The FBI followed Richard W. Miller for weeks, waiting for him to slip. He was one of them, a veteran man from the office, and now he was suspected of betraying his oath and his country. A small army of agents watched him day and night, trying to catch him by transmitting secrets to the Soviets. They hit his car. They hit his phones. They hit his office in the office on the Boulevard Wilshire of the office.
At 48, Miller had waded and dripped a 20 -year career, to the dismay of his superiors, who could not bring together the desire to dismiss him. Instead, they threw him to the so-called Russian team in Los Angeles, a counter-espionage unit intended to fight Soviet espionage. He did not speak Russian. It was in 1984, the year Moscow boycotted the Los An Olympic Games
In this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the Forgotten, the consequence of the dark, the diving in the archives and the memories of those who were there.
However, the KGB looked at, and Miller, moving, bitter and broken, made a tempting target. He had eight children. He had debts. He sold Amway Nylons to FBI secretaries while other agents make fun. He took bribes and burst money from informants. He had a weakness for women and not his wife, which had led to his excommunication from the Mormone Church.
He had been suspended for flouting weight regulations, stripped of his informants and demoted to monitor phone listening. And, lately, he had clandestine meetings with a Russian emigrant with KGB, Svetlana Ogorodnikova links, in cheap cars and hotels around Los Angeles.
An FBI FBI FBI monitoring photo Richard W. Miller, in white shirt and dark pants, with Russian emigrous Svetlana Ogorodnikov. Federal agents hoped to prove that he gave his state secrets.
(Bettmann Archive)
“Loely, without a friend, despised by his office, far from her family, even alienated from his God”, it is the way in which Paula Hill, his ex-wife, described Miller in a memory. “A moral man who led an immoral life, an idealist who had betrayed his ideals. No one despised Richard as much as Richard himself.”
The code name of the massive operation to catch Miller, in summer and autumn 1984, was “Whipworm”, a reference to an intestinal parasite. The case against him seemed overwhelming when an electronic listening captured an officer of the KGB by asking Ogorodnikova to attract Miller in Warsaw, who was part of the Soviet block.
But at the end of September, Miller did something that surprised everyone: he entered the office of his supervisor and said he was on himself.
Yes, said Miller, he secretly saw Ogorodnikova, but only in the context of a daring and yourself plan to infiltrate Soviet intelligence. He would be the first agent of the FBI to do so. He would be a hero. He would buy his wrong career and would come out “in a flambé of glory”, as he would say.
History struck the FBI like Asinine – the agents simply did not act in this way – but could it be refuted? The brass of the office doubted proceedings which were possible without confession. At one point for five days of questioning, Miller received a conference from Richard T. Bretzing, who led the FBI office and was a bishop in the Mormone church. He told Miller to consider the “spiritual ramifications” of his behavior under the doctrines of the Church, to repent and to make a restitution.
“I reminded him that he had a woman and eight children who needed someone in his position to respect and that he was his responsibility to find the courage and decency himself to develop these attributes which would gain their respect,” wrote Bretzing in a memo.
A photo of July 1986 by former FBI agent Richard Miller after his second trial.
(Larry Davis / Los Angeles Times)
Miller cried and shortly after, he admitted that he had given Ogorodnikova a 50 -page FBI document called the positive intelligence reporting guide, an internal inventory of the intelligence community.
Responsible for having succeeded in secrets for $ 65,000 in cash and gold, Miller became the first FBI agent to be tried for espionage. His lawyers tried to exclude his confession on the grounds that he involuntarily made, tortured by religious guilt. Testifying in January 1985, Miller said that the “spiritual conference” of his supervisor had cooled him with the specter of the eternal separation of his relatives.
“What came to mind is that I lose my family,” said Miller. “I don’t go to the celestial kingdom … the equivalent of going to hell.”
Robert Bonner, the former American lawyer who continued Miller, told Times in a recent interview that the “spiritual conference” may have an effect, but the effect was to encourage Miller to tell the truth.
“The question is:” Was it a binding confession? “” Said Bonner. “I would say Baloney. It’s not the rubber hose.”
Bonner said that the myriads of Miller defects make him vulnerable to enemy openings: “He had financial problems. He had zipper problems. His problems were known to the KGB, and he was targeted. He was interested in having sex with Svetlana. ”
In subsequent spy scandals, FBI agent Robert Hanssen, and CIA Officer Aldrich Ames have damaged American interests much more by betraying the identity of the Russian spies for America. The document that Miller admitted to having fled to the flight was relatively unimportant.
“It was not going to shoot the Republic,” said Bonner. “It was not the earth as a classified document.” The KGB strategy was to compromise it. “A classified document, and he has finished. They have it. He’s going to work for them.”
The question was to suspend the question of why an agent widely considered incompetent was authorized to keep his job. An FBI official would testify that he had tried to dismiss the “neglected” Miller, but that a Mormon supervisor had protected him. The point of view of Bonne is that the FBI hoped to let Miller end his career in a position where he would not hurt.
“The easy route is not to fire them, because you are going to be prosecuted,” said Bonner. The was considered a small scene for the Spycrates, and the members of the countelertement team “were not superstars like the agents of San Francisco and New York and Washington”.
The Russian team therefore seemed to be a safe place to throw an agent on the way to retirement. “They were trying to bury the guy,” said Bonner, “and it really came back to bite them.”
Miller’s lawyer Joel Levine told Times that the FBI had launched the book to his client as an excessive reaction to his error to keep him employed. “They were embarrassed,” said Levine. “The reaction to their embarrassment was to become it as strong as possible, to compensate for the fact that they did not look at it.”
Levine added: “What he was trying to do was ultimately going to his bosses and saying:” Guess what? I was able to change this lady and get information from her, and now I will be a great hero in the office. “It was a cockamity plan, but he argued that he was serious about it.
Miller’s first trial ended with a trial, and his second trial resulted in a conviction which was canceled. The government went to court a third time, Adam Schiff – then American assistant lawyer, now a senator from California – as a principal prosecutor. Miller was found guilty of spying and received a 20 -year sentence in prison. He served about half of this period and was granted early in 1994. He moved to Utah, remarried and died a free man in the 1970s.
His ex-wife, Hill, now aged 83, is a retired teacher of high school living in Saratoga Springs, Utah. She said that she believed that Miller was innocent of spying and that he really tried to infiltrate the KGB.
In a recent interview, she described it as “a ugly agent”, “a terrible husband” and “a mediocre father”, but said that she had not influenced the bitterness towards him.
“He was a weak man, but he was not a bad man, and he was certainly not a spy,” she said. She added: “I knew he was unhappy at home. I was not the little wife of sweet coffee. She raised eight children.” New, if you count Richard. “
And the Russian spy who seduced Miller? Ogorodnikova, with her husband of the time, Nikolai Ogorodnikov, pleaded guilty to espionage and received prison terms of 18 and eight years, respectively.
Even so, she said “60 minutes”, “I am not a spy. I’m not Mata Hari. I’m not sex maniacs like people say of me. Am I like I’m a sexual maniac?”
Locked in a federal prison in the county of Alameda who housed men and women at the time, she met Bruce Perlow, a condemned drug smuggler, and the romance was flourished. He loved his high cheekbones and his broken English. He said that she was an unknown communist who loved Josef Stalin and drank a lot.
“She said that she was a lieutenant-colonel in the Gru,” said 74-year-old Perlow in Times, referring to the Soviet Union military intelligence agency. He said she also claimed to be the daughter of former Soviet chief Yuri Andropov. “All of this could be alcoholic invented stories. But in prison, she didn’t drink. It was very consistent, and it never changed … She was very crazy that she was caught. She hated losing. “
At the same time, she denied being a spy. “She said,” I’m not a spy. It was part of his adorable accent. »»
However, when they got into a room to have sex for the first time in prison, he told, she inserted a pair of toothbrushes to the door to prevent guards from entering. “She knew all these little laps,” he said. “She says,” I’m not a spy “, but how do you know?”
They got married in prison, and she became free in 1995, after 11 years of detention. They traveled the country and finally divorced. But Perlow said that he had taken care of herself in recent years in Arizona, where she died of what he called an alcohol -related disease. “She was cute as a button,” he said.
California Daily Newspapers
