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

There was silence on the other end of the line.

“Hello? Sally? What’s wrong?”

Apologetically, Sally said that since their conversation she had received a phone call from Clayton’s father, who had informed her that William Kunstler had been contacted and he was going to represent Clayton.

Stuhff was hugely relieved. Not only did this let him off the hook, he knew the veteran Kunstler was the right man for this job. Indeed, as a passionate advocate for civil rights himself, he had been a longtime admirer of William Kunstler. Among his cherished memories was an exchange the two had had back in the early seventies. After Kunstler had delivered a speech at the University of Utah Law School, at a reception in the student lounge Stuhff had approached him and expressed the opinion that following the precedent of Nuremberg, he thought a war-crimes trial ought to be held and General Westmoreland and President Nixon, among others, ought to be tried for prosecuting the Vietnam War. An amused Kunstler had chuckled and said, “You’re being too radical, my friend.”

Since the remark was coming from a fire-breathing radical, Stuhff had taken it as a compliment. And now he took the opportunity to have another conversation with his legal hero, calling Kunstler in New York to wish him well.

“You have been misinformed,” Kunstler replied. “I am not representing Clayton.”

“Why not?” Stuhff asked.

“I’m not sure,” Kunstler answered. “What I was told by his Marine lawyer was he did not want civilian representation because he thought it was in his interest to go through this without any publicity.”

Stuhff was dismayed. It seemed more than a little suspicious that a Marine confined in the Quantico brig would not wish to be represented by someone free of military control. As for wanting to avoid publicity, it was too late. A cursory check of media stories had revealed that the adverse-publicity mill was already churning. In a session with a group of reporters at the Pentagon, Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger had even made a statement to the effect that in his opinion if Lonetree wasn’t hanged, he ought to be shot.

A second time Mike Stuhff called Sally Tsosie. He related the essence of his conversation with William Kunstler and said he was still willing to take her son’s case. But for that to happen, he said, “Clayton is going to have to make up his mind that he definitely wants independent civilian counsel.”

Sally said she would talk to Clayton, and the way she said it left little doubt which way her son would go.

After hanging up the phone, Mike Stuhff found himself thinking about his grandfather. Stories about the old man’s involvement in the international protest of the French army’s espionage conviction of Alfred Dreyfus because he was a Jew had been handed down in the Stuhff family as an example of social idealism to be emulated. From all that he’d read so far, the case against Clayton Lonetree sounded like a similar rush to judgment.

When the physical evidence confiscated from Lonetree’s room in Vienna arrived at NIS headquarters, included were a batch of photographs. Angelic White spent several days sifting through them, culling the obvious ones—photos of Lonetree and his family—from those that were not immediately identifiable. Mid-morning on the second day, a fellow NIS agent by the name of Ron Larsen dropped by her cubicle to help out. As he shuffled through the unknowns, he stopped on one of Lonetree in a white polo shirt and blue jeans, standing in front of a building beside a brass plaque.

“This is San Francisco,” he remarked.

A.W. craned to see which one he was talking about.

“San Francisco? That’s odd. There’s nothing about San Francisco in his background records. I wonder what he was doing there.”

Larsen looked more closely at the photo. He was familiar with the Bay Area because he had spent a lot of personal time there, but it was as an NIS agent that he was familiar with the foreign consulates. “I don’t know, but that’s the Soviet Consulate he’s standing in front of.”

“Get out of town!” A.W. exclaimed.

Larsen handed her the photo, and A.W. stared as if seeing it for the first time.

“This came from a stack taken during the time he was at Camp Pendleton,” she observed. “Where he was stationed before he went through Marine guard training.”

The photo immediately took on the charge of a potentially case-breaking piece of evidence. Everyone had assumed Lonetree’s downfall began in Moscow, when he met Violetta. The big question now was how far back all this went: Had Lonetree entered the Marine security guard program with the intention of betrayal?

Leads were immediately sent to NIS agents in the Bay Area, who were given the task of tracking every step of Lonetree’s San Francisco trip. Within a week they reported back. Lonetree had purchased a plane ticket from San Diego to San Francisco in 1983, while stationed at Camp Pendleton. He had come up on a Friday, remained Saturday, and returned on Sunday. The hotel where he stayed was located and its records revealed that he had rented a single room. There was no record of any outgoing calls.

As for who took the picture, there was no way of telling at this point. He could have stopped some tourist on the street and asked for a favor. On the other hand, this was a guy who kept copies of his meet instructions in Vienna.

Had he just posed out front or actually gone inside? A.W. went to the FBI for the answer to that question, because they maintained twenty-four-hour visual surveillance of the Soviet Consulate. But apparently there had been a camera malfunction on that particular day, and for reasons never explained, no backup logs describing entries and exits had been kept. Lonetree could have gone in and out, but there was no way of knowing.

For several weeks Angelic White could not get the lead out of her mind and continued to try on various meanings. It proved he was there—so big deal, you could say. San Francisco’s a popular vacation spot, lots of people go there. But from her position at the time she thought it was unusual for someone on Lonetree’s salary to jet up to San Francisco for such a short trip. And presumably he shot a whole roll of film, but what was the one picture he saved? Not Fishermen’s Wharf. Not the Golden Gate Bridge. Himself in front of the Soviet Consulate.

The ante was raised when a tantalizing results-of-interview was filed by an NIS agent on the Camp Pendleton interview beat who had located a Sgt. Scott Howard, a Marine assigned to the same company as Lonetree in 1982, who remembered him well. “Howard said subject was quiet, intellectual, and always reading books on World War II and the Soviet Union. Subject was current on world events and would sometimes talk with Howard about going to the Soviet Union and the activities of the KGB. Howard said that subject was fascinated by the world of espionage….”

Angelic White didn’t know what to make of the fact that Lonetree had apparently been absorbed in thought about the Soviet Union and the KGB at this stage of his Marine career. Her familiarity with KGB policies regarding walk-ins led her to believe that if Lonetree had initiated contact himself, it was unlikely they would have welcomed him. More probably they would have suspected he was a dangle or a crank, opened a file on him, and done nothing more. But even if Lonetree had not made an actual approach, she thought at the very least this indicated he was already fooling around with the notion of hooking up with the Soviets. Just in his head, maybe, but nevertheless he was thinking about it. Which put him on the road to espionage before he ever got to Moscow.

As provocative as the San Francisco lead was, when it went no further, A.W. turned her attention back to other investigative issues that were proving to be equally frustrating. Headquarters wanted NIS agents to speak with every Marine security guard who had come into contact with Sergeant Lonetree while he was dealing with Soviet intelligence. Thinking the Marine Corps was the logical place to go for that information, she had submitted a formal request asking for the name and current location of all MSGs whose tour of duty overlapped Lonetree’s. When a week went by and she had yet to receive a response, she called for an update on the progress. This time she was informed that she had come to the wrong place. The Marine Corps didn’t have those records because Marines on embassy duty technically belonged to the State Department.