Secrets for Sale.

• Author: MCCOLLUM, SEAN
• Position: Ex-altar boys betrayal in 1970s - Brief Article

Was it the disillusionment of the 1970s that made two ex-altar boys betray their country?

They were two young men looking to find themselves. But when Christopher Boyce and Daulton Lee became Soviet spies, they found themselves in big trouble.

In the 1950s and '60s, when Boyce and Lee were growing up in an affluent Los Angeles suburb, Americans considered the Soviet Union a bitter foe. It was a Communist dictatorship that competed fiercely with the U.S. for world influence, and bristled with missiles pointed at the hearts of U.S. cities. Helping the Soviets against your own country was no joke. But while still in their early 20s, Boyce and Lee decided to do just that--and thus entered the dangerous world of international espionage.

Boyce and Lee were unlikely spies. Neither had any intelligence experience. They had been altar boys at the Catholic church in Palos Verdes Estates and played on the same high school football team. In the early 1970s, the growing unpopularity of the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal that tarnished the presidency had left many young Americans disillusioned with their government. But neither Boyce nor Lee was politically active. Boyce was more focused on his hobby, falconry, and Lee on illegal drugs, which had become for him both an addiction and a business.

In July 1974, Boyce got a job as a clerk at TRW, a military communications manufacturer. Having given up plans for the priesthood, he was taking some time off from college. His father, a former FBI agent, had set up the job through a family friend.

Working closely with the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and the Central Intelligence Agency, TRW built secret surveillance satellites and helped the CIA manage its communications with spies around the world.

By December 1974, supervisors had taken a shine to the earnest and hard-working Boyce. After some background checks, they cleared him to work in TRW's Black Vault, a communications room so secret that not even the security guards were allowed to enter. A $140-a-week college dropout, Boyce, 21, now had access to the nation's most secret code systems and spying plans.

Early in 1975, as the room's clacking teletype machines decoded secret messages from around the world, Boyce learned that the U.S. was spying on allies as well as enemies. And it wasn't just spying. One communique indicated that CIA operatives were secretly interfering in Australia's internal politics. As Boyce later said in...