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

But after eighteen months of hearing about and thinking about the enemy, watching the enemy from a distance but never once engaging the enemy, a strange thing happened. His idea of the enemy became so abstracted that his readiness to fight them was transformed into a curiosity about them. Who were those guys? he began to wonder. How did they really feel about their system of government? Sometimes he would even gaze across the minefields and see a Cuban guard looking back, and it occurred to him that he might be thinking the same thing.

Several other developments took place during this time that started him thinking differently about his life. He began taking correspondence courses through Old Dominion University, expanding his interest in world affairs. And since about ninety percent of the barracks were smoking pot and dropping acid, he decided to give it a try.

It was during this period that he put in for Marine security guard duty. It was a way of doing what he’d always wanted: to travel. He also saw it as an opportunity for career enhancement. Being a Marine was good, but being a Marine security guard was even better.

The only problem was that in order to qualify for the program a Marine had to score a minimum of 92 on the GCT exam, and Lonetree’s 77 wasn’t good enough.

Lonetree skimmed the next few years, but having seen his service record, Williams knew enough about what had happened to fill in the blanks himself. Lonetree had been transferred back to Camp Pendleton in San Diego, where he had been promoted to corporal; he had served time uneventfully; he had continued to read his fortunes in the MSG program; and eventually, through a series of events that Tom Williams would judge harshly, admission had been granted.

As Lonetree told it, his father had appealed to a U.S. senator from Minnesota, Rudy Boschwitz, requesting that he be allowed to retake the GCT exam on the grounds that the military testing system was culturally biased. The senator, in turn, had used his influence, and the Marines gave Lonetree another test, which he passed this time, but just barely. And even at that his acceptance was conditional: Since his four-year hitch was just about up, he would be admitted to MSG school only if he reenlisted.

Of course Tom Williams registered none of his thoughts when he realized what had happened. But privately he was outraged. They’d had no right on God’s green earth to give this kid GCTs until he got a score high enough to go on embassy duty, he thought. That’s why they have a minimum score.

Lonetree’s account of MSG school was breezy. He talked about the classes in which he was given weapons training and taught riot-control techniques and evasive-driving tactics. He said he learned about the chain of command in the embassy, and the security responsibilities of an MSG. He said for some Marines the perspective shift from the Marine who was trained to kill it, shake it, and then find out what it was doing there in the first place, to the “ambassador in blue” that described a MSG, was difficult. “Here,” he quoted an instructor as saying, “we are looking less for the John Wayne type of Marine than the Jimmy Stewart type.”

But what Lonetree said he had had the most trouble with was the time-consuming uniform and clothing inspections. It seemed to him an obsessive amount of importance was placed on dressing sharp and looking good. Indeed, he admitted that he had once been put on probation for his lack of attention to detail. But the warning that he must square himself away or else he would be cleaning out his wall locker had woken him up. It was just a matter of getting his brain in the right gear, he said, and he eventually graduated with a final class standing of 87 out of 128, which put him in the upper third.

Lonetree said his first choice for duty post had been East Germany; his second, anywhere else in the Eastern Bloc, because of his interest in Euro-Communism. When he learned he was going to Moscow, having read quite a bit about Russia, he was glad for the chance to see firsthand what life was like behind the Iron Curtain.

Tom Williams already had read the statements Lonetree had given to the NIS and he’d been extensively briefed by Stuhff, so he was familiar with Lonetree’s earlier versions of his experiences in Moscow and Vienna. Nevertheless he let Lonetree tell it one more time, and as far as he could tell they all meshed almost identically.

But this time around, Williams was less listening to what Lonetree said he’d done than he was looking for the causes behind his actions. And along those lines Williams thought he came up with enough insights to feel comfortable with his understanding psychologically of how it had all happened.

He did not believe that Lonetree had gone to Moscow saying, “Oh, boy, now I can sell my country out.” Williams believed it was more a matter of a chaotic personal history poising Lonetree on the edge of his fate as though it were a hole, and the right combination of circumstances waiting in the Soviet Union to give him a shove. An emotionally needy person yearning for love and acceptance, Lonetree had felt friendless in Moscow and unappreciated by superiors he thought were prejudiced; he had fallen for an attractive woman who, he felt, recognized his worth as a person; and he had been skillfully manipulated by a paternal figure who preyed on his weaknesses.

As for Lonetree’s ability to rationalize spying for the enemy, Williams could only speculate about how his mind worked that out, but if he had to venture a guess, it would have something to do with his Indianness. Although Clayton discounted his Indian heritage and said he’d had relatively little exposure to Indian culture, he was a Native American, and like any native person who tried to assimilate himself into white society, a certain amount of dissembling was part of life. In Clayton Lonetree’s case, here was someone whose identity had been damaged by his upbringing, who felt torn between two cultures and was unable to find his own voice, who had no core sense of himself or strong set of values—and the spy business, with its requisite role playing and assuming of new identities, had given him a chance to remake himself.

As he closed in on an understanding of why Lonetree had done what he did, Williams wanted to hear why Lonetree had stopped doing it.

“I felt like telling, many times,” Lonetree said. “Once, I wanted to tell my detachment commander—even went to his door and said, ‘Sir, uh, is it okay if I take my language lessons?’ But I backed out at the last minute. I even had a dream one time that everyone knew and the Marines surrounded my house and came to my door. At that moment someone knocked at the door to my room and I jumped up and cried, They’re here! But it was just a guy down the hall wanting to know if I wanted to go out and get a pizza with him. I came close to telling him.”

“So what made you finally come forward?” Tom Williams persisted.

As he cast about for the answer to that question, Lonetree rambled, touching on a number of explanations, none of which seemed to satisfy even him. Then, after a long pause, he recalled an incident that appeared to have pushed him over the edge.

“One day I was invited to this school in Vienna. A USIS class. They wanted to learn about Native Americans, so I said I’d be glad to come. So I went and there were all these kids who looked up to me. Admired me, because I was a Native American and because I was a Marine. They went crazy. A little girl came up to me and she wanted me to sign an autograph. I did it. All right!… But afterwards I felt terrible. Here there were these people who thought highly of me, and yet I was rotting away inside. There was only one thing I could do about it.”