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

What was going on with Arnold Bracy? Kunstler was convinced that the NIS, in quest of a witness to assure a conviction, had contrived a case against another minority—a black Marine—thinking if they put enough pressure on him he would roll over and testify against Lonetree.

At Marine Corps headquarters (HQMC), Eighth and I Streets in Southeast Washington, D.C., where the commandant of the Marine Corps had lived and presided since President Thomas Jefferson picked the spot, the turmoil could not have been greater if Marines had been engaged in a military campaign. The Marine Corps was a proud organization that embraced a powerful code of integrity. Its lustrous reputation as the nation’s truest warriors was based on each leatherneck’s commitment to the hallowed concepts of honor, duty, and country. The Corps was supposed to be a tribal brotherhood as much as a military service, and loyalty was a religious vow with its members. For this reason the current commandant, General P. X. Kelly, had made a point of letting the military counterintelligence service know that Marines were not available for double-agent operations: He did not think any hostile intelligence service would believe that a Marine would ever betray his country.

It had been a strange and turbulent tenure for General Kelly. No sooner had he come into office in 1983 than a suicide-terrorist crashed a 5,000-pound truck bomb into the Marine barracks in Beirut, killing 241 Marines on a peacekeeping mission. It was a disaster that in retrospect had been both foreseeable and avoidable, and the general’s handling of the crisis had drawn sharp criticism from Congress. Then had come the invasion of Grenada, where instead of reprising an Iwo Jima-like amphibious assault, the Marines had become mired in an interservice turf battle. To these frustrations had been added the image of a Marine lieutenant colonel by the name of Oliver North, wearing his medal-bedecked uniform and invoking the Fifth Amendment when asked about illegal plans to supply arms to the Nicaraguan Contras and his decision to misinform Congress about it. And now, on the verge of retirement, the general was forced to contend with casualties from a program that was supposed to harvest the best and the brightest from its overall ranks, casualties whose wounds were inflicted not on the battlefield but in the bedroom.

There had been a time when it was widely believed that General Kelly was on his way to becoming the first Marine to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Not anymore. Not with congressional committees convening with the expressed intention of ripping the covers off this scandal, dragging former and current Marine commanders before them and demanding an explanation for why a wheel had to come off before the Marine Corps realized there was something broken. Not when your troops were being ridiculed the way they were on a mock travel flyer tacked prominently on a bulletin board at CIA headquarters:

Moscow Embassy Tours. See Ambassador’s Office. See Latest in Communications Equipment. See Finest in Secure Rooms. Special Rates for Representatives of the Special Services. $$$$$$$$$$$$ Bonus. Burn Bag Souvenirs for First 10 Visitors. Pretty Girls Free. Contact: Local Marine Security Guard for details. And watch for our new offerings in: Leningrad. Vienna. Rome. Asia. Africa. Latin America.

Perhaps the crowning insult was delivered when Time magazine carried on its cover the picture of the square-jawed Marine normally seen on recruiting posters, except this leatherneck sported a black eye.

You could all but hear the commandant’s teeth grinding each time he picked up the paper and saw another cartoonist making the Marine Corps the butt of an outrageous joke. One drawing in particular that was reported to have aroused his wrath parodied the Marine hymn:

The way the Marine Corps was portrayed in the press was very important to General Kelly. Image was not just a matter of appearance. It affected budgets. Manpower. Morale. Missions. So it was painful beyond belief when media pundits, searching for unmistakable signs of the decline of American civilization, looked no further than the “utterly demoralizing spectacle of members of this country’s most elite fighting force betraying… their fellow countrymen in a disgusting swap of sex for top secrets.” Op-ed pieces were even referring to the scandal as a symptom of the Me Decade, a crime of cultural failure, and issued a call for a national commitment to rebuild character standards: “Our government, our churches and our civic institutions must reestablish a national curriculum that breeds honor, loyalty, respect for tradition, patriotism and individual and collective responsibility.” Let’s get back to Semper fidelis, in other words.

The official response of the Corps to date had been that a few “bad apples” will turn up in any large organization and the Marine Corps had never been in better shape. At a Congressional hearing the commandant asked that “the American people… judge this very unique institution not by the alleged actions of a few but by the patriotic and exemplary conduct that has been our heritage.” And he assured the Senate that “our readiness to go to war today is the highest it has been in our peacetime history.”

Unfortunately, given the climate, the commandant’s comments sounded like so much bumper-sticker bravado.

In the face of mounting criticism that the Corps was “wallowing in complacency” and incapable of engaging in self-analysis, the senior legal people at headquarters drafted a memo to the commandant saying, in essence, it was time to get off the track and on the train. If this thing was as big as NIS was making it out to be, the Marine Corps needed to get more involved. Do we want to continue to read about it? Or do we want to help write it?

The particular action they recommended was the formation of a joint Department of Defense-Department of Justice task force to take over the investigation and prosecution of all future cases relating to security breaches at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow. Urging this would accomplish several things. It would put distance between the commandant and the investigation/prosecution process; it would blunt criticism that the Marines were not vigorously pursuing the cases; and it would serve as a preemptive strike. A big fear at HQMC was that the Department of Justice, which ultimately had jurisdiction over all cases related to national security, was going to step in and assert its prerogative, and the Marine Corps would lose all influence on the scope and thrust of the investigation—a politically unpalatable result.

The commandant signed off on the proposal, as did everyone in the Department of Defense chain of command up to the Secretary of the Navy, where it died. Justice wanted no part of this one, because every time it took on a case involving the CIA there were problems getting the suspects’ statements into evidence. The CIA invariably used all manner of psychological ploys in their efforts to get a statement, which damaged the notion of a free and voluntary confession required by law. Justice was also candid in saying that after the lambasting it had received from the Secretary of the Navy for its handling of the John Walker case (Secretary John Lehman had been bucking for the death penalty and had accused Justice of being lenient in its treatment of Walker when it agreed to cut a plea-bargain deal without consulting him first), Justice was more than content to stand back and let the Navy go it alone this time.