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

The one sticking point, of course, was that Lonetree had confessed. And that was something that Kunstler was unable to comprehend: why his client had walked up to the CIA at a Christmas party in Vienna and said, Listen, I’ve been sleeping with a Russian girl and, oh, by the way, I gave stuff to the KGB. Who did that? Nobody in his right mind. If Lonetree had kept his mouth shut, there would never have been anything to this.

Mike Stuhff also had his problems fathoming why Lonetree had voluntarily stepped forward. But Stuhff had been going to the brig and interviewing his client almost daily, and if he’d learned one thing from these visits, it was that Clayton Lonetree was not a simply understood person. His character was as complex as it was concealed. He experienced life in a very different way from most people.

Take what he’d said during an early conversation: “Mr. Stuhff, do you think you can get me out of this without my getting a dishonorable discharge?”

Stuhff had frowned. “Why do you ask?”

Lonetree was slow in answering. He liked to take his time before he responded to a question. Watching, waiting, Stuhff could only imagine where Lonetree’s thoughts would stop before they came out as a statement. “I was hoping things would work out so I could still go to work for the foreign service. You know, I always wanted to serve in a diplomatic capacity….”

Confronted with evidence that his client lacked normal reality checks, Stuhff wondered if, in addition to his unusual personality traits, there might very well be a psychological imbalance present that would be worth his knowing about. After all, Lonetree had made a number of damaging statements that were untrue and physically impossible. When told to lie, he had obeyed the command as if it were an order. Could it be that he was more susceptible to suggestion than the average Marine? Or prone to making false admissions?

The end of this line of thinking took the form of a request for a psychological evaluation, and the individual Stuhff went to was a psychologist named Tom Williams. Once before, Dr. Williams had examined a client of Mike Stuhff’s and testified for him in court. The case involved an Arizona State Police officer who went berserk one night, barricaded himself in his house with his daughter as hostage, and threatened a shootout. After an interview and psychological tests, Tom Williams, who specialized in post-traumatic stress disorder, had concluded that the police department’s precipitate actions had turned a domestic dispute into a reenactment of the officer’s combat experience in Vietnam. The verdict had been favorable to the defense in that case, and Stuhff was hoping that, after examining Clayton Lonetree, Williams would be able to come up with something just as useful.

A bearded, even-tempered man who had gotten heavy since he left the Marine Corps after two tours in Vietnam as an officer and a teaching stint at Annapolis, Tom Williams was based in Colorado at the time he was contacted about the Lonetree case. Williams instantly knew why Stuhff was coming to him: As an ex-leatherneck he understood Marines and how the Marine Corps worked. Just as a mechanic could look at the receipts for work on your car and know everything that had gone wrong, he could glance at a military service record and derive a tremendous amount of information that someone else would miss.

Credibility was also added by the fact that Williams’s father at one time had been a deputy director of the CIA.

What Williams did not know when he agreed to fly to Quantico and evaluate Clayton Lonetree was that William Kunstler was an attorney on the case. He didn’t find that out until he attended a defense-organized fund raiser in a hotel in downtown Denver. Mike Stuhff showed up, and so did Samuel Lonetree, Clayton’s grandfather, wearing a full headdress. Even AIM leader Russell Means was there. William Kunstler couldn’t make it, but a tape-recorded statement from him was played before the crowd, and even though the distortion from the cassette player, coupled with a bad sound system, made Kunstler’s raspy growl sound as though it issued from a throat not fully cleared of noises within, his inflammatory rhetoric came through loud and clear: “This is a dirty, dirty case, and the penalty is so severe that the Marine Corps ought to be ashamed of itself for the action it has taken.”

As Williams sat among Indian activists and white liberals listening to Kunstler accuse the Marines of singling out Lonetree because of his Indian heritage, he became increasingly irritated. He considered himself pro-Indian. His father was one-quarter Cherokee. He’d been in the Marines for eleven years, so he’d seen the way Native Americans were treated. And he didn’t believe for a minute that persecution of an Indian was what was going on here. Ever since the Navajo Code Talkers had distinguished themselves in World War II, Native Americans had enjoyed a decided prestige in the Corps. The expectation was that, coming from warrior cultures, they would even be special fighters: silent, efficient, dedicated.

Had he known Kunstler was part of the defense team, Williams would have thought his involvement over more carefully. Knowing what he did of the maverick attorney, and of the case, he did not think going for headlines was the smartest way to deal with an institution like the Marine Corps. It would only cause them to close ranks. But he had committed himself, and the truth was he was intrigued by the case. So he flew from Denver on to Washington, D.C., and drove down to Quantico for his date to evaluate Clayton Lonetree.

The Marine personnel at the brig were surprisingly cordial to Williams, but when one of the guards escorted him to the gun locker and asked him to leave his weapon there, Williams suspected that was because they did not know who he was and were mixing him up with a military investigator. In a comfortable office, with a guard posted outside who peered through the glass from time to time, Tom Williams met his subject and was immediately struck by Lonetree’s demeanor. One of the possibilities he had considered beforehand was that Lonetree would be angry at the Marines. When he’d been a Marine officer, Williams had done a lot of legal work, and most of the Marines he’d dealt with who had gotten into trouble were pissed off at the system. He was expecting Lonetree to be like some of those Marines, but he wasn’t. Stuhff had said he was basically a nice kid, polite, eager to help, and he was.

Williams began by introducing himself and explaining why he was there. He said he’d been a Marine officer so he knew how things went, and after they rubbed globes and anchors together and a rapport had been established, he shifted smoothly into an interview mode that directed without leading Lonetree through a detailed, thorough personal narrative, from birth to the brig.

Clayton Lonetree told his life story in a flat, quiet, matter-of-fact voice. He said he was born on November 6, 1961, in Chicago, and that a brother, Craig Lonetree, was born two years later, and a half sister, Valerie, several years after that. He said his parents were from two different tribes and they had never married but he had been given his father’s name. He said his strongest memories from childhood were his parents’ arguments. “Sometimes it got pretty vicious,” he whispered softly.

When asked, Lonetree answered he was never really comfortable when he was young. Maybe it was because he was never in one place long enough to make friends. Or because he and his brother were continually passed back and forth between their parents. “My mom and dad didn’t get along,” he said in a way that underscored that it was an understatement. Whichever parent the children were with would try to turn them against the other parent. Clayton said he used to cry at school thinking about the terrible things his father said about his mother. During this time, he said, he lived in terror of his father because of his drinking. “It got so bad, just the smell of alcohol used to scare me.”