Miller Called Himself the ‘Office Screw-Up,’ FBI Witness Testifies

An FBI polygraph expert testified in Los Angeles federal court Friday that former agent Richard W. Miller called himself the “office screw-up,” when asked why he had kept classified government documents in his house.

James Murphy, one of several FBI agents who interrogated Miller before his Oct. 2 arrest on espionage charges, said he asked Miller about the documents on Sept. 29, after they had been discovered during a search of Miller’s house in Lynwood.

“‘Well, I’m just an office screw-up,”’ Murphy quoted Miller as saying. Miller is the first FBI agent in history to be arrested as a spy.

Murphy said that Miller had denied on Sept. 28 that he had any government documents in his possession. The polygraph expert said the former agent changed his story, however, when confronted the next day with the results of the FBI’s search of his house.

‘Was Somewhat Lazy’

“He said he was somewhat lazy,” Murphy testified. “He would take documents home. He hadn’t gotten around to doing the work and returning them to the office. That was the gist of what he said.”

Murphy’s testimony came on the eighth day of pretrial hearings for Miller, 48, and Soviet emigres Svetlana Ogorodnikova, 34, and her husband, Nikolai Ogorodnikov, 51. The former agent is accused of passing secret documents to the two alleged Russian spies in exchange for $65,000. Their trial is set for Feb. 12.

The FBI polygraph expert cited Miller’s comment about being a “screw-up” as an example of Miller’s generally “flip” attitude during the first days of the five-day interrogation that preceded his arrest.

Because Miller “seemed to be taking it as a joke,” Murphy said he pointed out the seriousness of the situation to Miller on the afternoon of Sept. 29.

“I told him I thought he was making light of this, that this was an espionage investigation and he could go to jail,” Murphy recalled.

“He said, ‘Jimmy, my boy, you don’t know how serious I know this is,’ ” Murphy added.

Broke Him Down

Miller’s lawyers, Stanley Greenberg and Joel Levine, have contended that the FBI’s questioning of Miller gradually broke him down physically and emotionally and led to a series of admissions about providing documents to Ogorodnikova that led to the espionage charges.

In rebuttal to the testimony of Murphy and chief FBI polygraph expert Paul K. Minor, they presented testimony from their own polygraph expert Friday to challenge the techniques used by the FBI during Miller’s interrogation.

David C. Raskin, a professor at the University of Utah, argued that the FBI experts could not have obtained reliable results from Miller’s polygraph tests because they questioned him too long and too many times, subjecting him to stress and emotional fatigue.

The hearings resume Tuesday. U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon must decide whether to sever Miller’s trial from that of the Ogorodnikovs and whether Miller’s statements are admissible as evidence.

Attorneys for Ogorodnikova have reserved the right to offer an insanity defense on her behalf, but have not yet indicated whether they will do so.