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

A moment later the black-and-white image of a young Marine appeared on the TV monitor. He wore camouflage utilities and was leaning back in a chair with his hands locked behind his head. His wide, flat cheeks and ethnic features identified him as an American Indian, the high-and-tight military haircut adding a Mohawk touch. At the moment he seemed calm and relaxed, like someone who had kicked back and was spinning a good yarn.

“I was on the midnight shift, at the desk, and I bent over and my cover fell off. I picked it up and brushed it off. Then I looked at it. I looked at the emblem. I looked at the eagle. It took me back to boot camp. They told us the eagle is a representation of our nation. The globe is our additional duties. I didn’t care about the anchor. I kept looking at the eagle and thinking about the things it represented….”

As I listened to Lonetree talk, my eyes picked at the details. The date and time pulsating in the lower right-hand corner. The low-grade quality of the programming you would expect from a surveillance camera. Lonetree’s peculiar mannerisms: Asked a question, he would lapse into a long pause during which he stared straight ahead, eyes wide, mouth slack, as if he were watching memories… and when at last he spoke, his rambling, stream-of-consciousness response would frequently appear to miss the point.

As if reading my mind, the NIS agent recalled that Lonetree’s delivery bothered him at the beginning. “With a normal criminal suspect, if he’s not making eye contact, he’s probably lying. Of course some can look you in the eye and lie, but in the initial stages of the interrogation, when he was doing this, I thought he was making up stories. Later I realized it was just his way.”

After several discursive digressions and another interminable pause, Lonetree seemed to recover the thread.

“To get back to where I was, I didn’t do anything on that post. But then I figured what am I gonna do, carry on till the day I die? Be an old man?… I was going against my principles. What I believed in… I cried once.”

If any of this made sense, it was only to him. But he glanced at his interrogator for a reaction. My guess was he didn’t receive one, and after taking a deep breath, he continued.

“I pulled the thirty-eight out of my holster. It was loaded. I was wishing I was dead…. I thought, If you kill yourself, there’s gonna be an investigation. They’ll want to know why you did this. They’ll probably search your room. You’re going to puzzle the hell out of them. They’re not going to rule out espionage. But that’s probably as far as they’ll get.”

His concentration was absolute now.

“It was the easy way out. I toyed with it. I put it up to my head. My forehead.”

He squinted, as though once again feeling the pressure of oblivion against his skull.

“Then I brought it down. Put my mouth around the barrel. Put it under my chin. They would find me that night. It would be a mess, of course. People trying to get in contact with the post. When they found me, I’d probably still be sitting in the chair….”

A sudden case of the sniffles overcame him.

“But I valued my life more than that.”

There was a quaver in his voice when he delivered a line that I was told had, to the note takers, the kick of the shot he never fired: “I remember thinking, It’s only espionage.”

Several days after Sgt. Clayton Lonetree unholstered his .38 Smith & Wesson, cocked the hammer, and put the muzzle under his chin, but was unable to apply the pound-and-a-half pull to the trigger that would have ended his life, he decided to turn himself in.

The date was December 14, 1986. The place, Vienna, where Lonetree had been transferred after an eighteen-month tour in Moscow. The occasion he chose was the annual Christmas party at the residence of Ambassador Ronald Lauder.

The ambassador lived on the opposite side of the city from the embassy, in a mansion that claimed historic interest. It was here that President John Kennedy met with Premier Nikita Khrushchev before the Cuban missile crisis and, legend had it, Khrushchev decided that if one of them blinked, it wouldn’t be him. By the time Sergeant Lonetree arrived in a van loaded with barracks buddies, the reception was in full swing. In a ballroom graced by a Christmas tree whose top touched the ceiling, embassy personnel, from the clerks and telephone operators to the ambassador and deputy chief of mission, stood in chatting groups, and a piano player was summoning the holiday spirit with a medley of Christmas carols.

Helping himself to a drink, Sergeant Lonetree pointed his attention toward a tweedy professorial type about whose posture there was a distinct slouch in the shoulders typical of Austrians, who liked to say they carried the weight of the world on their backs. Officially the man’s position at the American Embassy was “political officer,” but Lonetree knew better. He knew the man was the CIA station chief.

It was an open secret in the diplomatic world that foreign embassies housed covert branches of the “silent services.” In all of the American embassies abroad there existed a station staffed by Central Intelligence Agency personnel who were dedicated to conducting intelligence-gathering operations and undercover missions deemed important to U.S. foreign policy and national security, and who went through elaborate charades to disguise their identities, posing as everything from State Department clerks to commercial attachés, while engaging in clandestine activities. Everyone knew it, everyone did it, and the United States was no exception.

As Clayton Lonetree would later describe his movements: “So I walked up to him and introduced myself. I could tell he recognized me, because he said, ‘Oh, yes, I’ve seen you around. What can I do for you?’ I told him I had some serious problems and wanted his advice. He asked what sort of problems. I said, ‘It concerns my tour of duty at our Moscow embassy. Can we talk privately?’ ”

Taking a last swallow from his drink before setting it down on a small table, Big John (as he would be referred to throughout the proceedings that followed in order in protect his real identity) guided the young Marine by the arm into a corridor outside the reception area. And there, in a shaky, emotional voice, Sergeant Lonetree blurted out the admission that while he was stationed in Moscow he had become involved with Soviet intelligence agents.

Big John took the announcement casually, seemingly bent upon pretending that nothing unusual was happening in case anyone was watching. “Have you reported these contacts to anyone else?”

Lonetree shook his head. “No, sir. You’re the first.”

Big John then asked about the classic vulnerabilities. “Sergeant, do you have a problem with liquor or drugs?”

Lonetree came to attention. “No, sir. I take pride in the fact that I have kept my body clean of drugs.”

“Was a woman involved?”

Not so quickly and with less assertion, Lonetree said, “No, sir.”

“Was any money exchanged?”

Lonetree admitted he had accepted ten thousand Austrian schillings, about seven hundred dollars.

Flicking a glance to see if there were any guests within earshot, Big John asked the important question. “Did you give them any classified information?”

“No, sir,” Lonetree answered.

The CIA station chief studied the Marine at this point, and under his scrutiny Lonetree all but wailed, “Sir, I really fucked up my life.”

Lowering his voice, Big John said, “Well, Sergeant, we’re at a party now. This is not the place to discuss this matter. Call me in the morning at my office.”