursuit. People turn trai-
Film
"The Falcon and the Snowtnan"
tor for a variety of reasons-love, money,
even conviction-but impulse? Nor were.
Boyce and Lee burned-out cases; their
torches had never been lit.
No wonder "The Falcon and the Snow-
man," the story of convicted traitors
Boyce and Lee and the secrets they sold,
became a best-selling book for Robert
Lindsey, the Los Angeles bureau chief of
the New York Times. This particular per-
version of the American Dream fairly
quivered with symbolism. Boyce and Lee,
former altar. boys, were raised in upper-
middle-class suburban comfort, sheltered
but not immune from the turmoil shaking
the country in the '60s. Lee became a drug
dealer, Boyce a seminary dropout. Still,
their hobbies were golf and falconry, not
politics.
Air. Lindsey's account of the story
raised but left unanswered this question:
Were the two natural byproducts of the
transmutation of American society taking
place while they grew up or merely devi-
ants? The other big unanswered question,
the one that helped give this real life spy
story its tragicomic thrust: Was the Cen-
tral Intelligence Agency really that stupid?
It was the ClArS civilian subcontractor,
2fter a t. tnat p aced a 21-year-old college
dropout in F. position to read highly classi-
fied messages-and other sensitive mes-
sages the CIA regularly misrouted.)
The movie that director John Schle-
singer has nlarle out of this story is most
effective when it tells what happens and to
whom, and least effective when it tries to
figure out why. He sets up the parasitic re-
lationships between Lee and Boyce and be-
tween the American spies and the Soviets
in a series of deftly paced vignettes. He
makes us understand the planning and ten-
sion and theatricality that goes into the
business of spying, even as he underscores
the absurdity of these particular spies (Lee
the drugged-out hustler, Boyce the cor-
rupted choirboy).
Mr. Schlesinger undercuts the force of
his narrative every time he tries to make a
Sean Penn, Timothy Hutton
connection between this "nice guy,"
Boyce, and the not very nice practice of
selling state secrets. For example, the
scenes with his pretty girlfriend are almost
embarrassingly flimsy. Presumably the
purpose of sketching this relationship is to
underscore that Boyce's crime was espe-
cially surprising because he seemed so
sweet. Instead, these scenes stop the story
cold. The confrontations between Boyce
and his father (convincingly played by Pat
Hingle), which do serve a narrative pur-
pose, are too fleeting.
Part of the problem lies with Timothy
Hutton, who plays Boyce. He broods and
smiles and smokes cigarettes with great
exactitude. There is a lot of intensity. Too
much intensity. His character, like too
many of the characters he has played,
smolders too deliberately. We always get
to see the wounds but not the soul.
At the end, just in case we haven't
caught the numerous hints alluding to
Boyce's disillusionment with his country,
we are forced to listen to several minutes
of Boyce's political theory as formulated
from news headlines. Not only is this dra-
matically anticlimactic, it gives too much
intellectual weight to the moral confusion
that created this impulsive spy.
But these bits of static don't short-cir-
cuit the story's energy. Mr. Schlesinger
knows how to bite into unusual relation-
ships (as he showed us in "Midnight Cow-
boy" and "Sunday, Bloody Sunday") and
how to pace suspense (as he did in "Maras
thon Man"). He convincingly sets up the
whacked-out subhole called "The Vault,"
where three low-level clerks with top-secu-
rity clearance ripped and filed messages
about CIA spy satellites.
In this aseptic, fluorescent-lit room clut-
tered with teletypes and file cabinets, the
three listened to rock music, drank the
Margaritas they mixed in the paper shred-
der, and ripped and' filed-except for
Boyce, who ripped and filed and read. He
figured out that the messages he was de-
coding weren't meant for his eyes and
might be interesting to the Russians.
Although it was Boyce who came up
with the plan to sell these secrets to the
Russians, it was his old friend Daulton
Lee, hustler extraordina.ire, who did the
legwork. Lee's motives were simple. He
was a drug pusher who'd gotten busted one
time too many. He wanted 'to make some
dough.
As this swaggering, insecure gamecock
of a spy, Sean Penn is a marvel to watch.
He pushes Lee, with his scruffy hair, ugly
but expensive clothes and silly, thin mus-
tache, right up to the edge of buffoonery.
Yet he always keeps us tuned into the des-
peration barely covered by the braggado-
cio. For him, this is just another hustle (at
one point he tries to talk the Russians into
importing heroin for him to deal as a little
side venture). There's a lightness to his
voice, a kind of little man's hopping en-
ergy that brings back memories of the
young Dustin Hoffman.
Mr. Penn is especially exciting to watch
because his performances change so much
from film to film. In "Bad Boys" his por-
trayal of the bad kid daring to go straight
was grimly powerful. Yet his dimly con-
nected surfer Jeff Spicoli in "Fast Times
at Ridgemont High" was a study in stoned-
out hilary, his Henry Nash in "Racing
With the Moon" a sweet and gentle roman-
tic lead.
"The Falcon and the Snowman" would
be worth seeing just for Air. Penn. And
even if Mr. Schlesinger doesn't reach the
lofty heights of morality play he seems to
be groping for, he has put together a spy
story that's pretty good stuff.
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/05/03: CIA-RDP90-00965R000605740006-7