More Soil on Image : Marine Spy Case Angers Proud Corps

Wesley Fox walked into the U.S. Post Office at Front Royal, Va., and joined the Marine Corps 37 years ago. He was 18. He had no intention of making the military his career. He just wanted to get into the Korean War, and he did.

He is 55 now, a weathered, square-jawed old mustang who was an enlisted man for 16 years before he pinned on the gold bars of a second lieutenant during the Vietnam War. His hair is white, but he still has the arms of a blacksmith and a belly as flat as an anvil, and he wears the Medal of Honor for an all-day fire fight in the A Shau Valley.

With nearly all of his contemporaries long in retirement, he has just been promoted to colonel. For the past two years, he has run the Staff Noncommissioned Officer Academy, where leaders are taught leadership.

Instinctive Warrior

Fox is a throwback to the days when benevolent judges offered young first offenders the choice of going to jail or joining the Marines. He is an instinctive warrior, an elder in a far-flung tribe now humiliated by the spectacle of young NCOs accused of espionage.

He is also a symbol in a Marine Corps that is relying once again on symbols and traditions to see it through another time of trouble.

Not far from Fox’s spartan graduate school, three other noncoms languish in the Quantico brig, principals in the secrets-for-sex scandal that has rocked the corps.

Court-Martial Awaited

Sgt. Clayton J. Lonetree, a former guard at the U.S. Embassy in Moscow, awaits court-martial on charges that he passed secret documents, including diagrams of the embassy’s office spaces, to Soviet operatives. The Marine Corps is preparing to decide whether to put Lonetree’s friend, Cpl. Arnold Bracy, on trial for espionage, and whether to try Staff Sgt. Robert S. Stufflebeam, a Moscow guard supervisor, for improper fraternization with Soviet women.

Publicly, the corps has remained rigidly aloof since the scandal broke with Lonetree’s arrest last December amid accusations that his affair with a Russian temptress led him to open the most sensitive areas of the U.S. Embassy to Soviet intelligence.

But underneath is seething anger. One retired general said: “Divide the 199,000 Marines on active duty by six, and that is how many firing squads would volunteer to shoot the bastards. And I’m not sure they shouldn’t start with the ambassador.” A worried lieutenant colonel at Camp Pendleton told friends: “I never would have believed this could happen. It will take 10 years for us to re-establish who we are. It may take another Iwo Jima.”

The anger and embarrassment have touched every Marine, from the retired generals to recruits sweating their way through boot camp, for the Marine Corps is as much a tribal brotherhood as a military service.

Martin Benkin, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, said: “There is a mystique and a national love affair with the Marine Corps that make this pill all the more bitter for them. They are hanging their heads, and justifiably so. It is probably the darkest day for the Marine Corps since the efforts to do away with them in the late 1940s.”

The Moscow affair is not the only reason. It came amid other unnerving public insults to the Marine image: the central roles of Lt. Col. Oliver L. North and former Lt. Col. Robert C. McFarlane in the Iran- contra scandal; North, in his ribbon-spangled uniform, invoking the Fifth Amendment to avoid testifying before Congress; McFarlane attempting suicide. Then there was former Col. Donald T. Regan, a man with extraordinary pride in his Marine background, unceremoniously dumped as White House chief of staff.

Beirut Tragedy

And as the corps anticipated the selection of a new commandant to succeed Gen. Paul X. Kelley, there were haunting memories of Beirut in 1983, when a terrorist rammed a truck loaded with explosives into the Marine barracks, killing 241 members of a peacekeeping force.

Kelley had been commandant for less than four months when that disaster struck, but already it was widely believed that he was on his way to becoming the first Marine to serve as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

The Beirut tragedy ended his chances. The general’s handling of the crisis drew sharp criticism from Congress. Within the corps, some high-ranking officers privately faulted him for not taking the blame for the tragedy.

But the Moscow embassy spy scandal has cut deepest, for it involves the noncommissioned officers, historically the backbone of Marine leadership.

‘Count on the NCOs’

“It’s troubling no matter who is involved,” said a major at the Parris Island Marine Recruit Depot in South Carolina. “But this is doubly so because we count on the NCOs to run the Marine Corps.”

At Quantico, the proceedings against the handpicked elite guards go unmentioned in classes at the staff NCO academy, and Fox is incredulous when he is asked whether lessons of Moscow are being pointed out to the student sergeants.

“I don’t think I follow you,” he said. “Do you mean to say we need to teach a Marine that he shouldn’t give secrets to the enemy?” He paused. “No, sir, it isn’t mentioned. It doesn’t need to be mentioned unless you want them to cut you off and pay no attention to anything you say from that point on. All Marines are disappointed and disgusted that the whole thing ever came up, that the media has nothing else to talk about.”

If the lesson of Moscow is too self-evident to be lectured to senior NCOs, it has been pointedly put to younger corporals and sergeants joining the prestigious ranks of drill instructors and others schooling for embassy guard duty.

‘Teaching Example’

“We use it to show people that such actions cause the entire Marine Corps to take body shots,” said Capt. Gary Ole at Parris Island, S.C. “We use it in drill instructors leadership classes--as a teaching example.”

Not since 1956, when a drill instructor under the influence of vodka marched a platoon of recruits into Parris Island’s Ribbon Creek and drowned six of them, has public scrutiny been so focused upon the Marine noncom.

The Ribbon Creek debacle brought massive reform in Marine recruit training. Drill instructors, who had ruled boot camp, often brutalizing recruits more than training them, were brought under the close supervision of officers for the first time.

Fox was a DI then. He thought that the reforms would ruin the corps, that recruits would be coddled. “It was my opinion,” he said, “that the corps was finished, gone. It would never be the same.

“I thought the old way was the way it should be. I washed out as many recruits as I could wash out. I thought that a good DI didn’t graduate very many. But I’ve had some thoughts about that in later years--some of those young men I sent back to civilian life would have done a good job as Marines.”

The Moscow spy scandal involved special noncoms, who loom nearly as large as the fabled drill instructor in Marine imagery. For years, embassy guards in their dress blues have been living recruiting posters, the ideal of young American manhood on display at 127 embassies around the world, commanded by one of their own. State Department security officers attached to the embassies exercise only modest control over the guards.

“The problem in Moscow was probably caused by the lack of proper and adequate supervision,” said former Commandant Wallace M. Greene, who investigated the Ribbon Creek disaster 31 years ago. “That is exactly what happened at Parris Island. In this case, supervision was the responsibility of the Department of State. The ambassador and the security officer are both accountable.”

The relationship between the Marines and the State Department has always been, said one Marine official who declined to be identified, “a very delicate subject. The State Department’s security officers have been most sensitive about our people treading on their operational authority. But it would help if embassies were more receptive to the advice of the regional officers who visit.”

Needed Elsewhere

In the early 1970s, critics suggested that it was time for the corps to get out of the embassy-guarding business. The 1,400 NCOs on guard duty were among its best, and they were desperately needed in operational units of the Fleet Marine Force.

Now, in the wake of Moscow, the recommendation is heard again.

“The Marines are used for a doorkeeper service,” said Edward N. Luttwak, a senior fellow of Washington’s Center for Strategic and International Studies. The State Department is happy to use Marines as guards, Luttwak said, because their salaries do not come out of its budget.

Richard Gabriel, a political scientist at St. Anselm’s College in Manchester, N.H., and a specialist in military affairs, said Marine guards do little more than make sure that visitors have proper credentials and that the embassy is secure at night. “Rent-a-cops,” he said, “could do the same thing.”

That kind of talk makes the Marines’ skin crawl. They are repelled, one said, by the notion of America’s diplomatic outposts being “guarded by fat retired Miami cops.”

Guard Duty as Incentive

To some potential Marine recruits, the prospect of guard duty in foreign capitals is itself incentive enough to sign up for a four-year hitch. To valued young NCOs facing their first re-enlistment decision, a guard tour is sometimes enough to keep them in the corps.

“It is in effect promised to young men when they come into the Marine Corps,” said retired Gen. Louis Wilson, commandant during the mid-1970s. “It provides them a respite from duty with the Fleet Marine Force; it is an opportunity for travel, adventure and education.” For the Marine brass, it is also an opportunity for visibility. The first and last American seen by diplomats, congressmen, Cabinet members and presidents visiting a U.S. Embassy anywhere in the world is the snappy Marine sentry in his dress blue uniform.

Through such opportunities for attention has the Marine Corps successfully cultivated its image as America’s elite fighting force. Now, in the wake of the Moscow spy scandal, the Marines know that they must make some changes if they are to retain their responsibility for guarding the embassies.

Lie Detector Tests

The changes have already begun. Embassy guards will be henceforth subject to random lie detector tests. Screening has been tightened, and all Marines taken into the guard ranks will receive the psychological evaluation heretofore given only to drill instructors and gunnery sergeants commanding guard details.

The detail sent to Moscow to replace the contingent withdrawn after the arrests is accompanied by a captain, and Marine Corps officials are considering whether to put an officer in charge of each embassy contingent just as they installed lieutenants with drill instructors in recruit training platoons 30 years ago.

A little more than a decade ago, half the corps’ recruits did not own a high school diploma. Desertion and unauthorized absence were rampant; drug use was common. On some Marine posts such as Quantico, the streets were unsafe at night.

Questions resurfaced about whether the United States really needed a Marine Corps any longer. There had been a threat to the Marines’ very existence in the late ‘40s, but the critics were silenced by the historic Inchon landing in Korea. In the troubled ‘70s, however, Defense Secretary James R. Schlesinger asked whether a 200,000-man force, whose principal mission was amphibious landings, still made technical sense.

But during the late 1970s and early 1980s, the corps toughened standards to reverse a disastrous decline in quality, and it benefited mightily from pay raises and the Reagan Administration’s massive modernization of the country’s military.

Today, the long-running debate over the Marines’ overall mission is muted. World terrorism, Soviet adventurism and more sophisticated weapons in the hands of Third World countries have, in the Marines’ view, validated the case for amphibious assault forces.

Evidence of Value

Although frustrated that they were not left alone to carry out the attack in Grenada, Marines point to their landing there as more indisputable evidence of their value in their traditional, though seldom employed, role.

“The whole world is trashed up with precision weapons, and strategic surprise becomes harder and harder,” Col. Marshall Darling said, “but tactical surprise is possible. A whole new class of landing zones is now vulnerable, and this and the ability to attack from over the horizon prevent the enemy from deciding where he needs to defend.”

This summer the Marines will deploy from Camp Pendleton the first of a new generation of big air-cushion assault vehicles, capable of launching from a ship as far as 200 miles offshore and approaching a beach at 50 m.p.h. At closer ranges of 50 miles or so, they can carry as much as 75 tons of cargo.

With new vertical takeoff and landing aircraft, they foresee operations by reconnaissance and killer teams from distances of 400 miles, hit-and-run raids from 200 miles and diversionary attacks on beaches 100 miles from a main force landing.

Desertion Rate Down

Marines themselves have changed as much as their equipment. Virtually all the recruits coming into boot camp at Parris Island and San Diego are high school graduates. Desertion and unauthorized absence rates are a fraction of those a decade ago.

In no small measure the turnaround is attributed to the decision of Commandant Robert Barrow several years ago to make the commanders of the recruit training depots also the commanders of the recruiting regions.

Drill instructors and recruiters thus have the same boss. The progress of each new Marine through his career is kept in the personnel file of the recruiter who brought him into the corps, thus holding recruiters accountable for the quality of young men they bring into the service.

“We’re not recruiting anybody today to come into the Marine Corps in the next couple of weeks,” said Brig. Gen. Joseph P. Hoar, commander of the Parris Island Recruit Depot and the corps’ eastern recruiting region. “We are recruiting people today who will graduate from school in June. They will come in here in the fall and then go on to a classroom that will put them with the fleet next spring.”

Shortly after James H. Webb, a much-decorated Marine rifle company commander in the Vietnam War, was sworn in as secretary of the Navy earlier this month, he sent Defense Secretary Caspar W. Weinberger a list of Marine generals from whom, presumably, will be chosen Kelley’s successor as commandant.

The new commandant, the 29th to lead the corps since the Continental Congress created it in 1775, will face some vexing problems when he takes over July 1. The Reagan military modernization is nearing its end, and there is small prospect for more of the healthy pay boosts of the early ‘80s or for all of the new hardware the corps wants.

“The Marines may well face the same problems as the Navy, winding up with all of this fine new equipment and not enough people to operate it,” said John Buchanan of the Center for Defense Information.

Retired Maj. Gen. Fred E. Haynes predicted “a reopened flurry of analyses” of the Marines’ roles and missions. The new Navy secretary has hinted as much himself, suggesting in a published interview that he questions the Marines’ move to heavier and heavier equipment, perhaps at the expense of mobility.

‘Problems Recruiting’ Seen

“The combination of all these factors suggests not a return to the ‘70s, but it does suggest that the Marine Corps is going to have some problems recruiting,” said Jeffrey Record of the Institute for Foreign Policy Analysis.

At the moment, however, Marine personnel officials have a quite different concern.

Although the pool of available young men of military age is dwindling, 30,000 to 35,000 Marine recruits report to Parris Island and San Diego each year. At the same time, the re-enlistment rate marches upward.

“If it continues to get higher, we may have to force a correction,” said a Marine manpower expert. “If everybody wants to stay in, we will have an old Marine Corps. The way you force a correction is to put a cap on the number of people who can re-enlist in individual job skills in a given year. How do you tell a Marine who wants to stay on active duty that you don’t have a slot for him?”

The Marines’ dramatic turnaround from the 1970s notwithstanding, critics of the all-volunteer armed forces are no less convinced that the enlisted ranks of the armed services represent a low stratum of American society. Some suggest that this accounts for a waning of commitment to the hallowed concepts of honor, duty and country--and that it underlies the Marine embassy guard scandal.

“There has been a drastic change in ethos since 1973,” Gabriel at St. Anselm’s said, “a selling of the military not as an obligation of citizenship but as an economic job. You can’t really blame Lonetree and the other fellow.”