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

But the most significant development was that Cpl. Robert Williams and Sergeant Downes, the two Marines who had given NIS agents statements implicating Bracy in espionage, had also executed retractions. Both men complained of unethical interrogation techniques. They said their words had been twisted and events changed. They said they had been harassed and browbeaten. They said they had signed their statements reluctantly, because they were tired of arguing and were told their careers in the Marine Corps, indeed their lives from this point on, would be ruined if they did not. In other words, tactics similar to the ones Bracy said were used on him had been used on them.

The next time Powell was approached, he didn’t even make an effort to be cordial, because now he was absolutely convinced of his client’s innocence.

“Look, Mike, we’ll give you a deal. He gets a twelve-year sentence, does four.”

“You don’t understand. Bracy will walk.”

“What have you been smoking?”

“This case is a loser. You heard it here first.”

“This is your last chance. Go with us and we’ll pin it all on Lonetree.”

“You’re still not listening. There was no penetration because of Bracy.”

The Marines had to go ahead with an Article 32 hearing. There was probable cause, and you didn’t just walk away from a confession. You aired it out.

Joining the defense team for the proceedings were two high-powered civil-rights attorneys supplied by the NAACP: Charles Carter, assistant general counsel for the NAACP; and a private attorney out of New York, George Hairston. Both men were commanding and formidable personalities, and the very presence of two distinguished black men on the defense side of the aisle sent a loud and clear message that they considered race to be a component of this case.

Character witnesses were brought in. On the stand, Williams and Downes testified that their original statements had been doctored. Then the NIS agents who took the statements from Bracy were grilled. The points the defense hammered home were that a DI on a polygraph did not necessarily mean the subject was lying; it could just as easily mean the question needed to be reworded for more clarity. A false positive could also be the result of hostility in the interrogation, which was why polygraph operators should be neutral. But Agents Jim Pender and Patrick Hurt had not been neutral, argued Bracy’s defense attorneys. At an early point in their interviews they had become interrogators, and to administer polygraph tests repeatedly under hostile conditions was unprofessional and unethical, and the incriminating results should therefore be disregarded.

Polygraphers rarely came off well under tough cross-examination by informed inquisitors, and Pender and Hurt did nothing to help their cause. They answered Powell’s questions as if they expected him not to believe them.

As the Article 32 began to lean toward the defense, the prosecution found itself in a quandary, which Maj. Dave Beck brought to a head at a meeting with the lawyers assigned to the National Security Task Force. Asked about the Lonetree case, he said it was good and solid. Asked about the Bracy case, he said, “We have a confession and it’s alarming. But as for corroboration…” and he reached into his right-hand pocket and pulled it out and there was nothing but the inside of his pants pocket. Then he pulled out his left one the same way and there was nothing there, either. “That’s it,” he said. “There’s not a single piece of independent, corroborating evidence. We’ve got no case.”

Everyone in the room was flabbergasted. The only known basis for the belief that Soviet agents were permitted into the American Embassy was the testimony provided under interrogation by Bracy.

No one involved in the investigation—in the NIS or in the Marine Corps legal command—was entirely comfortable with Arnold Bracy. There had been inconsistencies and contradictions in the various stories he’d told investigators. He denied sex was part of his relationship with Galya, yet the people who caught him with her said different. Bracy maintained he and Lonetree weren’t buddies, but the logbooks showed they signed out together on seven occasions during the last month Lonetree was in Moscow. Before Cpl. Robert Williams complained that NIS agents had browbeat a false statement out of him about Bracy’s espionage admissions, Major Beck had interviewed Williams in a Virginia hotel room, and there had been no NIS agents present when Williams recounted those admissions to the major. And if Bracy had nothing to hide, investigators just couldn’t fathom why, when the interrogation heated up, he wouldn’t have just said, Screw you guys. I want to see an attorney. Why would he end it by saying, Okay, I was a spy for the KGB, Lonetree and I did it? It didn’t make sense. There were strange and troubling aspects to the Bracy case that remained unresolved, but without corroboration, without logical investigative leads, there was really no choice but to call it quits.

By now Lieutenant Colonel Powell had become so personally involved in this case that he was an advocate for Arnold Bracy. He was ebullient when he heard that the Marine Corps intended to drop its charges against his client, but that wasn’t good enough. Powell knew from conversations with Bracy’s parents that they wanted the people in their neighborhood, their community, to know their son was not guilty as charged. It was important to them that their son’s name also be cleared. So Powell, along with the two attorneys from the NAACP, decided they would orchestrate a press conference. Powell got on the phone and called reporters, giving them the time and place, as well as tips on how to get past the MPs at the gate who might try to screen them out. He guaranteed them it would be worth their while coming.

The four attorneys—Carter, Hairston, Lynch, and Powell—agreed beforehand that there should be no laughing or smiling. Their demeanor would be serious—even grim—and they would not sugar coat any answers to questions.

At noon on June 12, 1987, Arnold Bracy, his two military lawyers, and his two civilian counsels filed into a room in a building at Quantico that was packed with journalists and cameramen. Reading from a statement, Charles Carter explained his interest in this case—“For some seventy-eight years the NAACP has been fighting for justice for black people”—before taking the media itself to task. “Caught up in a hysteria of what they saw as a juicy sex scandal, it has in effect already tried and convicted this young man. In the minds of millions of people he is a treacherous Marine who was taken in by the Russians and betrayed his country….”

It was left to Lieutenant Colonel Powell to affix the blame for what he perceived to be a travesty. “Corporal Bracy is innocent not because of any technicality or lack of evidence. He is innocent because the things the NIS said he did didn’t occur. They did not happen. They were fantasies in the minds of Mr. Hurt and Mr. Pender. Fantasy.”

Nor did Powell stop there in his castigation of the NIS. He proceeded to challenge their investigative techniques, calling them “shabby and unethical.” He issued a call for the FBI to look into their methods of operation. He even went so far as to maintain that the Naval Investigative Service was responsible for “a worldwide wild-goose chase looking for spies in the Marine Corps who helped Russians come into the American Embassy, which is not true.”

Later in his career Lt. Col. Michael Powell would teach a course to defense counsels in how to deal with the press. He would always remind them, “You never know when the camera is focused on you, so you must always be careful how you behave.” And to illustrate the point he would show them a videotape of his biggest boner.