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

The task-force concept did not die there, however. Headquarters decided the second-best idea was to go ahead on its own in a modified form. Create an “independent” Marine Corps organization that would provide the overall legal support necessary to make sure the military justice system worked properly and justice was done. And this was how the National Security Task Force (NSTF) came into being.

Selected to run the effort was a sharp deputy staff judge advocate from Camp Pendleton. Lt. Col. James Schwenk was blessed with the collegial manner required to facilitate such a complex undertaking, and in mid-April he, along with ten experienced Marine trial lawyers and five enlisted Marines from various parts of the country, moved into an abandoned floor of a building at Quantico that was scheduled for renovation and turned their attention to the business at hand. This involved setting up prosecutorial trial teams, making certain they had their cases totally prepared to go to court, orchestrating court-martials, clarifying legal gray areas as they arose, coordinating exchanges of information with various agencies, and arbitrating jurisdictional disputes.

Once the National Security Task Force was in place and functioning, General P. X. Kelly’s advisors felt the time was right for the commandant to go public. His first press conference was held at noon on Friday, April 17, and it began well enough. Reading from a prepared statement, Kelly explained that he had made a conscious decision not to participate in media interviews “which could in any way jeopardize the ongoing investigation and subsequent judicial proceedings,” and he thanked the press for its patience. Sounding a note of caution—“I cannot answer specific questions about the ongoing investigation… for obvious reasons”—he then launched into an exhaustive defense of “the patriotism, the courage, the selfless devotion to God and country, and honor of over four million Americans who have called themselves Marines,” as a prelude to attacking those who would judge the institution by the sins of a few Marines in Moscow. After all, these were the first Marine prosecutions for treason in the Corps’s 212-year history.

The media wasn’t buying it, and the questions fired by reporters clearly annoyed the commandant.

“General Kelly, can you comment on reports that there has been interagency fighting…?”

“Sir, how do you know that right now, what went wrong in Moscow is not happening at other diplomatic posts around the…?”

“If I can follow up, how do you respond to some of your critics who say that the discipline problem in the Marine Corps goes beyond the spy scandal in Moscow…?”

“One final question, General. If you are angry, and the Marines are a close-knit organization as you say, then how can you be sure that you’ll be able to try people who you feel have undermined the reputation of that organization in a fair way…?”

The commandant was aware that the media were normally liberal in their approach, skeptical of the military, and always looking for “the scoop.” But by the end of the press conference he had come to believe even more than that might be going on.

Just what, he revealed in his next speech, delivered to the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco. The Soviets were attempting to use this case to degrade and humiliate the Marine Corps, he asserted; and going a step further, he accused the media of pernicious complicity.

“The press focus has not been on the alleged acts of individuals, but on the Marine Corps as an institution,” he declared angrily, “and I have one agonizing question. Why?”

The explanation, he went on to suggest, could perhaps be found in a novel called The Spike, which implied that leftist elements controlled the media. “The KGB works around the clock,” he said. “If they can seduce and exploit a Marine officer, there can be few in this country who cannot be exploited.”

General Kelly’s attempt to compare what had happened to Marines in Moscow with critical coverage of the Corps by journalists was roundly laughed off. If anything, it goaded the press. In the weeks that followed, the Marines, in particular Marine guards, continued to take media shots on the chin from both the left and the right.

The official Soviet news agency TASS, referring to MSGs in Moscow as “drunken Yankee brawlers,” accused them of driving drunk in Red Square, harassing Muscovites on the street, tearing down Soviet flags, scuffling in bars, and luring women into the embassy compound for wild nights of liquor, drugs, and pornographic films. Editorialized The National Review, “With their red-striped trousers and white hats and gloves, they are an aesthetic treat when you see them in a foreign capital, and not least because they are a throwback to another era, rather like the red-coated guards outside Buckingham Palace, with their black fur hats. But let’s be serious. This is the Twentieth Century. The Moscow Embassy should have been guarded by mature, professional counterintelligence squads, not by a couple of skirt-chasing enlisted men with room-temperature IQs.”

There was even talk of disbanding the MSG battalion and replacing Marines with a civilian security force made up of retired military personnel; a Cl-trained rent-a-cop service that would not be inclined to conduct foreign policy independently and in the nude.

While some of the critics were unduly harsh, even reasonable voices acknowledged that the job was self-contradictory. That the Marine Corps was a war-fighting organization whose primary purpose was to prepare for and conduct successful combat operations, and taking young, robust, adventurous, single men and assigning them to what was often excruciatingly boring duty in countries where they were forbidden either to fraternize or fight with the enemy made them vulnerable to those facets of intelligence operations that involved the manipulation and exploitation of human weaknesses.

Such talk was blasphemy at HQMC, where the Marine security guard program was considered a sacred cow. To be able to say the State Department chose Marines over all the other armed services to protect its embassies overseas was not only a source of prestige for the smallest service, it was good recruiting material. Marine Corps propaganda loved to emphasize the fact that its troops stood between American ambassadors and their enemies. That even when Marines were not storming beaches, MSGs were in combat in the sense that their presence at embassies was an active deterrent to terrorism.

But there could be no denying that something in the system had gone wrong. Troubling questions about how Sergeant Lonetree had gotten away with behavior that should have flagged him as a problem child continued to haunt the Corps. An examination of his military record book showed that he should never have been admitted to MSG school in the first place, should never have gotten through it, and certainly should not been sent to the most sensitive U.S. outpost in the world, where he’d been allowed to extend his tour of duty. Details from his career suggested that many of the traditional warning signs of a security risk were ignored in his case, and that Clayton Lonetree was as full of character flaws and vulnerabilities as a man could be. “We did everything we could to set him and ourselves up for what we got,” concluded an internal report.

And then, just when it seemed things could not get any more confusing for the Marine Corps, the knot began to slip on Arnold Bracy.

From the moment he had terminated with the NIS polygraphers and asked for a lawyer, through his arrest at Twentynine Palms and transportation to the brig at Quantico, where formal charges capable of carrying the death penalty were preferred, Cpl. Arnold Bracy had continued to disavow everything he had said and signed. Even when confronted with the information that two other Marine guards who had served with him in Moscow, Cpl. Robert Williams and Sgt. Vincent Downes, had signed sworn statements implicating him in admissions of espionage, he denied his guilt. He claimed his statements were concoctions of speculative scenarios that NIS agents had asked him to advance, not admissions of things that had actually happened.