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

Meanwhile she initiated the proper requests for approval for the two best NIS polygraphers in the region to fly to Twentynine Palms, so that once Embry was done questioning Arnold Bracy his statements could be checked against a lie detector.

As chief prosecutor at Quantico, Maj. Frank Short had done the usual stuff—assault and batteries and unauthorized absences—but he had not had much experience with complex cases that required strategic planning. Given the high estimation around the base of Major Henderson’s legal abilities, to which had now been added a civilian defense team that included William Kunstler, the staff judge advocate, Col. Patrick McHenry, instructed the assistant SJA, Lieutenant Colonel Breme, to see how the government’s case was shaping up and report back.

“Need any help, Frank?” Breme asked when he strolled into Short’s office in Lejeune Hall.

“Naw. I’ve got it under control.”

Breme glanced around at the stacks of files, the papers strewn everywhere. It looked as if a thermite grenade had exploded in the place.

“Well, why don’t we have a talk and you tell me what you’ve done, and what you’re thinking.”

After the meeting Breme reported back to the SJA. Major Short was working hard, he said. He was spending eighteen, twenty hours a day in his office. “But if he had to go to court tomorrow, he’d get his ass handed to him. He’s in over his head.”

Overnight, Maj. Frank Short became persona non grata. Confidence in his ability to prosecute went from a full tank to empty. And the next day Colonel McHenry called Lieutenant Colonel Breme back into his office and said, “I’m going to relieve Short. Do you want the case?”

Breme didn’t have to think twice. “Hell no, I don’t want the case. I’ve got enough problems of my own.”

“Okay. Have you got any suggestions for prosecutor?” Colonel McHenry asked.

While he’d been a judge at Camp Lejeune, Breme had met some sharp trial counsels who had prosecuted cases in front of him, and he mentioned several names. Among them was Maj. David Beck.

The book on Major Beck was almost too good to be true. He stood six feet tall, weighed one hundred and seventy-five pounds, and had sandy hair, bright blue eyes, and a healthy glow to his boyish face. At thirty-eight years of age, he rose each morning at the crack of dawn to run ten miles at six minutes a mile, followed by forty pull-ups without stopping and five sets of one hundred push-ups. He was a religious man who could quote Scripture, and a family man married to his high school sweetheart, with four daughters and a son. His father had been an Army Air Corps pilot who had been shot down over Northern Italy and spent a year in a POW camp, and Beck had joined the Marines in 1971 when he was a senior at the University of Tennessee after learning that a friend he grew up playing football with in a mill village had stepped on a mine in Vietnam and been killed. After going into aviation, where he was trained to fly attack helicopters and earned a reputation as a “hot stick,” without a war to fight he had pursued his second ambition and entered the Marine Corps law program, graduating third in his class at the University of Tennessee Law School.

Beck’s military law career had begun in defense, where he was very good. As a trial attorney, who you are can often be as important as what you say, and Dave Beck’s integrity and sincerity, his strong sense of right and wrong, and his gift for expressing his beliefs in such a way that there really didn’t appear to be any other possible conclusion won him so many cases that the Corps soon moved him over to prosecution, where he went on to compile a perfect win-loss record. Nobody had ever been acquitted at a trial Dave Beck prosecuted.

The first Major Beck heard of the Lonetree case was in early February. He and his wife were in their home on Parris Island, South Carolina, and were in bed watching TV when it came on the news. His first reaction had been surprise that an Indian was implicated. The only one he’d known personally was a lance corporal who did the three-mile run barefoot on asphalt about two minutes faster than anybody else, and who walked around in winter outside in a T-shirt, and until this he’d heard nothing but good about Indian Marines.

Race aside, Major Beck’s response was typical of most Marines. His notion of patriotism did not allow for the idea that a Marine sworn to defend the national interests of his country would ever be involved with a nation that considered America its mortal enemy. To his way of thinking, after the Tenth Commandment, the Eleventh might have been A Marine Shall Never Be a Traitor.

Beck was no longer actively prosecuting, he was on a two-year assignment as battalion commander, but if he were still practicing law, this was a case he would have loved to take on, and he said as much to his wife.

Early the very next morning he was playing a pickup basketball game with several drill instructors when the staff judge advocate at Parris Island showed up. “Dave, you’ve got to come with me. The general wants to see you.”

“Why? What’s going on?” Beck asked.

The SJA shook his head. “Can’t say.”

Nor was anything more said in the car on the way to the commanding general’s building. The first indication didn’t come until Beck was waiting outside the general’s office and the chief of staff asked him, “What’s a redneck like you know about the Soviet Union?”

Tennessee to the core, Dave Beck shrugged and offered the extent of his knowledge. “It’s cold over there.”

The chief of staff grinned. “Well, then, you better get your cold-weather gear together. There’s been some meetings at headquarters, and it seems you’ve been picked to take over the Lonetree prosecution.”

It was a standing joke at Parris Island that the officers’ housing was bugged with listening devices. Dave Beck had never taken it seriously until now.

Arrangements were made for Major Beck to fly to Washington on February 15, and after a series of briefings and meetings he understood better why he had been brought in. The prosecution’s case was in disarray and confusion. There was a confession, and a substantial part of it appeared to be legitimate and confirmed by evidence collected by the NIS. But numerous factual and legal issues remained unresolved, and virtually no coordination had been established among the various organizations and agencies with an interest in the case.

Although this was a case that Major Beck had glibly expressed the desire to prosecute, now that it had been handed to him, he had personal reservations about accepting it. If it meant he would lose his position as battalion commander at Parris Island, he wasn’t sure he wanted to make the trade. More important, within a matter of weeks of being offered the assignment, his father died suddenly of a heart attack while tending his mother, who was undergoing cancer treatments, and Beck was reluctant to get involved in something that would prevent his spending the time she had left with her. All of these matters weighed on him, but headquarters was in crisis mode, and when his mother told him his dad would want him to do his job for his country, Major Beck heeded her words and accepted the assignment to shore up the prosecution of Sgt. Clayton Lonetree.

After relocating to the officers’ quarters at Quantico, Beck turned his full attention to the case. For starters he ordered a mental examination to determine whether Lonetree suffered from a mental disease or defect that would affect his responsibility for the offenses alleged or his capacity to stand trial. He did this not only because Lonetree’s behavior, as expressed in his confession, struck Beck as bizarre, but also because he had learned that the defense had arranged for a psychologist to render his expert opinion on the relevant psychological aspects of the case.