As the courtroom emptied, leaving the judge alone to deliberate, the appellate defense team allowed itself to hope that Lieutenant Colonel Anderson would see his way to remedying what had happened the first time around. Calligaro had specifically requested a sentence of time served, in which case Lonetree would be a free man in a matter of days.
Fifty-five minutes later the judge indicated he had arrived at a decision.
In his closing argument the Marine prosecutor, Maj. Ronald Rogers, had said, “Your honor, your job today would be far easier, I believe, if the accused were sitting here in the courtroom in a red outfit carrying a devil’s pitchfork. But he’s not. He’s a man of flesh and blood, just like the rest of us. But he’s wearing a Marine Corps uniform, sir. And to those of us who wear this uniform, who believe in the Corps and believe in our country, who believe in the sanctity of the commitments we make on a daily basis—that he used his office as a Marine to come into contact and gain information which he passed to the Soviet Union; that he used his office as a base of knowledge to compromise intelligence agents—covert intelligence agents—who truly represented the point men in America’s efforts in the Cold War; that he did those things wearing this uniform is unforgivable.
“To label this conduct a mistake is blasphemy. Your honor, the accused has earned substantial punishment. It is the government’s recommendation that the punishment you award almost approach the maximum.”
Judge Anderson was apparently persuaded. He reduced Clayton Lonetree’s sentence, but only by five years, from twenty-five to twenty.
The appellate defense team was stunned. Sally Tsosie began to wail. Spencer Lonetree was enraged. The only person who seemed to take the decision calmly was Lonetree himself. After thanking his appellate attorneys for doing their best, he turned his sergeant’s uniform back in and submitted his wrists to be handcuffed by a Marine guard, who would escort him from Lejeune Hall to the van outside that would take him to the brig.
In the lobby, just inside the exit door, something stopped Lonetree. It so happened that I was standing beside him at that moment, and I could see that he had just spotted perhaps a dozen cameramen and photographers waiting outside for a photo opportunity.
On TV we have all seen criminal suspects with their jackets draped over their heads, ducking the cameras as they are led from a law-enforcement facility to a waiting vehicle. But that was not Clayton Lonetree’s style. Unable to lift his hands because they were chained to a leather belt, he asked his guard to adjust his fore-and-aft cap to a slightly smarter angle. Once that small measure of dignity was achieved, he nodded he was ready and marched forward into the flashing media lights.
23
When the KGB talks openly about a case, it is usually one in which their “intelligence” has prevailed over another service’s and their officers can be portrayed in a heroic light. As he sits in a Moscow restaurant drinking beer and reminiscing, this is not the spin that Uncle Sasha gives to Tyulpan—the code name for the Lonetree operation—which is Russian for “tulip,” a fast-growing flower cultivated from a bulb.
Dressed informally in jeans and a sweater, a receding hairline losing the battle of baldness, Aleksei Yefimov is neither a charismatic nor a chameleonic personality, but straightforward and friendly. His appearance is typical of Russian men in their mid-forties: If you met him once, you might not recognize him if you were to pass him on the street again. What is distinctive is his voice—it is deep and resonant, like a disc jockey’s—and his attention to detail. In his hands an article of clothing casually thrown on that morning becomes a character revelation.
Although Aleksei Yefimov could not be called a reformer, like many of the people who were working on the frontier of intelligence during the Cold War, now that Russia is no longer a communist state and the former enemy is an ally, he has ambivalent feelings about his past. At one time he believed in the State and the system, and even though he understands the reasons for the decline and fall of the Soviet empire, it disturbs him. He thinks Gorbachev ought to be prosecuted, and Yeltsin deserves little better.
While he is not ashamed of his involvement in this case, now that the service his organization provided for the country is discredited, reviled, and in some cases even labeled criminal, he is embarrassed to talk much about it. It’s not that he thinks the twenty-odd years of his life involved in spywork were wasted on meaningless activities, it’s just that he’s more comfortable talking about his performance as a professional, from which he does take personal satisfaction.
Yefimov scoffs at the idea that the relationship he developed with Clayton Lonetree was special in a familial way. “That is definitely an exaggeration,” he says. “It is what you Americans would call ‘bullshit.’ ” He acknowledges that there is an odd, almost paternalistic feeling that develops when you recruit an agent, particularly one who is considerably younger than you are. And he would express a certain sympathy for Lonetree as a victim of his “complexes” and “noncynical attitude towards women.” But as for personal feelings, according to Yefimov he cared a lot more about the impact of this operation on his own career than what it meant to Clayton Lonetree’s future.
Yefimov says he was not totally surprised when Lonetree turned himself in. He had a feeling it would go that way when he realized that Lonetree’s motivation for cooperating with the KGB could not be transferred from his emotional attachment to Violetta to his ideological admiration for the Soviet system. In his view it was a shortsighted miscalculation by his bosses that cost them Lonetree. They considered Violetta nothing more than an “approaching instrument,” and once she brought them Lonetree, in their eyes she became expendable. This led to future problems, because the only real chance they had of keeping the agent under control was if he thought it would win him Violetta.
It was a testament to Lonetree’s lack of guile, says Yefimov, that rather than bargaining for more access to Violetta, he experienced a “moral or nervous breakdown,” gave a “simple confession to his countrymen,” and “agreed to be punished.”
For Yefimov this meant reams of paperwork. Filling out dozens of forms. Writing up explanations for why the agent was lost. There were no claims lodged against him from bosses, but neither were there the major promotions he was hoping for. During the course of the operation his work had been highly complimented, and from time to time he had received “incentives’; but his rewards were relatively minor because ultimately the operation not only failed to achieve its potential, in the eyes of some bosses it was a debacle.
An internal assessment of what had gone wrong questioned the very wisdom of recruiting Lonetree, pointing out that the personality defects that made him susceptible in the first place—his lack of reliability and “businesslike properties”—complicated his effectiveness in the end. He was an agent who contained the seeds of his own destruction, it was written.
In the final analysis it would be the unexpected repercussions that flowed from the exposure of their efforts to recruit Lonetree that would account for why this operation was judged as a calamity for the Soviet security services. Because the KGB did not just lose an agent when Lonetree turned himself in. After his confession, the United States took dramatic security measures that hardened virtually every American embassy as a target. The KGB liked to use military analogies to describe its operations, and in this case they likened the recruitment of Sgt. Clayton Lonetree to a trigger that was pulled without regard to the blast at the other end—which blew up in their face.