THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, June 23, 1996 TAG: 9606210719
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY BILL ROACH
LENGTH: 82 lines
DANCING WITH THE DEVIL
Sex, Espionage and the U.S. Marine: The Clayton Lonetree Story
RODNEY BARKER
Simon & Schuster. 335 pp. $24.
When news first broke of the arrest of a Marine security guard who had been stationed at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, the media trumpeted it as a sex-for-secrets spy scandal. It was big news.
But when Clayton Lonetree, the only Marine ever convicted of espionage, was released from prison on Feb. 27, having served nearly nine years of an original 30-year sentence, he was scarcely noticed.
This may be because, while Lonetree committed serious breaches of security, his crimes paled compared to the efforts of renegade CIA counterintelligence agent Aldrich Ames. Ames vastly overshadowed Lonetree, who fell in love with a KGB-directed Russian woman, Violetta Seina, and confessed to a series of security violations at his post.
In Dancing With the Devil, Rodney Barker tells Lonetree's story, starting in 1986 when he approached a CIA agent in Vienna and confessed, and culminating with his highly publicized trial and sentencing. Though much of the information here is well-known, Barker was able to gain access to Seina, a Soviet national who worked as a translator at the U.S. Embassy, and her KBG handler and thus report their ``side'' of the scandal.
Such reportage is unusual. So, too, is Barker's conclusion that Lonetree actually was pushed by the KGB in order to deflect inquiry about Ames, who was subsequently unveiled by an FBI-CIA investigative team as a Soviet spy.
Barker takes us painstakingly through Lonetree's initial confession and recounts the problems the Naval Investigative Service (NIS) had in tackling the espionage case - chief among them, the lack of proof and the fact that in the military ``a man could not be prosecuted on his word alone.''
He details how the case grew, at one point, turning up a report of 579 incidents involving Marine security guards. A NIS task force interviewed 564 Marines and more than 1300 other people; administered 264 polygraph examinations; and opened 143 investigations into possible espionage on security-related infractions by Marines. Only one Marine was successfully prosecuted, though: Lonetree.
The book also reveals dissension within Lonetree's defense team of Maj. David Henderson, his military lawyer, and the late William Kunstler. The volatile Kunstler, a civil rights activist, is condemned as an attorney with an ax to grind who failed so miserably in defending Lonetree that the Marine received a harsher sentence than was expected.
Barker's characterizations of the various case participants are brilliant and contribute to the careful narration that is the book's highlight. He meticulously details the KGB role, both in ``recruiting'' Lonetree through Violetta, and in detected CIA personnel lurking around KGB meetings with Lonetree. Barker says the KGB handler characterized Lonetree as a ``nechiporenko'' - a condemned agent. Lonetree, Barker writes, would become a ``chip in a double-agent operation run at the CIA, in which a Soviet intelligence agent would bona-fide himself by providing exclusive details about a leak inside an American embassy.''
Barker further writes that Violetta wasn't ``The KGB's most famous seductress,'' as Connie Chung labeled her in a CBS-TV program, but rather an exploited young woman, who has now written to Lonetree that she loves him and will marry him.
The author also takes strong issue with Ron Kessler, who wrote Moscow Station: How the KGB Penetrated the American Embassy two years after the Lonetree scandal broke. That book, Barker says, ``is so full of erroneous presumptions that it is best viewed as a cautionary tale that illustrates the trap a writer of fact-based spy books falls into when he's in a hurry to publish provocative claims.''
In actuality, Barker writes, the Lonetree case ``was judged as a calamity for the Soviet security forces. 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.''
This is an absorbing narrative, revealing in its description of Lonetree and even-handed in its portrayal of the Marines. It is sympathetic to the Marine's belief in ``Semper Fi,'' but harsh in handling the CIA, which sought to obstruct the developing investigation. The in-depth portrayal of Lonetree is an intriguing one. MEMO: Bill Roach is a retired Navy officer in Jacksonville, Fla., who
formerly served in the Norfolk area. by CNB