Clayton J. Lonetree

Who is Clayton J. Lonetree?

Clayton J. Lonetree, son of a Winnebago father and Navajo mother, served nine years in prison for espionage. 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 US Marine to be convicted of spying against the United States. Lonetree, who was stationed in Moscow as a guard at the US Embassy in the early 1980s, confessed in 1987 to selling documents to the Soviet Union. Lonetree was seduced by a 25-year-old female KGB 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 US Embassy buildings in Moscow and Vienna and the names and identities of US 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.