“Well, I guess there is,” Barron replied.
“And what is that possibility, in your opinion, Mr. Barron?”
John Barron seemed to have trouble finding his voice. He glanced at the jury, and it almost seemed as if a tear was forming. To himself Major Beck said, “Don’t get too theatrical, please.” But Barron came across as Mr. Sincerity when he answered, “That the Marine was being a traitor to his country.”
In the recess that followed, John Dion from the Justice Department rushed up to Beck as though he wanted to slap high-fives. “You hit a home run with that redirect.”
Beck shrugged. “When you’re in a 300-foot ballpark and the defense moves you to the 290-foot mark and lobs a softball, you better hit a home run.”
Meanwhile, a very different reaction was taking place at the defense table. Throughout most of the trial Clayton Lonetree appeared to be mentally absent. From time to time, in reaction to something that was said on the witness stand he would whisper to his defense counsel or jot a note on a yellow lined pad, disputing a statement. But it usually addressed some minor matter—the wrong color or an inverted sequence of events—and after a while he seemed to realize that he could not be an effective ally in his own behalf and almost to lose interest in the proceedings.
All that changed with John Barron’s testimony. In some ways Barron had been his hero—Lonetree had read several of his books—and his testimony held Lonetree in rapt attention. As Barron described sexual seduction as a routine KGB activity, Lonetree leaned forward, as if to hear better. When Barron described KGB recruiting methods that precisely matched his own experiences, Lonetree was drop-jawed. Up until this point he had refused to accept that Violetta had seduced him for the purposes of the KGB. He had managed to hold on to the belief and even defended the hope that she had not been a witting part of his recruitment but was a victim of the KGB like himself.
But at a certain point in John Barron’s testimony, when it was no longer possible for him to delude himself, Lonetree seemed to realize he had been used. Removing his wire-framed glasses, he stared up at the ceiling as though floating up there was a last brilliant, fragile image of Violetta that was suddenly shattered by the truth… and his head dropped to the table, and he covered his face with his arms, and he wept.
William Kunstler, who was sitting to his left, put his arm around Lonetree and offered him a glass of water, but Lonetree shook his head. “She didn’t love me,” he mumbled through his tears. “I thought she loved me.”
It was time for the anonymous CIA witness. Identified only as John Doe even to the prosecution, in a cleared courtroom he provided the clinching piece of corroboration. He said that on December 27 he had shown up at the church in Vienna where Lonetree was scheduled to meet “George,” and he remained there long enough to confirm that the Soviet agent whom Sergeant Lonetree had identified from photographs did indeed appear and seemed to be waiting for an appointment.
Although the judge had ruled during motions that this witness would not be identified and cross-examination would be restricted, Kunstler was unable to let the occasion pass without renewing his objections and at least attempting to sneak questions past the judge. He got away with inquiring about the conditions under which John Doe observed George: Was it day or night? Was the weather clear or was it raining? How close did you get to him? But he had no luck when he tried to challenge the qualifications of the witness that would allow him to make an ID based on an old photograph: Are you an expert? Have you done this before? How could you be sure it was the same person?
Corroboration aside, what most distressed Kunstler about John Doe was the impact of a deep-cover witness on the minds of the jurors. It created a cloak-and-dagger ambience. It couldn’t help but lead them to think that if the government was going to this much trouble to protect this witness’s identity, then Lonetree’s crimes were extremely serious. Maybe more than they were being told. But given the constraints imposed on the defense, there was little he could do to counter the negative effect he was sure the CIA spook was having.
In rapid succession Major Beck called his final two witnesses.
In their opening statement the defense had brought up the fact that Aleksei Yefimov, a.k.a. “Uncle Sasha,” had apparently for several years been an information source of a U.S. foreign service officer by the name of Shaun Byrnes. From this they had proposed a scenario in which Yefimov was in reality a double agent working for the CIA and Lonetree was a pawn used by the State Department to increase Yefimov’s standing in the KGB. It sounded farfetched to Major Beck, but nevertheless he had Shaun Byrnes flown in from Moscow to testify.
Under direct examination Byrnes acknowledged meeting regularly with Yefimov, who represented himself as an official with the State Committee for Science and Technology, but said it was to discuss Soviet domestic political developments. Byrnes explained that such unofficial contacts between the two governments was an accepted way of life, and approved by the ambassador. He said he had not been aware of Yefimov’s true profession, or of the fact that at the same time these meetings were taking place, in the role of “Uncle Sasha” Yefimov was recruiting Sergeant Lonetree. Only after Lonetree confessed and identified Yefimov from photos, Byrnes said, did he find out the truth, and then he was directed by Ambassador Hartman to confront Yefimov.
“What happened?” Major Beck asked.
“I asked him if he had known Sergeant Lonetree and if he had handled him. He looked me straight in the eye and told me he did not know Sergeant Lonetree, and had not ever known Sergeant Lonetree, and had not dealt with Sergeant Lonetree, and he asked me to pass that on to the ambassador and to Washington.” Byrnes said he did not believe Yefimov was telling the truth, and several weeks later Ambassador Hartman instructed him to break off the contact.
The defense wasn’t convinced. They thought the set of circumstances was too remarkable to be coincidental. One man’s spy was another man’s government-approved source? In cross-examination William Kunstler tried to illuminate this murky side of U.S. diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, but other than eliciting the opinion that Byrnes thought Yefimov was “one of the sharpest Soviets I’ve ever dealt with,” defense counsel was unable to make any headway with the scenario that the two were involved in covert intelligence activities.
Last in line was Gus Hathaway, chief of the counterintelligence staff of the CIA. From Hathaway’s testimony Beck wanted the jury to hear why the U.S. government had intelligence officers overseas, and the contributions covert intelligence made to the national defense. He wanted him to talk about the time and money and resources, on both sides, that went into trying to identify the other’s agents. He wanted Hathaway to remind the members that these were real people, most with families, and, when their cover was blown, what the consequences were—to them personally, to human intelligence assets within the Soviet Union, and to national security, which was why there were espionage laws protecting them. When Hathaway was done testifying, the prosecution rested its case.
Throughout the trial the defense team had conducted a running battle with Judge Roberts. Time and again civilian counsel had complained that by limiting the scope of their questions, especially regarding intelligence matters, the judge was handcuffing the defense. Nevertheless, the broad outline of a defense theory had emerged through Stuhff and Kunstler’s cross-examination of prosecution witnesses. By the questions they asked and the objections they raised, it was clear that they were trying to establish that the accused’s statements had been obtained through the use of coercion and unlawful inducement. They had tried to throw doubt on the charge that their client had sold his country’s secrets by characterizing the information he passed as low level and already known by the Soviets. And they had done everything they could to impress upon the jury the idea that this was a case of a young man who was proud to be a Marine, who got caught up in a love affair, as so many men had over the centuries, but who, when he realized the situation he was in, being someone who had always wanted to be an American hero, had attempted to outwit the KGB. Which was a foolish mistake, the defense conceded, but he was no spy.