Christopher Boyce, an expert in the sport of falconry and the son of a former FBI special agent, gets a job as a civilian defense contractor working in the so-called "Black Vault," a secure communication facility through which flows information on some of the most classified US operations in the world.

Boyce becomes disillusioned with the US government through his new position, especially after reading a misrouted communiqué dealing with the CIA's plan to depose the Prime Minister of Australia.

Andrew Daulton Lee is Boyce's childhood friend, a drug addict and minor cocaine smuggler nicknamed "The Snowman", who has frustrated and alienated his family.

Lee agrees to contact and deal with the KGB's agents in Mexico on Boyce's behalf, motivated not by idealism but by what he perceives as an opportunity to make money with plans to settle in Costa Rica, a nation that at that time had no extradition treaty with the United States.

The website's consensus reads: "Stranger than fiction and improbably entertaining, The Falcon and the Snowman shows how easily idealism can be twisted into treason.

[2] Film critic Roger Ebert gave it a perfect four-star rating, citing one of the many strengths as that "it succeeds, in an admirably matter-of-fact way, in showing us exactly how these two young men got in way over their heads.

It's just the meticulously observant record of how naiveté, inexperience, misplaced idealism and greed led to one of the most peculiar cases of treason in American history.