The 1985 movie "The Falcon and the Snowman," starring Sean Penn and Timothy Hutton, depicted the story of Christopher Boyce (played by Hutton) and his lifelong friend Andrew Daulton Lee, convicted American spies for the Soviet Union.
Boyce's father, an FBI agent, helped his son get a job as a clerk at TRW, a California company that dealt in U.S. spy satellites. As a boy, Boyce had taken up falconry as a hobby, hence the nickname The Falcon.
Lee was a drug dealer, which accounts for his nickname, The Snowman.
Boyce would purloin classified documents, and Lee would drive them into Mexico to sell to the Soviets. Detained in 1976 on suspicion of non-espionage criminal activity, Lee was caught with classified microfilm. He fingered Boyce, who was arrested at age 24 in 1977. Both men went to prison.
Boyce said that the reason for his treason was anger over some of the ill-advised activities of the C.I.A.
Boyce escaped in 1980 and turned into a one-man Bonnie and Clyde, robbing 17 banks before being recaptured in 1981.
Remarkably, Lee was paroled in 1998 and Boyce in 2003.
Boyce and Lee have led awfully active lives for a pair of former Roman Catholic altar boys.
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