Caught between an uncertain future and the weight of a past he was anxious to leave behind, Clayton Lonetree pondered his alternatives. He had to go back a long ways to remember when he’d last been on his own. The seven years at Fort Leavenworth had been preceded by a year at the brig in Quantico, two and a half years on embassy duty, four years in the Marine Corps, four years in a household run by his father like a boot camp, and before that five years in an orphanage. He didn’t think of himself as being institutionalized, but he did realize that life was going to be very different for him once his time was no longer regulated.
One of the most unsettling considerations he faced was how to deal with his parents. United in their crusade for his freedom, they were typically divided over what was best for him, and his mother was counting on him to come to Arizona once he was free, while his father had plans for him in Minnesota.
What he really wanted was to walk out of prison and step into a situation that offered him, as much as a fresh start on a new life, a different ending to his story. Clayton Lonetree’s favorite book from the Bible was the story of Job, who had been robbed by Satan of every sign of God’s favor, losing family and property and experiencing personal adversity. Lonetree could relate: He felt as though he’d gone through a similar ordeal. And just as Job had persevered, believing that everything that happened to him was part of a higher purpose, so had he maintained faith that the trouble and suffering he’d endured was not merely a sinner’s punishment, but would end up serving as a trial that culminated in spiritual gain and perhaps vindication before his peers.
“Once I’d acquired the taste, it was like going back to the apple tree every summer,” Lonetree wrote me in a letter responding to a query about the significance of the Book of Job to him. “The content is just as sweet as the first time I absorbed it, satisfying the taste buds of the heart and mind every time.”
When a journalist researching his story in Russia returned with a letter from Violetta in 1993, in which she wrote that she still loved him and was waiting for him, he did not immediately recognize it as the opportunity he was waiting for. His astonishment was too great. The overture was completely unexpected. After it had been pointed out by experts at the court-martial how gullible he’d been to think that Violetta ever really cared for him, he’d done his best to cross her out of his mind.
He didn’t know what to think. He knew what his lawyers would say, because they had drilled him in preparation for his second hearing before the Navy Clemency and Parole Board, and told him he should expect to be asked, “How do we know the next sexy pretty thing that crosses your path isn’t going to lead you down another primrose path?” They intended to argue that proof of their client’s rehabilitation was his insight into the various ways he’d been manipulated. They anticipated that he would respond that he understood now what had gotten him into this mess, and was immune to further foolish temptations.
But what if she was telling the truth? What if he’d been right about her all along?
For better or worse, Violetta was the great love of his life. They were inextricably linked in history. He had no idea what would happen if they were reunited, but he did know there was only one way to find out.
AFTERWORD
On January 19, 1995, the CBS newsmagazine Eye to Eye, with Connie Chung devoted a segment of its broadcast to the Clayton Lonetree story. Lonetree did not appear in person on the program—military policy denied the press access to prisoners in the disciplinary barracks except under extraordinary circumstances—and in his absence the star of the show was Violetta. “The KGB’s most famous seductress,” according to the CBS correspondent.
Using Spencer Lonetree as a go-between, CBS had approached Violetta with the incentive that cooperation could increase the chance of an even earlier release for Clayton, and she had made an appeal to her contacts at the reconstructed KGB, which, as it turned out, was currently embarked on a public-relations campaign to improve its image. After a discussion of the parameters of what she could talk about, she had been given permission to participate in the program.
Violetta was filmed strolling across Red Square, riding the same metro line on which Lonetree first approached her, applying cosmetics in front of the vanity in her apartment, and sitting at the kitchen table answering questions. She admitted that she had delivered her lover into the hands of the KGB, but said she had done it only because “I was put under conditions such that there was no choice for me. I absolutely had to do it.”
Asked “Do you feel guilty about what you and Clayton started years ago?,” she nodded vigorously. “Yes, absolutely. He fell in love with me. As a result, he’s in prison.”
The program was sympathetically scripted to suggest that when Clayton Lonetree decided to engage in do-it-yourself double-agentry, he had been under the influence of the spy thrillers he liked to read. “He was convinced he could use his romance with Violetta and the KGB to obtain information to help his own country,” viewers were told.
It was a program rich in redemptive purpose. Like a Greek chorus bearing witness to a tragedy, two former U.S. ambassadors to the Soviet Union, Arthur Hartman and Jack Matlock, were interviewed and they agreed that the security breaches attributed to Lonetree had been exaggerated, and his sentence had been excessive. It was an assessment shared by Aldrich Ames, whose letter to Eye to Eye stating, “There is no doubt in my mind that Lonetree’s heavy sentence was imposed solely because of the secret panic and hysteria in the CIA and Defense and State Departments induced by my compromises,” was flashed on the screen. Even Dave Beck, the government prosecutor, filmed in his office in Knoxville, Tennessee, went on the record as saying, “Clayton Lonetree should be released from confinement.”
It was also a remarkable piece of theater that cast Clayton and Violetta as characters in a Cold War version of Romeo and Juliet: the children of two families (countries) that did not get along, who engaged in a forbidden love and were guilty of little more than a crime of the heart.
Even the finale was a scene worthy of Shakespeare, who loved plot twists that resolved personal plight and ended with ultimate reconciliations. After the correspondent revealed that a recent letter from Clayton to Violetta contained a proposal of marriage, an American TV audience, along with Clayton Lonetree, who was watching from prison, read her handwritten response:
Yozhik,
I got your letter. It made me feel the happiest woman in the world.
I do want to marry you.
The answer is YES.
I love you.
I miss you terribly.
PHOTOGRAPHS
