Rodney Barker - Dancing with the Devil - Sex, Espionage and the U.S. Marines - The Clayton Lonetree Story

A.W. knew it was a rare investigation that proceeded faultlessly, but this was not something that could be blown off as a minor kink. At the very least it created a defense counsel’s dream, and a prosecutor’s nightmare.

Although a host of specters had been raised, White did not feel the situation was catastrophic. Indeed, she thought it could even mean that in the process of fitting the key into Lonetree’s lock, they might open up greater crimes than he had yet confessed to.

At the Quantico brig Sgt. Clayton Lonetree was kept in a five-by-ten-foot cell that had three cement walls and a fourth of iron bars. His every move was monitored night and day by a closed-circuit camera. He was given no access to television or radio, he ate his meals in his cell, and every two or three days he was taken outside and allowed to run. But exercise is difficult when you’re wearing leg irons, a belly chain, and handcuffs.

He was told not to engage his jailers in conversation, and the only time they addressed him was to say things like “Here’s your chow, traitor,” and “Haven’t they lynched you yet, Indian?” As it was explained to him, he was in lockdown for his personal safety. For having dishonored the Marine Corps, there were any number of Marines who would take him out if they had the chance. It was made known to him that boot-camp drill instructors were invoking the name of Clayton Lonetree to fire up trainees at bayonet practice. Already two letters had arrived from citizens expressing outrage over his actions and recommending he be executed. One suggested it be done on national television.

Once in a while he was given a newspaper, but anything related to his case was cut out. When he tore a picture of a farm scene out of the paper and hung it on the wall just to remind himself what the out-of-doors looked like, it was taken down.

One day he was escorted to the brig library, which was a closet full of old paperbacks. He returned with a book written by the Russian author Dostoyevski, Crime and Punishment.

He had two regular visitors during those first few weeks. One was a Navy lieutenant commander in the Medical Service Corps by the name of Forrest Sherman. The brig psychologist, Sherman had been called in to evaluate Lonetree for suicidal impulses. But after spending several hours with him, Sherman had decided that while Lonetree’s behavior could easily be seen as self-damaging, he was not, at least at this point, going to kill himself. What he was was a very confused young man.

So Sherman had gone to the commanding officer and said he felt it was important that Lonetree have someone to talk to during this period. Someone not involved in the process, who had no stake in the direction of the court-martial. The commanding officer agreed, and it was set up so that Sherman would visit Lonetree privately on a regular basis.

As Sherman saw his role, he wanted to provide some positive valuing of Lonetree as a human being. Certainly nobody else was. And Lonetree seemed to want to talk to someone. About himself. About what he’d done.

At that stage Lonetree seemed almost shellshocked by the events that had engulfed him. What would stand out in Sherman’s memory of their early conversations was Lonetree’s description of himself. When Sherman began by asking Lonetree about his name and his racial heritage, assuming there would be some comfort to be found in his cultural background, or a sense of identity, Lonetree shook his head and referred to himself as an “apple.”

Sherman had been unfamiliar with the term at the time and asked, “What do you mean?”

Lonetree’s answer was, “You know, like there are blacks who are Oreos.”

Sherman still didn’t catch it. So Lonetree proceeded to explain that his Indian heritage was not an important part of who he was. While he appeared to be a red man on the outside, on the inside he thought and felt like a white man, and that’s what was known as an apple.

Lonetree also expressed a profound ambiguity regarding his loyalties. On the one hand he acknowledged that he had been manipulated by the KGB, but he also felt he had been set up by the CIA and betrayed by the NIS. At this point he didn’t know who his friends were and who his enemies were. People on both the Soviet and the American side appeared to have befriended him only to take advantage of him.

The other person who called on Lonetree daily was Major Henderson. In the two weeks since he’d met his client, Henderson had come to a new appreciation of him. Initially Henderson had found Lonetree so lacking in guile, so slow and dim, that the possibility of retardation had occurred to him, or perhaps some kind of learning disability. There were times when Henderson would ask a question that was answered with what seemed like a non sequitur, or a response the exact opposite of what he expected.

But as they began to establish a rapport, Lonetree’s thought processes gradually seemed to become more focused, and after getting to know his client better, Henderson had come to the conclusion that Sergeant Lonetree was a deceptively intelligent guy. Yes, he was someone whose attention drifted. And he certainly evidenced an emotional immaturity that resulted in questionable judgment. But Henderson saw indications of native smarts that he likened in his mind to those of a coyote. Nobody would call a coyote slow and dumb. Take them out of their element and they couldn’t add two and two. But in their own element coyotes were crafty as could be.

His client’s credibility had also been enhanced when the NIS released a report saying all of the assertions in Lonetree’s third statement had proved to be demonstrably false. This told Henderson that Lonetree had been voicing the truth when he’d said an NIS agent in London had encouraged him to lie.

The overall result was that Henderson’s thinking about this case had begun to change. Where at first it had sounded like a serious security breach, now he was beginning to think an over-reaction might be taking place. And this was his frame of mind when the chief prosecutor at Quantico, Maj. Frank Short, raised the idea of a plea bargain.

“Dave, there’s all these intelligence agencies who want to talk to your guy,” Short said. “And I’m having trouble getting material and releasing it to you because it’s classified. What do you say to a deal?”

Henderson was willing to listen. “What’s the case worth?”

“If Lonetree admits to minor security violations and disregarding the Intelligence Identities Protection Act, and he’s willing to cooperate with an intelligence debriefing, we’re talking in the neighborhood of five years.”

A defense counsel never measures success by acquittals. Effective representation was a matter of getting the best deal for the client, and Major Henderson had a reputation for recognizing early on when going to trial was a lost cause and negotiating a favorable deal. So he was tempted. His client was a Marine who had committed serious violations. He had confessed and was even now not denying most of what he said had happened. The government did not want the case to become a public spectacle, nor did it want to go through the risk of having national-security information divulged. This trial was also going to be expensive to conduct if witnesses had to be brought in from around the world. And as Short had said, Lonetree was in demand by a list of government agencies who wanted to talk with him. Added up, that made a persuasive case for accepting a pretrial agreement.

But for the time being, Henderson decided to pass. Under the Uniform Code of Military Justice a suspect had to be brought to trial within ninety days of confinement or the charges had to be dropped. Officially Lonetree had been taken into custody on December 24, so they were almost a third of the way through that period. At the rate the government was collecting evidence, and given the slowness of the classification process, he doubted the prosecution would be ready to proceed before the deadline. He was hoping either they would be unprepared to go to trial, which would give him added leverage to make an even better deal, or they would rush their case and make a mistake that would constitute grounds for dismissal.