The conversation had lasted no more than ten minutes, and when it was over, the depths of Sergeant Lonetree’s turmoil were stirred by a mixture of relief and disappointment. A tremendous amount of agonizing had preceded his decision to come forward with his story. He’d spent numerous sleepless nights. He’d had a headache for a week. He’d reached the point where he wished he were dead. But lacking the courage to take his own life, he had fantasized about going AWOL and joining the French Foreign Legion. About being gunned down in a terrorist attack on the embassy, which would allow him to go out in a blaze of glory, not humiliation. It had been a major decision for him to come forward—which accounted for why he was so dissatisfied with the way the station chief had acted. The CIA official’s response had been perfunctory. What you would expect from the typical bureaucratic head of a department tipped to malfeasance, who saw whistle blowing as more work. Lonetree felt he’d been treated as if he were a mere functionary. Big John had seemed more interested in returning to hobnob at the party than hearing the details of an espionage confession.
Nevertheless, the process had been set in motion. At nine o’clock the next morning, “Sam” called the station chief’s office. He was asked if he knew where the McDonald’s was in the center of Vienna. Lonetree said he did. They arranged to meet there at two that afternoon, after the lunch crowd had cleared out.
But Lonetree was fifteen minutes late, because paranoia was gnawing at him as much as guilt, and he employed a series of counterintelligence moves to lose a tail he suspected either the CIA or the KGB might have on him. Drawing on spy books he’d been reading for years, he took a trolley downtown, pretending to read a newspaper while peering over the top. When the trolley stopped, he waited until it was about to start up again before jumping off. He hurried into a department store, exited through another door, and hailed a taxi that took him to a spot where he caught another trolley that dropped him off in the vicinity of McDonald’s. He walked the rest of the way.
Big John was waiting for him at an outside table, wearing a trademark trenchcoat. The Marines were never let in on who the intelligence personnel were operating out of the embassy, so one of the guessing games they played was Who’s the Spook? The guy with the red eyes who’s been up all night analyzing data? The fellow who never says hello, just comes and goes? No one knew for sure, but according to the stereotype, they all wore trenchcoats.
When Big John stood and shook his hand, Lonetree immediately thought, He’s using some kind of signal. As he sat down, he scanned rooftops and parked cars for surveillance. He noticed a university student on the opposite side of the restaurant reading a newspaper who was also wearing a trenchcoat, but ruled him out because he looked too young for the spy game.
“Don’t be nervous, Sergeant,” Big John said. “Coffee?”
Lonetree shook his head. “Hot chocolate.”
After returning with the order, Big John asked Lonetree how he had known that he was the CIA station chief.
Lonetree took a sip before answering. “The Soviets told me who you were.”
Big John smiled grimly before admitting that yes, he was the station chief, but he did not personally handle counterintelligence matters. He left that up to his operatives. And with that he cast a sideways glance toward the student. “If you don’t mind, I’m going to let my best CI man handle this matter.”
Only in retrospect would Lonetree realize that this was a critical juncture for him, and if he’d thought ahead of time, he would have realized his tremendous bargaining position at this point. Any number of deals could have been struck that would have been to his advantage, including immunity in exchange for his story. But overwhelmed by the momentous decision he had made, consumed by regret, and not just a little caught up in this real-life spy drama, he missed the opportunity.
After a cordial introduction to Little John (as he would be referred to in all future dealings), Big John left the two of them alone. But it was apparent that Little John was not comfortable with the location, and after a brief exchange of small talk he asked, “Do you know the location of the Intercontinental Hotel?” Lonetree said he did, and Little John suggested they meet there in the lobby bar at four o’clock.
Lonetree arrived at the Intercontinental early, standing across the street and watching those who entered and exited the front door. At four precisely he went inside and found Little John sitting at a corner table. The agent put on a little act, as if this were an unexpected encounter with an old friend, inviting Lonetree to join him for a drink. Lonetree passed on the alcohol, but his mouth was dry, so he accepted a ginger ale. After some light conversation Little John whispered he had rented a room and when he finished they could go up there and talk. Downing the soda swiftly, Lonetree said, “Let’s go.”
It was an ordinary hotel room—two double beds, a dresser, a TV—that lent itself to the Agency’s preferred debriefing environment: anything to put the subject at ease. A decision had been made to bring Lonetree here because the Agency did not want to take a chance on alerting anyone else to this meeting by having him enter their secured spaces within the embassy, and they did not want to blow the location of a safe house by taking him there.
For almost five hours Lonetree talked about his involvement with Soviet intelligence. It had begun in Moscow, and had continued in Vienna. Indeed, he said, he had yet to break off relations. He was scheduled to meet with his Soviet handler on December 27 to finalize plans for a surreptitious return to the Soviet Union.
Little John asked him a lot of questions, focusing primarily on the potential damage done the CIA station in Moscow. Gathering intelligence data from inside the Soviet Union had always been difficult, encumbered by the relentless surveillance of Soviet internal security forces. Nonetheless an important network of informants had been developed—communist diplomats, military officers, intelligence agents, scientists. Over the years they’d fed classified information and documents to the West about everything from Russian military plans and weapons models to subversive diplomatic thrusts and internal shake-ups. Little John was trying to determine to what extent these assets might have been compromised by Lonetree’s actions.
Of course, in order to gain this information it was essential that Lonetree continue to talk, and toward that end Little John made a number of assertions. He assured Lonetree his disclosures would be kept “confidential.” Told him it would be in his best interest to continue with his debriefings uninterrupted by independent advice. Even discussed the possibility of double-agentry.
Lonetree was encouraged. Fully acknowledging wrongdoing, he was anxious to make up for what he’d done. All along, he said, he’d thought about exposing the KGB operation.
Over the next nine days Lonetree would be debriefed in the same hotel suite on five different occasions. Then, on December 24, Christmas Eve, Little John laid out a collection of photographs and asked him to identify the man in Moscow who had been his handler, and his Soviet contact in Vienna. After picking two faces out of a pictorial lineup, Lonetree was informed that another set of counterintelligence people wanted to talk with him and were waiting downstairs.
“Are you willing to meet with them?” Little John asked.
“Sure,” Lonetree replied, unaware that the people he was about to be introduced to were special agents from the Naval Investigative Service, whose interest in him was less damage assessment than criminal prosecution.
2
At this time the NIS headquarters filled the top floor of a gray, three-story building of World War II vintage in a government complex that did nothing to improve the low-income neighborhood of Suitland, Maryland. Long, dim, poorly ventilated corridors that smelled of asbestos led to depressingly small offices divided into cluttered cubicles, and the atmosphere reflected the morale at NIS, which was at an all-time low.