The spy case that appeared at first to be an isolated instance of two lonely Marines being seduced into espionage at the U.S. embassy in Moscow took a broader and more ominous turn last week. A third Marine was charged with illegal fraternization with Soviet women, and two other pairs of former embassy guards are suspected of having been compromised by female contacts. As the scandal spread, both the Marine and State Department supervisors of the 28-man guard contingent came under increasing criticism for their failure to monitor the behavior of the Marines more closely. Rather than clean-cut Americans being entrapped by their innocence, it seems, all too many of the guards were hard-drinking, brawling women-chasers whose wild partying was condoned.
"The Marines have been difficult all along," Arthur Hartman, who retired only last month as Ambassador to Moscow, told TIME last week. "They are trained for a different kind of duty, and in a place like Moscow, they're young people who don't have the maturity to understand the dangers they face."
Seven Marines were shipped home, Hartman disclosed, after a British nanny accused two of them of raping her last December in the Marine quarters in the embassy building. The Marine Corps charged the two with allowing the woman into the embassy and with having sex with a foreign national, but would not reveal their punishment. The others failed to report the incident, and some were also accused of illegal currency exchanges. On another occasion, said Hartman, Marines had "decked" a worker from another embassy during a presumably friendly game of broomball, a form of ice hockey.
The young servicemen were known in Moscow for their parties at "Marine House," the name given the embassy quarters in which they lived. Two men occupied each tiny room, off long hallways on four of the building's nine floors. On Fridays, a "TGIF" (Thank God It's Friday) affair in the second-floor lounge of Marine House would include West European and American nannies who cared for the children of Western families. Some guests, however, were Soviet women who worked at the embassy until the Kremlin ordered all its citizens out of clerical and custodial jobs in the building last October.
The young set drank and danced to loud rock music until 1 a.m. "There was always a lot of booze," recalls a former American nanny. "People got more and more rowdy as the night progressed. You'd see couples sprawled all over the couches, and others would head off into the Marines' rooms." She claimed that even a Marine noncom leader joined in the "Animal House" carousing. "When you see your boss getting dead drunk and going around pinching women, it doesn't make for a very strict atmosphere."
Stories about the Marines' behavior are rife among former Soviet embassy employees, although these workers, who often report to the KGB, have reasons to exaggerate. "They were wild," a Soviet woman translator said of the Marines. "They chased all the skirts, Russian or otherwise. If we were flowers, they were bees." A Soviet secretary who had booked dinners for embassy personnel said that many Moscow restaurants would not accept the Marines "because they got drunk and got into fights with other customers."