Christopher John Boyce

Christopher John Boyce (born February 16, 1953) is a former American defense industry employee who was convicted of spying for the Soviet Union in 1977.

Boyce was raised in Southern California and began working for aerospace firm TRW Inc. in 1974. In 1977 he and a childhood friend Andrew Daulton Lee were discovered to have been passing classified documents to Soviet officials in Mexico City in exchange for cash payments. Boyce was convicted of espionage and sentenced to 40 years in prison. During his trial he attracted attention in Australia for his disclosures about joint Australian–American activities at the Pine Gap base in Australia, as well as allegations of CIA involvement in the 1975 dismissal of the Australian prime minister Gough Whitlam.

In 1980, Boyce escaped from the Lompoc Federal Correctional Complex. He subsequently carried out a series of bank robberies in Idaho and Washington, apparently with the intent of defecting to the Soviet Union. Boyce was recaptured in 1981 and the following year was convicted of escaping from a federal penitentiary and bank robbery offenses, receiving a further 28-year prison sentence. He was eventually paroled in 2002. His espionage activities were dramatized in the 1979 Robert Lindsey book The Falcon and the Snowman and a 1985 film of the same name.