Miller Was Never Told of Spy’s Tip : Lover Informed FBI She Was Under Orders From Moscow

A new disclosure that Richard W. Miller was never told of a dramatic tip to the FBI by Svetlana Ogorodnikova that she was under orders from Moscow to work as a spy surfaced Tuesday as a new defense issue in the Los Angeles trial of the first FBI agent ever charged with espionage.

Less than three months before her first contacts with Miller in late May, 1984, Ogorodnikova had told the FBI that she had been directed to start intelligence training in Moscow at some future point and was under orders from the Soviet KGB to reestablish an earlier relationship with another FBI counterintelligence agent, John Hunt.

The 35-year-old Soviet emigre, who had a reputation for volunteering unbelievable stories in previous contacts with the FBI, also told the agency that she had been directed to find an important Soviet defector, Stanislav Levchenko, who was targeted for assassination by the KGB.

Ogorodnikova delivered her information during a March 5, 1984, meeting with FBI Agents Alicia Fuentes and Rudolph Valadez. Her claims and her mysterious motives for coming forward were dismissed by Valadez with the assessment that she was “unreliable and mentally unstable,” and a similar evaluation was made by Gary Auer, chief of the FBI’s Soviet counterintelligence squad.

First Contacted

When Miller was first contacted by Ogorodnikova on May 24, 1984, he reported the initial meeting to Auer and was warned in general terms by both Auer and Hunt, who has subsequently retired from the FBI, to have no further dealings with Ogorodnikova, because of her unreliable and troublesome past dealings with the agency.

Instead of following the instructions, Miller launched immediately into a secret sexual relationship with Ogorodnikova that led to his arrest last Oct. 2. Ogorodnikova and her husband, Nikolai Ogorodnikov, have already been convicted of conspiring as Soviet agents in a plot to recruit Miller as a Soviet spy and are serving prison terms.

Details of the March 5 meeting were never disclosed during the two-month trial of the Ogorodnikovs, which ended in a June 25 plea-bargain agreement. The first mention of Ogorodnikova’s accurate foretelling of her future spy role came last week, when Miller’s lawyers, Stanley Greenberg and Joel Levine, opened their defense.

Both Valadez and Fuentes were among the early witnesses called by the defense, and they were joined Tuesday by Auer, who testified that Ogorodnikova had first attempted to reach Hunt, with whom she claimed to have had a sexual relationship.

Links to KGB

Greenberg asked Auer if he had told Miller about the March 5 meeting in which she had described her strong KGB spy links.

“The particular incident itself was not discussed,” Auer said.

During the meeting with Valadez and Fuentes, Ogorodnikova claimed that her son, Matthew, hated her and would not speak to her because of his “love for the U.S.S.R.,” where he had already begun spending his summers in Communist Pioneer camps. She said the KGB had voiced its demands for her participation in espionage during one of her frequent trips to Moscow.

Ogorodnikova said both her son and her husband hated her, because of her relationship with Hunt. She claimed that Hunt had once followed her to her Hollywood apartment. She told her FBI interviewers that her husband had pulled a gun on Hunt and that the agent had been forced to draw his gun too, but no shots were fired.

The allegations made by Ogorodnikova in March, when she unpersuasively claimed to be appealing to the FBI for advice, later coincided with many of the actual events presented by the government in the trials of the Soviet couple and Miller as circumstantial evidence of the espionage conspiracy.

Paternity Suit

Previous testimony has established that sometime in May, 1984, the Ogorodnikovs paid a Santa Monica lawyer, Donald Levinson, to attempt to locate Levchenko on the pretext that they had an unidentified friend who wanted to file a paternity suit against him. Testimony has also indicated that Miller may have been asked by Ogorodnikova to help find Levchenko, a former KGB major who ran a spy ring in Japan, before defecting to the United States.

After the start of her affair with Miller, Ogorodnikova returned to Moscow for a month in the summer of 1984, and it was immediately after her return that she allegedly told Miller that the Soviet Union would pay him vast sums of money for secret FBI documents. Miller is accused of passing at least one classified document for the promise of $50,000 in gold.