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

Brannon came back out shaking his head. “The machine tells me you’re not giving us the truth.”

“But I am telling the truth, Mr. Brannon,” Lonetree protested.

“I believe you, boy. But you gotta convince this machine.”

A second test was administered, and this time the same first two questions were asked and the results checked. Deception was indicated again. A third polygraph was then given, asking the third and fourth questions, and once more deception was indicated.

The interrogation that followed was much more intense than anything that had gone on before. Up until then, Lonetree had been treated with relative gentleness. After the polygraph registered deceptive three different times, with national-security issues at stake, Brannon bore down heavily on him.

“Come on, Clayton. If you don’t cooperate, we’re going to burn your ass. We know you’re holding back. Now, tell me the truth.”

When Lonetree said he’d told them everything, Brannon shouted, “Well, tell us more!”

At first Lonetree tried to keep up with him, responding, “There is no more.” But Brannon found his answer unacceptable. “You couldn’t meet twelve times with the Soviets without giving them something more than what you’ve said. Tell me what it was. Did you pass them any classified documents?”

Lonetree continued his denials, but soon became overwhelmed by Brannon’s demands and turned nonresponsive. He seemed almost to go into a trance—staring straight ahead with his arms folded, a scowl on his face, refusing to answer Brannon’s questions. But under Brannon’s battering, tears streamed down his cheeks, and as Special Agent Moyer would testify later, “He looked like a person who wanted to say something but couldn’t quite get himself to come out with the words.”

In this context, to get Lonetree talking again, Brannon initiated an exchange that would be pivotal not only to this interrogation but to the entire NIS investigation that would follow.

“Talk to us, Clayton. Come on, talk to us.”

Reentering real time, Lonetree cried, “What do you want to hear?”

Brannon emitted an exasperated sigh. “Say something. Say anything. Say you’re sitting down, the walls are green, whatever. Just talk to me.”

“Do you want me to lie to you?”

“Okay. Make something up. Tell me a lie.”

This statement—“Tell me a lie”—appeared to break through the last of Lonetree’s resistance. Sobbing, he then admitted to obtaining the combination to a secured office and safe in the Vienna embassy, removing three documents marked top secret, and hiding them in a drainpipe on the roof of the Marine House before turning them over to the Soviets. He said he also examined the contents of a classified “burn bag” and removed one hundred secret documents concerning Mutual Balance Force Reduction, which he turned over to his handler at the next meeting.

On a legal scale of zero to ten, before these admissions his espionage case was probably about a three. It had just jumped to a six.

Lonetree was weeping openly and having difficulty breathing and trying to talk at the same time. The agents gave him several moments, and when he was at last able to be coherent, it was to deny everything he’d just said. “It’s not true,” he told the agents. “It’s a lie.”

Brannon roared, “Clayton, look at me!” And he pointed the question like a gun: “Did you in fact steal and give those documents to Sasha?”

Lonetree seemed almost to be hyperventilating now. “Yes,” he said, reversing his story once again. “I did. It’s the truth and I’m so ashamed. I’ve never been more afraid in my life for what I’ve done.”

It was an extreme moment, relieved when Moyer said, “Why don’t you go in and wash your face, Clayton, and calm down.”

Lonetree took the advice, going into the bathroom, where he splashed cold water on his face, toweled off, and sat on the edge of the tub for a few minutes. When he had collected his composure, he returned.

“How do you feel, Clayton?” Moyer asked. “You want to continue? Want to see a lawyer?”

Lonetree sniffed. “I want to stop. Yeah, I want to see a lawyer.”

A third statement was drafted off the information he’d provided during the emotional session, but Lonetree refused to sign it. “It will only get me into more trouble,” he would be quoted as saying. Both Moyer and Brannon were irritated because they felt he had only just begun to be honest with them. But they also knew their law.

In handcuffs, Sgt. Clayton Lonetree was driven to a U.S. Air Force base sixty miles outside London, where he spent the night in the brig. The next day he was picked up by a different NIS agent, James Austin, a quiet but shrewd assistant director of counterintelligence at NIS, who had come to London to provide support and guidance to the investigation, and to escort Lonetree back to the States.

The next day the two of them boarded an Air Force plane that was already scheduled to make a transatlantic flight. It was manned by reservists, one of whom, noting that Lonetree was wearing cuffs, made a point of letting Austin know that he was armed if there was trouble.

They talked very little during the flight, in large part because it was a huge cargo plane, so noisy inside they had to shout to be heard. But at one point Lonetree did ask Austin if he was really an expert on Soviet intelligence.

“My boss considers me one,” Austin replied.

Lonetree thought about that, before asking what it took to become a double agent.

Austin was not inclined to talk shop. “You’ll have to talk to somebody else about that.”

The plane landed in Dover, Delaware, where they switched to a smaller plane that flew them to National Airport in Washington, D.C. There, two more NIS agents in civilian clothes walked them to a waiting car and drove him the forty miles south to the Marine Corps Development and Education Command (MCDEC) at Quantico, Virginia.

Lonetree was silent the entire ride, but as they entered the main gate to Quantico, passing a replica of the famous Iwo Jima monument of Marines raising the American flag on Mount Surabachi—one of them the legendary Pima Indian, Ira Hayes—he would later say that in his mind he was comparing this drive to the last time he’d passed this way. It had been after his graduation from Marine guard school, when, prideful of his accomplishments and savoring the anticipation of standing duty in the enemy’s capital, he had departed for Moscow. It would have been inconceivable to him then, just as it was unbelievable to him now, that he would be returning in two and a half years in chains, charged with being a trophy of Soviet espionage.

From eight at night until nine the next morning someone drawn from the officer ranks at the Marine base at Quantico would act as the base representative in place of the commanding general. His duties ranged from summoning the military police to handle barking-dog calls and listening to complaints from the civilian community about artillery rattling their houses, to handling medevac flights. The assignment was handed out on a rotating basis, and the night before Sgt. Clayton Lonetree was delivered to the brig, Maj. David Henderson was the acting duty officer.

Henderson was a laid-back six-footer, full of homespun anecdotes. He gave the impression he would rather be hunting or fishing than anything else. When visitors called on him in his office, as often as not they would find him sitting with his feet propped up on his desk, and he’d wave them in and start talking about his hunting dogs before he got around to asking, in a drawl that all but drew his home state of Oklahoma in the air, “And what was it you came by for?” Nothing much excited Henderson, but it was a mistake to underestimate him, because he didn’t miss much either. President of his junior and senior classes in high school. Captain of the debating team. Graduate of the University of Oklahoma and its law school. Nomination to the Order of the Coif, which consisted of the top ten percent of law students in the nation. He was your classic country lawyer who kept his IQ under wraps as he outsmarted his adversaries, dressed in a Marine uniform.