THE F.B.I.'S MOST UNWANTED SPY CASE

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000201350039-2
• Release Decision: RIFPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 5
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: January 19, 2012
• Sequence Number: 39
• Publication Date: February 10, 1985
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

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NEW YORK TIFIES MAGAZINE
10 February 1985
THE FB.I'S MOST
UN%YANTED.. SPY
CASE
By Judith Cummings
KNOW YOU. YOU DON'T KNOW ME, BUT I WANT TO
meet you." The woman's voice on the telephone was
baroque, as gilded and grooved with Slavic accents as a
Faberge egg. With that introduction began a series of
events that would startle the American and Russian
espionage establishments.
Richard Miller listened to the caller that day last May but
shrugged off the invitation. There were other, more pressing
things to do at the busy Los Angeles office of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation that spring morning than to meet, for
no good reason, with one of the thousands of Russian
immigrants recently settled in the area.
If the portly, rumpled F.B.I. agent had responded with
the same indifference two days later, when, he recalled,
the mysterious woman phoned again, he might never have
become the first F.B.I. agent to be accused of agreeing to
give classified national-defense information to a foreign
government. But early last October, Richard William
Miller, a 20-year veteran of the F.B.I., was accused of spying for the
Soviet Union.
The first trial growing out of this case is scheduled to open next
month, with the woman on the telephone, Svetlana M. Ogorodnikov,
and her estranged husband, Nikolay Ogorodnikov, as defendants.
They are charged with conspiracy to commit espionage. This trial
will be followed by a second = Miller's - and the two are expected to
etch a picture of trust and betrayal, sex and money, of some of the
quirks and vulnerabilities of secret foreign-intelligence operations,
and of how a leading American investigative agency responds when
those accused of spying include one of its own. .
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much is known from official
records: Miller and Svetlana
Ogorodnikav, a blond, lean-fea.
tured woman said to seem, at
times, a striking beau y,
quickly became lovers.
Whether this romantic liaison
developed into a clandestine
me e*d-g^ld deal, as the Gov.
eminent charges, to transfer
secret F.B.I. counterinteL-
gence files into the hands of
Soviet intelligence services, a
Federal jury must determine.
EVEN HIS FAMILY MAKES
no grand claims for distinction
in the life of special agent Mlll-
er. His wife, Paula, a school-
teacher and aspiring writer
who said she abandoned a
beginner's job offer at the
Washington Post 21 years ago
after Richard told her the
F.B.I. objected, says that a
capsule
ildd be that "he's of his life
would
a nice
everyone in the world says he's
a nice guy." Paul, at 19 the old.
est of the Millers' eight chit.
dren, calls his father "a teddy
bear...
Richard Miller was born in
1936 in Wilmington, a working.
class section of Los Angeles,
and was educated through jun.
for college at nearby public
schools. Paula passed her girl.
hood in the same neighborhood.
Her mother and young Richard
worked together at a toilet-seat
factory, and the older woman
would sing the praises of the
nice young man who, like her
own child, had been reared in
the Mormon -faith. Paula and
Richard later were students to
gether at Brigham Young Uni-
versity in Utah, where Miller
majored in English and took a
minor in Spanish. After
graduation they married.
The case raises questions with compelling relevance to national-se-
curity considerations - including questions about how a man with
Miller's official record of indiscipline and lack of judgment could
have been assigned to a job that gave him free access to national de-
fense and espionage information; about the internal workings of the
F.B.I. in general, and about procedures for monitoring Soviet
i migreg. Interviews with the Miller family and others familiar with
the case have brought some new information to light, including some
details of Miller's early years.
There is a curious coincidence in this case with that of Christopher
J. Boyce, a California youth who was convicted in 1977 of selling to
the Russians military secrets gleaned from his job with an important
defense contractor. The Boyce case is the subject of the new movie
"The Falcon and the Snowman," based on the book by Robert Lind-
sey. Boyce, like Miller, had little obvious accomplishment to recom-
mend him for high-security responsibilities - except, perhaps, that
he fit the mold: Boyce is the son of a former F.B.I. agent; Miller, a
Mormon, is a member of a faith that, in a changing America, has
held steadfast to traditional concepts of patriotism and duty.
Whatever the outcome of the raffia t1,.- - -
In the first interview since
her husband's arrest, Paula
Miller said that the F.B.I. re-
cndted Richard at Brigham
Young in 1964, as it di I numer.
ous other young Mormons
graduating in the early 1960's.
The bureau n .eded men who
were fluent in Spanish and
"had clean backgrounds," she
said, and young Mormons who
had learned the Spanish lan-
guage to aid their required mis-
sionary work tended to fit the
bill. Miller had no other firm
plans.: he career of "a profes-
sional man" in J. Edgar Hoov.
er's F.B.I. was appealing.
Miller thereafter had many
postings, all of them requiring
Spanish: to San Antonio, to
New York, to Puerto Rico,
Tampa, Fla., and finally, in
1969, to Los Angeles, where he
worked on routine criminal
matters. Because one of his
sons, Drew, now 17, had be-
come deaf as a result of a child-
hood infection, Miller re-
quested and was grante3- a
transfer to the town of River
side in the citrus growing re-
gion east of Los Angeles. It was
near a special school.
But as Drew began to blos..
som in the carefully chosen en-
vironment, his father began
having increasing problems.
For Years, Miller, at 3 feet 10 or
11 inches, weighed more than
200 pounds, well over the
recommended weight. His per.
sonnel record is full of admani-.
tions to lose weight, to conform
to the image of a G-man that
was created by Hoover and em-
bedded in the public mind by
television "agents" like Efnm
2imbalist Jr. But Miller could
not or would not lose weight.
(After he was arrested, he ad.
witted to investigators that he
had often hung out for two or
three hours at a stretch at a
7-Eleven store where be stuffed
himself with candy bars for
which he did not pay while he
read comic books.)
More serious, though, his job
performance was poor and, ac-
cording to a former superior in
Los Angeles, "needed close su-
pervision." The place to which
he was transferred for that su-
pervision was the F.B.I.'s for.
eign counterintelligence unit in
Los Angeles, a multinational
metropolis studded with high.
security national-defense con-
tractors and a prime target for
spies of every description.
Miller was assigned to inter-
view Soviet emigres and to-do
paperwork.
Meanwhile. Miller, who had
moved his family to a 16-acre
avocado ranch they shared
with his in-laws, seemed to
have developed some other
ambitions. Miller related to
the investigators, and the
Federal court now has on file,
accounts of several other inci-
dents of petty thievery. In one
case, Miller sold 'six-foot
roller devices for muscle
relaxation that his wife's
uncle had invented-and pock-
eted the money. He also pock.
eted money that belonged to
his wife's grandmother, once
a check for $113. He has also,
according to this file,
skimmed money in amounts
of $500 to $1,000 that he was
supposed to have paid an eld-
j erly informant code-named
Mary. In addition, he ran
checks of auto-registration
records and F.B.I. criminal
indexes for, a private investi-
gator in Riverside for as
much as $500 a run. In Janu-
ary 1984, Miller has admitted
in court, he was excommuni.
sated from the Mormon
church for adultery with an
unidentified woman. . -
Miller, whose annual salary
was more than $40,000, was to
have retired in two years, and
his wife said that his dream,
the only one she could recall
his having had in his life, was
to start a second career as a
teacher of Spanish. But all
that has been changed and he
is now in Federal Correc-
tional Institution at Terminal
Island, as is Nikolay Ogorod.
nikov. Svetlana is in the
women's jail in Los Angeles.
Miller has told the court
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3
that what he was trying to do,
before he was placed under
arrest by the top officials of
the Los Angeles F.B.I. office,
was to redeem his failed ca-
reer and bring honor to the
F.B.I. by cracking a spy case.
He said he intended to turn
Svetlana Ogorodnikov into a
double agent, or otherwise to
use her and her husband to in-
filtrate a unit of the K.G.B.
I F RICHARD MILLER AP-
pears to be a man without
determined goals, Svetlana
Ogorodnikov seemed to know
exactly what she wanted.
Adam Uribe remembers her as
"a knockout." Uribe was Niko-
lay Ogorodnikov's supervisor
for the last eight years at the
Hoffman Brothers Meat Pack-
ing Company, where Nikolay
was a packer. Uribe had social-
ized with the couple on several
occasions, had been to their
apartment, and used to see
Svetlana when she visited
Nikolay at the plant. "She
knew exactly what to wear,
how to match it, how to walk it,
and when she got it together
she was really beautiful,"
Uribe said in an interview.
There was something else
for which she had a visible
flair. She, as well as her hus-
band, a Soviet Jew, apparently
burned with the spirit of free
enterprise. They arrived in the
United States as refugees in
1973 and received a routine im-
migration and security check.
They became highly visible
among the 15,000 people in Los
Angeles's Russian immigrant
community for the Soviet mov-
ies they obtained and
promoted at movie houses in
the West Hollywood area,
charging $5 a head. Depending
on their own political views,
the local amigras regarded the
couple's films as either
"propaganda" or "culture."
Yet by 1983, Svetlana Ogo-
rodnikov was collecting wel-
fare payments for herself and
her 13-year-old son, Matthew.
She had separated a year
earlier from Nikolay, whom
she married in the Soviet
Union in 1971. Last August,
Svetlana notified the appropri-
ate county office that she and
her husband were back togeth-
er.
Joseph Russo, a vice presi-
dent at Hoffman Brothers, said
that the Ogorodnikovs were
"always very anxious to get in-
volved in different business
transactions" and that he was
amused by it, given the cou-
ple's habit of openly lauding
the communist system, a
behavior pattern mentioned by
many others who knew them.
Three or four years ago,
Russo said, the Ogorodnikovs
came to him about an elabo-
rate machine they told him
they had imported at a cost of
$15,000 from the Soviet Union.
They said they were going to
manufacture a Russian meat
pastry, which Russo nick-
named "Russian ravioli," and
that they wanted Hoffman's to
market it. Svetlana had even
cooked up a sample at the
meat plant. The next thing be
knew, Russo said, Nikolay was
claiming that the machine did-
n't work, and cursing up a
storm about Soviet technologi-
cal abilities.
Meanwhile, the Ogorodni-
kovs were engaged in various
lawsuits. The bunkerlike build-
ing that is the underground ar-
chives of the Los Angeles Su-
perior Court contains the
records of a number of law-
suits for damage claims, usu-
ally for personal injury, that
the Ogorodnikovs filed over the
last decade. Barry J. Krasner,
a lawyer who represented the
Ogorodnikovs for a while,
remembered several of the set-
tlements. He said that Mrs.
Ogorodnikov got $250 once
from the settlement of a den-
tal-malpractice suit, and
$22,500 from a Beverly Hills
woman's insurance company
for the couple's claim in a rear-
end auto collision, a common
type of claim that is probably
settled out of court hundreds of
times a day in Los Angeles.
But there was another side to
their lives, too. Svetlana Ogo-
rodnikov was known to the
F.B.I. in Los Angeles at least
since 1980, when she began of-
fering what one official called
in an interview "good informa-
tion" to the bureau. But at
other times, according to the
bureau, her information could
not be relied upon and, worse,
she showed signs of instability.
Prosecutors on the spy case
told Federal District Judge
David V. Kenyon, who is slated
to be the trial judge, that Mrs.
Ogorodnikov tended to make
wild statements when she had
been drinking. They said that
while she was talking to a su-
pervisory agent in 1983, she
claimed that she was dying of
breast cancer and that she had
slept with the late Soviet pre-
mier, Yuri V. Andropov, dur-
ing one of her visits to the
Soviet Union.
She aroused the suspicions of
the F.B.I., resulting in her sur-
veillance, because she made
frequent trips to the Soviet con-
sulate in San Francisco, known
to American officials as the
key base of Soviet intelligence
operatives on the West Coast.
Acquaintances reported that
Mrs. Ogorodnikov also made
frequent trips to the Soviet
Union. Other emigres said it
was very unusual for a refugee
to do so.
When F.B.I. agents searched
the Ogorodnikovs' apartment
at the time of their arrest, they
uncovered a cache of the spe-
cialized tools of the espionage
trade, among them conceal-
ment devices, microfilm, code
books and secret writing im-
plements. If the American
Government is correct in its
estimation, Svetlana Ogorod-
nikov was a "swallow," the
picturesque term used by the
K.G.B. fora specialized kind of
operative, an appealing
woman set in flight to subvert,
through sex, men of opposing
intelligence services. Svetla-
na, although she denies being a
spy, has told the court that she
earlier had had an affair with
one of Miller's colleagues.
It was not long before the
relationship between Miller
and Svetlana Ogorodnikov
turned to talk of obtaining se-
cret documents. Miller said,
according to F.B.I. notes, that
after his first meeting with
Svetlana, at a restaurant in
Marina del Rey last May, they
had sex almost every time
they were together. He had fi-
nally agreed to meet heron the
strength of her promise to fur-
nish information on the Rus-
sian immigrant community,
he said. Her initial information
proved to be faulty, but she
promised bigger fish and
Miller said he got the feeling
that "she was trying to recruit
me." He said he thought he
could "make" a case on her, a
big case.
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He said he decided to create
"a scenario" in which he told
her he was unhappy with his
work, that he had serious
financial problems and that he
was worried about a possible
divorce. After several meet.
ings, Svetlana told him she
was going to Moscow at the
end of June for a monthlong
stay to report to Soviet mili-
tary intelligence, the G.R.U.
After her return, she contacted
him again in the second week
of August and they resumed
meeting.
She told Miller that the Soviet
Government was willing to pay
a great deal of money for
F.B.I. intelligence files, ac-
cording to Miller's statements
to the F.B.I. At one point, Svet-
lana offered to give him the
equipment he would need to
breal: into his superior's safe.
Miller told her it would take
,.one or two million dollars" to
secure his cooperation. On the
night of Aug. 15, he went with
her to her apartment in a run.
down building in West Holly-
wood where he was introduced
to Nikolay. The two men went
to the building's garage, and
they discussed money and a
trip out of the country to de-
liver documents. The sum they
agreed on was $65,000 in gold
and cash.
Miller accompanied Mrs.
Ogorodnikov on a trip to San
Francisco, where she told him
she had to deliver canisters of
film, and on Aug. 25 she en.
tered the Soviet consulate with-
out him. She later told him that
they had been photographed by
Soviet agents. They continued
to develop a plan.
Then, on Sept. 26, according
to the summary notes of the
Miller interviews, she and
Miller made final plans for a
trip to Vienna. She told Miller
he was to meet there with "Mi-
khail," a general of the Soviet
G.R.U. Telling the ever-dishev-
eled Miller that she wanted him
to look dapper and "European"
for the Vienna meeting, Mrs.
Ogorodnikov took him on what
the prosecutors call a shopping
spree. She had already bought
him a pair of red Italian shoes
and, incidentally, some gym
togs to help his weight-loss
campaign. And, on the 26th, she
bought him a $675 Burberry
trenchcoat.
The following day, Miller ap.
proached his superior, P.
Bryce Christensen, the head of
the counterintelligence unit,
and told him of his dealings
with the Ogorodnikovs. He had
voluntarily come forward, he
later told one of his F.B.I. in-
terviewers, because he felt he
had taken the operation as far
as he could without official ap-
proval.
Many questions must be an-
swered at the trials about what
incriminating actions might
have taken place during those
encounters between Miller and
Svetlana Ogorodnikov. Miller
was questioned and underwent
polygraph tests by the F.B.I.
repeatedly during five days in
late September and early Octo-
ber after he approached Chris.
tensen. Over the course of
those days, his account
-hanged from denials to state-
-ents that were increasingly
damaging. F.B.I. officials,
when they announced on Oct. 3
the arrests of Miller and the
Ogorodnikovs, said that Miller
had admitted passing a 25-page
classified document titled "Re-
porting Guidance: Foreign In-
telligence Information," to
Svetlana. Miller, however, in
the words of summary notes by
an F.B.I. agent of an interview
conducted on the evening of
Oct. 1, had "indicated that he is
so exhausted by the interview
process that he sometimes
feels that he is ready to admit
to anything just to get the pro-
cess over."
i "In fact, he stated," the sum-
mary went on, that "toward
the end of one of his interview
sessions on Oct. 1, 1984, he indi-
cated to his interviewer some-
thing to the effect, 'Just give
me the confession; I'll sign
it!' '
Perhaps the most damaging
of the statements Miller made
to his interviewers were these:
^ Miller on Oct. 1 told his in-
terviewer that he now
remembered giving Svetlana
the Reporting Guidance docu.
ment.
^ Miller said he remembered
telling Svetlana that she
could take his badge and
credentials to show to Soviet
consular officials to prove
that she was indeed dealing
with an F.B.I. agent.
^ Miller admitted that a
hoard of classified documents
that agents recovered in a
search of his Lynwood bunga.
low had been collected by him
to serve as a pool from which
he would feed material to
Soviet officers abroad.
^ Miller, complaining that he
was feeling exhausted and
frustrated, according to the
notes, elaborated his protest
in that evening interview on
Oct. 1. He had said that he
was told by his interviewers
so often that he had done a
certain thing "that he is
beginning to believe that he
actually did what they are
saying he did."
M ILLER'S ARREST
as an accused spy
slammed his fellow
agents with the force of a .38-
caliber slug. Men and women
trained in the necessity for
emotional detachment were
embarrassed, incensed and
collectively shaken to a degree
unknown before within the Los
Angeles office.
One agent, who requested
anonymity, demanded rhetori-
cally the reasons a man with
Miller's poor reputation as an
agent could have been placed
in such a sensitive job by the
leadership.
Miller's defense lawyers,
Joel Levine and Stanley I.
Greenberg, insist that this rage
fatally poisoned the Bureau's
investigation of Miller and in.
spired the investigating agents
to "bad faith and deception." A
Federal judge, David Kenyon,
has flatly rejected the defense
lawyers' claim of bad faith, but
the notion that objectivity
could have been clouded re-
mains troubling.
For example, one man who
gave information to the F.B.I.,
Donald E. Levinson, now ques.
tions the F.B.I. version of his I
information. Levinson is a
Santa Monica lawyer who as
recently as last summer was
trying to help the Ogorodri ikovs
expand their film-distribution
business. Levinson approach
ed the F.B.I. offering informa- i
tion about the Russian couple
shortly after their arrests.
F.B.I. summaries written by
agents of their interviews with
T
Conbnue4
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s.
Levinson painted a damning
picture of the Ogorodnikovs.
Among other things, the sum-
maries report that Levinson
said the Ogorodnikovs' claim of
being in the film business was
"doubtful in his mind," in the
agent's words, but that they
had plenty of money to enter.
tain or travel to Moscow. They
also quoted Levinson directly
as saying the couple "lived like
pigs" and "always had some
kind of a scam" going on.
When these summaries were
recently read to Levinson by a
reporter, he unexpectedly
denied having said such harsh
things. Levinson said that their
movie business was "legiti-
mate, I can tell you that for a
fact." He said he could not
remember saying they had
ready money for trips to Mos-
cow, nor that they lived "like
pigs." Levinson also said he
could not remember using the
word "scams " and said that he
had only told the F.B.I. that the
Ogorodnikovs always had
something for which they
needed a lawyer. Levinson said
that he could offer no explana-
tion why the F.B.I. account of
the conversations differed so
markedly from his own, except
to say that maybe his words
had been "taken out of con-
text."
Miller's lawyers have not dis-
puted the outline of Miller's ac-
tions between May and early
October 1984 - not Miller's dis-
cussions with Svetlana devel-
oping a plan for him to work for
the Soviets, not the agreement
on payments, not the repeated
sexual encounters.
"The key point," Levine
says, "is that you can take
every fact in that case and in-
terpret it as meaning Richard
was out to be a spy, or that he
was trying to do what he said
he was doing. Every fact but
one: Why he walked in there
Sept. 27" and told Bryce Chris-
tensen what he was doing. Le-
vine, a quick, slender man who
is a former Federal prosecutor
here, said there is no evidence
that Miller had any idea his ac-
tivities with Svetlana were
being investigated by the
F.B.I. before the moment he
approached Christensen.
Miller chose that moment to
inform his superiors, Levine
said, because Svetlana had just
paid for their travel arrange-
ments to Europe. Miller knew
she could not have paid on her
own, the lawyer said, so that
act meant to him that the con-
tact he was waiting for had
been established with highly
placed people in Soviet intelli-
gence.
Miller also knew that he
would need official F.B.I. back-
ing to take any further his plan
to recruit or compromise the
Ogorodnikovs, his lawyer con.
tends, and he had expected to
get it.
Levine also stresses another
issue, one that is specific to the
F.B.I. Los Angeles office and
that :hey have tried to make a
major issue at the trial. It is a
contention, which had surfaced
in the usually tight-ranked bu-
reau even before the Miller
case broke, that the number of
Mormon agents in positions of
power in Los Angeles has led to
favoritism toward other Mor-
mons. The head of the F.B.I.'s
office in Los Angeles, Richard
T. Bretzing, and Bryce Chris-
tensen are both Mormons.
Bretzing, special agent in
charge of the F.B.I. Los An-
geles office,- is a Mormon
bishop in his own community in
Los Angeles.
Miller's defense team has
made much of a discrimination
suit by a former assistant spe.
cial agent in charge, Matt
Perez. Perez has filed a com-
plaint with the Federal Equal
Employment Opportunity
Commission asserting that
Bretzing had discriminated
against him because he is
Catholic and not Mormon.
Miller's defense contends
that undue Mormon influence
was the reason a man of Mill-
er's failings was assigned to
counterespionage, a unit
headed by a fellow Mormon.
But in the end, his defense
maintains, it was also the rea-
son for his prosecution, as a
..pawn' ' in a purported politi-
cal move to dispel talk of Mor-
mon favoritism.
In her defense, Svetlana Ogo-
rodnikov denies that she is an
agent of the Soviet Union or
that she has done anything to
further that country's intelli.
gence actions. Her lawyers,
Brad D. Brian and Gregory P.
Stone, maintain that she was
an F.B.I. informant and had an
affair with Miller while per-
forming in that role. They have
indicated to Judge Kenyon that
they intend to develop before
the jury such issues as the
F.B.I.'s use of informants and
purported government miscon.
duct, both of which could have
the effect of putting the bureau
on the defensive.
Nikolay Ogorodnikov has as-
serted the simple premise that
he did not conspire with his
wife or anyone else to get clas-
sified documents, and that he
never saw or even heard of the
"Reporting Guidance" papers.
One of the most puzzling
questions to be answered about
the case is why Miller, as he
contends, thought he could in-
filtrate a K.G.B. cell, in view of
his admittedly poor record as
an agent. Levine said it was be-
cause his client was, in his
view, "not very bright." "He
didn't even get the raincoat,"
Levine said, amused at the
idea.
Miller had only watched the
Russian woman put a deposit
on the coat in "layaway" at a
stylish shop, where it was to
stay until she could pay it off.
After the pair was arrested,
Government agents picked up
the size 50 long trench coat and
held it as evidence. ^
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