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

After learning that she sentenced herself to a misfortune comparable to Lonetree’s, when I thought about her self-imposed punishment and penance, I found myself thinking of Violetta in the tradition of the great Russian tragic heroines, women ennobled and purified by suffering, women brought closer to God by their grief….

But before drifting too far into melodrama, I was yanked back to earth by a Russian contemporary of Violetta’s, a woman her age who also attended the Institute of Foreign Languages, who also was approached by the “servants of intelligence,” but who declined to cooperate with them.

“The people who were open to the charms of the KGB, who allowed themselves to be recruited, were people lacking in moral character,” she insisted. “If you chose the path of covert collaboration, it meant you agreed to do dirty things. You would sit and drink vodka with your friends and ask them about their feelings, their family. And if they criticized society or told you a political anecdote or made the slightest comment that was unfavorable, they could never go to the West. Their careers would be ruined, and they would never know why. You cannot forget the lives that were affected by her. Thanks to those ‘bloody bitches’ we all lived in fear and distrusted everyone around us.”

Evoking a Faustian motif—the willingness to sell one’s soul to the devil in return for worldly gains—this woman condemned Violetta for committing herself to a life of treachery, not out of an idealistic protest against the enemies of socialism, but out of self-interest and for material advancement, which was worse.

“She knew the rules. She knew her relationship with Lonetree could have no future. Soviet citizens who collaborated with the KGB received benefits, but permission to go abroad with someone they recruited was not one of them. And yet she lied to him and got him to believe that somehow, if he continued to cooperate with ‘Uncle Sasha,’ their difficulties would be overcome.”

And yet, even as this woman called people who engaged in such duplicity despicable, she acknowledged that “Violetta is a product of the Soviet socialist system. She is a typical ‘Homo sovieticus.’ And this is what distinguishes her radically from the heroines of Russian literature. The worst thing that seventy years of socialism did for my country and the national consciousness of the Russian people was to destroy the moral basis of human existence…. I see Violetta more like an anti-heroine. A kind of socialist perversion of the marvelous Russian women characters created by classic Russian literature. Because in spite of the trials and suffering endured by Violetta, I do not believe that she has cleansed her soul. I do not believe that she has repented her sins. Because if she were truly remorseful, she would have broken off all her connections to the KGB, and she has not done that.”

After several years, Violetta gradually emerged from her seclusion to lead a somewhat normal life. With the end of Communism had come an infusion of Western companies that set up branch offices in Moscow and were in need of people with bilingual skills. She has worked for several joint-venture firms as both interpreter and administrator, facilitating the complicated business of doing business in the new Russia.

From time to time she is contacted by Slava, who brings her flowers and takes her out to a restaurant for lunch. And although she has made it clear there are limits to what she will do, she has found there continue to be employment advantages to maintaining her connections with the security services. She changed her last name from Seina to Kosareva in an effort to separate herself from her past, as well as to make it more difficult for journalists to find her. The freedom of the press that came with democratization in Russia unleashed reporters to write about the “dark truths” of Soviet history, and both the Western and the Russian media have pursued this story, albeit without success. Out of concern that an open discussion would encroach on state secrets, the Federal Counterintelligence Service, the successor to the KGB’s Second Directorate, refused to give her permission to talk to reporters. Which was fine with Violetta, who has always been a private and guarded person, and who felt she had nothing to gain from going public, and that nothing she could say would help Clayton Lonetree.

“There have been times when kings were criticized in the press, and presidents have been taken to task, just as I have been,” she said to her mother one day. “But they lived through it, and in time it passed. I have no desire to argue with anybody, nor to prove anything to anybody. I don’t want to do anything that keeps this story alive. I just want to forget it.”

In the years that followed, Violetta would collect her share of male admirers, some serious enough to propose marriage to her, but always she refused. There had been no contact with Lonetree since his arrest, and for all she knew his resentment toward her was too deep and bitter for forgiveness. She was also realistic enough to know that they both had changed over the years, and there was no way of knowing how compatible they would be now. Nevertheless, she intended to stay true to her promise to wait for him. Only he could release her from her vows—by sending for her, coming back to her, or telling her he wanted nothing more to do with her.

When Clayton Lonetree returned to the DB, as the inmates referred to the disciplinary barracks, he was not overly disappointed. Twenty years was less than twenty-five, was the way he thought about it.

Although there were things Clayton Lonetree did not like about prison life, overall he had adjusted quite well to his situation. He didn’t like mowing lawns in the summer heat and shoveling snow on freezing winter days, and he didn’t have much good to say about litter detail: picking up cigarette butts and gum wrappers. But that being the extent of so-called hard labor, he wasn’t about to complain. And on the positive side he had a clique of friends. He enjoyed taking academic classes and exercising regularly. He had a radio he listened to late at night, he could watch sports on television, and he had all the time in the world for the activity he enjoyed most: reading a good book. He had even come to appreciate the view from his two-man room: fields and hills and the 1850-vintage buildings that had stood since the facility was first constructed as an outpost in Indian Country.

All in all, it wasn’t bad duty. And increasingly he had come to recognize that it even had its advantages: These were the kinds of comforts some people would like to escape to.

There was another plus for Clayton Lonetree where he was: As a prisoner, he enjoyed a peculiar sort of celebrity status. Across the country there were people who saw in his plight an example of the ongoing persecution of Indians by the American government. He had received dozens of letters from them since his incarceration. Some were straightforward letters of support, encouraging him to keep his spirits up and to remember Billy Mills, the Oglala Sioux who ran in the Olympics in the fifties and against all odds won a gold medal. Some included money, five-and ten-dollar bills, toward a Clayton Lonetree Defense Fund. He heard from activists and housewives, students and professors, many offering to write protest letters to congressmen or the press. One of his biggest fans was an elderly woman living in a retirement home in Salt Lake City who wrote long letters to him recalling her youth in the Netherlands during World War II when she had sheltered Jews from the Nazis. In her opinion sentencing Clayton Lonetree to prison for his misdeeds was a harbinger of the coming of death camps to America.

To his credit, though it offered an easy and tempting out, Clayton Lonetree was not comfortable being perceived as a victim or a martyr. He hated it when people expressed pity for him as a poor Indian boy, troubled by a deprived upbringing, abused by a feckless father, and stuck in an orphanage by an uncaring mother, and this was why he became a spy. You heard no whining or special pleading from him on that account. Nor had he said or done anything to reinforce the notion that he had been wrongfully prosecuted for offenses he did not commit. He did feel his punishment exceeded his crimes, which in his mind were still relatively minor; and if he was accused of something he did not do, he would be the first to speak up. But the image he wanted to project now was of someone who had done wrong, was man enough to admit it, and was willing to stand up and take his punishment, so when the day came that he did walk out of prison, he could hold his head up and say he had paid his debt to society and was entitled to put the past behind him.