FBI Official Says Mormon Bias Prevented Firing of Spy Suspect

A former top official of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, testifying that he once tried to have Richard W. Miller fired for being a grossly overweight “bumbler,” charged Wednesday that Miller was protected and coddled as an agent because he was a Mormon.

Bernardo (Matt) Perez, formerly the second ranking FBI official in Los Angeles, said he was blocked from firing Miller in December, 1982, by the head of the Los Angeles office, Richard T. Bretzing, who is a Mormon bishop.

“We talked about Mr. Miller’s work record,” Perez said, recounting a conversation he recalled having with Bretzing. “From my personal knowledge, he was a bumbler. He was in all sorts of trouble. He was more than the office joke; he was the FBI joke.

“I wanted to fire Mr. Miller from the FBI, and Mr. Bretzing was opposed to it,” said Perez, who is now in charge of the FBI’s El Paso office. “He told me that I was being unduly harsh.”

Perez, a Roman Catholic who filed a religious discrimination complaint against Bretzing last year, said Bretzing told him that he should let P. Bryce Christensen, another Mormon agent who personally supervised Miller as a counterintelligence agent, handle the Miller matter.

“When he told me to let Mr. Christensen handle it, that was favored treatment in my opinion,” Perez said. “I think this was done because they were both Mormons. I also saw this done with other Mormons, and only Mormons.”

Jury Doesn’t Hear Testimony

The testimony by Perez, the strongest charge yet made about alleged Mormon influence in the Los Angeles FBI office, was heard by U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon outside the presence of the jury Wednesday in a special hearing to determine if it was relevant to Miller’s defense.

After the three-hour hearing, Kenyon ruled that Perez may repeat most of his testimony--some of which directly contradicts earlier testimony by Bretzing--when the jury reconvenes today in the closing stages of Miller’s espionage trial.

Miller, 48, was arrested Oct. 2, 1984, along with Svetlana and Nikolai Ogorodnikov on charges of passing secret FBI information to the Soviet Union. He is the first FBI agent ever charged with espionage.

The statements by Perez on Wednesday contradicted earlier testimony by Bretzing on Sept. 6, when the Los Angeles FBI leader denied that Perez had ever urged him to fire Miller.

“Didn’t Perez suggest Miller be terminated because he was an unreliable agent?” Stanley Greenberg, one of Miller’s lawyers, asked Bretzing on the stand.

“Absolutely not,” Bretzing answered.

Perez, who was involved in a bitter feud with Bretzing before leaving the FBI’s Los Angeles office in 1983, also charged that Bretzing had minimized the importance of Miller’s counterintelligence work during earlier hearings on the Perez discrimination complaint by the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

‘Their Work Is Sensitive’

“He waffled about what Mr. Miller was doing,” Perez said. “He said he was assigned to the FCI (foreign counterintelligence) but wasn’t working sensitive matters. I don’t know what he could have been doing. All of their work is sensitive.”

Despite strong objections from U.S. Atty. Robert C. Bonner and Assistant U.S. Atty. Russell Hayman, Kenyon ruled tentatively that Perez also could testify on Bretzing’s alleged statements to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission because of their apparent discrepancy with other portions of Bretzing’s Sept. 6 testimony.

Bretzing, accused of unfairly using his Mormon ties to deliver a religious lecture to Miller to “repent” before a series of damaging admissions by the ex-agent that led to his arrest, had earlier defended his action on grounds that he feared Miller had seriously hurt U.S. defense.

“I knew Mr. Miller had access to extremely sensitive information,” Bretzing testified.

Emotions heated up Wednesday between Greenberg and Bonner as the defense and prosecution battled over the issue of whether testimony by Perez should be presented to the jury.

Greenberg, charging that the government had ordered Perez not to communicate directly with the defense, unsuccessfully asked Kenyon to dismiss all charges against Miller on grounds of obstruction of justice. Bonner called Greenberg’s charges “piffled bombast.”

In his testimony Wednesday, Perez also recounted a meeting with Miller in 1982 in which he said he told Miller of his intentions to have him either medically discharged for being overweight or fired for being insubordinate.

“His appearance was slovenly. He was unkempt and dirty looking. He was fat. He was wearing black-and-white checked canvas shoes,” Perez said. “I asked him why he was so grossly overweight. I said, ‘What is wrong with you?’

Talking ‘Like a Child’

“He began talking to me like a child, saying, ‘I don’t know. I can’t get a hold of myself.’ I had seen this act before. I told him I intended to have him removed from the FBI for not losing weight and for failing to do his work.

“He said the reason he could not lose weight was because I was putting pressure on him, and if I took the pressure off, he would lose the weight. I told him he had it backwards.”

Perez, already censured by the FBI for disclosing information in connection with the Miller case, spiced his testimony with frequent bitter comment about his experiences in the FBI’s Los Angeles office.

‘I Lived Through It’

At one point, when Bonner objected that his remarks about Mormon favoritism were simply his opinion, Perez responded: “I saw what I saw. I was there. I lived through it.”

As both sides prepared for Perez’s testimony before the jury today, Greenberg and co-counsel Joel Levine revealed that they are near the end of their defense, saying they could conclude by the end of the week, a strong hint that they do not plan to call Miller to testify in his own behalf.

The Miller trial began Aug. 6 after the earlier trial of the Ogorodnikovs, who were sentenced to prison after pleading guilty to espionage conspiracy. Seventy witnesses testified for the prosecution, and 39 witnesses have been called so far by the defense.