Boyce

In the summer of 1974, Boyce, a bright but disaffected 21-year-old college dropout, got a job as a clerk at the TRW Defense and Space Systems complex in Redondo Beach.

Boyce made $140 a week at the defense plant and held down a second job tending bar.

Boyce impressed his bosses and was soon cleared to enter the steel-doored fortress called the “black vault,” a classified sanctum where he was exposed to sensitive CIA communications pertaining to America’s network of espionage satellites.

“I just was in total disagreement with the whole direction of Western society,” Boyce told The Times many years later.

For more than a year, thousands of classified documents flowed from the TRW complex to the Soviets, with Boyce sometimes smuggling them out in potted plants.