A Tale of Two Spies: Espionage in the United States and Mexico

I met two of the important spies for the Soviet Union against the U.S. entirely by accident. Curiously, Mexico played an important role in both tales.

By Howard Campbell*

The first spy I met was Christopher Boyce. It was the summer of 1980, and I was working as an archaeologist for the Forest Service in northern Idaho. My partner and I were looking for old logging and mining camps in the forests outside Bonners Ferry, near the Canadian border. While hiking up heavily timbered Katka Mountain, we were surprised by two scruffy young men camped out by an abandoned gold mine. One pulled a gun on us and asked us what we were doing. I nervously replied, “We are just archaeologists looking for old sites.” The young light-haired guy with the pistol must have believed us, because he put the weapon down and we had a chat. In those days, it was not uncommon for hippies, loners, and others to try to live off the land in the wilderness in the remote Pacific Northwest and British Colombia.

Thus, my partner, a middle-aged recovering alcoholic, and I did not think much of the encounter once the initial scare wore off. We chatted amiably with the two mountain men and, as was the custom then, smoked a peace pipe, and hung out for about an hour. I remember that the young guy, who said his name was “Jim Namchek,” offered me some raw garlic to eat. He said it was good for health. That seemed to jibe with my notion of what a back-to-the-lander might do. The only strange thing about Namchek was that he seemed to be too good looking and articulate to be a real hippie. But he said he was from California so it kind of made sense. Many Idahoans had a chip on their shoulder about the relative wealth and sophistication of Californians.

The only other time I saw Namchek in person was one Sunday afternoon when I was listlessly hitchhiking on the outskirts of Bonners Ferry back to the battered shack where I lived with my fellow archaeologist. There was little traffic on lonely state highway 2 that led eastward to Montana. Suddenly, Namchek zoomed by in a white pick-up. Recognizing me, he screeched to a halt and told me to jump in the back. His buddy tossed me a couple of cans of beer, and they drove me home.

The next time I saw Namchek’s face was in a photograph on the front page of the New York Times in September 1981. By then I was living in Mexico City, using my wages from the Forest Service job and trying to eke out a living as an English teacher. It was a kind of bohemian dream inspired by Kerouac and the 1960s. I had so little money that I would go to Sanborns restaurants and read the U.S. newspapers for free until the employees kicked me out. At the Sanborns on Reforma, near the Monument to the Revolution, I learned that Namcheck was actually Christopher Boyce, one of the most important spies against the U.S. of the twentieth century.

Boyce and his childhood friend Andrew Daulton Lee stole U.S. espionage secrets from TRW and sold them to Soviet agents at the Russian embassy in Mexico City. Boyce was first captured in 1977, after Lee foolishly threw litter in the streets by the Embassy and Mexican police arrested him. Under interrogation, Lee gave up his accomplice. Boyce was sentenced to forty years in prison. Yet only two years later, he escaped from the prison in Lompoc, California and eventually made his way to sparsely populated northern Idaho. There he survived by robbing banks in Idaho, Montana and Washington, and we briefly met. The Hollywood movie, The Falcon and the Snowman, starring Timothy Hutton and Sean Penn, faithfully recounts Boyce’s chapter in U.S. spy history.

I also met the other spy, Gilberto López y Rivas, serendipitously. After living in Mexico City for several years I developed a passion for the country and decided to do my PhD thesis about the Zapotec people of Oaxaca. In the mid-1980s, I was conducting anthropological fieldwork for my dissertation in Juchitán, Oaxaca. I was invited by a local friend to attend a national meeting of indigenous people held at the local cultural center. At the meeting I was introduced to a tall, thin, white anthropologist from Mexico City, a well-known, well-published radical: López y Rivas. He was incredibly rude to me, refusing to converse, barely shaking my hand and quickly leaving. When I later found out that López y Rivas had spied against the U.S. (for the Soviet military) while studying for his PhD at the University of Utah in the 1970s, I concluded that he probably wasn’t being rude but may have been afraid I was an American who was snooping on him.

In 1978, narrowly escaping capture by the FBI in Minnesota—two of whose agents died in a place crash while tracking López y Rivas—the Mexican anthropologist had returned to his home country. He then became a prominent scholar and eventually a successful leftist politician.

Neither Boyce nor López y Rivas ever rejected their reasons for spying on the U.S., even though Boyce spent 25 years in U.S. federal prisons and López y Rivas nearly did, and he was heavily criticized in Mexico when his spying exploits were revealed in the mass media. Both felt that the U.S. was an arrogant superpower that caused great harm to the rest of the world while pursuing a destructive Cold War against communism. Both men are still alive today and living in the free world.

I have searched my mind to try to make sense of the strange coincidences which led me to meet these real-life spies. I draw few morals from the story other than that in a complex political world, Mexico and the U.S. are intricately intertwined as nations and as peoples. It behooves us in both countries to move beyond the simple dichotomies of the Cold War and the Manichean calculus of spy vs spy that produced the spying activities of Boyce and López y Rivas across the U.S. and into Mexico. The same goes for Russia and the U.S., although the likelihood of a rapprochement between the two is ever less likely as the Trump-Putin bromance declines. Although political conflict and espionage will never cease, they are dangerous games with profound human consequences.

*Howard Campbell is a professor of cultural anthropology at the University of Texas at El Paso (UTEP). He is the author or editor of six academic volumes, including a 2009 book from University of Texas Press called “Drug War Zone: Frontline Dispatches from the Streets of El Paso and Juárez.”