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

It ran fifteen pages in length, and in it Lonetree admitted to violating the regulation against fraternization with Soviet nationals and becoming intimately involved with Violetta Seina, who was employed at the embassy as a translator. He characterized their relationship as a friendship that turned sexual in late December of 1985 and became something even more clandestine in early January of 1986, when she introduced him to a man she identified as her Uncle Sasha.

Lonetree indicated that he did not report this contact either, because initially it was uneventful and there was no harm done. He admitted that gradually, however, he had been drawn into a web of conspiracy with Uncle Sasha, and that he had disclosed confidential information about the Central Intelligence Agency’s presence within the embassy—the location of CIA spaces, the identity of CIA agents—as well as data about the embassy’s seventh floor. This was where all the top-secret offices were located, including the Communications Programs Unit. Known as the CPU, it was the secure workplace where code clerks from the CIA, National Security Agency, and State Department went about their business. Within its chambers crypto machines transmitted and received encoded messages by satellite to and from Washington, D.C., and Langley on matters that ranged from the results of NSA’s electronic eavesdropping successes on Kremlin communications and instructions from the President and Secretary of State to the ambassador, to information about CIA informants in the Soviet Union.

Lonetree told the investigators that many times he seriously considered reporting his encounters with Uncle Sasha to the security officer in the embassy, but did not because he knew if he did, he would be relieved of duty and transferred back to the States, where he would face disciplinary action. He said he decided to take Sasha’s word that no one in the embassy would find out if he just cooperated.

While acknowledging he was disregarding his obligation as a security guard to protect classified material, Lonetree defended his actions with various rationalizations. It was apparent to him that Sasha already had a pretty good idea who was CIA. What he’d done was wrong, but to his way of thinking none of it was critically important.

Lonetree said that this went on for about three months, until he was transferred to Vienna in March 1986. At that time Uncle Sasha said that he planned to visit Vienna in the summer and suggested they should get together then. When Lonetree agreed to continue their relationship, Sasha gave him a slip of paper that had already been prepared, indicating a set of dates on which to meet, along with an enameled wooden jewelry box, which he said was a gift for being a friend.

In Vienna, Lonetree said, he purposely did not make the prearranged meeting with Sasha, and secretly he hoped this whole business would end there. He missed Violetta but felt guilty about what he was doing with Sasha. Then one night while he was on guard duty, the phone rang and it was Sasha. In a disguised voice he rescheduled the meeting.

They met in front of an opera house and Sasha gave him a big hug, expressed concern that he looked worried and thin, said Violetta sent her best regards, and took him out to dinner. Things were very friendly between them, and Sasha did not ask him anything about the embassy. Nor did he for the next few meetings, during which they took walks in the countryside and strolled in the Vienna parks.

Nonetheless, to his interviewers Lonetree would say, “I thought for sure he was playing a dangling game to draw me in deeper,” which prompted him to try to break it off with Sasha through a harebrained scheme. Since Sasha had something on him, he would try to get something incriminating on Sasha.

“I knew this girl called Alexandre who was a waitress who worked at a bar called Slambos in Vienna. I went to her and told her that a Soviet I’d known in Moscow had followed me to Vienna and was bothering me. I told her I wanted something on him so he’d leave me alone. I said he was married and offered her one hundred dollars to meet him in the park and entice him into a compromising position I could photograph and use for blackmail, but I didn’t tell her any other details.”

He told her where he was to meet Sasha in the park; then he went and hid in the bushes near the rendezvous point with his camera. Sasha arrived and waited but she never showed. Lonetree found out later she got the directions mixed up and went to the wrong part of the park.

After that, Lonetree said, he accepted the inevitability of his situation, and Sasha made it easy. He would deliver letters from and pictures of Violetta. He would put his arm around Lonetree’s shoulders and refer to him as “one of the family.” And he would overwhelm Lonetree’s resistance with grand gestures. After they had gone to an inn for lunch one day, he laid out a thousand dollars in Austrian currency on the table. He said it was a present. Lonetree said he couldn’t accept it. Sasha became indignant and said, “If you don’t accept it, you’ll be insulting me.”

By this time Lonetree was convinced he and Sasha had a genuine friendship, so he took the money and went to a store and bought a dress for Violetta and a shirt and tie for Sasha.

Their relationship reestablished, Sasha began once again to make inquiries about the identities of CIA personnel at the embassy in Vienna. Lonetree said that at first, “I told him since I was new at the embassy I did not know everyone on the staff or where they worked.” But he admitted that at a later meeting, “I gave Sasha pictures of three employees I thought were probably CIA that I had taken from embassy files on Post One. I would consider that these pictures were classified anywhere from confidential to secret.”

In November 1986, Sasha’s requests began to pick up intensity. He asked a series of questions about the Austrian ambassador’s secretary, and hinted that Lonetree should try to begin to date her. He asked detailed questions about other Marines in the guard detachment, and in particular he wanted to know which Marines had problems with alcohol or drugs or were homosexual. He asked about the embassy alarm system.

At a late-November meeting Sasha told him that he was ill and was not going to be able to continue traveling between Moscow and Vienna. He said that he was going to turn this thing over to his friend in Vienna who was a KGB officer, and a meet date was set up for December 5, 1986, at seven in the evening.

By now, Lonetree said, he’d become tired of the whole thing and wanted it to end. Upon hearing that Sasha was going to pass him on to a KGB officer, he also felt angry. “That’s when I thought of getting a gun and killing him. One of my friends at the Marine House collected World War II souvenirs, and I’d talked to him about getting a pistol—a Luger or a Walther P-38—and some ammunition.”

But he didn’t do that. Instead he missed the next date intentionally, and agreed to meet again only after Sasha called.

This was a meeting he dreaded. They met at a church but moved to a restaurant, where Sasha talked about leaving the next day. Eventually the friend showed up, and Sasha introduced him as George. “He reminded me of the National Security Adviser during the Carter administration, Brzezinski,” Lonetree said. George also had cold and humorless eyes, and a piercing stare that made Lonetree squirm.

With few preliminaries, George began asking questions about the ambassador’s office. He was also interested in the cleaning personnel at the embassy and wanted Lonetree to get him a list. “But the biggest topic of conversation was how I was going to get to the Soviet Union. George said we would finalize plans at a meeting on the twenty-seventh of December.”