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

For several hours McCullah, Hathaway, and Lannon discussed the significance of Arnold Bracy’s confession. “Could they have done it?” McCullah asked.

Gus Hathaway had been a station chief in Moscow, while Jim Lannon was intimately familiar with the layout of the embassy and the systems that protected it. Both nodded grimly. Everything Bracy said he and Lonetree had done was feasible.

“What do you make of the retraction?” they asked McCullah.

“It’s unfortunate, but not surprising,” he replied. “Nothing hurts the truth like a good night’s sleep.”

By the end of the discussion it was apparent that both the State Department and the CIA would have no choice but to accept the worst-case scenario. The operative question was not Could it have happened? but What if it had? A bug hunt of colossal proportions would have to be initiated. Coding equipment would have to be shipped back to the United States for inspection. No matter the cost, the security and communications systems in Moscow would have to be replaced.

As for the Naval Investigative Service, Lanny McCullah recognized that the investigation had vaulted beyond what could reasonably be expected from the investigative branch of his Counterintelligence Directorate. A much broader response was going to be required, and the following Monday he met with the deputy director of NIS, Brian McKee, to give him a status report and make a recommendation.

“The spy case that at first appeared to be an isolated instance of a lonely Marine being seduced into espionage has taken a more ominous turn,” he said. “To corroborate everything Bracy said, hundreds more interviews are going to be required. Not only that, there’s no reason to think this stops at two. Already there are several other Marines worth taking a close look at who may have been recruited by the Soviets, and before this is over we very well may discover more. We don’t know how big this thing is, or how big it’s going to get once we start looking into it, but to determine that will be the biggest thing NIS has ever been involved in. We’re going to need a lot of people for this. We’re also going to need office space, furniture, equipment, vehicles, phones….”

Asked “What are you proposing?,” McCullah replied, “I think we’re talking task force.”

McKee pursed his lips but saw the sense of it. “Okay. Do what you think needs to be done.”

The NIS task force came together in an amazingly short period of time. Office space was found in a GSA building at Buzzards Point in Southeast Washington, the same building that housed the Washington Field Office of the FBI, and within a matter of days it was transformed into an office facility. As the investigation proceeded, there were going to be thousands of pieces of information that would have to be stored and cross-referenced, so an NIS reservist who had his own computer company was brought in to set up a database. McCullah wanted the top interviewers in all of NIS at his disposal—guys who could elicit information under difficult circumstances—so a list was drawn up and twenty of NIS’s best agents were TDY’d (temporary dutied) to Washington, where they were thoroughly briefed, paired with the best polygraphers to form flyaway teams, and dispatched to specific locations to follow up on leads. He then contacted each agency with a special interest in the outcome of the investigation—the NSA, CIA, FBI, State Department, and Marine Corps—and asked them to assign someone with expertise to the task force who would examine and analyze information as it came in and would advise them as they went along. Of course, the whole campaign had to have a designated code name, so someone came up with Bobsled, and on April 1, 1987, the Bobsled task force was officially launched, with Lanny McCullah as its director.

With confirmation of Arnold Bracy’s confession heading the list of task-force objectives, McCullah went after an explanation for why the State Department had played deaf, dumb, and mute and withheld critical background information on him from the NIS. His source was Angelic White, who had been told what happened by her counterpart on the Department of State’s counterintelligence staff. Bracy had been booted from the MSG program in the summer of 1986, when he was discovered with Galya in an American diplomat’s quarters where she was working as a maid. The embassy security officer had identified Bracy as a possible espionage suspect at that time and suggested he be debriefed in Washington, but somehow, when he returned to the States, the recommendation had been overlooked. When details of Lonetree’s recruitment became known, the counterintelligence people at State, recognizing the similarities to Bracy’s story and realizing a potentially embarrassing oversight on their part, had dropped Bracy’s name to the bottom of the list of Marines bounced from the program for frat, and ordered one of their debriefers to go to Twentynine Palms and talk to Bracy. They were hoping to buy time, but had not gotten around to Bracy when the NIS came up with his name on their own.

McCullah was livid. To save face, the State Department had obstructed their investigation. When he called Jim Lannon and confronted him, all attempts to be friendly and professional were off. “I’m not going to put up with any more of this shit. How many more other Bracys do you have sitting on your shelves?” he demanded to know.

Within a week he had his answer. A document appeared in his in box titled “Marine Security Guard Program Disciplinary Infractions, 1980-1987.” It listed 579 incidents involving MSGs whose assignments had been prematurely curtailed for a variety of violations, only a fraction of whom NIS had been aware of before.

There were no words to describe McCullah’s reaction. He couldn’t believe that the State Department had not shared this information with them, because NIS had jurisdiction over these people and a substantial number of the offenses would have been of interest to them from a criminal or counterintelligence viewpoint.

In the first thirty days of its existence Bobsled proved its worth, as investigators turned up the names of new and more Marines who admitted to involvement in a range of infractions—unreported sexual encounters with Soviet females, currency violations, black-marketing, unauthorized travel—that were the favorite recruitment ploys of hostile intelligence services. In rapid succession three more espionage investigations were opened, and NIS agents appeared to find the corroboration they were looking for when another black Marine, by the name of Robert Williams, who had served with Arnold Bracy in Moscow, told agents that Bracy had confided to him that he was intimately involved with Galya and that she had recruited him to engage in espionage, for which he had been paid thousands of dollars. In support of his statement, Williams said there had been another Marine present who overheard this admission, Sgt. Vincent Downes, and when Downes was interviewed by NIS agents, he acknowledged that the events as reported by Williams were true.

It was still a mystery just how extensive the Soviet infiltration of the Marine security guard program was, but it was growing before Lanny McCullah’s eyes when he learned through confidential channels that a “sensitive source,” having heard through the media about the Marine security guard investigations, had reported that on three separate occasions, three different and senior KGB officials had made specific references about the phenomenal successes they were having in the recruitment of American Marine security guards.

The way the memo was worded, McCullah knew the source was a defector and not an electronic intercept, and he called Gus Hathaway and asked about their source’s credibility. “Has anything he said ever been proven to be wrong? Or disinformation?”