Testimony Details FBI Role in Soviet Spy Probe : Court Hears the First of 20 Agents Involved in Massive Surveillance Operation

When accused Soviet spy Svetlana Ogorodnikova stepped from her Hollywood apartment Sept. 2, FBI surveillance agent Ronald Durkin was watching through binoculars from a parked car half a block away.

Durkin and other FBI agents followed her as she drove that afternoon to Ohrbach’s Department Store at Wilshire and Fairfax.

While some of the agents formed a perimeter outside the store to watch for a surprise exit, Durkin and Randall Wilczynski, another member of the surveillance team, followed her inside.

Ogorodnikova walked over to look at some women’s shoes and was joined by a middle-aged man. Durkin concentrated his attention on her eyes and facial expressions from a vantage point by the men’s underwear table.

Wilczynski, also pretending to be browsing in the store, kept his eyes on the hands of Ogorodnikova and the man next to her.

“They were playing with the shoes,” Wilczynski testified last week. “He put his hand inside one shoe and withdrew it, then she put her hand in the same shoe and withdrew it.”

Start of Operation

The shopping trip was early in a massive surveillance operation launched by the FBI on Ogorodnikova, her husband, Nikolai Ogorodnikov, and former FBI counterintelligence agent Richard W. Miller, all arrested on espionage charges exactly one month later.

Wilczynski and Durkin became on Friday the first of an expected 20 FBI surveillance witnesses at the spy trial of the Ogorodnikovs in Los Angeles federal court. They are expected to testify about how they tracked the movements and monitored many of the conversations of the defendants until the Ogorodnikovs were arrested. Miller is to be tried later.

The investigation began some time after Aug. 25, 1984, when Miller accompanied Ogorodnikova to San Francisco, where Ogorodnikova visited the Soviet Consulate, allegedly to deliver proof that Miller was an FBI agent willing to provide secret documents to the Soviet Union in exchange for $65,000 in cash and gold.

The details of how and exactly when the FBI learned of Miller’s involvement with Ogorodnikova have not been revealed for national security reasons. Miller was waiting at a San Francisco restaurant during the Aug. 25 visit, and it is possible that Ogorodnikova was followed there after visiting the consulate. Speculation has also focused on the possibility that some kind of electronic surveillance provided the link.

A few days after the trip to San Francisco, the investigation into Miller’s possible espionage activities began. The FBI code name for the investigation was Whipworm, a reference to an internal parasite.

Problems for the FBI

Last week’s trial testimony revealed new details of the surveillance--and some problems encountered by the FBI.

For example, during the Sept. 2 surveillance at Ohrbach’s, the two FBI agents testified, they were unable to tell if the man who met with Ogorodnikova had placed anything in the shoe. They also testified that they did not check FBI photographs to see if they could identify the man and added that the FBI made no attempt to check the shoes for fingerprints.

Wilczynski followed the man to an apartment building at 520 S. Burnside not far from the La Brea Tar Pits, but did not follow him into the building. He said that the man had been looking behind him to see if he was being followed and that the agent thought it was “too early” in the investigation to jeopardize the surveillance effort.

Government officials have said that had they determined the identity of the man, it might have been an important piece of evidence in the case.

There were other problems with the visual surveillance of the suspected spies, the testimony revealed. One was that none of the surveillance agents spoke Russian, so even when they got close enough to the defendants to hear them talking, they could not understand what they were saying.

Chance to Exercise

Durkin, who frequently observed the Ogorodnikovs walking in the area around their apartment, said that on one occasion when he managed to get close to the suspected spies near Plummer Park, two blocks from their apartment, he noticed them looking at him.

“There are some chin-up bars. I jumped over a little fence and started exercising,” the FBI undercover agent said.

In addition to the surveillance agents who followed the suspects on foot and by car, there were others listening to conversations on the wiretapped telephones in the apartment of the Ogorodnikovs in Miller’s San Diego County home in Valley Center, where he spent weekends, and in a house Miller used during the week in Lynwood that belonged to his father. Miller’s office phones at the FBI’s Westwood office were also tapped. In addition, the cars driven by Miller and Ogorodnikova were electronically bugged.

Michael di Pretoro, a San Francisco-based FBI agent fluent in Russian, was one of the agents assigned to monitor the “various electronic surveillances that we had.”

He testified about a phone call to the Ogorodnikova residence Sept. 11, which prosecutors contend was made by Soviet Vice Consul Alexander Grishin, an unindicted co-conspirator in the case who is protected by diplomatic immunity, to discuss plans with Ogorodnikova for taking Miller to Warsaw, Poland, for a meeting with Soviet KGB officials. A recording of the call was played in court.

Instructions for Travel

The male caller, speaking first in English and then in Russian, said he was calling for Ogorodnikova’s “acquaintances” whom she had seen the preceding summer, a period when she had made one of several trips to Moscow. He also said she should travel “via the itinerary known to you or via Warsaw,” adding that her “friend should bring everything he can,” a comment the government interprets as a reference to secret documents.

The start of the surveillance testimony on Friday, expected to continue for most of this week, followed testimony by Diane Baskevitch, the Russian-born operator of a Beverly Hills travel agency licensed by the Soviet Union to make travel arrangements for visitors to the Soviet Union.

Baskevitch was called by the prosecution to detail 10 trips to the Soviet Union by the Ogorodnikovs and their son, Matthew, from 1980 to 1984.

The government claims that the accused spies were permitted frequent travel to the Soviet Union although other Soviet immigrants who arrived in the United States in the early 1970s are not given permission to return to their homeland.

With considerable reluctance, however, Baskevitch conceded under tough questioning from Brad Brian, one of the Ogorodnikova’s defense lawyers, that she had falsely put Ogorodnikova’s birthplace on a visa application as Czechoslovakia and reported that Ogorodnikov was born in Yugoslavia.

On one document, she also reported Ogorodnikova’s birth date as 1940 instead of 1950. Brian contended that the Soviet Union allows emigres to return who were born before the end of World War II and has no restrictions on travelers born in other Soviet bloc countries.

Role of Hockey Player

Another witness who clearly disappointed the prosecution was a former Russian hockey player, Victor Nechaev, who played briefly with the Los Angeles Kings after moving to the United States in 1982.

Nechaev, who was involved with the Ogorodnikovs in the distribution of Soviet films within the Russian emigre community, backed away from earlier comments to Assistant U.S. Atty. Richard B. Kendall that Ogorodnikova visited the Soviet consulate twice during a trip he took with her to San Francisco in July, 1984.

Kendall, obviously exasperated, took the rare step of attempting to impeach the testimony of his own witness, but he was hampered by statements of Randy Sue Pollock, the federal defender representing Ogorodnikov. She said that the 30-year-old hockey player refused to cooperate with the defense, that he had told the lawyer that he did not care if the Ogorodnikovs received a fair trial and that “as people, they just did not matter to me.”