The Wizards of Langley by Jeffrey T Richelson

Author:Jeffrey T Richelson [JEFFREY T. RICHELSON]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Basic Books
Published: 2012-01-03T05:00:00+00:00

PROSECUTION WITNESS

By 1977, Leslie Dirks had been with the CIA for sixteen years. He had participated in countless meetings to discuss U.S. satellite reconnaissance activities—meetings that were conducted under strict security guidelines, often in vault areas. But in April 1977 and November 1978, Dirks would appear in a quite different setting—U.S. District Court. In each case, he would be the key prosecution witness in a trial that resulted from the sale of secrets about one of the CIA’s greatest technical accomplishments. The buyer was the Soviet Union. The secrets concerned RHYOLITE and the KH-11.

The sequence of events that led to Dirks’s first court appearance began on July 29, 1974, when twenty-one-year-old Christopher John Boyce began work at TRW as a general clerk at a salary of $140 a week. On November 15, he was briefed on RHYOLITE, described by the briefer as “a multipurpose covert electronic surveillance system.”36 He was also told about the PYRAMIDER and ARGUS programs.

The revelations were necessary because Boyce had been assigned to work in TRW’s “black vault”—a bank-style vault with a three-number combination and an inside door with a key lock. Within the vault, he monitored secret communications traffic relating to various CIA-TRW satellite projects. Less than six months after joining TRW, Boyce was using a boyhood friend, Andrew Daulton Lee, to sell the vault’s secrets to the KGB. In April 1975, Lee, who was more familiar with peddling marijuana than crypto cards, walked through the front door of the Soviet embassy in Mexico City and handed a typewritten note to the first official he encountered. It read, “Enclosed is a computer card from the National Security Agency, crypto system. . . . If you want to do business, please advise the courier.”37

The KGB, naturally, was interested. And Boyce had a wealth of material to choose from, with fifty to sixty messages a day passing through his hands, messages kept on file for a year. Altogether, Lee would make seven trips to meet with KGB officers. On March 15, 1976, he arrived in Vienna and delivered ten rolls of film containing a month of ciphers; RHYOLITE communications traffic among TRW, the CIA, and Pine Gap; and a thick technical report on the proposed ARGUS system.38

In early October 1976, Boyce joined Lee, for the first time, in Mexico City. Once there, it became apparent that as much as KGB officials valued the intelligence Boyce was providing on U.S. satellites, they thought he could be more useful elsewhere. The KGB would be willing, Boyce was told, to provide $40,000 to pay for college and graduate school. They envisioned that Boyce would become a Soviet or Chinese specialist and find a job with the State Department or CIA. Before the month was out, Boyce had applied for admission to the University of California at Riverside.39

But the KGB’s plan to turn Boyce into a mole was torpedoed by Lee’s impulsive behavior. On one occasion, such behavior had led his KGB contact, Boris, to pack Lee in a car and toss him out onto the road.

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