Two Suspected of Letting KGB Agents Into Embassy

In a potentially lethal blow to U.S. intelligence operations in the Soviet Union, two Marine guards are now suspected by investigators of having given the Soviet KGB secret police physical access to top-secret communications and CIA offices in the American Embassy in Moscow in 1985 and 1986, government sources said Thursday.

If the fears prove true, one source said, the damage could exceed even that wreaked by CIA turncoat Edward Lee Howard, who defected to the Soviet Union in 1985 after compromising key U.S. intelligence operations and sources in that nation.

“It’s horrible,” one knowledgeable official said of the Marine spy case. “We were had seven ways from Sunday.” A second official said that U.S. estimates of damage remain incomplete but conceded: “It’s grim.”

U.S. investigators suspect that the two Marines, Cpl. Arnold Bracy and Sgt. Clayton Lonetree, arranged to serve security watches at the embassy together so that they could allow Soviet agents to enter key offices undetected.

The embassy normally is patrolled by no fewer than two guards at a time. This “buddy system” ensured that no single guard could grant unauthorized access to the building but did not preclude access being granted by two guards working in tandem.

The Marines say that Bracy’s and Lonetree’s tours at the embassy in Moscow overlapped for nearly eight months, during which they served a number of guard watches together. During some of those watches, U.S. officials increasingly fear, KGB agents penetrated the most sensitive offices on the uppermost floors of the embassy.

Those offices include 7th-, 8th- and 9th-floor complexes that house the embassy’s coded communications center, the headquarters of the CIA’s Moscow station chief and offices of the U.S. ambassador to the Soviet Union.

Such access probably would mean that virtually every embassy secret fell into Soviet hands, one intelligence official said. Another official said it appears certain that the communications center was compromised, but that it is less clear whether CIA embassy offices were entered.

Hearing Set for Today

Bracy was placed in a Marine brig in Quantico, Va., Tuesday on suspicion of espionage-related crimes but has not been charged. A military magistrate is to decide after a hearing today whether he should continue to be confined.

Lonetree was jailed by the Marines last December, reportedly after confessing some role in Soviet espionage and later was charged with 19 espionage-related crimes. On Thursday, the Marines added five more counts, including a second charge of espionage that could draw the death penalty because of “aggravated” circumstances under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.

The new charges include two counts of conspiracy to commit espionage, which one official said stem from the newly obtained evidence of Bracy’s involvement in the case. The other two charges involve lesser criminal offenses.

Lawyers in Europe

Prosecutors and defense lawyers in the Lonetree case returned this week from Moscow and Vienna, where Lonetree also was stationed, after questioning U.S. officials in the two cities.

Lonetree’s lawyers, citing Bracy’s detention and the conspiracy allegations, have asked for postponement of an Article 32 hearing--the military equivalent of a grand jury proceeding--that has been convened in their client’s case.

Lonetree’s family has vehemently denied that he ever worked for the Soviets. On Thursday, Bracy’s parents said that their son also has denied any role in espionage, though he freely admitted a friendship with a female Soviet worker at the U.S. Embassy.

Undercover Agents

Bracy, 21, and Lonetree, 25, are said by U.S. officials to have been lured into aiding the Soviets after being seduced by female embassy employees who were undercover KGB agents. Until a change in policy last fall, Soviet citizens were routinely employed at the Moscow embassy in non-sensitive positions, such as translators, drivers and cooks.

U.S. investigators are working from a “worst-case” scenario, which assumes that the KGB had free and wide access to secure embassy areas. While that worst case is not “nailed down,” one official said, investigators have strong suspicions that most of the embassy was compromised.

Another official said flatly that the KGB “physically got into the (communications) room--and worse.”

One especially worrisome possibility is that KGB agents planted listening devices in the embassy that operated undetected after Lonetree was transferred to Vienna early last year.

The KGB bugged some U.S. Embassy typewriters with surprisingly sophisticated devices at least twice in recent years. The bugs might still be working, one official said, had not another agency discovered similar devices in another U.S. facility and triggered a general search for them.

The spying operation is the second intelligence disaster to befall U.S. officials in Moscow in three years. The first occurred in 1984 and 1985 when Howard, dismissed from the CIA after being trained for an undercover post in Moscow, gave the Soviets details of U.S. operations in that country.

The Soviets later expelled several U.S. diplomats identified as spies and arrested and executed at least one Soviet scientist who is believed to have been a U.S. undercover agent compromised by Howard.

Howard eluded an FBI tail in 1985 and turned up in the Soviet capital last year, where he was granted political asylum.

Staff writer Ronald J. Ostrow contributed to this story.