Christopher Boyce is a good sport. He's howling with laughter at the tiny snowman on the table just outside his front door, happy to indulge a visitor bent on shooting a photo of him with it and his falcon.

He eases into an outdoor chair, snow covering the lawn of his home in the high desert flats of central Oregon. The bird perches on his gloved hand. The snowman wears a tiny carrot nose.

Click.

The falcons and the snowman.

Wearing a sweatshirt in the sub-freezing weather, Boyce is the spy who'd just as soon come in from the cold. Nearly 40 years after he was caught selling U.S. secrets to the Soviet Union, he remains one of the most notorious figures in American espionage.

Christopher Boyce, who prefers to be called Chris, agreed to pose with his falcon "Higher Power" and a little snowman at his home in the high-desert flats of central Oregon.

Boyce stole U.S. satellite documents and other classified files from the California defense contractor TRW Inc. and sold them to Soviet spies. The KGB code-named him Falcon, a sobriquet that made him famous in a book (1979) and movie (1985) both titled, "The Falcon and the Snowman."

The tale of the Falcon soared again last year, when journalists drew parallels between Boyce and former NSA contractor Edward Snowden.

How the Falcon happened to land in snowy Terrebonne with the hero of his life – a woman we'll call the Surfer – is an epic love story.

...

It began in the early 1980s, a time of big hair, big glasses and big ideas.

The Surfer, a paralegal living in San Diego, was intrigued by "The Falcon and the Snowman." She felt sorry for Boyce's co-defendant, Andrew Daulton Lee, characterized in Robert Lindsey's book as an unrepentant heroin dealer (the "Snowman"), a short, big-eared, acne-scarred young man soundly rejected by women.

She wrote Lee in hopes of helping him get out of prison early.

Lee and Boyce had grown up as best friends and altar boys on California's majestic Palos Verdes Peninsula. As young men in the mid-1970s, they took different career paths -- Boyce worked as a file clerk with top-secret clearance at TRW, and Lee sold drugs -- before throwing in together in the business of espionage in 1975.

Boyce, given access to CIA cables at TRW, was so enraged by the reach of U.S. surveillance that he fought back. He smuggled top-secret documents out of the TRW vault and passed them to Lee, who – between drug deals – couriered them to Mexico City and sold them to the KGB.

The government arrested Boyce and Lee in 1977 and tried them for espionage. Boyce got a 40-year prison term, and Lee got life. Both had the possibility for parole.

The Surfer made friends with Lee and Boyce through prison mail in the early 1980s. She offered Lee her paralegal services, free of charge, in hopes of helping him win early release.

Her first contact with Boyce was a pitch to help her with Lee's case, asking a series of questions about Lee's culpability in their crimes. Boyce responded with a friendly letter wishing his old friend well. But he told the Surfer he had nothing useful to offer.

Their correspondence continued, sparked by shared youths in Southern California, books, nature and critters. Soon they were pen pals. As the years piled up, they grew close. So close the Surfer hatched a plan to help Boyce win a parole date.

He was intrigued but fatalistic. His criminal record was a train wreck.

Two years after the government locked him up for espionage, Boyce broke out of a prison in Lompoc, Calif. He funded his 19-month run with a string of armed bank robberies, then got an additional 28 years tacked onto his sentence after he was caught in Port Angeles, Wash.

"I didn't think the government would ever turn me loose," he says. "Ever."

Still, he enjoyed flirting with the Surfer by U.S. mail. She sent a photo, showing a willowy 6-foot redhead with blue eyes, high cheekbones, and legs turned sinewy by long days carving up waves on her short board.

In the late 1980s, the Surfer – now married and deeply immersed in helping Lee – continued to write Boyce. But she was losing hope she could help him get out. In her mind, it would take a team of lawyers, not a solitary paralegal.

"What do you tell somebody? 'Yeah, someday I'll be able to fight for your release'? Well, I couldn't do that," she recalls. "I wasn't going to offer anybody hope like that. It wouldn't have been fair."

So she wrote him a kiss-off letter.

Boyce was stung but also felt a measure of relief. Now he had license to quit hoping for a miracle. It was easier to turn off the world outside the walls, put his head down and do his time.

...

The Surfer wrote Boyce again in April 1995 to say Lee would be out by 1997. She asked: What about you?

She was now divorced, living at the beach in San Francisco, still a hard-charging paralegal. She told Boyce she wanted to go full bore to help him put together a winning parole packet.

Boyce played along.

"The more we corresponded and talked to each other on the phone, the more she started to share her life with me," Boyce says. "The things she did. Surfing. She was like my window to the world. I just started to feel closer and closer to her."

Boyce figured he'd probably lose his bid for release. But he was desperate to keep her in his life. He began to think of her as his girlfriend.

It's not uncommon for inmates to fall for a pen pal. But it was highly out of character for the Surfer. She began to question herself: "You're about to give up everything that you are to be in love with this guy that is a felon?"

The Falcon and the Surfer worked through much of 1996. They collected evidence of his good deeds and contrition to market him as a reformed man.

A key piece of evidence in Boyce's favor was his appearance before a Senate subcommittee trying to find ways to prevent espionage on U.S. soil. He testified in 1985, the so-called Year of the Spy, in which eight people – including the notorious Soviet mole John A. Walker Jr. – were caught.

"I only wish, Senators, that before more Americans take that irreversible step, they could know what I know, that they are bringing themselves heartaches more heavy than a mountain," Boyce told them.

What he didn't tell them is that he never felt like a traitor. He felt like a man who loved his country and mourned its loss of liberty. He hated what he thought of as the government's "surveillance state." So he had punished his nation by selling its secrets to its key Cold War enemy.

...

On Oct. 19, 1996, the Surfer's doctor delivered terrible news. She had an invasive form of breast cancer, lobular carcinoma. She underwent a radical mastectomy but declined chemotherapy.

"I knew if I did chemo, I wouldn't be able to put together Chris' parole packet," she says. "He was counting on me, and I was not going to deny him."

The Surfer submitted Boyce's request for parole in February 1997.

On March 24, 1997, a parole examiner took Boyce's testimony inside the walls of a maximum-security prison in Oak Park Heights, Minn. He soon recommended that Boyce be released after five more years.

The U.S. Parole Commission turned him down that April and set his next parole hearing for 2012. He would be 59.

The next month, the Surfer flew to Minnesota. She had laid eyes on Boyce just once before, from the gallery of a Seattle courtroom just after his 1981 recapture. She remembered his good looks and now would see how the years had treated him.

A corrections officer gave Boyce an interview room for a professional visit with his paralegal. When they met, he grabbed her and kissed her hard. The Surfer kissed him back.

"I don't think you're supposed to kiss your legal help," the officer said.

She visited five days in a row, then cried much of the way home.

The following month, the Surfer filed Boyce's appeal.

On Sept. 25, 1997, Boyce called her at home in San Francisco. He made small talk, asked about the surfing, the weather, her dogs. Then, as if an afterthought, he mentioned he had gotten a letter from the Parole Commission.

The Surfer launched a fusillade.

"We're gonna fight this," she told him. "In 24 months, we'll do the whole thing over again."

Boyce waited until she exhausted her venom. He read her the final line of the letter. He'd be out in 4½ years.

She had done it.

Boyce heard her voice seize. She was blubbering. A line of men stood behind Boyce at the bank of phones, and he did his best to hide the tears burning down his cheeks.

"I was no longer dead," he says. "There was reason to go on."

...

Boyce served his final two years at the government's medium-security prison in Sheridan.

On Sept. 16, 2002, his keepers cut him loose and ordered him to report that night at a halfway house in San Francisco for the last months of his sentence.

His parents drove down from their home in Washington's Gig Harbor and picked him up at the flagpole in front of the prison. Boyce remembers hugging his dad hard. His betrayals had deeply wounded the old man, a former FBI agent whose connections got him the job at TRW.

Boyce remembers the drive to the Portland airport. The sky was gray, and they passed fields of green and gold.

"I got complete sensory overload," he says. "I'm talking to my dad. I'm his son again after 25 years."

The Surfer was waiting for him at San Francisco International Airport. Boyce came down the ramp all by himself, and they kissed like teenagers.

As they strolled together toward her Ford Explorer, she noticed him craning his neck.

"Are you checking out my butt?"

"Well, yeah," he said.

...

The Surfer's real name was Kathleen Mills, but Boyce called her Cait.

They were married Oct. 12, 2002, by a certified minister wearing Spock ears for a Star Trek convention. A week later, they made it public in a ceremony in the Redwoods. Cait Boyce wore a Vera Wang dress she found on sale. Chris' entire family came. It marked the first time they had all been together since his arrest.

Cait's cancer recurred twice, but she kept powering through life. She surfed and took long runs at Golden Gate Park. She loved her home, her friends and the city's world-famous restaurants.

But California felt like a haunted place to Chris, where the ghost of his youth spied for the Soviets and busted out of Lompoc. As a man old enough to be his ghost's father, he found he still needed solitude. And falcons.

The snowman and the falcon outside the front door of Christopher and Cait Boyce's home in Terrebonne, Oregon.

The Surfer understood. In 2004, they bought a home in Terrebonne, a town that straddles U.S. 97 on the sagebrush flats north of Redmond. Boyce took a job at a local airstrip.

Cait's cancer returned. She suffered through radiation treatments five days a week and took medication that made her bones ache. Chris made them dinner every night and feigned good cheer but took long walks in the woods, petrified he might lose her.

In 2012, Cait's cancer went into remission.

She and Chris teamed up with Utah writer Vince Font on their book: "American Sons: The Untold Story of the Falcon and the Snowman." The Boyces found the process a staggering purge of crime and punishment, old wounds and sickness, hate and recriminations.

In the end, they were left with love and each other.

"I don't know anyone whose wife saved his life like Cait saved mine," Boyce says. "That has always been the greatest demonstration of love that anyone has ever given me in my life. Cait gave me my life back."

-- Bryan Denson