ONCE MORE INTO THE EMBASSY: Review

Thus, unless Mr. [Vitaly S. Yurchenko] was clairvoyant, he could not have foreseen in August 1985 that Sergeant [Clayton J. Lonetree] or Sergeant Bracy would fall into a K.G.B. ''honey trap'' months later. Clearly, if Mr. Yurchenko did possess information that the embassy's communications were compromised, it could bear no relation to any actions by Sergeant Lonetree or Sergeant Bracy. Mr. [Ronald Kessler] does say at one point, more or less in passing, that the penetration of the embassy's code machines ''could have'' gone back to 1984, but in that case, what did it have to do with this group of marines? What, then, is Mr. Kessler's evidence that Sergeant Bracy was guilty? ''Unless he were guilty, it was virtually impossible to comprehend why he would implicate himself.'' Impossible, perhaps, if you are not a black marine with a high school education being sweated and threatened by a Naval Investigative Service goon squad. Mr. Kessler is too experienced a reporter never to have heard of a coerced confession. Chief Justice Earl Warren's eloquent words in the landmark Miranda decision about the ''compelling atmosphere'' of a ''menacing police investigation'' are still instructive, even two decades later. The fatuous State Department policies that permitted the Russians to plant literally thousands of bugs in the steel and concrete of the new (and never occupied) embassy in Moscow turned the entire building, Mr. Kessler notes, into ''nothing more than a gigantic eavesdropping device.'' And he rightly observes that the mishandling of the case by the Naval Investigative Service ''gave new meaning to the phrase 'Keystone Kops.' ''