THE FALCON AND THE SNOWMAN: A True Story of Friendship and Espionage

by Robert Lindaey ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 1979

The travails of two young Californians convicted of selling CIA secrets to Soviet embassy officials in Mexico City--a story that echoes the Loeb-Leopold case as well as the neon horrors of a Robert Stone drug novel. The two youths are well-to-do children of Palos Verdes families and seem unlikely candidates for the disasters they make of their lives. At 21, Christopher John Boyce finds himself cleared for top secret files in his supersensitive job in the Black Vault at TRW, a satellite missile maker of spies-in-the-sky for the CIA. A heavy-drinking potsmoker, he is also an ardent falconer, and few readers will fail to identity with his high-hearted release as his tamed furies rise to the kill and distract him from. . . the stark terror of FBI arrest: for over a year, his friend Andrew Daulton Lee has been peddling military secrets to vodka-swilling drunks in the Russian embassy. Lee is a snowman (cocaine dealer) with a big police record who has successfully avoided trial for six years while rising through the coke hierarchies; a heroin addict, he's striving now for the big score that will get him out of the drug trades. The story's highpoints are scenes of Chaplinesque comedy as the swinging dealer strings along KGB biggies as if they were drug addicts, making them pay through the nose for bits and pieces of heady info from our spy satellites. The final trial packs an emotional wallop and Chris Boyce, at least, comes across as a tragic, tortured figure. A near-rival to Thompson's Serpentine and Mailer's The Executioner's Song for this season's true-crime audience.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1979

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 1979

Categories: NONFICTION