INTERVIEW WITH CHRISTOPHER BOYCE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP88-01070R000100450003-3
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 7
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: March 13, 2007
• Sequence Number: 3
• Publication Date: November 21, 1982
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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RADIO TV REPORTS, INC.
4701 WILLARD AVENUE, CHEVY CHASE, MARYLAND 20815 656-4068
PROGRAM 60 Minutes STATION WDVM-TV
CBS Network
DATE November 21, 1982 7:15 P.M. CITY Washington, D.C.
Interview with Christopher Boyce
ED BRADLEY: Last week British spy Geoffrey Prime went
to jail for giving away the most sensitive British and American
secrets. Five years ago, so did this man, Christopher Boyce.
What he had given away to the Soviets -- or, more accurately,
sold to the Soviets -- was the secret that our satellite
surveillance system was telling us just about everything the
Russians were up to. Having learned that we were listening in,
the Soviets started putting out false information. What that did
was to make our intelligence-gathering satellites virtually
useless.
Boyce is now serving 40 years for espionage at Marion
federal penitentiary. Recently we talked with him about why he
and his partner, Dalton Lee, did it.
You willingly turned that information over to the
BRADLEY: In the courts of this land, you've been tried
and convicted...
BRADLEY: ...of espionage.
BOYCE: Right.
BRADLEY: You are a traitor.
BOYCE: Uh-huh.
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BRADLEY: Does that bother you?
BOYCE: Well, if you qualify it as a traitor to what? I
think that you can't protect any freedoms or liberties behind
stockpiles of nuclear weapons and chemical and biological
weapons. And I think that the United States Government is
eventually going to involve the United States and the rest of the
world in a nuclear war. And I don't mind being called a traitor
to the United States Government at all. No. I think the United
States Government needs a few more traitors. Humanity needs a
few more.
BRADLEY: Senator Daniel Moynihan, the Vice Chairman of
the Senate Intelligence Committee, believes that what Boyce and
Lee turned over to the Russians had a major impact on the SALT
talks.
Senator, how would you describe to the average American
just what happened as a result of Boyce and Lee?
SENATOR DANIEL MOYNIHAN: Basically, with respect to the
satellite systems that were compromised, they made them,
temporarily at least, useless to us, because the Soviets could
block them. And the fear that that would happen, had happened
permeated the Senate, and as much as any one thing was
responsible for the failure of the SALT treaty. And if you
think, as I do, that the breakdown of our arms negotiations with
the Soviets is an ominous event, then nothing quite so awful has
happened to our country as the escapade of these two young men.
It's difficult to understand why Boyce held such a
grudge against his country. He had so much of what this nation
can bestow on its young men. He grew up here in Palos Verdes,
one of the wealthiest communities in this country. He was the
oldest of nine children in a very closely-knit family. His
father had left a career with the FBI for a job in private
industry that paid a lot more money. Boyce was said to be
sensitive, intelligent, and a devout Catholic.
You know, at your trial -- and I want to get this quote
right -- Monsignor McCarthy, the priest you served as an altar
boy, said, "To my knowledge, he has the highest reputation for
truth, veracity, and integrity." That's the way he saw you.
BOYCE: Well, it was awful nice of him to say that. I
think he's dead now.
BRADLEY: But from what he knew of you and your life
then, was that the truth?
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BOYCE: Well, that's how I was brought up. Yes.
BRADLEY: It may be an irony that it was in church that
Boyce, the man so highly recommended by his priest, became
buddies with his future partner in espionage, Dalton Lee. Both
served as altar boys. Boy practiced the sport of falconry. They
attended this high school together. It was a time of discontent:
Vietnam, Watergate, drugs.
Dalton Lee, Boyce's friend, got into trouble for pushing
drugs. Chris stayed clean. But he says political events made
his ideals crumble. He gave up on religion, lost interest in
college. He decided to get a job.
BOYCE: I was taking history courses and flying my
falcons up there, and I was having so much fun I started to feel
guilty about it, I think, you know. And my father offered -- and
it just seemed that in conversations with family that what I was
told, "Well, how can you drop out from the mainstream of society
and condemn the American intelligence community unless you know
it from the inside?"
So I said to relatives, "Well, yes. I can see that
point." So I went to work for 'em. But once I did, they were
worst than I ever dreamed.
BRADLEY: With the help of his father, 21-year-old Chris
Boyce, a dropout from three colleges with no real work
experience, was able to land a job here at TRW as a security
clerk. The pay was only $140 a week, and it would seem to be an
insignificant job. But within just a few months, it would lead
Boyce to another job, this one in the black vault, or code room,
a facility so sensitive, so top secret that only eight other
people with the highest government security clearances had
regular access.
Now, on the surface, the black vault would seem to be
completely secure. To get in you had to go past an array of
guards, television monitors and checkpoints. But how did Chris
Boyce find that security?
BOYCE: There was no security. Like the codes are
supposed to be destroyed every day, but we used to just throw
them in the corner. And there was a large blender to put the
codes in and you would blend them down to mush. Well, they never
used that to destroy codes with. We would -- we made daiquiris
in it.
BRADLEY: A few months after getting the job, Boyce
started selling the highly classified material to the Russians.
His partner in the crime, his old friend Dalton Lee, who used the
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money paid by the Soviets to finance his illegal drug business.
Boyce would photograph the secret material with his
small Minox B camera, give it to Dalton, and Dalton Lee would
hand it to the Soviet KGB agents in Mexico City.
But how did Boyce get such top secret documents out of
the black vault?
buy...
BOYCE: My boss would send me out to the liquor store to
BRADLEY: Liquor.
BOYCE: Yeah, you know. And what he would do is they'd
give me the document satchel, and I would take that to the liquor
store and buy whatever was ordered by the different people in
different departments that day. And then I would just take the
satchel and just mark it and walk it right back into the facility
past the guards, say hi to the guards and walk -- they even knew
what I was doing, you know. So it was very simple to take rolls
of documents and put them in the satchel and take them out the
same way that I would go and buy liquor for my superiors. The
problem was bringing it back in then, because I would have to
keep it overnight to photograph it. And one time I brought a
potted plant, a pot and a plant, and I rolled the documents up in
plastic and stuck them in the pot and put dirt over that and
stuck the plant in the top and then walked in and told -- drove
to work and told the guard to go out to my car and bring the
potted plant into the offices.
BRADLEY: How could such a security system exist in one
of the most top secret facilities in the country?
SENATOR MOYNIHAN: Well, a very good question, Ed. I
don't see how the United States Government could ever again give
a security-sensitive contract to TRW. They've made some changes
and said they've changed their ways. But the responsibility of
that firm is massive.
BRADLEY: Since Boyce's conviction, the dollar amount of
government contracts with TRW has increased each year. But the
company refused to discuss the nature of those contracts for
reasons of national security, and also refused to discuss past
and present security procedures at their facility.
Well, who has the responsibility for security?
SENATOR MOYNIHAN: The government is supposed to oversee
it. The government has procedures. They assume the companies
follow them. They were not following them. Criminal.
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BRADLEY: Boyce says he betrayed his country for
idealistic reasons. He says he found out the U.S. was not living
up to its agreement with Australia, a country which provides us
with two satellite stations, one of them at Pine Gap near Alice
Springs. Boyce claims that while he worked for TRW, the CIA
meddled in Australian labor strikes and helped topple the
government of former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam.
BOYCE: So what happened was I received a TWX from my
superiors which said, "Continue to ship hardware and software.
Pilot will continue to suppress the strikes." Which can only
mean that somewhere along the line we'd infiltrated their unions.
BOYCE: Right. And Australia, you know -- what's
independent about that? They're supposed to be an independent,
English-speaking, parliamentary democracy? And, you know, if
we're not playing it straight with those guys, we're not even
playing it straight with ourselves.
SENATOR MOYNIHAN: That's just another lie from that
lying young man. Our government is not in any way involved in
the internal politics of Australia. I know that. I assert it.
And I know it at the highest levels of this government. That was
just an extra added bit of damage by a villainous young man.
BRADLEY: But at the highest level of the Australian
government at that time, former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam told
us they did believe Boyce. And he asked us to pass along his
best regards to Chris Boyce.
In May of 1977, Christopher Boyce was found guilty of
espionage and sentenced to 40 years in prison. His partner in
the crime, Dalton Lee, was sentenced to life.
Two years later, Boyce escaped from prison. For 19
months he was this country's most wanted fugitive. Boyce told us
that eventually you just can't run anymore. Well, this is where
he stopped, Boundary County in the northern panhandle of Idaho.
Just down the valley there is Canada, to one side is Montana, on
the other the state of Washington. This was the place that he
liked best. And at some point during his stay here, he picked up
a new vocation, bank robbery.
BOYCE: While I was gone I held up banks. But I didn't
take any money from anyone who worked in the bank, I didn't take
any money from the banks themselves. I never meant to hurt
anyone and I didn't hurt anyone. The money I took was all
federally insured, so it was the Federal Government's money. So
the only thing I took was the Federal Government's money. And if
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they're going to chase me, try and chase me down all over the
world, I have no qualms at all spending their money while they do
it.
BRADLEY: When Boyce wasn't robbing banks, his friends
in Boundary County say he was a regular social butterfly who made
no attempt to hide, at least from them, his real identity.
BOYCE: Well, I was sitting in a little bar up there in
Boundary County, and my friends all knew who I was. We were
drinking beer. And on came a news report that the U.S. marshals
said they were one campfire behind me down in Mexico. So they
got a big kick out of that. I cheered them on. It was crazy.
BRADLEY: Is that a true story?
WOMAN: Yes, it is. [Laughter]
BRADLEY: What was your reaction when you saw that?
WOMAN: I thought it was funny.
BRADLEY: But did you know then that eventually you'd
get caught?
BOYCE: When this first began, I knew that I would be
arrested for espionage because I knew that that couldn't go on
forever. But after having been convicted of espionage and
sentenced to what the judge said, you know, forever, 40 years,
anyway, and then just up and leaving again, I figured that they
must all be so incompetent that I suppose I got a little
overconfident.
BRADLEY: But the U.S. marshals, acting on a tip from
his bank-robber friends, captured Boyce again. This time he got
a 25-year concurrent sentence.
Today, at Marion federal penitentiary, he lives alone in
an isolation ward because of threats on his life by a prison
group known as the Aryan Brotherhood. His prospects for an early
parole are dim.
Do you think you've hurt anyone in the last nine years?
BOYCE: Have I hurt anyone? I think I've probably hurt
my father quite a bit. Sons aren't always like fathers.
BRADLEY: He came up through that system that you
despise, that you thought was wrong.
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BRADLEY: Is that difficult for you?
BOYCE: Well, he's so set in his ways that there's just
no -- I have my beliefs and he has his own. And we're still
father and son, but there are a lot of things that, rather than
put them between us, we -- there are a lot of subjects that we
can still be family on, aside from espionage and the FBI and the
military-industrial complex of which he is a part. You know,
fishing and old memories, stuff like that.
BRADLEY: If you could do it all over again, erase these
last nine years and go back and start over, what would you do?
BOYCE: No, I don't think I would. I think I would just
do it better than I did it.
BRADLEY: If you had the chance to do it all over again,
you'd do the same thing and it'd put you right back here?
BOYCE: Only better.
BRADLEY: After Boyce and Lee were arrested, the British
and Americans were confident they had plugged the leak, but they
hadn't. Boyce and Lee were behind bars, but the British spy
Geoffrey Prime wasn't, and he continued to provide the Soviets
with what they wanted to know. Presumably, his arrest finally
put an end to that. Presumably.
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