FBI Ruined Miller’s Plot Against KGB, Attorney Says

Former FBI Agent Richard W. Miller could have pulled off a major counterespionage coup by infiltrating the Soviet KGB if only his superiors had trusted him--rather than deciding he was a traitor--his defense lawyer said in opening statements at his trial Wednesday.

Waving a giant color photograph of Soviet KGB Agent Alexandr Grishin, Stanley Greenberg claimed that Miller had successfully used Svetlana Ogorodnikova to convince Grishin and KGB officials in Moscow that he was a possible recruit as a Soviet spy.

The FBI was aware that Grishin was involved in a Soviet plot to recruit Miller, although Miller was not when he initially reported his involvement with Ogorodnikova last Sept. 27, Greenberg said.

“He (Miller) did not know how successful he had been,” Greenberg said, holding Grishin’s picture as he addressed the jury. “The fish was on the hook. This is the fish: Alexandr Grishin, vice consul of the Soviet Consulate. He wasn’t in the boat yet, but he was on the line.”

Record of Adultery

Greenberg, saying he did not want to embarrass Miller, nonetheless described him as an agent of a “far lower level of intelligence” than was required for his job in the Soviet counterintelligence squad of the FBI’s Los Angeles office and also conceded that the ex-agent’s record of adultery did not speak well for his character.

“He was not a perfect husband, and his wife was not a perfect wife, and the marriage was not a perfect marriage,” Greenberg said. “But Mr. Miller is not on trial for being a perfect person.

“Although in television and the movies, FBI agents are all Efrem Zimbalists, in real life, they are just as fallible as all the rest of us,” he added. He suggested that Miller was more like the comic figure played by Jackie Gleason in the 1950s television series, “The Honeymooners.”

“Get this image of Efrem Zimbalist out of your mind and substitute Ralph Kramden, without the humor,” Greenberg said.

The attorney’s three-hour opening statement was the first chance for Miller’s defense team to counter months of devastating publicity surrounding Miller’s personal life and his alleged espionage activities since U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon imposed a gag order on attorneys March 5.

Making the most of his opportunity, Greenberg argued that Miller’s involvement with Ogorodnikova last summer was an attempt to set up a double-agent plan known as a “dangle operation.” He said another FBI counterintelligence agent, John Hunt, tried the same sort of operation with Ogorodnikova two years earlier.

“What Miller tried to do was what Hunt had tried to do. Hunt dotted every “i” and crossed every “t,” and he did it by the book and it failed,” Greenberg said. “When Mr. Miller did it, in the most unconventional way imaginable, it worked.”

The problem, Greenberg admitted, was that the FBI did not believe Miller’s story that he remained a loyal agent despite months of clandestine sexual encounters with Ogorodnikova, talk between the two of providing documents to the Soviet Union for $50,000 in gold and another $15,000 in cash, a trip together to the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco last August and plans for another trip to Warsaw to meet with Soviet intelligence officials.

“Every coin has two sides, and every story has two versions,” Greenberg told the jury. “Virtually everything you see and hear in this trial is going to be a two-edged sword.

“You are going to have to decide what was in Mr. Miller’s mind. Keep an open mind. Wait ‘til you’ve heard it all.”

Planned Trip

Greenberg’s comments came at the conclusion of an opening prosecution statement presented by U.S. Atty. Robert C. Bonner, who focused Wednesday on a shopping trip by Miller and Ogorodnikova Sept. 26 in preparation for a planned trip to Warsaw Oct. 9. Miller was supposed to meet there with a man identified as Gen. Mikhail of the Soviet GRU, the military branch of Soviet intelligence.

Instead of making the trip, Miller reported Sept. 27 to P. Bryce Christensen, the assistant agent in charge of the Los Angeles FBI office, that he had been involved with Ogorodnikova and her husband, Nikolai Ogorodnikov, during the previous four months in an effort to penetrate Soviet intelligence and had taken his plan as “far as he could go” before notifying superiors.

Bonner, portraying Miller as a bumbler, a liar and a cheat, said the reason Miller revealed his activities to Christensen Sept. 27 was that he had become aware of FBI surveillance and was trying to save himself from arrest with a “bail-out story.”

“By this point in time, Miller had doubts he could get away with it. Miller decided to cut his losses and give the FBI his bail-out story,” Bonner said. “Miller was pursuing his own venal scheme and not the interests of the FBI or his country.”

License Number

Bonner said the Ogorodnikovs, who pleaded guilty June 25 to conspiring with Miller to commit espionage, had become aware of FBI surveillance by Sept. 24, when Ogorodnikova wrote down the license number of one of the numerous FBI surveillance cars that had been following her for weeks. The prosecutor added that Ogorodnikova had told Miller she was being followed.

For the first time since Miller’s arrest last Oct. 2, following five days of questioning after he told Christensen of his plans, Bonner revealed that on the afternoon of Sept. 26, Miller had encountered an FBI agent named Paul De Flores in the parking lot of the Little League ballpark where he frequently met Ogorodnikova.

“He looked directly across at an FBI car 25 feet away from him. They made eye contact, and Mr. Miller looked shocked,” Bonner said. “Miller was aware that the FBI was on to him, and he had already devised a cover scheme.”

Miller sat at the end of the defense table with his back to the courtroom, obscured from the view of some jurors as the trial entered its second day. His mother-in-law, Verna Monsen, sat in the courtroom, but his wife, Paula, was not allowed to watch the proceedings because she is a possible witness.

During a morning break, Paula Miller was allowed to speak briefly with her husband but was quickly escorted out of the courtroom after Bonner told Greenberg and co-defense counsel Joel Levine that he did not want Paula Miller seen by any of the jurors when they returned from their break.

Comment Cut Off

Complaining outside the courtroom, Paula Miller objected to her forced absence and to a ruling by Kenyon cutting off comment by Greenberg about one of the Miller’s eight children, Drew, who has been deaf since suffering an attack of meningitis while the Millers were stationed by the FBI in Puerto Rico during the late 1960s.

It was Drew’s deafness that led Miller to ultimately seek assignment in the Los Angeles area, where Paula Miller had found a special school for her son, who is now 17. Paula Miller says her husband had to go directly to J. Edgar Hoover to get a “hardship” transfer to come to Los Angeles and hurt his career at an early stage by doing so.

“Mr. Bonner doesn’t want any humanizing element in this case. He doesn’t want the jury to know that Drew is deaf or that I am here and would like to be in the courtroom with my husband,” Paula Miller said.