Weinberger Fears Serious Losses in Embassy Spy Case

Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger expressed concern Wednesday over what he called “potentially a serious set of losses” involving an espionage case in which a Marine guard was reportedly seduced by a Soviet woman employed at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow.

“Preliminary indications are that it is quite serious,” Weinberger said of the case of Marine Sgt. Clayton J. Lonetree, now held in solitary confinement at Quantico, Va. Lonetree is awaiting proceedings in which he could be formally charged with several counts related to taking secret material from embassies in Moscow and Vienna and passing it to the Soviets.

The State Department, meanwhile, said it has launched a full-scale counterintelligence investigation and “a worst-case damage assessment” because of “possible security compromises at the U.S. embassies in Moscow and Vienna.”

Declines to Elaborate

State Department spokeswoman Phyllis Oakley would not elaborate on the case, but sources have told The Times that Lonetree confessed that he had provided secret information to the KGB after he was seduced by a Soviet woman working in the American Embassy in Moscow.

As a Marine guard, Lonetree had extensive access to classified information at the embassies, where guards are entrusted not only with protecting documents but with destroying them.

Weinberger, in a session with a group of reporters at the Pentagon, said that investigations of the Lonetree case are continuing. “We hope it won’t add to the losses we’ve already suffered, which are very substantial,” he said in an apparent reference to spy cases last year involving active and retired Navy personnel.

“It is potentially a serious set of losses,” Weinberger added. “It is a continuing source of the greatest unhappiness that even the people least likely to commit treason against the United States may have done so.”

KGB Embassy Employees

While declining to discuss specifics of the Lonetree case, Weinberger said that “it illustrates one of the major problems of utilizing KGB people as employees in the embassy, something we’ve worried about for a very long time.”

In Lonetree’s hometown of St. Paul, Minn., his father, Spencer Lonetree, said that the family had hired nationally known trial lawyer William Kunstler to defend the 25-year-old Marine.

In his Pentagon meeting with reporters, Weinberger also fielded questions on issues ranging from the contras in Nicaragua to the prospects for deploying the first phase of the “Star Wars” space-based anti-missile system, formally known as the Strategic Defense Initiative.

The contras, he said, “are doing very well. . . . They have made an impressive showing” recently in their fight against the Sandinista government. The rebels now have in the field “a lot more than they had a few weeks ago,” Weinberger said without elaboration. Other Pentagon officials later estimated the current rebel force at 8,000.

Sandinista Arms Estimates

Weinberger, in urging congressional approval of President Reagan’s request for $105 million in aid to the contras, said that the Marxist government in Nicaragua received 23,000 tons of military supplies last year from the Soviet Union, its Eastern European allies and Cuba. This was an increase from about 1,000 tons in Soviet military supplies shipped in 1981 and from 1985’s total of 13,900 tons, according to new Pentagon estimates.

In discussing the “Star Wars” research program, Weinberger said that “we are making great progress” but that it is too early to estimate when deployment of a first phase could begin. He repeated his opposition to initial deployment as “a traditional ground-based” anti-ballistic missile system to protect missile sites, for instance, preferring instead a system to protect the entire North American continent.