When Skinner asked him these questions, Lonetree denied virtually everything. But again, the odd character of his denial was disconcerting. There were a couple of times when it seemed Skinner had him on the verge of admitting to letting the Soviets in and collaborating with Bracy. When Skinner asked him, “Isn’t it true that…” instead of saying, “Hell, no,” or “That’s bullshit,” he’d sit there and his Adam’s apple would bob up and down and a tear would form in the corner of his eye and he’d look at the floor and then at the ceiling. On one occasion two minutes and twenty-two seconds lapsed between a question and Lonetree’s response.
This was not what most people would do if they were accused of something as serious as espionage. They would immediately deny it and move on to the next question. When Lonetree got like this, the intelligence officers observing him couldn’t help themselves; they would coach him. “Come on, Lonetree, come on. Say it. Say it.”
Then Lonetree would gulp, and what he would say was, “Oh, no, we didn’t do that.”
When it was the polygrapher’s turn to go over the prepared list of questions, it was impossible for the intelligence types gathered in the adjoining room to know what the instrument was registering while the exam was going on. All they knew was that Lonetree answered “No” to every single question. When at last the exam was completed and the polygrapher walked out with the charts in his hand, John Skinner and Angelic White were waiting for him in the hallway.
“Well?”
“He’s clean.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Nope. He’s clean.”
The full debriefing of Sgt. Clayton Lonetree would last for almost three months, during which time he would be given eight different polygraph examinations. Lonetree would continue to answer “No,” and the results of the polygraph examination would continue to be NDI: no deception indicated.
SECRETS
16
The Marine Spy Scandal was no longer page-one news by the time Sergeant Lonetree’s debriefing was finished, but the results were newsmaking nonetheless. No specifics, no details were given. The public was never told what questions were asked, nor Lonetree’s responses. “Sources familiar with the interrogation” were simply quoted as saying it was official now, the security disaster everyone feared apparently had never taken place. Sergeant Lonetree did have prohibited contacts with Soviet agents and did pass sensitive material to them, but there was no evidence of a spy ring in the Marine guard detachment in Moscow, and Soviet agents had not been allowed to roam through sensitive portions of the American Embassy.
At Eighth and I, and Quantico, it was like the end of a war. At long last it could be said that Sergeant Lonetree was the one and only Marine guilty of espionage, and the degree of damage he’d done was less than had been thought.
No knowledgeable counterintelligence person was prepared to say that Lonetree’s admissions were insignificant, however. The KGB, like any intelligence agency, was never satisfied with just one source of information. They were always checking the word of one informant against another, because historically they were suspicious of whatever they were told. When Lonetree confirmed the identities of intelligence agents, that meant the Soviets put them under twenty-four-hour surveillance and followed their every move to determine who their Soviet contacts were. This, in turn, conceivably could have led to the loss of human assets inside the Soviet Union, as well as setting up the now-known CIA agents for possible recruitment efforts within the Soviet Union; and when they were transferred to their next posts in Africa or Asia or wherever, the KGB residency there would be notified and once again the agent would be followed to determine his contacts, or targeted for an operation.
These were important issues in the intelligence business. They could compromise an operation or national security just as certainly as penetrating the code room and placing an electronic listening device on the communications equipment could. But they weren’t perceived as major in the press, where an outcry took place over the pitiful payoff. A demand arose that before this episode was dismissed, the witch hunt should be unpacked. A lot of innocent folks had had their careers blighted. The reputation of the Marine Corps had been tarnished. Millions of dollars had been spent removing, shipping, and replacing equipment. Relations between the superpowers had been severely strained. It wasn’t good enough to say an unfortunate but understandable overreaction had taken place. Errors had to be explained. Responsibility for this ludicrously overblown mess had to be assigned.
Because the investigation of the affair had been entrusted to the Naval Investigative Service, the consensus was that the NIS had badly bungled the case. Even before the charges against Arnold Bracy were dropped, the press had changed from a mode of reporting the event to critical scrutiny of the investigation. Under such banner headlines as “Marine Scandal Puts Probers Under Cloud,” it had been written that the NIS had made an important decision early on to focus on damage assessment, and in its rush to determine the extent of the spying it had failed to adequately collect physical evidence for prosecution. After Bracy, the question on everyone’s mind was summarized in a Time magazine article: “There was sufficient detail… to see a classic espionage pattern, but did the accused embassy guards sketch that pattern, or was it provided by aggressive, overzealous agents of the NIS?”
The search for an answer was initiated by Reps. Daniel Mica and Olympia Snowe, who requested a formal inquiry into the NIS investigation by the General Accounting Office, the official Congressional investigative agency. But to the dismay of those hoping to pin excesses and exaggerations of the Marine Spy Scandal on the NIS, the GAO report concluded that while the Bracy confession remained an unexplained hole at its center, the Naval Investigative Service had conducted a “logical, thorough, and professional” inquiry.
Despite the exoneration, disappointment ran deep at the NIS. When Lonetree cleared the polygraph, Lanny McCullah, who had worked tirelessly for months on the case and had been absolutely convinced that Lonetree would confirm at least a portion of Bracy’s statement, was so devastated he didn’t show up for work for three days. When he resumed his duties as director of Bobsled, McCullah put on a philosophical face, maintaining that just because the NIS effort had not resulted in more people being convicted or brought to trial, that didn’t denigrate the performance of the Bobsled task force.
“Should we have looked for wider recruitment and deeper penetration?” he would say. “We’d have been remiss not to. Should we be criticized because we didn’t find anything? That’s not fair. Maybe it seemed we spun this all up, but how do you look at that without spinning it up?”
In this regard he felt the blame for what went wrong ought to be shared by the Congressional committees who had been insatiable in their demand for briefings and updates, and had taken NIS’s investigative leads and prematurely released them as facts; the impacted organizations who had taken NIS’s raw intelligence data and, if it made them look bad, used it for damage-control instead of damage-assessment purposes; and the press, who had relied on unverifiable leaks from anonymous sources with political agendas and hyped the worst-case scenarios, creating public expectations that were greater than what NIS could ultimately prove.