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

The program was sympathetically scripted to suggest that when Clayton Lonetree decided to engage in do-it-yourself double-agentry, he had been under the influence of the spy thrillers he liked to read. “He was convinced he could use his romance with Violetta and the KGB to obtain information to help his own country,” viewers were told.

It was a program rich in redemptive purpose. Like a Greek chorus bearing witness to a tragedy, two former U.S. ambassadors to the Soviet Union, Arthur Hartman and Jack Matlock, were interviewed and they agreed that the security breaches attributed to Lonetree had been exaggerated, and his sentence had been excessive. It was an assessment shared by Aldrich Ames, whose letter to Eye to Eye stating, “There is no doubt in my mind that Lonetree’s heavy sentence was imposed solely because of the secret panic and hysteria in the CIA and Defense and State Departments induced by my compromises,” was flashed on the screen. Even Dave Beck, the government prosecutor, filmed in his office in Knoxville, Tennessee, went on the record as saying, “Clayton Lonetree should be released from confinement.”

It was also a remarkable piece of theater that cast Clayton and Violetta as characters in a Cold War version of Romeo and Juliet: the children of two families (countries) that did not get along, who engaged in a forbidden love and were guilty of little more than a crime of the heart.

Even the finale was a scene worthy of Shakespeare, who loved plot twists that resolved personal plight and ended with ultimate reconciliations. After the correspondent revealed that a recent letter from Clayton to Violetta contained a proposal of marriage, an American TV audience, along with Clayton Lonetree, who was watching from prison, read her handwritten response:

Yozhik,

I got your letter. It made me feel the happiest woman in the world.

I do want to marry you.

The answer is YES.

I love you.

I miss you terribly.

As tricky as it is to research and write about intelligence issues, acknowledging everyone “without whose help…” can be just as problematic. There are people who gave me their trust and time and who, for legitimate personal and professional reasons, spoke only on condition of anonymity. There are people who continue to be employed in sensitive positions whose careers would be jeopardized were I to credit their contribution publicly. And there are people in Russia who spoke openly to me only on the assurance their names would never be revealed, because a lesson of their country’s history has been that what it is permissible to say today could be grounds for punishment tomorrow. So to all those who helped but do not find themselves mentioned—and you know who you are—you have my gratitude.

While I’m still in a covert state of mind, I’d like to thank the Central Intelligence Agency—for nothing. I share the frustrations expressed by virtually everyone in this story who had to deal with the CIA. Direct letters to the public affairs office, requests under the Freedom of Information Act, intervention by sympathetic congressmen, all elicited the same response: “We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of any information relating to your appeal.”

The KGB was more cooperative with this endeavor than the CIA. It was Soviet intelligence agents, not American, who initially parted the veil for me on the Vienna intrigues involving Yuri Lysov and the CIA “hooded witness” at the court-martial. The CIA, it turns out, had been aware of Clayton Lonetree’s espionage activities before he turned himself in.

As I later learned, Yuri Lysov had been servicing other American personnel at the embassy, some in positions significantly higher than Lonetree’s, and the CIA was allowing him to continue to operate in order to determine the full range of the people he was in contact with until it sprang its own recruitment trap on him. This was an operation it had been committed to before Lonetree came on the scene, which was why it took so long for the Agency to make up its mind how to handle Lonetree. It was considering whether or not there was a way to use Lonetree to get to George. Detailed questioning of John Doe at the court-martial could have jeopardized the CIA’s plans, which were still in progress at that time.