Ex-FBI Man Will Take Center Stage in Spy Melodrama

The two Soviet emigres--a hot-tempered meat packer and his adulterous wife--were never more than bit players in an espionage melodrama that focused on the misadventures of the first FBI agent ever charged as a traitor.

Nikolai and Svetlana Ogorodnikov were not the primary targets of the massive investigation launched last year when the FBI first learned that one of its agents was a possible Soviet spy.

The main target was always Richard W. Miller, a counterintelligence agent with a dismal 20-year career who had been the subject of office ridicule for years.

Even in their own spy trial, which ended last week two months after it had begun, the Ogorodnikovs were upstaged by Miller’s two-week performance as a witness against them, when he appeared at times to be almost boasting of his own stupidity.

In a plea bargain negotiated with federal prosecutors, Ogorodnikova pleaded guilty Wednesday to one count of conspiracy to commit espionage, in exchange for an 18-year prison sentence. Her husband was sentenced to eight years on a similar plea.

Within 24 hours, the focus had shifted back to Miller and plans for the Aug. 6 start of his own trial on charges of passing secret FBI documents to the Soviet Union in exchange for the sexual favors of Svetlana Ogorodnikova and the promise of $65,000 in gold and cash.

There had been 27 days of testimony in the Ogorodnikov trial, and they had been filled with the most intimate details of Miller’s sexual relationship with Ogorodnikova and his less personal association with her husband.

But the trial, which ended Wednesday before the prosecution had even finished presenting its evidence, left many questions unanswered, and it remained unclear whether Miller’s trial would finally resolve those remaining issues.

Although Ogorodnikova admitted conspiring with Miller to pass secret documents, one crucial question still disputed was whether Miller had actually given any secret FBI documents to her during their four-month relationship that began May 24, 1984.

Also unanswered was the extent of the damage, if any, that may have been done to national security, and the value of the information that may have been relayed by Miller to the Ogorodnikovs.

How the FBI learned of Miller’s involvement with the Ogorodnikovs remained another unknown, and government officials said it will stay secret for reasons of national security.

For the FBI, there were also more embarrassing questions, first raised when the three accused spies were arrested last Oct. 2 and renewed with Miller’s recent testimony and the preparations for his coming trial.

Foremost was why the FBI had continued to put up with Miller’s performance as an agent for as long as it did, and why he had not been fired instead of being placed in a counterintelligence job where he could potentially cause serious damage to the nation’s security.

As the trial of the Ogorodnikovs ended, feelings of embarrassment and grim anger at Miller’s involvement in the alleged conspiracy were as strong among FBI agents in Los Angeles and Washington as they were when he was first arrested.

Colleagues Bitter

Even the guilty pleas entered by the two Soviet conspirators were not enough to alter the continuing bitter mood of many of Miller’s former colleagues.

“We certainly felt some sort of satisfaction in that we discovered this ourselves, investigated it ourselves and brought it to prosecution,” Assistant FBI Director William Baker said in a telephone interview from Washington.

“But that’s about our only solace,” Baker added. “This has been a tough one for us.”

As the trial of the Ogorodnikovs opened April 24, the defense lawyers had already made their strategies known.

Ogorodnikova, 35, who once had been an FBI informant, was portrayed as an emotionally troubled alcoholic with a low IQ who had once been in love with another FBI counterintelligence agent, John Hunt, and who was on the rebound from an alleged affair with Hunt when she met Miller.

During Miller’s eight days of testimony at the trial, Ogorodnikova’s lawyers argued that she had told Miller at their first meeting that she would be traveling to Moscow with her son and feared that the Soviet GRU, the military branch of Soviet intelligence, might keep her 13-year-old boy as a hostage if she did not do their bidding in an effort to recruit an FBI agent as a Soviet spy.

Comes Up With Plan

The implication of Ogorodnikova’s lawyers, Brad D. Brian and Gregory P. Stone, was that Miller had ignored the plea for help and was only interested in taking sexual advantage of the troubled Soviet immigrant until he came up with his own plan to make money by selling FBI documents to the Soviet Union.

Nikolai Ogorodnikov was represented by Randy Sue Pollock, a federal public defender, who portrayed the 52-year-old meat packer as the unwitting accomplice of his wife’s intrigues and a hard-working immigrant who had remained with his adulterous wife only because of his love for their son, Matthew.

Pollock argued that Ogorodnikov met Miller only once, and that he did so only to please his wife, not really understanding that Miller regarded him as a KGB “money man” in charge of financing Soviet spy operations in the Los Angeles area.

Ogorodnikov indignantly proclaimed his innocence even as Pollock was negotiating his guilty plea. But in his final emotional words to U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon, he confessed just enough knowledge of the conspiracy for Kenyon to accept his guilty plea as legally valid.

The opinion of sources close to the trial was that Ogorodnikov had a slight chance of acquittal because there was less evidence against him than the other defendants. But like his wife, Ogorodnikov faced a possible life sentence if convicted of the conspiracy charge.

Decide Against Risk

In the end, both the Ogorodnikovs and their lawyers felt that it was better to negotiate their sentences rather than gamble with even stiffer prison terms. But the decision was not made easily. Ogorodnikova wept during the final courtroom scene and her husband exploded in an angry tirade against American justice. Pollock also cried as her client was sentenced by Kenyon.

Watching as the two Soviet emigres confessed their guilt was Donald Stukey, head of the FBI’s Soviet foreign counterintelligence section in Washington, who had personally led the investigation of Miller and the Ogorodnikovs.

Also in the courtroom was FBI Agent Graham Van Note, who gave the operation its code name, Whipworm, a bitter reference to an internal parasite, and who supervised the massive surveillance operation with Agent Larry Torrence, under Stukey’s direction.

The agents responsible for the espionage arrests showed little emotion and had no comment as the Ogorodnikovs entered their guilty pleas. From the beginning, they had stressed the need for an unemotional approach to the investigation of Miller to make sure that no mistakes that might later jeopardize the prosecution were made.

Assigned to prosecute the Ogorodnikovs by U.S. Atty. Robert C. Bonner were Bruce G. Merritt and Richard B. Kendall, two of the most skilled trial lawyers in the U.S. attorney’s office. From the beginning, they made no effort to portray the Ogorodnikovs as professional spies, but nonetheless maintained that they were Soviet agents.

Not in Real World

“The Soviet Union will take as agents just about anybody they can get,” Kendall said in his opening statement to the jury. “In the world of fiction, the protagonists tend to be highly trained. Not in the world of facts.”

As the government began its case, Hunt was the first important witness called. It was an opportunity for Ogorodnikova’s lawyers to attempt to prove the allegations that Hunt had been sexually involved with her, but they backed away from earlier claims as Hunt steadfastly denied that there was ever any romantic relationship between the two.

Ogorodnikova had propositioned him sexually, and he had turned her down, Hunt testified. Later, he said, he decided that she was too unreliable to be a useful FBI informant and severed his relationship with her.

Following Hunt on the witness stand were more than 20 FBI counterintelligence and special surveillance agents who described in detail virtually every movement of the Ogorodnikovs and Miller from the time the FBI investigation began early last September until the three accused spies were arrested Oct. 2.

Most damaging to Ogorodnikova were FBI wiretaps that recorded conversations between her and Aleksandr Grishin, a vice consul of the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco who was identified by the FBI as a Soviet intelligence agent and an unindicted co-conspirator in the effort to recruit Miller as a spy.

Leaves for ‘Vacation’

A week ago, safe from prosecution because of his diplomatic immunity but facing possible expulsion from the United States because of his activities, Grishin left the United States for a prolonged “vacation” in Moscow and U.S. officials said they did not know whether he will return.

The trial of the Ogorodnikovs ended with Miller, already questioned mercilessly for five days by Merritt and three more days by the defense, still on the witness stand.

In his testimony, he admitted to being a thief, an adulterer and a general incompetent. But he also claimed that he was trying to salvage his otherwise disastrous career with the FBI by using Ogorodnikova to infiltrate the Soviet KGB and did not really plan on becoming a Soviet spy.

The 5-foot-10-inch former agent, far over FBI weight standards at 240 pounds, conceded that the FBI had disciplined him repeatedly for his weight problem and other transgressions and had even threatened to fire him if he did not improve his performance as an agent. At one point, he said he thought that would have been the best thing that could have happened to him.

As Miller faced his own trial, his lawyers, Joel Levine and Stanley Greenberg, had to decide whether to put Miller on the witness stand for a second time in his own defense. All sources agreed that he was a disaster as a witness in the trial of the Ogorodnikovs, and even Miller conceded that he was “embarrassed” at times by his own testimony.

Changes Testimony

Miller, changing his testimony from day to day, not only admitted lying to FBI agents before his arrest, but also admitted giving different versions of his story to the Ogorodnikov jury even as he testified.

“I changed my story on just about every facet of the thing,” he said in describing his five days of questioning by FBI agents that began last Sept. 27. “I was willing to say anything.”

At one point, asked why he had given two different accounts of one of his early meetings with Ogorodnikova while testifying in the Ogorodnikov trial, the former agent sighed and responded:

“It gets pretty tiring sitting up here answering questions as the day drags on. I think I might have faked it.”

In Miller’s trial, unlike the trial of the Ogorodnikovs, the government will present the testimony of FBI agents to elaborate on the different stories he gave during the five days before his arrest. During that questioning, Miller first denied passing secret documents to Ogorodnikova, but later changed his story.

Became ‘Recruitable’

According to the FBI, Miller not only confessed showing secret documents to Ogorodnikova at his house in Lynwood, but actually drew a map showing them the exact spot inside his house where he gave her the documents. Miller’s only hope of countering the map and the FBI testimony may be to repeat his story that it was all an unfortunate plan to convince Ogorodnikova that he was “recruitable” by Soviet intelligence.

The issue of whether Miller actually passed documents to Ogorodnikova is only one of the questions expected to surface again in his coming trial. The government can call Ogorodnikova as a witness against Miller, and if she testifies against him Miller’s attorneys may be able to reopen the issue of whether she had a previous relationship with Hunt, as she has claimed.

Greenberg and Levine charged in pretrial hearings that Miller, an ex-communicated Mormon, had first been coddled by his Mormon superiors at the Los Angeles office of the FBI, suggesting that he was prosecuted only because he had been treated too leniently in the past.

The so-called “Mormon issue,” dormant during the trial of the Ogorodnikovs, could be revived by Miller’s lawyers in the coming trial as their explanation for why he was not fired by the FBI instead of being placed in the Soviet counterintelligence unit.

U.S. Atty. Bonner will personally head the prosecution team in the second trial, his first actual prosecution since taking office more than a year ago. He will be joined by Assistant U.S. Atty. Russell Hayman.

If Miller’s trial starts on schedule, sources close to the case have speculated that it might continue into the early fall, possibly ending near the anniversary of Miller’s arrest last year.