Secrets for Sale.

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 an interview, the revelation made him angry:

My government was deceiving an ally ... [an] English-speaking parliamentary democracy. I thought it was indicative of ... what my country had sunk to.

To strike back, Boyce hatched a plan to sabotage the U.S. intelligence network, and recruited his childhood friend Lee to help him. "Man you're crazy," said Lee when Boyce first proposed that they contact the Soviet government. But Lee needed money badly. He agreed to visit the Soviet embassy in Mexico City and offer classified documents for sale --with the promise of more to come. Inside, he gave an embassy officer a package and a piece of paper Boyce had typed out:

Enclosed is a computer card from a National Security Agency crypto [code] system. If you want to do business, please advise the courier.

The officer wanted to do business. As Robert Lindsey, who covered the case for The Times, later wrote:

... he gave Daulton instructions to meet him at a Mexico City restaurant on his next trip and told him they would use passwords at future meetings. Daulton would be asked: "Do you know the restaurant in San Francisco?" And Daulton was to reply: "No, but I know the restaurant in Los Angeles."

For 18 months, with such cloak-and-dagger tactics, Lee passed along about 1,000 pages of the U.S. government's deepest secrets, for which the Soviets paid about $70,000.

Boyce left TRW in December 1976 to go back to college. A month later, Mexico City police arrested Lee for a murder he hadn't committed and found he was carrying negatives of top-secret documents. Lee was soon returned to the U.S. and into the arms of FBI agents. Boyce was arrested, and freely confessed to being a spy. The two were tried and convicted. Lee was given a life sentence; Boyce, 40 years.

Boyce and Lee had enabled the Soviets to block a spy satellite that could have been used to monitor Soviet compliance with a key arms-control treaty the Senate was voting on. That fact helped doom the treaty, leading Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan (D-N.Y.) to say that "nothing quite so awful has happened to our country as the escapade of these two young men."

Lee was paroled in 1998, and Boyce, who got additional time for bank robberies after a 1980 prison escape, is set for release to a halfway house in 2002.