Career
During the early 1980s, Lonetree was a Marine Corps Security Guard stationed at the Embassy of the United States in Moscow. Lonetree is the first United States. Marine to be convicted of spying against the United States. Lonetree, who was stationed in Moscow as a guard at the United States. Embassy in the early 1980s, confessed in 1987 to selling documents to the Soviet Union.
Lonetree was seduced by a 25-year-old female Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security) officer named "Violetta Seina" in that year.
He was then blackmailed into handing over documents when he was assigned to Vienna, Austria. These documents included the blueprints of the United States. Embassy buildings in Moscow and Vienna and the names and identities of United States. undercover intelligence agents in the Soviet Union.
He was tried in a military court in Quantico, Virginia and convicted of espionage on August 21, 1987. In May 1991, Lonetree filed an appeal, asking that his conviction be overturned because he had never learned the identity of one accuser, but this was denied.
He initially received a 30-year sentence with a reduction in rank from East-5 to East-1, a fine of $5,000, the loss of all military pay and allowances, and a dishonorable discharge.
The Commandant of the Marine Corps, General Alfred M. Gray, Junior., recommended to the Secretary of the Navy that Lonetree"s sentence be reduced from 30 to 15 years in a letter written in 1989 that said that the effect of Private Lonetree"s actions "was minimal." In addition, he said, the Marine"s motivation "was not treason or greed, but rather the lovesick response of a naive, young, immature and lonely troop in a lonely and hostile environment." His sentence was reduced to 15 years, but he was released in 1996 after serving only nine years at the United States Disciplinary Barracks. According to Time magazine:
He revealed the names of Central Intelligence Agency personnel, detailed the work habits of embassy staff, and sketched the layout of the Moscow and Vienna embassy offices.
The harsh sentence was given due to serious security breaches at the embassy, some of which later were found to have been the result of the Aldrich Ames case.
In 2001, Lonetree testified as an expert witness at the trial of former United States Army Reserve Colonel George Trofimoff, who was charged with spying for the Komitet Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti (Committee for State Security). After remorsefully describing his own recruitment by the Soviet State, Lonetree publicly sobbed on the witness stand. Colonel Trofimoff was subsequently convicted of espionage and sentenced to life imprisonment.
