Agent Describes Search of Miller’s Home

As the FBI was just beginning the questioning that led to the arrest of Richard W. Miller last Sept. 28, Miller did his interrogators a favor by telling them that they could search his house for secret documents and even giving them the key to his back door.

Within hours, four FBI agents had found half a dozen classified documents in the bedroom of a house in Lynwood that Miller used as a residence between weekend commutes to visit his family in San Diego County.

Even while the search was being conducted, Miller, unaware that he had been the subject of a major espionage investigation for almost a month, was telling an FBI polygraph expert that he had never passed secret documents to Svetlana Ogorodnikova and had no classified information in his personal possession.

The search of Miller’s Lynwood house was described by FBI agents Monday as the Los Angeles federal court trial of the first FBI agent ever charged with espionage entered its fourth week.

FBI Reporting Guide

Agent Douglas Moke testified that agents spent about three hours searching a desk, a built-in dresser and three cardboard boxes on the floor of Miller’s bedroom in the otherwise unfurnished Lynwood house.

Among the documents they found, Moke said, was a copy of part of a secret FBI document known as the FBI’s Positive Intelligence Reporting Guide, a secret paper on U.S. intelligence gathering objectives.

Also found, Moke and two other agents testified, was a one-page secret document titled “Development of Counterintelligence Awareness Program,” an unidentified FBI file “containing 31 pages of documents,” a secret FBI communication about Ogorodnikova and a copy of the FBI’s Los Angeles office directory, an unclassified but “sensitive” listing of all the agents assigned to Los Angeles and their squad assignments.

Miller’s decision to let the FBI search the Lynwood house as well as his family home in Valley Center was made the day after he had volunteered to his superiors that he had been involved with Ogorodnikova for months and was trying to penetrate a Soviet KGB spy ring.

Operation Whipworm

He gave his voluntary consent to the Sept. 28 search to FBI agents Graham Van Note and Larry E. Torrence after being told that they had come from Washington because of the strong interest in his story. What Miller did not know was that the agents were helping to supervise an FBI operation known as Whipworm, which had begun in early September after the FBI had learned that Miller and Ogorodnikova were involved in suspicious activities.

For almost a month, FBI surveillance agents had been following Miller, who was sometimes called “Worm,” and were also trailing Ogorodnikova, occasionally described in FBI logs as “Whip.” They were also watching her husband, Nikolai Ogorodnikov, arrested with the other suspects last Oct. 2.

When confronted by Van Note and Torrence with the FBI’s discovery of documents later on Sept. 28, Miller first denied knowledge of how they could have been found in his house, according to FBI documents already filed in the case.

During interrogation before his arrest, according to the FBI, Miller admitted not only taking the documents to his home but showing them to Ogorodnikova. Miller’s lawyers, Joel Levine and Stanley Greenberg, have maintained that Miller made his admissions under duress and never actually passed secret documents to the Ogorodnikovs, who pleaded guilty to espionage conspiracy June 25 and have been sentenced to prison.