LOYALTY LETS ITS GUARD DOWN

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000302170012-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 4
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: September 27, 2012
• Sequence Number: 12
• Publication Date: May 4, 1987
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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INSIGHT
r 4 May 1987
Loyalty. Lets
Its Guard Down
SUMMARY: Spying charges against two Marines stationed at the U.S.
Embassy in Moscow bring to the fore qualms about U.S. public virtue.
Have values so declined that treason no longer is totally wrong? Has
America lost its sense of right and wrong? Maybe, say some cultural
observers. They blame the loss of ethical grounding on the Me Decade,
situational ethics, even Reaganomics. Whatever the cause, repair will
be difficult, and emphasizing ethics classes is unlikely to be enough.
Marine Corps Base,
Quantico, Va., 30
miles south of
Washington, has
long been known
as the "crossroads
of the Corps." No
combat troops are stationed there. Quanti-
co's mission is research, development and
education, and most professional Marines
can expect to be sent there at least once
during their career. The Corps trains its
elite there: officers, selected staff noncom-
missioned officers, specialists in several
technical specialties.
And embassy guards.
"Well," says a young Marine corporal,
walking along the road from "mainside" to
the small air station and happy to accept a
ride, "we're not exactly all walking around
with our heads down. And we're not ex-
actly spending all day thinking about it. But
when we do think about it, it hurts:'
"It," of course, is the arrest of three
Marine guards at the U.S. Embassy in
Moscow, the replacement of their detach-
ment and the possibility of more arrests. At
the moment, two Marines, Sgt. Clayton J.
Lonetree and Cpl. Arnold Bracy, have been
charged with spying and face courts-
martial. They could be executed.
The government alleges that both men
were recruited as spies after sexual encoun-
ters with Soviet women, at least one of
whom worked in the embassy. The guards
may have provided the Soviets with floor
plans of the embassy, names of U.S. agents
and bags of classified documents. They
may also have allowed communist agents
access to sensitive areas of the embassy,
such as the communications center and the
offices of the military attache.
A third Marine, Staff Sgt. Robert S
Stufflebeam, has been charged with failun
to report contacts with Soviet nationals (al
unofficial contacts are prohibited) and ma)
also have had sexual relations with Sovie
women. In other, unrelated incidents, Ma.
rifles at the Leningrad consulate and the
embassy in Vienna have fallen under suspi-
cion of similar violations.
A variety of criminal and administrative
investigations are under way. All the Ma-
rines who served in the Moscow embassy
during the 1985-86 period may be asked to
take polygraphs. The State Department is
investigating what may be the worst em-
bassy espionage disaster in U.S. history
and has shown a lively new interest in
enforcing regulations governing the con-
duct of all embassy personnel. A congres-
sional committee has visited Moscow. Les
Aspin, the Wisconsin Democrat who
chairs the House Armed Services Commit-
tee, has expressed outrage at a situation in
which "no one seemed to be in charge"
Is there a larger lesson to be drawn from
the Marine spy scandal, a lesson about the
U.S. military? Charles C. Moskos, author
of "The American Enlisted Man" and pro-
fessor of sociology at Northwestern Uni-
versity, thinks so. "What we're seeing may
be the result of the marketplace military, of
the all-volunteer concept, of the idea that
there is no such thing as obligation."
Moskos praises the individuals serving
but notes: "They tend to be anomic, iso-
lated. There's no real institutional center,
either in the military or in the country,
telling people what's right and wrong, and
8 enforcing it. The anomie ? good socio-
logical word, it means rootlessness ? is, I
think, a necessary condition for things like
the Marine incidents, but not sufficient.
What I suspect may happen is that the
pressures of small cultures tend to override
larger values, to the extent that larger val-
ues do exist. Embassy duty isn't arduous,
1 but it tends to become a world of its own.
'Apparently, it was a world with rules
that overrode the idea that Marines
shouldn't let_ KGB agents into the code
room:'
Bracy and Lonetree (left, center) are accused of lettine Soviet agents in to tour the
Moscow embassy; Stufflebeam is charged with illicit contact with Soviet nationals.
CLAW
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The infiltration of the U.S. Embassy in Moscow may be the worst embassy espionage disaster in American history.
Understandably, the security implica-
tions of the arrests have dominated media
attention. But they also raise a larger, and
potentially far more troublesome, issue.
They are part of what The New York Times
calls "an epidemic of traitors": the Moscow
Marines, Jonathan Jay Pollard, the Walker
family, Ronald W. Pelton, et al. America
has not endured such a wave of treasonous
activity since the 1950s.
B. ut many of the 1950s spies
could at least claim an
ideological motivation, -
whether devotion to Marx-
ism, "free scientific re-
search" or some other
"higher value:' Those in
the new wave seem in it entirely for them-
selves. Pelton and the Walkers spied for
money and the thrill; the Marines allegedly
got involved via sexual encounters.
As former CIA analyst George A. Car-
ver Jr. demonstrated in a recent article for
The New Republic, even Pollard, who of-
fered his services to the Israelis out of a
misguided pro-Zionist urge to pass on ter-
ro. nst data, quickly found his handlers less
interested in terrorism than in U.S. military
secrets and stayed on for the money and the
enhancement of his romantic self-image.
.The question, then, is: What does this
epidemic of traitors say about the United
States -- its values, its culture, its ability
to command the loyalty of its citizens?
A retired intelligence officer echoes a
common view when he calls espionage the
"ultimate form of insider trading," the Wall
Street crime of using privileged informa-
tion for personal gain. "I suppose money
can be the prime motivator. Especially if
you're short on cash and getting desperate:'
But the analogy is questionable: The
kind of greed that insider trading represents
is different in degree from the kind of cor-
ruption that leads someone to betray his
country. In fact, money or sex might be the
introductory offer in the world of spying,
but it is the threat of exposure that often
keeps nonideological spies in business.
"You'd think those people would know
that no matter how much they get ? and
it's usually pretty pitiful amounts for the
risks they're running and the harm they're
doing ? once they start, the real induce-
ment to keep going is blackmail," the intel-
ligence officer says.
How do spies get caught? "Sometimes
they're living so openly beyond their means
that they practically beg for discovery.
Maybe an investment banker can disguise
it if he's getting a few million extra. A civil
servant or active duty military has trouble
hiding a few thousand if he spends it.
Sometimes they start leaving evidence, al-
most like they just want it all over with.
They get caught:' If only it were so easy.
Edwin P. Wilson, who spied for Libya,
lived outrageously well for a retired CIA
agent but attracted little suspicion.
Says Michael Mazarr of the Ethics and
Public Policy Center in Washington, "I
suspect that a lot of espionage has always
been simply for money. Once you could
claim ideology, but these days the reality of
the Soviet system is so well-known that
nobody can claim they're doing it for the
future of the world?'
But spies can let themselves be seduced
by the argument that we know everything
they do and they know everything we do.
"I suppose a spy can always minimize in
his own mind the damage he's doing, tell
himself that the country will make it up in
the long run," says Mazarr. He points out
also that "some commentators have tried to
link it to the Reagan administration, the
supposed emphasis on greed. I find it hard
to believe that Reaganomics could influ-
ence a bunch of Marines in Moscow, but
maybe the Me Decade isn't over after all."
Carver says the roots go deeper than the
so-called Me Decade, to a time in which
right and wrong and strict patriotism were
less blurred. "The real problem is that
we're feeling, as a country, the corrosive
effects of 20 years and more of situational
ethics:' he says. "We've lost the sense of
'off-limits' ? that there are things you
simply don't do, principles that aren't sub-
ject to analysis by deconstructionists at the
Harvard Law School. One of them is that
you don't betray your country. And that's
not going to be corrected by a few ethics
courses at the Harvard Business School?'
reec!l.q
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J: Gregory Dees, professor of manage-
ment at Yale University's School of Organi-
zation and Management, goes further.
Dees teaches ethics at one of the few
graduate schools granting a master's degree
in public and private management, which
trains older men and women for positions
in both the public and private sectors.
T, he problem:' he says, "is
the loss of the whole idea
of public virtue, of indi-
vidual obligation to things
outside yourself and your
immediate relationships.
It goes much deeper than
just blaming it on the Reagan influence.
You can't pin it all on mrrent events. And
you have to keep in mind that one of the
major reasons why people continue doing
those things once they've started is the
difficulty of getting out. Maybe their initial
intentions were to do it just a little, but then
they get involved in actions to cover up, and
those actions have to be covered up and at
some point other people get involved, as
accomplices, as witnesses, sometimes as
blackmailers. And I suppose there's an ad-
ditional problem. Bureaucratic institutions
create barriers to loyalty. Bureaucracies de-
mand efficiency, not integrity. It's easy to
become expedient or see the institution as
something to be used."
Have we lost our ethical grounding?
Dees says our institutions . are concerned
that we have. "Corporations and people are
starting to recognize that, long term, [ex-
pediency] has to hurt. John S.R. Shad [re-
tiring chairman of the Securities and Ex-
change Commission] just gave a lot of
money to Harvard Business to start teach-
ing ethics seriously. I know of cases where
corporations are getting involved. McDon-
nell Douglas in St. Louis is sponsoring
ethics courses in the public school system.
But it's going to take more than a few
courses to turn things around."
Among those who have been working
to turn things around is an educator with an
unlikely background. James B. Stockdale,
senior fellow at Stanford University's Hoo-
ver Institution, is a retired Navy vice admi-
ral who spent seven years as a prisoner of
war in Vietnam and was awarded the Medal
of Honor for his leadership and resistance.
His exploits were recently the subject of
NBC's docudrama "In Love and War."
"We've been doing something very
wrong in this country," says Stockdale, who
has written much about maintaining ethical
standards under stress. "In business. In the
military. We've been trying to run organiza-
tions as though they were independent of
both their people and their product. We
figure if you can manage one activity, you
can manage them all. Somehow everything
is interchangeable. Everything can be ma-
nipulated. We've turned human beings into
resources, productive assets, personnel."
We can see the consequences: "A sterile
environment that demands no loyalty, that
no one can be loyal to. Someone said that
a bureaucracy is the only organization de-
signed by man that brings people together
to accomplish something in a way that
keeps them from developing loyalties to
what they're doing or to each other. I have
a feeling he was more right than wrong."
Marines in Moscow: "Embassy duty tends to become a world of its
Symbols will not suffice to solve the
problem, he says. "I'm not that comfort-
able preaching motherhood and apple pie.
The real missing element isn't warm feel-
ings. The missing element is a clear sense
of right and wrong, and the resolve, the
individual and national resolve, to live ac-
cording to that sense."
Stockdale says that what kept the vast
majority of U.S. prisoners of war in Viet-
nam from the dishonor of collaborating, of
making public statements against their na-
tion that could lead to their release, was not
just religious faith or patriotism or physical
courage ? though all were important. In-
stead, the prisoners developed their own
civilization, whose rules were clear and
whose safety they valued above their own.
In a recent speech, Stockdale said:
"Where were the roots of this kind of re-
solve? Certainly, the roots were not cere-
bral, in our heads; the roots were emo-
tional, in our hearts. Power comes from
building layer upon layer of convictions that
are hard to assail. We can all conceive of
universes in which most of the things we
would approve of would be just as well
served by other choices. But can you con-
ceive of a universe in which it would be '
worthy of you to be cowardly or wanton?
"I say, let us be aware that resolve and
commitment cannot be displaced by throw-
away concepts. They are not worthy of us,
and because they are not worthy of us, we
cannot rely on them."
"He's touching something fundamen-
tal," says a philosophy professor. "There's
no sense anymore, there hasn't been in
philosophy for decades, that patriotism and
public virtue aren't the same thing. One's
a feeling; if you want it, go watch a parade.
Maybe see `Rambo' a few times. But pub-
lic virtue, the way the Greeks understood
it, means knowing that you're inseparable
from your country, that your country's fate
is your fate and you're responsible for your
country's fate and honor. The Greeks said,
'Character is destiny.' I don't know if that's
true for countries as well as individuals. But
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it might be worth thinking about."
Doesn't the public fury over the spy
cases suggest that things are getting better?
Not according to Edward Linenthal, pro-
fessor of religion at the Massachusetts In-
stitute of Technology. "I think the outrage
over the spies' is really hypocritical. If the
whole society runs on self-interest and
short-term gains and instant gratification,
why should we expect the opposite from
people we've put in positions of trust?"
But then, not all positions of trust are
equal. Some involve other people's money;
others involve their lives. Nearly all observ-
ers of contemporary American culture de-
cry what they see as excessive individual-
ism, oriented toward short-term gratifica-
tion and callously oblivious to long-term
damage. Nearly all bemoan the lack of
public virtue. But few can find a means of
resurrecting a national sense of individual
responsibility: that each citizen feels his
actions, his attitudes and his loyalty are
vital to the nation's survival.
"It was one of the biggest shocks of my
life:' says Alexios Antypas, a recent
graduate of Georgetown University who
grew up in the United States and holds dual
U.S.-Greek citizenship. "There really are
some bad people out there. And they don't
wish us well. It took me a while to realize
it. I tend to be pretty willing to see the other
guy's point of view. But some people just
plain hate our guts.
"They never teach you that in school.
The enemy is always the bomb, or bad
communication, or ugly thoughts, or pov-
erty, or original sin or something like that.
They never tell you that the world is full of
People who would just as soon kill an
American as say 'good morning.' What the
hell kind of education is it that won't let
you know you've got enemies?"
Or perhaps the real problem is, as for-
mer Prime Minister Menachem Begin of
Israel once put it, the failure to teach that
our desire to live and their desire to kill us
is not a difference of opinion."
? Philip Gold
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