The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of Friendship and Espionage

Rating:
Summary: The Cold Falcon
Review: At the southern tip of L.A. there's a bridge across the harbor. On one side it's beautiful, the other leads to Terminal Island, a federal prison. Boyce and Lee grew up on the beautiful side and ended up in the hell of a prison cell. Lindsey's book tells how. They did it, but to read of their journey downward is frightful when one considers the extreme differences the two sides of the bridge represent. And the book is much much better than the movie.

Rating:
Summary: Stumbling Into High Treason
Review: Of all the major spy stories to break open in the last thirty years, the case of John Boyce and Andrew Dalton Lee has to take the prize and the most troubling in its larger implications. Other spies like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen were disillusioned middle aged bureucrats whose spying was an outlet for their frustration as well as a source of additional income. Boyce and Dalton, however, were young men who blundered into the spy game mostly because of boredom with their comfortable upper middle class upbringings. Their betrayal of the country that allowed them to live such an easy life is as baffling, if not as horrific, as the later actions of the shooters at Columbine High School.

Those who enjoyed the popular movie starring Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn based on this book will particularly enjoy the details that the movie had to leave out. Of the two, Boyce's story is the most tragic. He was highly intellegent with a potentially bright future, and secured a position at defense contractor TRW with a Top Secret security clearance because of his retired FBI agent father's connections. Lee, on the other hand, was a dropout and a drug dealer whose life was spiraling downward toward the inevitable bad conclusion. One of the astonishing facts revealed in the book is just how many second chances Lee squandered along the way. A child of less affluence would have ended up in prison long before he even had the chance to join Boyce in his spying.

Author/journalist Robert Lindsey is an excellent writer and he tells the story in such a way that it reads like a fiction thriller. Lindsey reports astonishing facts such as the incredibly lax security at TRW without editorial comment, letting the events speak for themselves. Lindsey's extensive interviews with all of the principals, including Boyce in particular, make for particularly compelling reading.

Overall, a well-written journalistic account of one of the most unfortunate of America's spy cases.

Rating:
Summary: Stumbling Into High Treason
Review: Of all the major spy stories to break open in the last thirty years, the case of John Boyce and Andrew Dalton Lee has to take the prize and the most troubling in its larger implications. Other spies like Aldrich Ames or Robert Hanssen were disillusioned middle aged bureucrats whose spying was an outlet for their frustration as well as a source of additional income. Boyce and Dalton, however, were young men who blundered into the spy game mostly because of boredom with their comfortable upper middle class upbringings. Their betrayal of the country that allowed them to live such an easy life is as baffling, if not as horrific, as the later actions of the shooters at Columbine High School.

Those who enjoyed the popular movie starring Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn based on this book will particularly enjoy the details that the movie had to leave out. Of the two, Boyce's story is the most tragic. He was highly intellegent with a potentially bright future, and secured a position at defense contractor TRW with a Top Secret security clearance because of his retired FBI agent father's connections. Lee, on the other hand, was a dropout and a drug dealer whose life was spiraling downward toward the inevitable bad conclusion. One of the astonishing facts revealed in the book is just how many second chances Lee squandered along the way. A child of less affluence would have ended up in prison long before he even had the chance to join Boyce in his spying.

Author/journalist Robert Lindsey is an excellent writer and he tells the story in such a way that it reads like a fiction thriller. Lindsey reports astonishing facts such as the incredibly lax security at TRW without editorial comment, letting the events speak for themselves. Lindsey's extensive interviews with all of the principals, including Boyce in particular, make for particularly compelling reading.

Overall, a well-written journalistic account of one of the most unfortunate of America's spy cases.

Rating:
Summary: The Cold Falcon
Review: Robert Lindsey's "The Falcon and the Snowman: A True Story of friendship and Espionage" was a true story about Chris Boyce and Andrew Dalton and how they were selling secrets to the Soviets in the middle of the cold war. You see how simple this was, how they did it, and why they did it. I can't tell you much more with out giving something away. Once you pick it up you can't put it down.

Rating:
Summary: What you did NOT do in the 70's!
Review: This tale of young white males with connections, brains and some despair shows just how those qualities can generate WMD's. Drinking, drugging and sexing at the innermost hubs of the worlds' satellite data centers - taking and returning top secret documents barely concealed in potted plants and searching always searching for a reason to care- these kids went over the edge. They sold secrets- incomparable ones- to Soviets without a sense of humor, one boy coincidentally captured falcons and flew them in what were probably the last of the open areas on the California peninsula. They were clueless, their families were clueless and they had barely the sorts of trauma and alienation that the average street hustler has on a good day.

Now that I've read quite a few of these US spy things, it seems, and this is no surprise to others, I'm sure, that we Americans are as dogged in destroying ourselves as we are the environment and those who keep us rich. Then, we have systems that compete with each other and do the same to us by acting unaccountably and keeping these sorts of alienated criminals from being found out and prosecuted to the fullest.
Well, was it the 70's, the wealth or the post- Vietnam era? None, if we look at the current state of affairs, its human and we still haven't seemed to find a way to factor for that in our security and our passions for those who 'seem on the surface to be like us.' Read it.

Rating:
Summary: What you did NOT do in the 70's!
Review: This tale of young white males with connections, brains and some despair shows just how those qualities can generate WMD's. Drinking, drugging and sexing at the innermost hubs of the worlds' satellite data centers - taking and returning top secret documents barely concealed in potted plants and searching always searching for a reason to care- these kids went over the edge. They sold secrets- incomparable ones- to Soviets without a sense of humor, one boy coincidentally captured falcons and flew them in what were probably the last of the open areas on the California peninsula. They were clueless, their families were clueless and they had barely the sorts of trauma and alienation that the average street hustler has on a good day.

Now that I've read quite a few of these US spy things, it seems, and this is no surprise to others, I'm sure, that we Americans are as dogged in destroying ourselves as we are the environment and those who keep us rich. Then, we have systems that compete with each other and do the same to us by acting unaccountably and keeping these sorts of alienated criminals from being found out and prosecuted to the fullest.
Well, was it the 70's, the wealth or the post- Vietnam era? None, if we look at the current state of affairs, its human and we still haven't seemed to find a way to factor for that in our security and our passions for those who 'seem on the surface to be like us.' Read it.