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The FBI had been following Richard W. Miller for a few weeks, and waited for him to slip. He was one of them, a man from the Veteran Bureau, and now he was suspected of betraying his vows and his country. A small army of agents watched him day and night, trying to catch him telling the Soviets a secret. They slammed his car. They tapped his phone. They slammed his desk at the office on Wilshire Boulevard, the bureau.
At 48, Miller thrusts and bumps into her 20-year career. Instead, they had abandoned him to the so-called Russian team in LA, a counter-epion unit intended to fight Soviet spies. He did not speak Russian. It was in 1984 when Moscow boycotted the LA Olympics, but Southern California, which had no Russian consulate, was considered the backwaters of the Cold War spy game.
In this series, Christopher Goferard revisits old crimes since Los Angeles, from famous people to forgotten people, to the consequences of unforgettable people, and the memories of those who were there.
Still, the KGB was watching, and Miller created an embarrassing, bitter, broken, and charming target. He had eight children. He had debts. He sold Amway Nylon to the FBI secretary, and the other agents sneered. He took the bribe and took a quick look at the cash from the informant. He had weaknesses in women rather than his wife, which led to excommunication from the Mormon Church.
He was suspended due to restrictions on disrespect, stripped of informants and demoted to eavesdropping monitoring. And recently he had a secret trial with KGB tie, Svetlana Ogorodnikova, Russian Emigre and Svetlana Ogorodnikova in cheap hotels around Los Angeles.
FBI surveillance photo of FBI agent Richard W. Miller in a white shirt and dark pants along with Russia’s Emigre Svetlana Ogorodnikov. The federal agent wanted to prove he was giving her state secrets.
(Bettmann Archive)
“Solid, friendly, spurted in his office, alienated from his family, even God,” his ex-wife Paula Hill, is how Miller explained in his memoirs. “A moral man who lived an immoral life, an idealist who betrayed his ideals. No one has despised Richard as much as Richard himself.”
The code name for the large-scale manipulation to catch mirrors in the summer and fall of 1984 was “Whipworm,” a reference to intestinal parasites. The lawsuit against him looked terrible when eavesdropped on KGB officers instructing Ogorodnikova to lure Miller into Warsaw, part of the Soviet zone.
But in late September, Miller did something that surprised everyone. He entered the director’s office and told himself.
Yes, Miller explained, he had secretly seen Ogorodnikova, but only as part of a bold, self-styled plan to infiltrate the Soviet intelligence news. He will become the first FBI agent to do it. He will become a hero. He redeemed his false career and headed out “in the flames of glory.”
The story attacked the FBI as an acinin – the agents did not act that way – but could that be disproved? Brass from the Bureau suspected the prosecution without confession. At some point during the five days of questions, Miller ran the FBI’s LA office and received a lecture from Richard T. Bretzung, bishop of the Mormon Church. He told Miller to consider the “spiritual effects” of his actions under the doctrine of the Church, to repent and to pay reparations.
“He had eight children with a wife and eight children, and eight children in his position to respect him, and it was his responsibility to find his own courage and decency, and to redevelop the attributes that earned them their respect,” Bretzing wrote in a note.
Photo of former FBI agent Richard Miller in July 1986 after his second trial.
(Larry Davis/Los Angeles Times)
Miller cried and quickly admitted that he had given Ogorodnikova a 50-page FBI document called the Positive Intelligence Reporting Guide, the inherent inventory of the Intelligence Reporting community’s goals.
Miller was accused of winning secrets for $65,000 with $65,000 in cash and gold, and became the first FBI agent to be tested for spying. His lawyers attempted to eliminate his confession on the grounds that he was reluctant to have been tortured by religious guilt. Testifying in January 1985, Miller argued that his supervisor’s “spiritual lectures” had cooled him with the ghost of eternal separation from his loved ones.
“The first thing that came to mind was losing a family,” Miller said. “I’m not going to the Kingdom of Heaven… it’s the same as going to hell.”
Robert Bonner, a former US lawyer who indicted Miller, told The Times in a recent interview that “psychic lectures” might have been effective, but the effect was to induce Miller to tell the truth.
“The question is, ‘Was that a forced confession?'” Bonner said. “I say Baronie. This isn’t a rubber hose.”
Bonner said Miller’s countless flaws made him vulnerable to enemy overtures. “He had financial issues. He had a zipper issue. His issues were known to the KGB and he was targeted.
In the subsequent spy scandal, FBI agent Robert Hansen and CIA officer Aldrich Ames caused far more damage to American interests by betraying the identity of Russians spying for America. Miller admitted that the documents were relatively insignificant.
“I had no intention of defeating the Republic,” Bonner said. “It didn’t shake the Earth as a classified document.” The KGB’s strategy was to compromise on him. “One categorized document, and he’s finished. They have him. He’s going to work for them.”
Hanging in the case was the question of why an agent considered incompetent was allowed to continue his job. FBI officials will testify that he tried to fire “damage” Miller, but the Mormon supervisor protected him. Bonner’s view is that the FBI wanted Miller to complete his career in a position where he would not harm him.
“The simple route is not to fire them because you’re sued,” Bonner said. LA is considered a small stage for Spycraft, and members of the Counter Epion squad were “not superstars like agents in San Francisco, New York or Washington.”
Thus, the Russian squad seemed like a safe place to abandon agents on the way to retirement. “They were trying to bury the guys,” Bonner said, “and it really came back to bite them.”
Miller’s lawyer Joel Levine told The Times that the FBI threw the book to his client as an overreaction of his mistakes to keep his employment. “They were embarrassed,” Levine said. “Their response to embarrassment was to get down on him as hard as they could, to make up for the fact that they hadn’t seen him.”
Levine added: “What he was trying to do was eventually go to his boss and say, ‘What do you guess? I could turn around this woman and get information from her. It was a Cocamme plan, but he was seriously thinking about what Richard had done in his life that wasn’t well thought out.”
Miller’s first trial ended with misconduct, and his second trial led to an overturned conviction. The government was Adam Schiff (then a US lawyer) and now California Senator Adam Schiff, the chief prosecutor. Miller was convicted of spying and served a 20-year sentence. He served half that time and was granted early release in 1994. He moved to Utah and lost a free man in the 70s.
His ex-wife, Hill, now 83, is a retired middle school teacher living in Saratoga Springs, Utah. She said Miller is innocent to espionage and believes he is really trying to sneak into the KGB.
In a recent interview, she described him as a “poor agent”, a “bad husband” and a “mediocre father”, but she said she had no bitterness towards him.
“He was a weak man, but he wasn’t a bad guy and he certainly wasn’t a spy,” she said. She added: “I knew he was unhappy at home. I wasn’t the wife of a small sweet coffee tea or me. We had a lot of arguments.” She had raised eight children. “If you count Richard, then 9.”
And the Russian spy who seduced Miller? Ogorodnikova, along with her then-husband, Nikolai Ogorodnikov, pleaded guilty to spying, and was sentenced to 18 and 8 years respectively.
Still, she said, “60 minutes,” “I’m not a spy. I’m not a Matahari. I’m not a sexual nerd like people say about me. Do I look like a sexual nerd?”
Confined to a federal prison in Alameda County, she was housed men and women at the time, and the romance blossomed when she met Bruce Perrowin, a convicted drug smuggler. He adored her high cheekbones and broken English. He stated that she was a communist who loved Joseph Stalin and drank badly.
“She said she was a collone inside Gru,” Perlowin, now 74, told The Times, referring to the Soviet Union’s military intelligence agency. He also said she claimed that she was the daughter of former Soviet leader Yuri Andropov. “This could all be an alcoholic story, but she wasn’t drinking in prison. It was very consistent and it never changed.
At the same time, she denied being a spy. “She’ll say, ‘I’m not a spy.’ It was part of her adorable accent. ”
Still, when they crept into the room for sex in prison for the first time, he said, and she inserted a toothbrush into the door to prevent security guards from entering. “She knew all these little tricks,” he said. “She says, ‘I’m not a spy’, but how do you know this? ”
They got married in prison and were detained in 1995 for 11 years before being free. They traveled around the country and eventually divorced. However, Perrowin said he cared for her in his last year in Arizona. There she died of what he called an alcohol-related illness. “She’s as cute as a button,” he said.
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