Spying Trial Begins Amid Debate Over Threat to U.S.

The trial of the first FBI agent ever charged with espionage began in Los Angeles last week amid a continuing debate over the actual harm that might have been caused to national security by the alleged recruitment of Richard W. Miller as a Soviet spy.

Miller’s arrest in October was the first in a series of espionage cases in the country, including the May arrest of John A. Walker Jr., the alleged leader of a Navy spy ring.

Comparing the Miller case to that of Walker, one U.S. intelligence source said Miller eventually might have done “far more damage” if the Soviets had succeeded in planting him on a long-range basis as a “mole” within the FBI.

Miller’s lawyers denied that the ex-agent gave any secret documents to the Soviet Union or planned to do so, and continued to present Miller as an inept agent. They implied in their opening statements that he would have been just as much a bumbler as a Soviet spy.

Help Called Worthless

The ex-agent’s lawyers have ridiculed the charges against Miller, who faces a life sentence if convicted, saying that the one document he allegedly passed to the Soviets, a copy of the FBI’s Positive Intelligence Reporting Guide, was virtually worthless.

“If they did get hold of the Reporting Guide, it would have been the equivalent of toilet paper to the Soviet Union,” one of Miller’s lawyers, Joel Levine, said shortly after his client’s arrest. “The Russians could never have turned him into some kind of master spy. I don’t think anybody could have ever shaped him up.”

As Miller’s trial began, however, the focus of U.S. Atty. Robert C. Bonner’s opening remarks was a charge that Miller was regarded as an important recruitment target by high-ranking Soviet intelligence officials in Moscow. Bonner alleged that the Soviet KGB had plans to use Miller as a secret operative within the FBI.

Bonner charged that Miller had already been compromised by passing documents and his FBI credentials to Svetlana Ogorodnikova. She has already pleaded guilty along with her husband, Nikolai, to conspiring with Miller on behalf of the Soviet Union.

The contents of the Positive Intelligence Reporting Guide remain classified. But the document has been described as a 40- to 50-page outline of U.S. intelligence gathering objectives throughout the world.

Decision by Moscow

Bonner said that giving the document to Ogorodnikova, who allegedly later passed it to officials at the Soviet Consulate in San Francisco, set the stage for a decision by Moscow to summon Miller to a meeting in Warsaw scheduled for last October. During that meeting, Bonner said, Miller would have been “mercilessly pumped” about FBI counterintelligence activities.

Miller would then have been sent back to the United States as a Soviet spy, Bonner said, and the Soviet KGB would have achieved one of its major objectives: the planting of a mole inside the FBI.

After the lawyers’ opening statements, the government began presenting the first of an expected 60 witnesses in a trial that is expected to last two months. And the atmosphere turned emotionally charged.

Two of the dozen government witnesses called in the early stages of the prosecution’s case broke into tears on the witness stand as they gave their testimony, and the trial was interrupted Friday by a man who shouted insults at Miller and later protested tearfully outside the courtroom that there should be a death penalty for spies.

The emotional atmosphere also affected U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon, who was locked in an angry dispute with one of Miller’s lawyers, Stanley Greenberg, for most of the week, and who at one point launched into a lengthy complaint about the failure of the General Services Administration to provide the courtroom with proper microphone equipment.

Kenyon’s dispute with Greenberg was about whether Miller’s defense investigator, Albert Sayers, could sit at the defense table with Miller and his lawyers.

Of the dozen witnesses who testified in the opening week of the trial, the most important was Patrick Mullany, senior administrative assistant agent in charge of the FBI’s Los Angeles office. Mullany reviewed Miller’s personnel ratings during his 20 years as an agent, revealing that he had been rated as an “excellent” agent for seven consecutive years until receiving a “satisfactory” rating in 1973.

Casting some light on the actual meaning of the FBI’s rating system, Mullany said 90% of FBI agents were rated “excellent” when that term was in use. He said the term “satisfactory” was “somewhat of a warning to an agent that he was not performing up to the level of other agents.”

By 1984, Miller’s rating slipped to minimally acceptable and the FBI had warned him he might be fired if he did not comply with FBI weight standards. Mullany said Miller weighed 222 pounds shortly before his arrest.