Angelic White didn’t know what to make of the fact that Lonetree had apparently been absorbed in thought about the Soviet Union and the KGB at this stage of his Marine career. Her familiarity with KGB policies regarding walk-ins led her to believe that if Lonetree had initiated contact himself, it was unlikely they would have welcomed him. More probably they would have suspected he was a dangle or a crank, opened a file on him, and done nothing more. But even if Lonetree had not made an actual approach, she thought at the very least this indicated he was already fooling around with the notion of hooking up with the Soviets. Just in his head, maybe, but nevertheless he was thinking about it. Which put him on the road to espionage before he ever got to Moscow.
As provocative as the San Francisco lead was, when it went no further, A.W. turned her attention back to other investigative issues that were proving to be equally frustrating. Headquarters wanted NIS agents to speak with every Marine security guard who had come into contact with Sergeant Lonetree while he was dealing with Soviet intelligence. Thinking the Marine Corps was the logical place to go for that information, she had submitted a formal request asking for the name and current location of all MSGs whose tour of duty overlapped Lonetree’s. When a week went by and she had yet to receive a response, she called for an update on the progress. This time she was informed that she had come to the wrong place. The Marine Corps didn’t have those records because Marines on embassy duty technically belonged to the State Department.
“Terrific,” she muttered to herself, clearly perturbed, and that very day put in an identical request to the appropriate people at the State Department. And when the much-awaited report did not show up in a timely fashion, she made an exasperated phone call demanding to know what was taking so long.
“Be patient,” she was told. “It’s going to take time for a list of names to be assembled.”
“Why? Can’t somebody just go to a computer and jet off a copy?”
It was at this juncture that she learned about the Diplomatic Security Service’s outdated method of record keeping. Incredibly, its files on Marine security guards had yet to be computerized. MSGs were indexed by name only, they weren’t differentiated by duty stations, and the State Department’s tracking device consisted of going by hand through hundreds of three-by-five cards kept in a cardboard box.
Eventually ten names were turned over to A.W., which prompted another round of bickering. She wanted an open field: the right for NIS agents to interview Marine guards, to expand the conversation into interrogations if it seemed appropriate, to administer a polygraph examination if it was called for, and to conduct property searches should they be warranted. To her, these were the basic materials with which you built a case.
But the State Department didn’t see it that way. When Angelic White notified officials that NIS intended to begin their interviews with those Marines in these locations on this day, she was reminded that the regional security officer was responsible not only for implementing overall security at U.S. diplomatic missions overseas but also for investigating all matters of criminal interest.
A.W. had assumed that even though embassies were not the Naval Investigative Service’s natural jurisdiction, because the investigation of counterintelligence activities involving Marine Corps personnel belonged to NIS, full cooperation on the part of the State Department could be taken for granted. In any number of other investigations involving military personnel, a simple call to the primary organization was all it had taken, and where there had been concurrent jurisdiction, accommodations were usually made to let NIS take the lead.
This being the first inquiry of this nature, however, no established mechanism existed for coordinating this kind of counterintelligence investigation, and the State Department was not inclined to relinquish its authority. So out of its own counterintelligence shop went interview requests, which were received by security officers at the Moscow and Vienna embassies as well as embassies where other MSGs of interest to the NIS had been transferred. And when the first results came through, the weaknesses of the State Department’s criminal investigative abilities were apparent. There were glaring omissions, obvious questions unasked or not followed up on.
When they arrived on A.W.’s desk, in disgust she kicked them back. “I can’t use these. If a Marine said he attended a Thanksgiving luncheon with Lonetree, I don’t want to hear what was on the menu. I want to know who else was there, and what they talked about.”
Not until the State Department realized how extensive and detailed NIS wanted this investigation to be conducted, and the embassy security officers recognized the amount of work it entailed, did things finally loosen up and was the NIS invited to participate. But by this time several precious weeks had passed, and A.W. was beginning to hear the tick of the ninety-day clock.
The initial reports filed by NIS agents let A.W. know they were, not investigating the good soldier. Sgt. Clayton Lonetree, it turned out, had had a history of significant personal problems while on post. His fellow Marines remembered that he could not hold his liquor, he was loud and obnoxious when he had too much to drink, and this had led to several disciplinary actions. He also had a lengthy rap sheet for minor misconduct: showing up late for duty, falling asleep on duty, standing guard in civilian clothes, losing his nightstick. And after he’d been counseled, when he did not shape up quickly enough, the detachment commander had even tried to get him relieved from the security guard program.
But there were surprisingly few hits that connected Lonetree to the elements of offense in his case. He was described as a loner who kept to himself, someone whose name defined him, so few Marines could say they knew him well. To no one had he confided his relationship with Violetta, much less his meetings with Uncle Sasha. Several did comment that he was openly enamored with the Soviet system, as evidenced by living quarters that were decorated with large pictures of members of the Soviet Politburo, a five-by-eight-foot Russian flag, and a blown-up photograph of a Russian tank. And it was mentioned that when he was inebriated, you could count on his going off on a tangent about how Indians were the low man on the totem pole in American society, but it wasn’t like that in the Soviet Union, where everyone was equal. But no one thought much about it at the time because a lot of Marines collected Soviet military memorabilia, and everyone in the Corps had some gripe or other. Besides, other than those quirks, Sergeant Lonetree was a regular Joe. He responded to occasions for carousing as though they were a fraternity initiation, and got up the next morning and jogged ten miles in combat boots. While some of his barracks mates would jokingly call him Comrade Lonesky and refer to him as a “Red” Indian, he was more widely known by the nickname Running Bear.
The most inculpatory information turned up by NIS came out of the Moscow logbooks. The buddy system was in effect in Moscow, requiring Marines to travel in pairs whenever they left the embassy, but an inspection of the logs showed that Lonetree had signed out 104 times, and 73 of those times he had gone out by himself. The problem from an evidentiary point of view, however, was that even though it could now be confirmed that he had checked out on the days he said he met with Violetta and Sasha, there was only his word as to where he went.
By no means were the Marine interviews unproductive, however. To the contrary, although NIS agents were finding very little additional evidence against Lonetree that went beyond what he had turned over in Vienna, they were collecting a startling amount of contextual information about the Marine guard detachment at the American Embassy in Moscow. And what they discovered in this regard was as disturbing as it was enlightening.