From time to time she is contacted by Slava, who brings her flowers and takes her out to a restaurant for lunch. And although she has made it clear there are limits to what she will do, she has found there continue to be employment advantages to maintaining her connections with the security services. She changed her last name from Seina to Kosareva in an effort to separate herself from her past, as well as to make it more difficult for journalists to find her. The freedom of the press that came with democratization in Russia unleashed reporters to write about the “dark truths” of Soviet history, and both the Western and the Russian media have pursued this story, albeit without success. Out of concern that an open discussion would encroach on state secrets, the Federal Counterintelligence Service, the successor to the KGB’s Second Directorate, refused to give her permission to talk to reporters. Which was fine with Violetta, who has always been a private and guarded person, and who felt she had nothing to gain from going public, and that nothing she could say would help Clayton Lonetree.
“There have been times when kings were criticized in the press, and presidents have been taken to task, just as I have been,” she said to her mother one day. “But they lived through it, and in time it passed. I have no desire to argue with anybody, nor to prove anything to anybody. I don’t want to do anything that keeps this story alive. I just want to forget it.”
In the years that followed, Violetta would collect her share of male admirers, some serious enough to propose marriage to her, but always she refused. There had been no contact with Lonetree since his arrest, and for all she knew his resentment toward her was too deep and bitter for forgiveness. She was also realistic enough to know that they both had changed over the years, and there was no way of knowing how compatible they would be now. Nevertheless, she intended to stay true to her promise to wait for him. Only he could release her from her vows—by sending for her, coming back to her, or telling her he wanted nothing more to do with her.
25
When Clayton Lonetree returned to the DB, as the inmates referred to the disciplinary barracks, he was not overly disappointed. Twenty years was less than twenty-five, was the way he thought about it.
Although there were things Clayton Lonetree did not like about prison life, overall he had adjusted quite well to his situation. He didn’t like mowing lawns in the summer heat and shoveling snow on freezing winter days, and he didn’t have much good to say about litter detaiclass="underline" picking up cigarette butts and gum wrappers. But that being the extent of so-called hard labor, he wasn’t about to complain. And on the positive side he had a clique of friends. He enjoyed taking academic classes and exercising regularly. He had a radio he listened to late at night, he could watch sports on television, and he had all the time in the world for the activity he enjoyed most: reading a good book. He had even come to appreciate the view from his two-man room: fields and hills and the 1850-vintage buildings that had stood since the facility was first constructed as an outpost in Indian Country.
All in all, it wasn’t bad duty. And increasingly he had come to recognize that it even had its advantages: These were the kinds of comforts some people would like to escape to.
There was another plus for Clayton Lonetree where he was: As a prisoner, he enjoyed a peculiar sort of celebrity status. Across the country there were people who saw in his plight an example of the ongoing persecution of Indians by the American government. He had received dozens of letters from them since his incarceration. Some were straightforward letters of support, encouraging him to keep his spirits up and to remember Billy Mills, the Oglala Sioux who ran in the Olympics in the fifties and against all odds won a gold medal. Some included money, five-and ten-dollar bills, toward a Clayton Lonetree Defense Fund. He heard from activists and housewives, students and professors, many offering to write protest letters to congressmen or the press. One of his biggest fans was an elderly woman living in a retirement home in Salt Lake City who wrote long letters to him recalling her youth in the Netherlands during World War II when she had sheltered Jews from the Nazis. In her opinion sentencing Clayton Lonetree to prison for his misdeeds was a harbinger of the coming of death camps to America.
To his credit, though it offered an easy and tempting out, Clayton Lonetree was not comfortable being perceived as a victim or a martyr. He hated it when people expressed pity for him as a poor Indian boy, troubled by a deprived upbringing, abused by a feckless father, and stuck in an orphanage by an uncaring mother, and this was why he became a spy. You heard no whining or special pleading from him on that account. Nor had he said or done anything to reinforce the notion that he had been wrongfully prosecuted for offenses he did not commit. He did feel his punishment exceeded his crimes, which in his mind were still relatively minor; and if he was accused of something he did not do, he would be the first to speak up. But the image he wanted to project now was of someone who had done wrong, was man enough to admit it, and was willing to stand up and take his punishment, so when the day came that he did walk out of prison, he could hold his head up and say he had paid his debt to society and was entitled to put the past behind him.
And yet, paradoxically, at the same time Clayton Lonetree rejected the pity factor, underneath he also thrived on it. While he recognized there were people who invested his issue with something other than what was there for him—maybe it was white guilt, or they were seeking reflected glory from his stature as a media figure, or they had a personal grudge against the government, he didn’t know—the interest, the benevolence, even though it came from strangers and was often off base, countered the shame he felt for disgracing the Corps, his family, himself. And in its own strange way it kept him going.
The reason was perfectly understandable. Prison was a lonely experience, and prisoners were desperate for attention. They were surrounded by people they would prefer not to associate with and did not trust. Almost anyone who reached out a friendly hand from outside the prison walls was welcomed.
And if it happened to be women who were fawning over you, as was frequently the case with Clayton Lonetree, whether or not you agreed with their motives was often beside the point.
There exists a whole class of women who develop romantic obsessions with high-profile prisoners, especially those who appear to be victims of injustice, and among their numbers are a group of women, mostly white, who develop improbably erotic fixations on Native American male prisoners. While his court-martial was still in progress, there were women swooning over Sgt. Clayton Lonetree as a contemporary Native American warrior being crucified by the American military. Before he was even sentenced, he was receiving proposals of marriage; and after he was sent to Fort Leavenworth, the love letters kept coming. Some were from obviously disturbed women—one woman stalked his family in an effort to get close to him—but some bright and, by their pictures, quite attractive women of genuine merit also wrote him.
A young woman from Iowa with a history of crusading for the freedom of Native American “political prisoners” became a special one. Glory, as she liked to be called, started out writing to Lonetree as a pen pal. Then a friendship flourished, and soon they were exchanging several letters a week and talking on the phone almost as often.
Glory brought out the wistfully poetic side of Clayton Lonetree, which he expressed quite poignantly in writing. “Last night I heard the geese approaching through my barred window. Immediately I dropped what I was doing and searched the dark sky, hoping to catch a glimpse of at least one…. I saw none so I could only guess and speculate on the numbers in formation flying overhead. I am sure they were both beautiful and handsome… and then their quaint distinctive sound faded away.”