Holes in A Spy Scandal

By STANLEY W. CLOUD/WASHINGTON

Alarms went off all over Washington last March when former Marine guards at the U.S. embassy in Moscow were charged with espionage. Defense Secretary Caspar Weinberger proclaimed the case "quite comparable to Iran's actions in seizing our embassy in Tehran." The Reagan Administration, believing that the Marines had allowed KGB agents to plant miniaturized listening devices in the embassy, cut off electronic communications with it and undertook a $100 million program to replace security and communications equipment in Moscow and elsewhere. It seemed that the two key defendants, Sergeant Clayton Lonetree and Corporal Arnold Bracy, who were said to have been seduced into espionage by Soviet women, belonged up there with Benedict Arnold in the ranks of military traitors.

That judgment now appears to have been hasty at best. Bracy is no longer accused of anything. Lonetree is still charged with passing secret documents and the names of U.S. intelligence officers to the Soviets. Others face courts-martial on less serious matters. But the most stunning charges of spying inside the Moscow embassy have been dropped for lack of evidence. Indeed, no Soviet bug has yet been found anywhere in the current embassy, and there is growing concern that the military may have either blown the investigation or blown it out of proportion or both. Says a ranking U.S. diplomat familiar with the case: "The charge that KGB agents were being led around the embassy has never been proved. There's never been any evidence that the embassy was compromised in any way, at least in connection with Bracy's and Lonetree's associations with Soviet women."

Some Administration officials continue to insist that "confessions" by Lonetree, Bracy and others justified "worst-case" assumptions about the espionage damage, even if the statements, since recanted, could not be corroborated. "There is sufficient detail in their statements to see a classic espionage pattern," says a senior White House aide who is closely monitoring the case.

But did the accused embassy guards sketch that pattern, or was it provided by aggressive, overzealous agents of the Naval Investigative Service? According to military attorneys for Lonetree and Bracy, the classified report of the formal investigation reveals that Lonetree's NIS interrogators urged him to "lie to us, Clayton," hoping that he would implicate others.

By then Lonetree, a devotee of spy novels who had already been transferred from Moscow to Vienna, had voluntarily admitted to having had liaisons with a Soviet woman and providing relatively low-level documents from the Vienna embassy -- but not the Moscow embassy -- to a KGB agent nicknamed "Uncle Sasha." Only under persistent and prolonged NIS questioning did Lonetree name Bracy, asserting that when the two of them were in Moscow they had let Soviet agents roam the embassy's secure areas. On the strength of Lonetree's statement, Bracy was arrested.

According to his Marine lawyer, Bracy's interrogation and his eventual confession were shams. The lawyer, Lieut. Colonel Michael Powell, says NIS investigators have admitted altering their assessments of portions of Bracy's polygraph results from "nondeceptive" to "deceptive." (The Marine brass say the changes were merely "administrative.") Powell, an eleven-year corps veteran, insists that Bracy was ordered to sign an inaccurate summary of his statement without being allowed to read it. But when one of his interrogators then jumped up and shouted, "We've got ourselves another spy!" Bracy immediately denied saying anything of the kind. He also denied any sexual involvement with Soviet women and, says Powell, was held incommunicado for hours in a motel room after he had asked to see an attorney.

Lonetree was originally arrested late last year in Vienna. Charges against Bracy were filed about three months later, shortly before Secretary of State George Shultz was scheduled to arrive in Moscow for arms-control and summit discussions. The spy charges cast a pall over the Shultz mission; some State Department officials say that was one reason the charges were so well publicized, perhaps even hyped. Says a senior U.S. diplomat: "There are forces of darkness, if you want to call them that, who oppose any kind of long-term improvement in U.S.-Soviet relations." Even Republican Congressman Richard Cheney, a member of the House Intelligence Committee, concedes that some people inside the Reagan Administration "may well have" exploited the spy case in hopes of embarrassing Shultz.

Loud voices in the Pentagon and on Capitol Hill quickly shifted the focus of attention from alleged spying at the current U.S. embassy to the already well-known Soviet bugging of the still unfinished new embassy chancery. Why bait the public with the Marine case, then switch to the new facility? Because, says a top Reagan aide, both cases "are part and parcel of the same problem -- a breakdown, or lack of existence, of counterintelligence." Perhaps. But no one has suggested that Marine guards had anything to do with the bugging of the new embassy.

Faced with rising criticism, officials say it will take months to determine what, if anything, happened in the Marine case. Says Robert Lamb, head of the State Department's bureau of diplomatic security: "We've got a lot of work before we can give even an interim judgment." A classified report completed this month by a presidential commission led by former Defense Secretary Melvin Laird is said to recommend the creation of a new elite guard corps.

But a Marine general in Washington with detailed knowledge of the case seems to have new doubts of his own. Says he: "This does not feel to me, now, like one of the great espionage cases of the century."