The Falcon and the Snowman

In the mid-1970s, Christopher Boyce and Andrew Daulton Lee were two young men from comfortable families in Southern California who had been friends since boyhood. Boyce, a former seminary student and amateur falconer, took a job that gave him access to highly classified material, while Lee, nicknamed the Snowman, was a small-time cocaine dealer. Together they began selling secrets to the Soviet KGB. Robert Lindsey, then Los Angeles bureau chief for The New York Times, drew on extensive interviews with both men and others involved to reconstruct how two privileged young Americans became spies, and what it cost them. The book won the 1980 Edgar Award for Best Fact Crime and was adapted as a 1985 film.