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

While Lonetree was in Moscow, the KGB agent Aleksei Yefimov, dressed in sheep’s clothing as Uncle Sasha, had skillfully and successfully managed to brainwash him into believing that the CIA was the locus of evil in the world, and that the United States had been taken over by capitalist warmongers. Philosophically, Lonetree had been brought to a place where he no longer saw the Soviets as the bad guys. He believed Yefimov when he was told that the CIA was determined to overthrow the Soviet government and harm the Russian people, and that the CIA was responsible for the Cold War; he believed that the sole purpose of the KGB was to protect the Soviet people against the CIA. In an amazingly short period of time Yefimov had been able to dominate Lonetree’s thought processes and convince him that everything he was doing for the Soviets was right and honorable.

Eventually Lonetree had been able to shake off that indoctrination, and guilt-ridden, he had finally approached the CIA, the very people he had been warned about. But still he had been ambivalent, choosing what he thought was the lesser of two evils.

Ironically, his experience since his confession had brought him full circle. He had returned to a place of distrust toward the American government because Stuhff and Kunstler had told him the authorities were out to get him. In the process of mounting their defense, his civilian attorneys had reinforced the very notions propagated by Uncle Sasha: that the American intelligence community was involved in conspiracies against “the people” and that Indians were the convenient scapegoats for policies that profited the powerful. Stuhff and Kunstler had apparently even convinced Lonetree that the government could not be counted on to honor its side of the bargain, and the promise of five years off his sentence for cooperating was just a trick to get him to talk.

So Skinner took his time, trying to relax Lonetree and build a basis for trust. He talked about himself and his childhood in Vermont near the Canadian border. He told Lonetree of his own Indian heritage—his father was half Algonquin. He talked about his tastes in literature—he preferred nonfiction and had been reading espionage books since the age of ten. He said his two dreams in life were to play professional baseball or go into law enforcement, and guess which one didn’t pan out. He talked, he listened, and he answered honestly the questions Lonetree asked of him. And when he felt they were on firm ground, Skinner said, “Clayton, I’m not here to confirm the government’s case, or to prove a theory. My sole job is to help you tell the truth. I won’t let you take a polygraph until I am convinced that you are telling me the truth. And even then, we will only use it for confirmation. Because I want the truth without the machine.”

With those words, Clayton took the hand extended to him and came over to the American side.

Skinner wanted Lonetree to tell his story chronologically, beginning with his arrival in Moscow, because the atmosphere in the embassy and Lonetree’s response to it constituted the background for his eventual recruitment. Very little new information was derived in this area. Hostile intelligence agents assessing potential targets for recruitment looked for outsiders who felt misunderstood and underappreciated and who were willing to violate the rules. Lonetree had been placed, as much as he had put himself, square in their crosshairs.

After John Barron’s testimony, Lonetree no longer seemed to believe that his love affair with Violetta had been driven by real feelings on her part, and there were times during the debrief when he would start calling her names—“You bitch!”—as if she were present in the room. He seemed to realize now that the evolution of their friendship had been progressive steps in a sophisticated recruitment operation designed to emotionally involve him at the same time he more thoroughly compromised himself, so that by the time she introduced him to Uncle Sasha he would feel that he was caught in a chain of events he could not break.

When they began to talk about Uncle Sasha, it became immediately clear to Skinner why Lonetree had failed questions on the polygraph in London. He’d failed because he was minimizing his involvement with the Soviets and withholding information. What he actually divulged was more extensive and more specific than he had acknowledged either to the CIA or to NIS.

Painstakingly, Skinner helped Lonetree reconstruct each meeting with Uncle Sasha, of which there were seven in Moscow and eight in Vienna, almost twice as many as he had previously admitted to. They went over everything from where and when each meeting took place, to what was asked and what was said.

As expected, Yefimov had primarily been interested in identifying CIA agents and determining the location and features of CIA spaces within the embassy. “How did you know who the CIA agents were?” Skinner asked, since all of them operated under diplomatic cover. Lonetree replied that the Marines were briefed by someone from the Agency on how to handle defectors who came in, so that was one way. He could also tell them by the hours they kept and the access certain people had to floors and spaces that were off-limits to others. And they were generally recognizable by the fact that in all weather they wore trench-coats.

As improbable as that description may have sounded, it so happened that at this point in the debriefing there were two CIA agents in attendance, and sure enough, both were wearing trenchcoats. The next day it rained like a monsoon in Washington, and the only two people who showed up not wearing trenchcoats were the CIA guys.

It was easier to identify CIA agents in Vienna than in Moscow, Lonetree said, where he admitted to turning over to Yefimov photos of CIA personnel and writing their local addresses, obtained from a restricted address book, on the back. He estimated that he identified eighty percent of the CIA staff in Vienna, and said he had seen this as part of a larger effort to neutralize the threat the CIA posed to world peace.

As the debrief went on, Lonetree admitted to providing Yefimov with other sensitive material. After he was tasked to acquire floor plans of different floors in the embassies in both Moscow and Vienna, he sat down and annotated them with amplifying information that made them valuable intelligence documents. He provided information on the location and control of security cameras, alarms, and MSG responses to intruder-alarm activations, as well as assessment data on different Marines he believed might be homosexuals, alcoholics, or drug users. He identified a walk-in—a Soviet who on his own had visited the embassy in Vienna and offered his services to American intelligence.

And yet as cooperative as Lonetree had been, he had had his own standard of what he refused to do, and there were certain requests he had denied. When Yefimov encouraged him to consider applying for a Marine counterintelligence program, Lonetree balked. On several occasions he had had second thoughts at the last minute and refused to pass material he had been tasked to collect. And when Yefimov tried to talk him into defecting—promising him the opportunity of living with Violetta with a car, in a nice flat, possibly a dacha—although tempted, he turned them down.

What a political coup that would have been, Skinner reflected. An American Indian Marine in full uniform standing up in front of the cameras and going public about the brutal treatment of Indian people in America and the sinister activities of the CIA would have had tremendous propaganda value, particularly when combined with another incident in a similar time frame—the redefection of the KGB agent Col. Vitaly Yurchenko, who claimed he had been abducted by the CIA and then escaped.

As professionally as this operation seemed to have been run, there were puzzling aspects to it for Skinner. It might have been a ploy, but the KGB did not seem to have a good understanding of the kind of information a Marine security guard would possess. On several occasions Sasha asked Lonetree philosophical questions about U.S. strategic plans. Why ask him? No Marine would have the slightest knowledge about those issues. The ambassador might not even be privy to that information.