The FBI had been following Richard W. Miller for weeks, ready for him to slip. He was certainly one of them, a veteran bureau man, and now he was suspected of betraying his oath and his nation. A small military of brokers surveilled him day and night time, making an attempt to catch him transmitting secrets to the Soviets. They tapped his automobile. They tapped his telephones. They tapped his desk at the bureau’s Wilshire Boulevard workplace.
At 48, Miller had floundered and bumbled via a 20-year profession, to the dismay of his superiors, who couldn’t muster the will to fireplace him. As a substitute, they had dumped him at the so-called Russia Squad in L.A., a counterespionage unit meant to fight Soviet spying. He didn’t communicate Russian. It was 1984, the yr Moscow boycotted the L.A. Olympics, however Southern California — which didn’t have a Russian Consulate — was thought of a backwater in the Chilly Struggle spy sport.
On this collection, Christopher Goffard revisits previous crimes in Los Angeles and past, from the well-known to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the reminiscences of those that had been there.
Nonetheless, the KGB was watching, and Miller, shambling, bitter and broke, made a tempting goal. He had eight youngsters. He had money owed. He bought Amway nylons to FBI secretaries whereas different brokers sneered. He took bribes and skimmed money from informants. He had a weak point for ladies not his spouse, which had led to his excommunication from the Mormon Church.
He had been suspended for flouting weight rules, stripped of his informants and demoted to monitoring wiretaps. And, these days, he’d been having clandestine trysts with a Russian emigre with KGB ties, Svetlana Ogorodnikova, in vehicles and low cost motels round Los Angeles.
An FBI surveillance picture of FBI agent Richard W. Miller, in white shirt and darkish pants, with Russian emigre Svetlana Ogorodnikov. Federal brokers hoped to show he was giving her state secrets.
(Bettmann Archive)
“Lonely, friendless, despised at his workplace, estranged from his household, alienated even from his God,” is how Paula Hill, his ex-wife, described Miller in a memoir. “An ethical man who led an immoral life, an idealist who had betrayed his beliefs. Nobody despised Richard as a lot as Richard himself.”
The code title for the large operation to catch Miller, in the summer season and fall of 1984, was “Whipworm,” a reference to an intestinal parasite. The case in opposition to him appeared damning when a wiretap captured a KGB officer instructing Ogorodnikova to lure Miller to Warsaw, which was a part of the Soviet Bloc.
However in late September, Miller did one thing that shocked everybody: He walked into his supervisor’s workplace and informed on himself.
Sure, Miller defined, he’d been secretly seeing Ogorodnikova, however solely as a part of a daring, self-styled plan to infiltrate Soviet intelligence. He can be the first FBI agent to do it. He can be a hero. He would redeem his misbegotten profession and exit “in a blaze of glory,” as he would put it.
The story struck the FBI as asinine — brokers simply didn’t act that manner — however may it’s disproved? The bureau brass doubted prosecution was attainable with out a confession. At one level throughout 5 days of questioning, Miller acquired a lecture from Richard T. Bretzing, who ran the FBI’s L.A. workplace and was a bishop in the Mormon Church. He informed Miller to take into account the “non secular ramifications” of his habits beneath church doctrines, to repent and make restitution.
“I reminded him that he had a spouse and eight youngsters who wanted somebody in his place to respect, and that it was his duty to discover the braveness and the decency inside himself to as soon as once more develop these attributes which might earn their respect,” Bretzing wrote in a memo.
A July 1986 picture of former FBI agent Richard Miller after his second trial.
(Larry Davis / Los Angeles Occasions)
Miller wept, and shortly after admitted that he had given Ogorodnikova a 50-page FBI doc referred to as the Optimistic Intelligence Reporting Information, an inside stock of the intelligence group’s targets.
Charged with passing secrets for $65,000 in money and gold, Miller grew to become the first FBI agent to be tried for espionage. His attorneys tried to exclude his confession on the grounds that he made it involuntarily, tortured by spiritual guilt. Testifying in January 1985, Miller claimed that his supervisor’s “non secular lecture” chilled him with the specter of everlasting separation from his family members.
“What first got here to my thoughts was that I’m shedding my household,” Miller mentioned. “I’m not going to the Celestial Kingdom … the equal of going to hell.”
Robert Bonner, the former U.S. legal professional who prosecuted Miller, informed The Occasions in a current interview that the “non secular lecture” could have had an impact, however the impact was to induce Miller to inform the fact.
“The query is, ‘Was that a coerced confession?’” Bonner mentioned. “I’d say baloney. This isn’t the rubber hose.”
Bonner mentioned that Miller’s myriad flaws made him susceptible to enemy overtures: “He had monetary issues. He had zipper issues. His points had been identified to the KGB, and he was focused. He was occupied with having intercourse with Svetlana.”
In subsequent spy scandals, FBI agent Robert Hanssen and CIA officer Aldrich Ames did a lot better harm to American pursuits by betraying the identification of Russians spying for America. The doc Miller admitted to leaking was comparatively unimportant.
“It wasn’t going to convey down the republic,” Bonner mentioned. “It wasn’t earth-shaking as a categorised doc.” The KGB’s technique was to compromise him. “One categorised doc, and he’s performed. They’ve him. He’s gonna work for them.”
Hanging over the case was the query of why an agent extensively thought to be incompetent was allowed to preserve his job. An FBI official would testify that he tried to fireplace the “unkempt” Miller, however that a Mormon supervisor had protected him. Bonner’s view is that the FBI hoped to let Miller full his profession in a place the place he wouldn’t do hurt.
“The simple route just isn’t to fireplace them, since you’re gonna get sued,” Bonner mentioned. L.A. was thought of a small stage for spycraft, and members of the counterespionage squad “weren’t superstars like the brokers in San Francisco and New York and Washington.”
So the Russia Squad appeared like a protected place to dump an agent en route to retirement. “They had been making an attempt to bury the man,” Bonner mentioned, “and it actually got here again to chew them.”
Miller’s legal professional, Joel Levine, informed The Occasions that the FBI threw the e book at his consumer as an overreaction to its mistake in maintaining him employed. “They had been embarrassed,” Levine mentioned. “The response to their embarrassment was to come down on him as arduous as they may, to compensate for the proven fact that they weren’t watching him.”
Levine added: “What he was making an attempt to do was finally go to his bosses and say, ‘Guess what? I used to be ready to flip this girl round and get info from her, and now I’ll be a large hero in the bureau.’ It was a cockamamie plan, however he maintained he was severe about it. Lots of issues that Richard did in his life weren’t effectively thought-out.”
Miller’s first trial resulted in a mistrial, and his second trial resulted in a conviction that was overturned. The federal government went to courtroom a third time, with Adam Schiff — then an assistant U.S. legal professional, now a California senator — serving as lead prosecutor. Miller was convicted of espionage and acquired a 20-year jail time period. He served about half that point and was granted early launch in 1994. He moved to Utah, remarried and died a free man in his 70s.
His ex-wife, Hill, now 83, is a retired junior highschool trainer dwelling in Saratoga Springs, Utah. She mentioned she believes that Miller was harmless of espionage, and that he actually was making an attempt to infiltrate the KGB.
In a current interview, she described him as “a awful agent,” “a horrible husband” and “a mediocre father,” however mentioned she didn’t harbor bitterness towards him.
“He was a weak man, however he wasn’t a unhealthy man, and he definitely wasn’t a spy,” she mentioned. She added: “I knew he was sad at house. I wasn’t the little candy coffee-tea-or-me spouse. We quarreled a lot.” She was elevating eight children. “9, should you rely Richard.”
And the Russian spy who seduced Miller? Ogorodnikova, alongside with her then-husband, Nikolai Ogorodnikov, pleaded responsible to espionage and acquired jail sentences of 18 and eight years, respectively.
Even so, she informed “60 Minutes,” “I’m not a spy. I’m not Mata Hari. I’m not sexual maniac like folks say about me. Do I seem like I’m a sexual maniac?”
Locked up at a federal jail in Alameda County that at the time housed women and men, she met Bruce Perlowin, a convicted drug smuggler, and romance blossomed. He adored her excessive cheekbones and damaged English. He mentioned she was an unreconstructed communist who beloved Josef Stalin and drank closely.
“She mentioned she was lieutenant colonel in the GRU,” Perlowin, now 74, informed The Occasions, referring to the Soviet Union’s army intelligence company. He mentioned she additionally claimed to be the daughter of former Soviet chief Yuri Andropov. “This all might be alcoholic made-up tales. However in jail she wasn’t ingesting. It was very constant, and it by no means modified…. She was very mad that she bought caught. She hated to lose.”
At the identical time, she denied being a spy. “She would say, ‘I’m not spy.’ That was a part of her lovable accent.”
Nonetheless, once they snuck off to a room to have intercourse for the first time in jail, he recounted, she inserted a pair of toothbrushes in the door to stop guards from getting in. “She knew all these little tips,” he mentioned. “She’s saying, ‘I’m not spy,’ however how are you aware this?”
They married in jail, and she or he went free in 1995, after 11 years in custody. They traveled the nation and finally divorced. However Perlowin mentioned he took care of her in her final years in Arizona, the place she died of what he referred to as an alcohol-related sickness. “She was cute as a button,” he mentioned.
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