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

Whatever else happened on this particular evening, what Major Henderson remembers today is the phone call he received from the staff judge advocate, Col. Patrick McHenry.

“What’s your security clearance, Henderson?” McHenry asked straightaway.

“SBI,” Henderson replied. An SBI was a Special Background Investigation clearance, which authorized recipients to see top-secret material.

There was a silence on the line that Henderson suspected could be attributed to the fact this was not a secured line. “Can I assume, Colonel, that you won’t tell me why you’re asking over the phone?”

“You’re right,” McHenry said. “Meet me in my office tomorrow morning.”

The briefing Henderson received the next day was short and to the point. There was a heads-up at Quantico. NIS agents were flying in a Marine that evening. It looked like spy charges. Lonetree was going to be held incommunicado in the brig. As chief defense counsel, Major Henderson had been detailed to represent the accused.

By the luck of the draw, Henderson was duty officer again on New Year’s Eve, and as it was an unusually slow evening, around eleven o’clock he decided to pay his client a visit. Leaving the duty office at Lejeune Hall, he slid behind the wheel of his two-tone El Camino and negotiated the mile and a half of turns that took him past the air station, past Officer Candidate School, and to the brig. He’d been warned that this was a case affecting national security and that any conversations that involved a discussion of classified material must be conducted in a specially secured area. His intention was merely to introduce himself and reassure his client that he was not alone in this.

The brig guard led Henderson to D-seg, a wing where six isolation cells had been designed with terrorists in mind. All the others had been vacated, so the entire wing was dedicated to Sgt. Clayton Lonetree.

Henderson’s first impression of his client was dominated by the prisoner’s pathetically frail appearance. His eyes were glazed with the astonishment of someone locked into a set of headlights who realizes he is about to be flattened, and he was shivering in a bare-bones cell in just his underwear.

“Why are you in your skivvies, Sergeant?” he asked.

“They said I was a suicide risk, sir,” Lonetree replied.

“Why did they say that?”

Lonetree shrugged. “I don’t know.”

Henderson turned to the duty warden, who simply said, “Orders.”

Any prisoner who came in with high visibility, either because of notoriety or because of severity of offense, went to D-seg. And if there was any indication—underline any —that the individual could be a suicide risk, he was stripped of all things that could assist him: shoelaces, socks, down to his underwear. Henderson didn’t feel he could fault the brig personnel, because the NIS agents who brought him in might have said something that justified the precaution. But he made a mental note to call McHenry in the morning, because if there was no just cause, he would file a motion.

It was a short visit, during which Henderson did his best to put his apprehensive client at ease. He told him what he’d told a lot of clients, before and since. “Listen, I get paid to worry about this, so don’t you bother. You see this gray hair? That’s where it comes from. Just take it easy and trust me.”

It was hard for him to tell by Lonetree’s reaction what he was thinking, and whether he believed him. After all, Henderson was wearing the same green pants and khaki shirt as those who stood guard over him. He just hoped Lonetree would be somewhat relieved to know that there was someone on his side.

Afterward Henderson returned to the office. He did not have any paperwork about the case to look at; he knew only that the charge was espionage, and he was anxious to find out what supportive evidence had been gathered. But he would have to wait for that, so all there was left for him to do now was wonder. And that was what he did for the rest of the night. About the only thing he did not speculate on was what was going to happen when news of this case was released. He knew that a Marine charged with espionage was going to hit the press in a big way.

The next day Henderson got on the line and straightened out the skivvy business. But he had to wait for several days before the first batch of papers on the case was delivered. Compared with a normal military case, this one proceeded slowly, because nobody knew how to handle it. The Naval Investigative Service was classifying everything that had anything to do with the case, and even though Henderson had the proper security clearance, the defense was the last to receive material once it had gone through a classification review.

When at last Henderson received what he’d been anxiously waiting for, he read the summary of admissions: failure to report contacts and fraternizing with Soviet nationals; sexual liaisons with a Soviet national; contact with KGB personnel; theft of classified material; providing classified information to KGB officers; compromising identity of CIA officers; providing recruitment assessment data on other USMC personnel.

Then he turned to the three statements Lonetree had made to the NIS agents in London, describing in detail interactions with Soviet intelligence. The first two confessions struck him as serious but of minimal impact on national security. The third statement, however, was extremely damaging, for in it Lonetree admitted to providing the Soviets with top-secret documents he’d stolen from an embassy safe.

It didn’t look good for his client, but Henderson wanted to hear his side of the story. Their first meeting about the case was held in the Secure Classified Information Facility. Known as the SCIF, it was a windowless room in the basement of Hockmuth Hall that was as safe as a bomb shelter. As they went over the confession and Henderson asked questions, Lonetree complained about the circumstances under which his statement had been taken.

“They’d ask me a question and I’d talk for fifteen, twenty minutes, they’d be jotting notes, then they’d get up and go in and show them to this secretary, and she’d have them back for them in two or three minutes. They left out a lot.”

Henderson listened. What Lonetree was suggesting was that what remained was a rough cut of his actual statements.

“Did you read all the statements before you signed them?”

“No, not really. I glanced through them. But by that time I was so tired I didn’t care. I wanted to be done with it all.”

Henderson turned to the third statement. He’d noted that the first two were initialed and signed by Lonetree, but the third, the most damning one, was not. He asked about this and Lonetree said he refused to sign it because the things the interrogator had made him say weren’t true. “They told me to tell them a lie, so I did. That’s all a bunch of lies.”

Henderson had been a defense counsel long enough to suspect that most of his clients were fibbing if their lips were moving. He just assumed they were going to dissemble while trying to make their side of the story sound as good as they could, and leave it up to him to decide where the truth lay. So when Clayton Lonetree told him that the NIS agents who interrogated him had instructed him to tell them a lie, and that was the basis of his third statement, Henderson filed it in his mind as one more false denial.

Most guys in law enforcement didn’t like gals in law enforcement, and the Naval Investigative Service was no exception. It too was a male-chauvinist organization, which was why eyebrows had gone up when Angelic White had been transferred from Guam to NIS headquarters and put in charge of monitoring national security investigations for Europe and the Middle East. She came from a law-enforcement family, her father having been a special agent in charge in Orlando and London. While running the counterintelligence program out of Guam in the early eighties, she had been outstanding, exposing corruption and Chinese infiltration of the government of Guam. So she deserved the promotion. But still, it was unusual to see a woman on a fast track at NIS.