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

But from time to time there would be a lapse and he would ask—just out of curiosity, he assured his attorneys—if she had ever tried to get in touch with him.

So of course it was that person I set my sights on when I flew to Moscow in the spring of 1993 to get the Soviet side of this story.

When the publicity surrounding the Marine Spy Scandal shone her way, Violetta dropped out of sight, and as far as I knew no one in the West had heard from her since. I had gotten her last address from NIS investigators, and I was counting on the fact that the housing shortage in Russia prevented Muscovites from moving around much.

The exact nature of Violetta’s relationship to the KGB was open to question: She could have been doing her duty for her country, or she might have been involuntarily coerced into cooperating. But I knew enough about the way the system operated to suspect that when I did locate her, her ability to talk freely about her involvement in this affair was probably going to be limited. The Soviets had always been strict keepers of secrets, the immutable principle of the Soviet agent being: Keep your silence to the end. And in spite of the recent liberalization of Russian laws, it was still illegal to disclose “state secrets.”

In the absence of hard information, and feeling the need for a vision that would give me the confidence to dive headfirst into unknown circumstances, I had invented a scenario in which Violetta’s exposure in the press had caused her to lose value in the eyes of the KGB, and she had been shunted into some internal low-level secretarial position where she was resentful and bitter about her fate. Since she had always been told that humanism was the end product of Soviet socialism, she had now become cynical about the whole game of espionage and begun to empathize with the American Marine she had betrayed. It made her want to strike out and expose the hypocrisy and cruelty of the system, but she didn’t know how until the fall of Communism, the end of the Cold War, and, now, the arrival of a Western writer anxious to hear her story. It would be the chance she was waiting for, an opportunity to break with the past, tell her truth, redefine herself, and in the process answer questions that haunted a young man who was sitting in prison for having fallen in love with her.

There was a major problem with that scenario, I knew. Redemption through publicity in the mass media was an American phenomenon. It had no tradition in Russia, where newspapers and books historically were organs of propaganda for the state, and public confessions of sins were an important part of ideological propaganda. People in Russia remembered the show trials of the thirties, when innocent people were tortured until they admitted they were “enemies of the State,” and their confessions were published in the newspapers so everyone could see that Stalin’s conspiracy fears were justified. As recently as the sixties and seventies, when the “dissident movement” began, the newspapers would print so-called retractions signed by people who had been given a choice—labor camps, or a statement to sign that said the struggle for human rights was instigated by the West, and now they were convinced of the advantages of Soviet society. That was the tradition, and applying that history to Violetta, to expect a woman who had cooperated with the KGB in the Soviet era to bare herself to the world about what she did and why and how she felt about her choices now—well, it was a lot to ask.

I had decided not to write a letter or make a phone call and to just show up. A word of advice I’d received was that Russian people respected resourcefulness. If you went to the trouble to locate and confront them in person, I’d been told, they would be so impressed it would be hard for them to turn you down.

Accompanied by a fearless young Russian woman as my interpreter and toting a bag full of knickknacks—cosmetics and Kleenex, two items I’d been told were in short supply—we boarded the metro to Tekstilshiki, exited at an underground station, and surfaced along a busy boulevard lined with the metal kiosks that have become the symbol of the new commercialism in the new Moscow. They were stocked with liquor, beer, chocolate bars, and a brand of cigarettes I had to smile at. Between the expected Camels and Marlboros was a pack of Hollywoods, and the small print assured the smoker it was an “All-American blend.”

With little trouble we found the small, prefabricated, rather characterless apartment complex, and having agreed it would be best for her to go ahead and smooth the path for me, my interpreter disappeared in a dark entryway while I took a seat on a bench in the tree-filled courtyard.

Several kids rode by on bikes; a woman strolled by pushing a baby carriage. I looked up once and saw someone peering at me from behind drapes. The ten minutes she was gone seemed like twenty, and when she came walking out, I tried but was unable to read her expression. “I’m talking with the mother,” she said, “but she’s afraid to talk with you. I will give her what you’ve brought.”

I held out my bag of gifts, and watched her until she disappeared. I had no idea what was going on, and was even more confused when she came back out and gestured rather abruptly, “Let’s go.”

We were halfway back to the metro stop before she explained. My theory was correct: Violetta still lived there, along with her mother and her sister. But only the mother was home, and she was absolutely paranoid. Told that an American writer who wanted to talk to her was waiting outside, she had gotten extremely upset, and only some fast talking had kept her from slamming the door.

“So how was it left?” I asked.

“I gave her your presents, and I wrote your phone number down and mine and said we hoped to hear from her.”

The call never came. A week went by, then a second week, and finally I could wait no longer; I had to make something happen. Another tip I’d been given about dealing with Russians was that they respected perseverance. I should expect to hear no, but that wasn’t necessarily the last word. So at ten o’clock one evening I decided to make a personal appeal.

It was getting dark by the time I arrived at the apartment building, and the lights were out in the second-story apartment where Violetta and her family lived. Once again I took a seat on a bench outside and waited. It was shortly after midnight when I heard footsteps and watched a woman enter the building. Unable to speak Russian, and without a description to go by, I had no way of knowing whether it was Violetta, her mother or sister—or even a neighbor, until a light went on in the flat. Within seconds I was ringing the buzzer to apartment number six.

There was silence, and then a woman’s voice spoke from behind the door. No doubt she was inquiring who was there, so in fumbling Russian I recited three phrases I’d memorized from a Berlitz tape: “Good evening. How are you? Do you speak English?”

A safety chain rattled, and the door opened a crack, enough for me to see that I was addressing a plump woman in her late fifties with two gold front teeth and oversized eyeglasses. She said something, but I had reached the limits of my Russian vocabulary, I assumed that I was being asked to identify myself, so I did, in English. To which she spoke again in Russian, and once more I answered in English. And we went back and forth like this several times before we both gave up. She looked bewildered, and I did not know what to say next.

Suddenly I had a thought. In an elaborate pantomime, I pretended to make a phone call, and when an imaginary Natasha answered, I handed over the imaginary receiver. It worked. After a moment’s hesitation she opened the door to me.