The way Tom Williams saw the decision, joining the Marine Corps offered Lonetree a sense of roots and gave him an affiliation: As a Marine he would be part of a family, a tribe. Being a Marine would also help him define his self-image as well as project it to others. The Marine Corps would take care of him, fulfill his need for a macho image, provide him with security, and bestow honor upon him.
In civilian jails an interview like this would have been interrupted by now. A guard would have shown up and said it was chow time, count time, lockdown time. But at the Quantico brig there was no interruption, and Williams encouraged Lonetree to keep talking.
Clayton said he reported for active duty on July 29, 1980, at the Marine Corps Recruitment Depot in San Diego. He said he was not singled out for special treatment, favorable or otherwise, and liked the fact that the Corps seemed to make no racial distinctions. Although the spectrum of racial colors represented at boot camp included white, black, red, and yellow, once in uniform everyone was green. The Marine Corps color.
After completing his basic training, Lonetree said, his first duty assignment was Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. He admitted he was excited at being sent to one of the few places where the American flag flew on Communist soil. Where better to learn what war was about?
At first, he said, he enjoyed himself at Guantánamo Bay. His primary duty was walking point, and it was a rush knowing that this was no longer playacting in a field exercise with false bullets—it was the real thing. Even though there was never an exchange of fire, he would pause during his rounds along the perimeter fence to stare across the minefields separating him from the bunkers and guard towers manned by Communist Cuban soldiers, imagining the kind of assault that the detachment anticipated in its defense exercises.
But after eighteen months of hearing about and thinking about the enemy, watching the enemy from a distance but never once engaging the enemy, a strange thing happened. His idea of the enemy became so abstracted that his readiness to fight them was transformed into a curiosity about them. Who were those guys? he began to wonder. How did they really feel about their system of government? Sometimes he would even gaze across the minefields and see a Cuban guard looking back, and it occurred to him that he might be thinking the same thing.
Several other developments took place during this time that started him thinking differently about his life. He began taking correspondence courses through Old Dominion University, expanding his interest in world affairs. And since about ninety percent of the barracks were smoking pot and dropping acid, he decided to give it a try.
It was during this period that he put in for Marine security guard duty. It was a way of doing what he’d always wanted: to travel. He also saw it as an opportunity for career enhancement. Being a Marine was good, but being a Marine security guard was even better.
The only problem was that in order to qualify for the program a Marine had to score a minimum of 92 on the GCT exam, and Lonetree’s 77 wasn’t good enough.
Lonetree skimmed the next few years, but having seen his service record, Williams knew enough about what had happened to fill in the blanks himself. Lonetree had been transferred back to Camp Pendleton in San Diego, where he had been promoted to corporal; he had served time uneventfully; he had continued to read his fortunes in the MSG program; and eventually, through a series of events that Tom Williams would judge harshly, admission had been granted.
As Lonetree told it, his father had appealed to a U.S. senator from Minnesota, Rudy Boschwitz, requesting that he be allowed to retake the GCT exam on the grounds that the military testing system was culturally biased. The senator, in turn, had used his influence, and the Marines gave Lonetree another test, which he passed this time, but just barely. And even at that his acceptance was conditionaclass="underline" Since his four-year hitch was just about up, he would be admitted to MSG school only if he reenlisted.
Of course Tom Williams registered none of his thoughts when he realized what had happened. But privately he was outraged. They’d had no right on God’s green earth to give this kid GCTs until he got a score high enough to go on embassy duty, he thought. That’s why they have a minimum score.
Lonetree’s account of MSG school was breezy. He talked about the classes in which he was given weapons training and taught riot-control techniques and evasive-driving tactics. He said he learned about the chain of command in the embassy, and the security responsibilities of an MSG. He said for some Marines the perspective shift from the Marine who was trained to kill it, shake it, and then find out what it was doing there in the first place, to the “ambassador in blue” that described a MSG, was difficult. “Here,” he quoted an instructor as saying, “we are looking less for the John Wayne type of Marine than the Jimmy Stewart type.”
But what Lonetree said he had had the most trouble with was the time-consuming uniform and clothing inspections. It seemed to him an obsessive amount of importance was placed on dressing sharp and looking good. Indeed, he admitted that he had once been put on probation for his lack of attention to detail. But the warning that he must square himself away or else he would be cleaning out his wall locker had woken him up. It was just a matter of getting his brain in the right gear, he said, and he eventually graduated with a final class standing of 87 out of 128, which put him in the upper third.
Lonetree said his first choice for duty post had been East Germany; his second, anywhere else in the Eastern Bloc, because of his interest in Euro-Communism. When he learned he was going to Moscow, having read quite a bit about Russia, he was glad for the chance to see firsthand what life was like behind the Iron Curtain.
Tom Williams already had read the statements Lonetree had given to the NIS and he’d been extensively briefed by Stuhff, so he was familiar with Lonetree’s earlier versions of his experiences in Moscow and Vienna. Nevertheless he let Lonetree tell it one more time, and as far as he could tell they all meshed almost identically.
But this time around, Williams was less listening to what Lonetree said he’d done than he was looking for the causes behind his actions. And along those lines Williams thought he came up with enough insights to feel comfortable with his understanding psychologically of how it had all happened.
He did not believe that Lonetree had gone to Moscow saying, “Oh, boy, now I can sell my country out.” Williams believed it was more a matter of a chaotic personal history poising Lonetree on the edge of his fate as though it were a hole, and the right combination of circumstances waiting in the Soviet Union to give him a shove. An emotionally needy person yearning for love and acceptance, Lonetree had felt friendless in Moscow and unappreciated by superiors he thought were prejudiced; he had fallen for an attractive woman who, he felt, recognized his worth as a person; and he had been skillfully manipulated by a paternal figure who preyed on his weaknesses.
As for Lonetree’s ability to rationalize spying for the enemy, Williams could only speculate about how his mind worked that out, but if he had to venture a guess, it would have something to do with his Indianness. Although Clayton discounted his Indian heritage and said he’d had relatively little exposure to Indian culture, he was a Native American, and like any native person who tried to assimilate himself into white society, a certain amount of dissembling was part of life. In Clayton Lonetree’s case, here was someone whose identity had been damaged by his upbringing, who felt torn between two cultures and was unable to find his own voice, who had no core sense of himself or strong set of values—and the spy business, with its requisite role playing and assuming of new identities, had given him a chance to remake himself.