Free The Falcon and the Snowman by Robert Lindsey

other defense contractors must guard against, the voice droned on, is “an insidious effort by Communist agents to get government secrets that are covert.” And she began to list examples of how careless, foolish Americans had been duped by Soviet agents.
    â€œOne individual worked for Convair in San Diego,” the young woman said. “He had been contacted and agreed to furnish secrets for a price. The FBI got on to him after a while, but couldn’t figure out how he was getting the volumes of material out. It was one of those plants that you don’t carry anything in without having it searched and you fill out thirty forms to carry something out, and then copies go to everyone from the president to the janitor.
    â€œHis way was a simple one: he ran Xerox copies and put them in a contractor’s envelope, prepared a contractor’s label and mailed them to his contact on the East Coast via the company mail. He slipped up, though, when he put a wrong address on one package and it was returned marked, ‘No such address.’ They opened it to see who it was from and found classified information. And they nailed him.
    â€œRussians use all sorts of gimmicks to get acquainted with Americans,” she said. “They cultivate their friendship and then use them in whatever manner possible.” She told the new employees about a woman who worked “at a local defense plant” who went to West Germany on a vacation in 1966 and was befriended by a “local German boy when she stopped into a local beer garden to sample the beer.” When the woman returned to Los Angeles, the security-briefing officer continued, a Russian exchange student in this country tried to contact her, but “fortunately the girl reported the incident to Security.”
    When the lecture was over, the new TRW employees watched a film reinforcing the warnings of Communist agents: Security Is Your Responsibility . Chris then signed another document acknowledging that he had seen the film and had been advised of America’s espionage laws and of the menace of Communist agents.
    On the day Chris was hired, TRW granted him access to “confidential” defense information, as was the standard procedure for new employees in the defense industry. Confidential is the lowest of the three basic levels of classification used by the United States to guard military information. It is information deemed less sensitive than “Secret” or “Top Secret” data.
    Although his father’s friend had still not told him, he had bigger things in store for Chris than a Confidential clearance.
    Chris received a new set of forms to complete in early August, asking for further information about his past. Once again, he listed his name, his place and date of birth and his parents’ place and date of birth. But this time he gave a detailed description of each of the jobs he had held. He gave his physical description—five feet eight inches tall; 150 pounds; brown hair, blue eyes; he noted that he was a member of no organizations, that he had never traveled outside the United States and that he had no relatives residing out of the country. It was the biography of a young high school graduate without anything very distinctive about it.
    On August 8, unbeknownst to Chris, these forms and copies of other papers collected in his file during the processing of his application were placed in a pouch and sent to Langley, Virginia. The destination was the Central Intelligence Agency.
    Federal investigators had already begun to look into Chris’s childhood, his high school years and his tentative tries at college. Government agents interviewed neighbors of the Boyces’ in Palos Verdes and sent questionnaires to his former employers. Except for indications of drift in his life—three colleges in three years and seven jobs in two years—there wasn’t much to draw attention to the young man for those