The FBI had been following Richard W. Miller for weeks, waiting for him to slip. He was one of them, a veteran bureau man, and now he was suspected of betraying his oath and his country. A small army of agents surveilled him day and night, trying to catch him transmitting secrets to the Soviets. They tapped his car. They tapped his phones. They tapped his desk at the bureau’s Wilshire Boulevard office.
At 48, Miller had floundered and bumbled through a 20-year career, to the dismay of his superiors, who could not muster the will to fire him. Instead, they had dumped him at the so-called Russia Squad in L.A., a counterespionage unit meant to combat Soviet spying. He did not speak Russian. It was 1984, the year Moscow boycotted the L.A. Olympics, but Southern California — which did not have a Russian Consulate — was considered a backwater in the Cold War spy game.
In this series, Christopher Goffard revisits old crimes in Los Angeles and beyond, from the famous to the forgotten, the consequential to the obscure, diving into archives and the memories of those who were there.
Still, the KGB was watching, and Miller, shambling, bitter and broke, made a tempting target. He had eight children. He had debts. He sold Amway nylons to FBI secretaries while other agents sneered. He took bribes and skimmed cash from informants. He had a weakness for women not his wife, which had led to his excommunication from the Mormon Church.
He had been suspended for flouting weight regulations, stripped of his informants and demoted to monitoring wiretaps. And, lately, he’d been having clandestine trysts with a Russian emigre with KGB ties, Svetlana Ogorodnikova, in cars and cheap hotels around Los Angeles.
An FBI surveillance photo of FBI agent Richard W. Miller, in white shirt and dark pants, with Russian emigre Svetlana Ogorodnikov. Federal agents hoped to prove he was giving her state secrets.
(Bettmann Archive)
“Lonely, friendless, despised at his office, estranged from his family, alienated even from his God,” is how Paula Hill, his ex-wife, described Miller in a memoir. “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 for the massive operation to catch Miller, in the summer and fall of 1984, was “Whipworm,” a reference to an intestinal parasite. The case against him seemed damning when a wiretap captured a KGB officer instructing Ogorodnikova to lure Miller to Warsaw, which was part of the Soviet Bloc.
But in late September, Miller did something that surprised everyone: He walked into his supervisor’s office and told on himself.
Yes, Miller explained, he’d been secretly seeing Ogorodnikova, but only as part of a bold, self-styled plan to infiltrate Soviet intelligence. He would be the first FBI agent to do it. He would be a hero. He would redeem his misbegotten career and go out “in a blaze of glory,” as he would put it.
The story struck the FBI as asinine — agents just did not act that way — but could it be disproved? The bureau brass doubted prosecution was possible without a confession. At one point during five days of questioning, Miller received a lecture from Richard T. Bretzing, who ran the FBI’s L.A. office and was a bishop in the Mormon Church. He told Miller to consider the “spiritual ramifications” of his behavior under church doctrines, to repent and make restitution.
“I reminded him that he had a wife and eight children who needed someone in his position to respect, and that it was his responsibility to find the courage and the decency within himself to once again develop those attributes which would earn their respect,” Bretzing wrote in a memo.
A July 1986 photo of former FBI agent Richard Miller after his second trial.
(Larry Davis / Los Angeles Times)
Miller wept, and soon after admitted that he had given Ogorodnikova a 50-page FBI document called the Positive Intelligence Reporting Guide, an internal inventory of the intelligence community’s goals.
Charged with passing secrets for $65,000 in cash and gold, Miller became 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 religious guilt. Testifying in January 1985, Miller claimed that his supervisor’s “spiritual lecture” chilled him with the specter of eternal separation from his loved ones.
“What first came to my mind was that I am losing my family,” Miller said. “I’m not going to the Celestial Kingdom … the equivalent of going to hell.”
Robert Bonner, the former U.S. attorney who prosecuted Miller, told The Times in a recent interview that the “spiritual lecture” may have had an effect, but the effect was to induce Miller to tell the truth.
“The question is, ‘Was that a coerced confession?’” Bonner said. “I’d say baloney. This isn’t the rubber hose.”
Bonner said that Miller’s myriad flaws made him vulnerable to enemy overtures: “He had financial problems. He had zipper problems. His issues 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 did much greater damage to American interests by betraying the identity of Russians spying for America. The document Miller admitted to leaking was relatively unimportant.
“It wasn’t going to bring down the republic,” Bonner said. “It wasn’t earth-shaking as a classified document.” The KGB’s strategy was to compromise him. “One classified document, and he’s done. They have him. He’s gonna work for them.”
Hanging over the case was the question of why an agent widely regarded as incompetent was allowed to keep his job. An FBI official would testify that he tried to fire the “unkempt” Miller, but that a Mormon supervisor had protected him. Bonner’s view is that the FBI was hoping to let Miller complete his career in a position where he would not do harm.
“The easy route is not to fire them, because you’re gonna get sued,” Bonner said. L.A. was considered a small stage for spycraft, and members of the counterespionage squad “weren’t superstars like the agents in San Francisco and New York and Washington.”
So the Russia Squad seemed like a safe place to dump an agent en route to retirement. “They were trying to bury the guy,” Bonner said, “and it really came back to bite them.”
Miller’s attorney, Joel Levine, told The Times that the FBI threw the book at his client as an overreaction to its mistake in keeping him employed. “They were embarrassed,” Levine said. “The reaction to their embarrassment was to come down on him as hard as they could, to compensate for the fact that they weren’t watching him.”
Levine added: “What he was trying to do was ultimately go to his bosses and say, ‘Guess what? I was able to turn this lady around and get information from her, and now I’ll be a big hero in the bureau.’ It was a cockamamie plan, but he maintained he was serious about it. A lot of things that Richard did in his life were not well thought-out.”
Miller’s first trial ended in a mistrial, and his second trial resulted in a conviction that was overturned. The government went to court a third time, with Adam Schiff — then an assistant U.S. attorney, now a California senator — serving as lead prosecutor. Miller was convicted of espionage and received a 20-year prison term. He served about half that time and was granted early release 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 high school teacher living in Saratoga Springs, Utah. She said she believes that Miller was innocent of espionage, and that he really was trying to infiltrate the KGB.
In a recent interview, she described him as “a lousy agent,” “a terrible husband” and “a mediocre father,” but said she did not harbor bitterness toward him.
“He was a weak man, but he wasn’t a bad man, and he certainly wasn’t a spy,” she said. She added: “I knew he was unhappy at home. I wasn’t the little sweet coffee-tea-or-me wife. We quarreled a lot.” She was raising eight kids. “Nine, if you count Richard.”
And the Russian spy who seduced Miller? Ogorodnikova, along with her then-husband, Nikolai Ogorodnikov, pleaded guilty to espionage and received prison sentences of 18 and eight years, respectively.
Even so, she told “60 Minutes,” “I’m not a spy. I’m not Mata Hari. I’m not sexual maniac like people say about me. Do I look like I’m a sexual maniac?”
Locked up at a federal prison in Alameda County that at the time housed men and women, she met Bruce Perlowin, a convicted drug smuggler, and romance blossomed. He adored her high cheekbones and broken English. He said she was an unreconstructed communist who loved Josef Stalin and drank heavily.
“She said she was lieutenant colonel in the GRU,” Perlowin, now 74, told The Times, referring to the Soviet Union’s military intelligence agency. He said she also claimed to be the daughter of former Soviet leader Yuri Andropov. “This all could be alcoholic made-up stories. But in prison she wasn’t drinking. It was very consistent, and it never changed…. She was very mad that she got caught. She hated to lose.”
At the same time, she denied being a spy. “She would say, ‘I’m not spy.’ That was part of her adorable accent.”
Still, when they snuck off to a room to have sex for the first time in prison, he recounted, she inserted a pair of toothbrushes in the door to prevent guards from getting in. “She knew all these little tricks,” he said. “She’s saying, ‘I’m not spy,’ but how do you know this?”
They married in prison, and she went free in 1995, after 11 years in custody. They traveled the country and ultimately divorced. But Perlowin said he took care of her in her last years in Arizona, where she died of what he called an alcohol-related illness. “She was cute as a button,” he said.
