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

Yefimov scoffs at the idea that the relationship he developed with Clayton Lonetree was special in a familial way. “That is definitely an exaggeration,” he says. “It is what you Americans would call ‘bullshit.’ ” He acknowledges that there is an odd, almost paternalistic feeling that develops when you recruit an agent, particularly one who is considerably younger than you are. And he would express a certain sympathy for Lonetree as a victim of his “complexes” and “noncynical attitude towards women.” But as for personal feelings, according to Yefimov he cared a lot more about the impact of this operation on his own career than what it meant to Clayton Lonetree’s future.

Yefimov says he was not totally surprised when Lonetree turned himself in. He had a feeling it would go that way when he realized that Lonetree’s motivation for cooperating with the KGB could not be transferred from his emotional attachment to Violetta to his ideological admiration for the Soviet system. In his view it was a shortsighted miscalculation by his bosses that cost them Lonetree. They considered Violetta nothing more than an “approaching instrument,” and once she brought them Lonetree, in their eyes she became expendable. This led to future problems, because the only real chance they had of keeping the agent under control was if he thought it would win him Violetta.

It was a testament to Lonetree’s lack of guile, says Yefimov, that rather than bargaining for more access to Violetta, he experienced a “moral or nervous breakdown,” gave a “simple confession to his countrymen,” and “agreed to be punished.”

For Yefimov this meant reams of paperwork. Filling out dozens of forms. Writing up explanations for why the agent was lost. There were no claims lodged against him from bosses, but neither were there the major promotions he was hoping for. During the course of the operation his work had been highly complimented, and from time to time he had received “incentives’; but his rewards were relatively minor because ultimately the operation not only failed to achieve its potential, in the eyes of some bosses it was a debacle.

An internal assessment of what had gone wrong questioned the very wisdom of recruiting Lonetree, pointing out that the personality defects that made him susceptible in the first place—his lack of reliability and “businesslike properties”—complicated his effectiveness in the end. He was an agent who contained the seeds of his own destruction, it was written.

In the final analysis it would be the unexpected repercussions that flowed from the exposure of their efforts to recruit Lonetree that would account for why this operation was judged as a calamity for the Soviet security services. Because the KGB did not just lose an agent when Lonetree turned himself in. After his confession, the United States took dramatic security measures that hardened virtually every American embassy as a target. The KGB liked to use military analogies to describe its operations, and in this case they likened the recruitment of Sgt. Clayton Lonetree to a trigger that was pulled without regard to the blast at the other end—which blew up in their face.

Today Aleksei Yefimov still works for the intelligence services, but in an internal position. Just as he had feared—it was another of the reservations he’d had about being the point man on the operation—Lonetree identified him to the CIA, and it spelled the end of his involvement with the American Embassy. He has not been directly connected with recruitment and operative work since the Lonetree case.

When he reflects on his “moment in history,” the area Yefimov seems most uncomfortable talking about is what happened to Violetta. He developed a fondness for her as they worked together, and over the course of the operation he realized that she had been inadequately prepared for her role. It would have been better if they had used someone who possessed a detachment that would have allowed her to act in a loving way and would not have subjected her to raw emotions that would pull her in different directions.

“I feel very sorry that this girl ended up so poorly,” he says. “I thought she would come out of this experience in a better fashion than she did.”

Asked to elaborate, he returns to his belief that the women who worked at the foreign embassies had personal reasons for taking those positions. But then, using another of the military analogies favored by his organization, he expresses a sincere regret that Violetta “found herself in the path of a big tank, and thought she could sneak underneath. But it didn’t work out that way, and she got run over.”

When Genrietta Khokha cracked the book on her family history, which included long chapters on Violetta’s life story, I understood her motivation to be a resentment toward the KGB for “stealing” her daughter. Over the course of more than a dozen interviews, during which a genuine friendship evolved, I realized there was a subtext for her. In her own way Genrietta feels responsible for what happened to Violetta. Had Violetta not become estranged from her family, had her home life been more satisfying, then perhaps she would not have become involved with the “servants of intelligence.” Or so Genrietta thinks.

When this story broke in the press and Violetta was identified as the woman who “seduced” a Marine into spying and then betrayed him, Genrietta was so upset at the characterization of her daughter as a whore for the State that she considered marching into the American Embassy, asking for the ambassador, and telling him it was not her daughter’s fault. Blame the KGB, an evil organization that brought an entire population to its knees, that created generations of people who were “neither the lords of their deeds, nor their will.” Much tougher people than her daughter had been unable to stand up to the system, and to single out a young woman was unfair.

She never followed through with her plan—after she told Violetta what she was thinking, two men who represented themselves as Soviet diplomats showed up at the house and calmed her down—but she did continue to entertain the notion of challenging her daughter’s slanderers to a duel, with pistols, as they did in the nineteenth century when the honor of an innocent woman was sullied.

Genrietta’s efforts to create a more understanding and forgiving context for Violetta’s behavior would find support from social psychologists who teach that, a lot more than we rugged individualist Americans like to admit, people are reflections of the culture in which they are enmeshed, and before we judge them too harshly we must consider the society and times in which they live. When one takes into consideration the perverse pressures the Soviet system put on its people, the absolute control the secret police had over the average person’s life, the manipulation of opportunities and privileges by the ruling elite, and the duplicity and deception that were woven into the social fabric—where leaders lied to citizens, citizens lied to one another—it is hard not to be sympathetic toward Violetta. When she says she was a victim of circumstances and anybody in her place would have made the same choices, only those who have been in her situation and chose otherwise are truly qualified to take issue.

To one of her friends Violetta said she imagined her life as a kind of literature—a drama turned to tragedy. When I heard that, it made sense that she would view her life with the sort of shape and charge found in the romantic fiction she so loved to read as a student. In some ways hers was even a conventional love story: The lovers meet, impediments are placed in their path, they surmount them or seem to until at last they have to face what appears to be an obstacle that threatens to keep them apart forever.