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

“Terrific,” she muttered to herself, clearly perturbed, and that very day put in an identical request to the appropriate people at the State Department. And when the much-awaited report did not show up in a timely fashion, she made an exasperated phone call demanding to know what was taking so long.

“Be patient,” she was told. “It’s going to take time for a list of names to be assembled.”

“Why? Can’t somebody just go to a computer and jet off a copy?”

It was at this juncture that she learned about the Diplomatic Security Service’s outdated method of record keeping. Incredibly, its files on Marine security guards had yet to be computerized. MSGs were indexed by name only, they weren’t differentiated by duty stations, and the State Department’s tracking device consisted of going by hand through hundreds of three-by-five cards kept in a cardboard box.

Eventually ten names were turned over to A.W., which prompted another round of bickering. She wanted an open field: the right for NIS agents to interview Marine guards, to expand the conversation into interrogations if it seemed appropriate, to administer a polygraph examination if it was called for, and to conduct property searches should they be warranted. To her, these were the basic materials with which you built a case.

But the State Department didn’t see it that way. When Angelic White notified officials that NIS intended to begin their interviews with those Marines in these locations on this day, she was reminded that the regional security officer was responsible not only for implementing overall security at U.S. diplomatic missions overseas but also for investigating all matters of criminal interest.

A.W. had assumed that even though embassies were not the Naval Investigative Service’s natural jurisdiction, because the investigation of counterintelligence activities involving Marine Corps personnel belonged to NIS, full cooperation on the part of the State Department could be taken for granted. In any number of other investigations involving military personnel, a simple call to the primary organization was all it had taken, and where there had been concurrent jurisdiction, accommodations were usually made to let NIS take the lead.

This being the first inquiry of this nature, however, no established mechanism existed for coordinating this kind of counterintelligence investigation, and the State Department was not inclined to relinquish its authority. So out of its own counterintelligence shop went interview requests, which were received by security officers at the Moscow and Vienna embassies as well as embassies where other MSGs of interest to the NIS had been transferred. And when the first results came through, the weaknesses of the State Department’s criminal investigative abilities were apparent. There were glaring omissions, obvious questions unasked or not followed up on.

When they arrived on A.W.’s desk, in disgust she kicked them back. “I can’t use these. If a Marine said he attended a Thanksgiving luncheon with Lonetree, I don’t want to hear what was on the menu. I want to know who else was there, and what they talked about.”

Not until the State Department realized how extensive and detailed NIS wanted this investigation to be conducted, and the embassy security officers recognized the amount of work it entailed, did things finally loosen up and was the NIS invited to participate. But by this time several precious weeks had passed, and A.W. was beginning to hear the tick of the ninety-day clock.

The initial reports filed by NIS agents let A.W. know they were, not investigating the good soldier. Sgt. Clayton Lonetree, it turned out, had had a history of significant personal problems while on post. His fellow Marines remembered that he could not hold his liquor, he was loud and obnoxious when he had too much to drink, and this had led to several disciplinary actions. He also had a lengthy rap sheet for minor misconduct: showing up late for duty, falling asleep on duty, standing guard in civilian clothes, losing his nightstick. And after he’d been counseled, when he did not shape up quickly enough, the detachment commander had even tried to get him relieved from the security guard program.

But there were surprisingly few hits that connected Lonetree to the elements of offense in his case. He was described as a loner who kept to himself, someone whose name defined him, so few Marines could say they knew him well. To no one had he confided his relationship with Violetta, much less his meetings with Uncle Sasha. Several did comment that he was openly enamored with the Soviet system, as evidenced by living quarters that were decorated with large pictures of members of the Soviet Politburo, a five-by-eight-foot Russian flag, and a blown-up photograph of a Russian tank. And it was mentioned that when he was inebriated, you could count on his going off on a tangent about how Indians were the low man on the totem pole in American society, but it wasn’t like that in the Soviet Union, where everyone was equal. But no one thought much about it at the time because a lot of Marines collected Soviet military memorabilia, and everyone in the Corps had some gripe or other. Besides, other than those quirks, Sergeant Lonetree was a regular Joe. He responded to occasions for carousing as though they were a fraternity initiation, and got up the next morning and jogged ten miles in combat boots. While some of his barracks mates would jokingly call him Comrade Lonesky and refer to him as a “Red” Indian, he was more widely known by the nickname Running Bear.

The most inculpatory information turned up by NIS came out of the Moscow logbooks. The buddy system was in effect in Moscow, requiring Marines to travel in pairs whenever they left the embassy, but an inspection of the logs showed that Lonetree had signed out 104 times, and 73 of those times he had gone out by himself. The problem from an evidentiary point of view, however, was that even though it could now be confirmed that he had checked out on the days he said he met with Violetta and Sasha, there was only his word as to where he went.

By no means were the Marine interviews unproductive, however. To the contrary, although NIS agents were finding very little additional evidence against Lonetree that went beyond what he had turned over in Vienna, they were collecting a startling amount of contextual information about the Marine guard detachment at the American Embassy in Moscow. And what they discovered in this regard was as disturbing as it was enlightening.

The rule book said that Marines stationed in Moscow were not allowed to date Soviet women or women from any other Eastern Bloc country. They were not even supposed to associate or converse with them on a one-to-one basis outside the embassy. To reduce the possibility of interaction between Marines and Soviet women, certain hotels, bars, and discos were also declared off-limits. The rationale for these restrictions was that this would reduce the likelihood of Marines’ getting sexually or personally involved with Soviet women and potentially setting themselves up for entrapment, because that was the way the KGB operated.

But in the overwhelming majority of the interviews, Marines admitted to NIS agents that their superiors looked the other way when it came to policing the nonfraternization policy. Virtually every one of the Marines who served in Moscow with Lonetree acknowledged having violated the nonfraternization regulation on at least one occasion. They had gone to a “dollar bar” and danced with a Soviet hooker, or they had picked one up and taken her back to their room in the embassy. Some confessed to having Soviet girlfriends and switching duty so they could check out and sleep over. One Marine even admitted smuggling a Soviet girl into the Marine House, where he kept her hidden away like a love slave for several days. Several accused the assistant detachment commander of having a bevy of Soviet prostitutes that serviced him like a harem.