Violetta knew this was precisely the kind of background information that her superiors wanted her to collect—poignant personal details that exposed the target’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities—and dutifully she fulfilled her reporting requirements. But because she knew that the resentments and longings he was sharing with her were being considered by others for their value in his recruitment as a spy, an unexpected discomfort began to worm its way into her consciousness.
Approval had been given for her to show Clayton where she lived, and after one of the conversational walks she brought him home. Genrietta had a fit.
“Why are you bringing this American spy into our home?” she demanded to know. “You shouldn’t do this. I don’t like it. You are compromising your family.”
She retreated to her room and refused to come out. She was furious with Violetta. Under their system, if one member behaved inappropriately it could have implications and consequences for the rest of the family. It could even cause problems for their neighbors.
But Violetta had been nonplussed. “Give him a chance and get to know him better,” she told her mother. “Then you will change your attitude and feel toward him as you do toward my other friends.”
It turned out that she was right. Prior to bringing him home again, Violetta explained that she was just being friendly to him because he did not get along with the rest of the Marines at the embassy, he was lonely and interested in meeting Russian people, and she felt sorry for him. Genrietta was still wary of the whole idea, but she knew Violetta did not make friends with just anyone, and if Violetta insisted he was worthwhile, then maybe she was being unfair.
It was Genrietta’s idea to invite Clayton to the house to celebrate a winter holiday, and the occasion was a breakthrough for her. He didn’t speak Russian and she knew just a few words of English, but Violetta translated, and from the conversation they had around the dinner table, Genrietta could tell how much it meant to him to be included in a family affair. She could see that he was a shy and reserved young man, quite an ordinary person, really, with no strangeness or sharp edges to him. In fact, he was polite, appreciative, and sincere, and his presence added a pleasant element that made the celebration memorable. Genrietta also saw, from his eyes and the way they lingered on Violetta, that this American Marine was hopelessly infatuated with her daughter.
What happened next was a result of the risks inherent in operations that depend on human emotions.
The theory behind this kind of recruitment was that Violetta, in addition to gathering personal information on Lonetree, was supposed to create the impression they were conspirators engaged in something that those around them knew nothing about. This involved not just walks and talks, but coded exchanges—a glance here, a touch there—which built up personal memories that implied intimacy and created confidence and brought a sense of specialness to the relationship. The idea was to get the target to believe that he and the recruiter were forming their own world in which it was the two of them together on the inside, and everybody else was on the outside.
But in order for Violetta to play her part realistically, she had to be given certain freedoms. Just as Lonetree broke the rules when he would sneak away from the embassy to see her, she had to be given a license that allowed it to appear that she too was moving beyond the normal limits allowed a Soviet citizen. This entailed a freedom of movement, freedom of expression… the freedom to act, in other words, as if she were a free spirit.
The result was something almost magical. Violetta had been granted a range of liberties previously unknown to her for the purposes of exploring the interior life of a Western man. At the same time she had been told to encourage his affections by enjoying herself and giving him the impression that she was falling in love with him. But what she wasn’t given was adequate preparation for the emotional consequences of this behavior. Which is to say, when you fiddle with emotions as primal as love and whatever generates that between two people, you simply cannot predict or control what is going to happen.
More rapidly than she ever would have imagined, her fondness for Clayton deepened. A large part of their relationship was playfuclass="underline" When she tried to give him Russian language lessons, he had great difficulty getting the accents right, and said SAMovar instead of saMOvar, baBUSHka instead of BAbushka; and she corrected him with increasing sternness until she realized he was doing it wrong just to get a rise out of her. And when she nicknamed him “Yozhik”—Russian for “hedgehog”—and he pretended to be offended, she assured him it wasn’t only a reference to the spiky hairstyle of the Marines in Moscow, it was also a term of endearment peasant farmers used for favorite children. But at other times, as when they leafed through her photo album and both reminisced about what it had been like growing up, just as she was a source of happiness to him, she felt him filling a void in her life.
It had not been her intention for their friendship to take a sexual turn. Even when they walked hand in hand and kissed goodbye at the metro, it was because she had begun to care a great deal about him, and she did not necessarily consider it a prelude to greater intimacy. When she had first seen him, she had not thought of him as physically attractive—he was slightly built, approximately her own height, and not the handsome or heroic type. But his stoicism, his sensitivity, his gentleness had a certain appeal; his romantic interest in her created a heightened awareness of herself as a sensual being; and sleeping with him somehow seemed like a way of compensating for the duplicity she was engaged in.
It was after they made love that he began to talk about marriage. They discussed two scenarios: he could stay in Russia and become a citizen—he did not want to seek asylum because he would be doing this for her, not for political reasons—or she could come to America and marry him there. It was an impossible dream, she knew. The KGB was not going to allow her to leave the country with him. But they were living in the moment, and she enjoyed the reveries his words conjured up for her. It was a joyful escape from the depressing reality to leaf through magazines and pick out the car they would drive and the kind of house they would live in and talk about the life they would have together if she went to America as his bride.
When the time came to introduce him to “Uncle Sasha,” the fact that Violetta was keeping a secret from Clayton seemed not as important now as the bigger secret she was keeping from the KGB. This was no longer just an act. The romantic rhythms of love on the sneak had won her over.
She could see that it wasn’t easy for Clayton to answer Sasha’s questions and go along with his requests, and on her own she had second thoughts about the entire affair and considered putting an end to it, or at least being perfectly honest with Clayton about her complicity. Several times she started to say something, then stopped, unable to get the truth out. Because by then another dynamic had taken over. She realized that he was not deceived about their relationship: he was fully aware of its outlaw status and its other, “official” level. And his willingness to participate, in spite of the imminent danger to himself, was his way of showing her how much he loved her. He was doing this to prove his feelings for her were true.