The Associated Press reports that Christopher Boyce, popularly known as 'The Falcon' will be freed on parole as early as today.
Boyce was 22 when his father, a former FBI agent, helped him land a summer job as a clerk at TRW Inc. in Redondo Beach, where he had access to classified communications with CIA headquarters in Langley, Va.Boyce betrayed his country for cash. His sleazy partner in crime was paroled, but...He smuggled some of the documents home and sold them to the Russian Embassy in Mexico City, taking in about $77,000 before he and childhood friend Andrew Daulton Lee, his courier, were caught in 1976.
Both were arrested, tried and convicted of espionage. Lee was paroled in 1998.
Boyce made headlines in 1980 when he escaped from federal prison in Lompoc. He was free for 19 months, supporting himself by robbing banks in the Pacific Northwest, before he was arrested in Port Angeles, Wash.The article really softpedals what he did. Boyce committed sixteen armed robberies, in part to help finance his goal of escaping to the Soviet Union.
For this, he's getting parole? For shame!
And yet, Pollard is stil in jail. I don't get the double-standard.
It probably has something to do with Tenet threatening to quit as DCI when the issue of clemency for Pollard was brought up during the Camp David talks.
Neither of them should receive parole. They should both spend the rest of their lives in prison, at the very least. They betrayed their country.
It is amazing. The treason, the escape, the bank robberies...how is it possible that he could be released before at least 2027? It should have been a firing squad or life without, but parole?
Give me a break. Good luck with seven figure income from your book, Chris. You bastard.
B. Schlosser
Los Angeles, CA
But the USA did betray Australia (well the CIA did anyway....which is basically the same thing) and ousted Gough Whitlam (then Prime Minister of Australia).
So all I can say is touche!
Go Chris go!
Boyce got no money for the book.
Very glad to hear that.
Chris spends a quarter of his life in jail, never hurt anyone. Our "President" kills thousands in a war started with lies. In America, dissent is treason, but murder for oil is as American as apple pie.
Hey Abe -
'dissent is treason'...
Yup, all the DU folks I know have been rounded up, and when I had dinner with some liberal bloggers at Calpundit's, I had to pass through a cordon of state security police.
'murder for oil'
Saddam would have sold us all the oil we wanted at below-market prices (as he did to the EU) if we would have only lifted the arms embargo.
Get a grip, dude. Try and imagine a world in which people don't substitute taglines for thought.
A.L.
Yah, dissent is being crushed so bad that dissidents are being forced to accept large speaking fees - usually paid from education funds provided by the same nation they loathe - to rant about how silenced they are (which sounds like where "Abe" picked up his rhetoric) and compelled to accept lavish contracts from the same Capitalist Big Businesses Propaganda Machine they claim to spurn and assert refuses to air their views to produce movies documenting how they've been repressed and all (Not to mention all those wicked chain bookstores that hawk Zinn's and Chomsky's and Moore - again - et all's screeds on how crushed they all are under the jackboot of censorship and loss of freedom to dissent).
Hey, at least its a lucrative racket and gulls the marks, like "Abe", into thinking they're sincere, sefless idealists.
(Btw, going back to another topic, is A.L.'s response to "Abe" another example of how A.L. refuses to confront the Left so he can spend all his time bashing Republicans and conservatives instead? Just curious.)
(I know. . .let it go. . .)
This was a momentous act of stupidity by Boyce. But who hasn't done stupid things at 21? Even Robert McNamara admits that he and others would have been tried for crimes against humanity had America stayed in Vietnam and lost. Death would have been an easy way out for Boyce. He's suffered enough. Leave him be.
Well said, Brian. I love the way people come down so hard on Boyce - and sure he was a kid who did something iditioc, but he spent a quarter of a century in jail - but then these critics gloss over the fact that the CIA was trying to rig the Australian election - the people involved in that sleazy little enterprise deserved more time in jail than Boyce. They were adults who did what they did cooly and with political calculation--against their ally Australia.
"How disappointing"? How insane--the double standard, that is.