In a somewhat similar fashion, after the Marine Spy Scandal, Clayton Lonetree was never far from the minds of the Marine Corps. His memory was invoked in the upper echelons of leadership: When the commandant delivered a speech about the importance of integrity in the Corps, invariably he made reference to the worst example in its history, Pvt. Clayton Lonetree. Drill instructors in boot camp, indoctrinating troops with the notion of Semper fidelis, referred to the one who was not. At MSG school, where Marines were taught how to guard the secrets of the United States, they also heard about the Marine who turned over the keys to the kingdom. For the Marine Corps, Lonetree, like Quisling, became a shorthand term for “traitor.”
The demoted and disgraced Clayton Lonetree, whose journey to infamy ended at the U.S. Disciplinary Barracks at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, in January of 1988, did not dispute any of this. He seemed to know very well that a Marine did not slap America with a Russian hand in the Cold War and expect to simply walk away. He was stunned by the thirty-year sentence. Those who visited him at Quantico before his transfer described him as looking like someone who had been spun in circles and had yet to focus. But when he did speak, the anger he expressed was at his own foolishness, the exquisite little psych job he had performed while convincing himself the truth of things was what he wanted it to be.
In fact, once he got over the initial emotional shock of a thirty-year sentence, Lonetree seemed almost to embrace the judgment. During a farewell conversation with his military attorney, he remarked, “I got myself into this, Major. I’ve got nobody to blame but myself, and nobody could have gotten me out of it.”
Afterward, Major Henderson found himself thinking about civilian counsel and how different things would have turned out if they had not come aboard. The nation would have been spared a trauma, the government would have saved millions of dollars, and his client would have received a significantly reduced sentence.
Personally, Henderson held William Kunstler responsible. In retrospect he would believe that the cause behind the case was more important to Kunstler than the fate of his client. He knew what Kunstler would have said about that, because Henderson had heard him say it. “Going along with the military never works. You become a tool of the government’s lie. Only when you fight do you have a chance to win.” But Kunstler’s role in discouraging a pretrial agreement in the face of overwhelming evidence, his cavalier disregard for the facts in favor of a pat conspiratorial interpretation of the case, and his willingness to fight to the last ounce of his client’s blood made Henderson wonder if, in that part of his mind where he saw himself as serving a higher social purpose, William Kunstler wasn’t capable of rationalizing the conviction of certain clients as a victory of sorts—because it provided him with a chance to dramatize claims of racism and injustice. And he needed to lose from time to time in order to prove his point that the system was corrupt.
When he asked himself why Lonetree had gone along with Kunstler, Henderson felt that from the start his client had known damn good and well that he was going to be convicted for his crimes, but when told by civilian counsel that they could get him off, it had been a natural thing to let them try. If that had happened, however—if Lonetree had managed to slip through the justice system on a technicality—Henderson believed that, emotionally and intellectually, Lonetree would not have been satisfied. Because Henderson believed that for the scenario begun when Lonetree came forward to be complete in his mind, he needed to be found guilty. And he needed to be given a substantial sentence so he could stand tall while taking his punishment.
That said wonderful things to Henderson about his client’s character. That indicated a mature acceptance of responsibility for the consequences of his actions.
In the years that immediately followed the court-martial, Major Henderson’s impression would remain intact. Lonetree never complained that justice had not been served. Though rejected by the Marine Corps, he continued to align himself in his mind with behavior expected of a Marine. It was almost as if he thought that if he honored the image he had singlehandedly tarnished, redemption was possible for him.
There remained one disturbing area of doubt for Clayton Lonetree. To his family and lawyers he would swear that he had been stripped of his illusions about Violetta. He would say that he had been stupid to think her feelings for him were genuine, there was nothing more to be said, he didn’t want to talk about her. When he had no choice—when, for example, he was asked about her by members of the Navy Clemency and Parole Board considering further reductions in his sentence—he could not even bring himself to speak her name. She was “that person.” If he ever saw that person again, he said, he hoped she would be standing at the end of a breadline.
But from time to time there would be a lapse and he would ask—just out of curiosity, he assured his attorneys—if she had ever tried to get in touch with him.
So of course it was that person I set my sights on when I flew to Moscow in the spring of 1993 to get the Soviet side of this story.
17
When the publicity surrounding the Marine Spy Scandal shone her way, Violetta dropped out of sight, and as far as I knew no one in the West had heard from her since. I had gotten her last address from NIS investigators, and I was counting on the fact that the housing shortage in Russia prevented Muscovites from moving around much.
The exact nature of Violetta’s relationship to the KGB was open to question: She could have been doing her duty for her country, or she might have been involuntarily coerced into cooperating. But I knew enough about the way the system operated to suspect that when I did locate her, her ability to talk freely about her involvement in this affair was probably going to be limited. The Soviets had always been strict keepers of secrets, the immutable principle of the Soviet agent being: Keep your silence to the end. And in spite of the recent liberalization of Russian laws, it was still illegal to disclose “state secrets.”
In the absence of hard information, and feeling the need for a vision that would give me the confidence to dive headfirst into unknown circumstances, I had invented a scenario in which Violetta’s exposure in the press had caused her to lose value in the eyes of the KGB, and she had been shunted into some internal low-level secretarial position where she was resentful and bitter about her fate. Since she had always been told that humanism was the end product of Soviet socialism, she had now become cynical about the whole game of espionage and begun to empathize with the American Marine she had betrayed. It made her want to strike out and expose the hypocrisy and cruelty of the system, but she didn’t know how until the fall of Communism, the end of the Cold War, and, now, the arrival of a Western writer anxious to hear her story. It would be the chance she was waiting for, an opportunity to break with the past, tell her truth, redefine herself, and in the process answer questions that haunted a young man who was sitting in prison for having fallen in love with her.
There was a major problem with that scenario, I knew. Redemption through publicity in the mass media was an American phenomenon. It had no tradition in Russia, where newspapers and books historically were organs of propaganda for the state, and public confessions of sins were an important part of ideological propaganda. People in Russia remembered the show trials of the thirties, when innocent people were tortured until they admitted they were “enemies of the State,” and their confessions were published in the newspapers so everyone could see that Stalin’s conspiracy fears were justified. As recently as the sixties and seventies, when the “dissident movement” began, the newspapers would print so-called retractions signed by people who had been given a choice—labor camps, or a statement to sign that said the struggle for human rights was instigated by the West, and now they were convinced of the advantages of Soviet society. That was the tradition, and applying that history to Violetta, to expect a woman who had cooperated with the KGB in the Soviet era to bare herself to the world about what she did and why and how she felt about her choices now—well, it was a lot to ask.