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

More rapidly than she ever would have imagined, her fondness for Clayton deepened. A large part of their relationship was playful: When she tried to give him Russian language lessons, he had great difficulty getting the accents right, and said SAMovar instead of saMOvar, baBUSHka instead of BAbushka; and she corrected him with increasing sternness until she realized he was doing it wrong just to get a rise out of her. And when she nicknamed him “Yozhik”—Russian for “hedgehog”—and he pretended to be offended, she assured him it wasn’t only a reference to the spiky hairstyle of the Marines in Moscow, it was also a term of endearment peasant farmers used for favorite children. But at other times, as when they leafed through her photo album and both reminisced about what it had been like growing up, just as she was a source of happiness to him, she felt him filling a void in her life.

It had not been her intention for their friendship to take a sexual turn. Even when they walked hand in hand and kissed goodbye at the metro, it was because she had begun to care a great deal about him, and she did not necessarily consider it a prelude to greater intimacy. When she had first seen him, she had not thought of him as physically attractive—he was slightly built, approximately her own height, and not the handsome or heroic type. But his stoicism, his sensitivity, his gentleness had a certain appeal; his romantic interest in her created a heightened awareness of herself as a sensual being; and sleeping with him somehow seemed like a way of compensating for the duplicity she was engaged in.

It was after they made love that he began to talk about marriage. They discussed two scenarios: he could stay in Russia and become a citizen—he did not want to seek asylum because he would be doing this for her, not for political reasons—or she could come to America and marry him there. It was an impossible dream, she knew. The KGB was not going to allow her to leave the country with him. But they were living in the moment, and she enjoyed the reveries his words conjured up for her. It was a joyful escape from the depressing reality to leaf through magazines and pick out the car they would drive and the kind of house they would live in and talk about the life they would have together if she went to America as his bride.

When the time came to introduce him to “Uncle Sasha,” the fact that Violetta was keeping a secret from Clayton seemed not as important now as the bigger secret she was keeping from the KGB. This was no longer just an act. The romantic rhythms of love on the sneak had won her over.

She could see that it wasn’t easy for Clayton to answer Sasha’s questions and go along with his requests, and on her own she had second thoughts about the entire affair and considered putting an end to it, or at least being perfectly honest with Clayton about her complicity. Several times she started to say something, then stopped, unable to get the truth out. Because by then another dynamic had taken over. She realized that he was not deceived about their relationship: he was fully aware of its outlaw status and its other, “official” level. And his willingness to participate, in spite of the imminent danger to himself, was his way of showing her how much he loved her. He was doing this to prove his feelings for her were true.

At least that was the way she viewed the situation, which was why she decided to let things play out on their own, and to allow fate to decide how it would end.

By the time Clayton left for Vienna, Violetta, in her mother’s words, had been “conquered” by Clayton’s love. They met to say goodbye to each other, and then Clayton left for the airport and Violetta rushed home because he promised he would call and say goodbye one more time. Watching her sit by the telephone waiting for it to ring, Genrietta thought she had never seen a girl so desperately in love.

His final words before leaving Russia were “Whatever happens, I will come back for you.”

Violetta waited a “whole week” before she sat down at the table in her room, set out her favorite picture of Clayton wearing blue jeans and a faded workshirt and standing in Red Square with the domes of St. Basil’s Cathedral as a backdrop, and wrote him a letter. In it she told him she knew it was silly but each day when she returned home from her job at the Irish Embassy, a small part of her would be disappointed not to find him waiting for her. No matter where she was or what she was doing, she wrote, he was never far from her thoughts. “I can’t get rid of the memories and I don’t want to.”

Before leaving, he had talked about going to Vienna as an adventure, and in her letter she said she envied him and wished she could be there with him, sharing “new impressions, new places, new people,” instead of sitting in her room, alone, “staring at your picture and thinking how much I love you.”

Several days later he surprised her with a phone call. He was having trouble adjusting to Vienna, he said, and missed Moscow, missed her. They were words she wanted to hear, but as she wrote him afterward, it worried her to think of him feeling depressed. “I want so much to be in Vienna, next to you and share all your troubles so that you don’t feel alone there.”

After that she wrote him every few weeks, telling him about the ballets she attended at the Bolshoi Theater; a vacation she took with a girlfriend to the Caucasus, where they stretched out on the beach, swam in the sea, climbed mountains; and how much she anticipated the day when he would return. “I think that all the things that parted us—distance and circumstance—are temporary and we will be together again…. Now I am absolutely sure that I can’t feel happy, completely happy, without you by my side.”

The letters that he wrote her were filled with daily details of his life, made less boring by sharing them with her—a detachment inspection by the company commander, a required attendance at a diplomatic function. But they would almost always end with his reassuring her that his love for her continued to grow stronger by the day, and that he was looking forward to coming back to Moscow and visiting her, he hoped by the end of the year.

Throughout this period Violetta was never able to forget completely the “official” side to their relationship, because she had been instructed to encourage Clayton’s ongoing cooperation in her letters. Which she did, reminding him that Uncle Sasha’s blessings were important to their future plans. But even as she played her part, there was a difference now, because at the same time she was doing her duty she was staying true to her inner feelings. She wanted them to be together and knew this was the only way it could happen.

Their clandestine relationship had been going on for over a year, and as time had passed and nothing bad had happened, Violetta had begun to believe that maybe fate watched over young lovers. The year 1986 was drawing to a close, and she was waiting to hear precisely his plans for returning when she learned that he had been arrested.

She was frantic. There were no letters from him to explain what had happened, Uncle Sasha claimed ignorance, one or two small articles appeared in the Soviet press but they added little to her understanding, and the next thing she knew, her name had surfaced in the Western press as the woman at the center of the sex-for-secrets spy scandal and Western reporters had tracked her to the Irish Embassy and were requesting interviews.

Violetta left work one day, did not return the next, and put her life on hold, awaiting the outcome of Clayton’s trial. She rarely left home and tuned in daily to the Voice of America and Radio Free Europe on the radio, listening for news about Clayton’s case. What she heard made her despair. She had not given a great deal of thought to the specific worth of the information Clayton had passed to Uncle Sasha, and in particular she hadn’t thought about his actions in terms of punishable criminal offenses. But she thought there was something clearly exaggerated and not quite real about the charge that he had seriously damaged the national security of the United States.