Why Was Accused Spy Miller Retained? : Case Casts Doubt on FBI Rating System

Richard W. Miller was a Spanish major at Brigham Young University with thoughts of becoming an elementary school teacher when the FBI showed up to recruit on campus in Provo, Utah, in 1963.

Miller’s recruiters thought the young Mormon student had the makings of a good FBI agent and persuaded him to change his plans for the future.

On Dec. 31, 1963, J. Edgar Hoover signed a letter offering Miller a probationary appointment with the FBI and instructing him to report for duty in Washington on Feb. 24, 1964.

A year later, the FBI had reason to question its early assessment of Miller’s potential as an agent. His first assignment was to the FBI’s San Antonio, Tex., office, and Miller’s boss was not impressed.

“He is willing and enthusiastic in his work. However, he has required a great deal more supervision than the average new agent,” W.J. Brooning wrote in Miller’s first FBI performance rating in 1965.

“He handles less than the average volume of cases with more supervision than average. He not only has difficulty with his paper work, but also in handling his investigations,” Miller’s first boss added.

Nonetheless, Miller received a rating of “satisfactory” that year, the FBI’s usual judgment for first-year agents. During his 20-year career with the FBI, he also was rated “excellent” in 11 annual reviews.

Miller’s trial on charges of passing FBI documents to the Soviet Union, which went to a jury in Los Angeles last week, raised almost as many questions about the FBI’s rating system and handling of Miller over the years as it did about Miller himself.

As the jurors deliberate the case, officials in Washington and Los Angeles are continuing their own examination of what went wrong in the case of the first FBI agent ever charged with espionage.

“Maybe he shouldn’t have been retained,” U.S. Atty. Robert C. Bonner said in his closing remarks to the jury. “At best, Mr. Miller was a mediocre FBI agent. . . . The FBI perhaps didn’t move as swiftly and as surely as they might have in the beauty of 20/20 hindsight.”

But, Bonner said, even Miller’s strongest critics within the FBI had no suspicions that in addition to being an inept agent, Miller would later reveal he also had been a dishonest agent for years.

To Miller’s superiors, the major problem for years had been his weight as well as his increasing marital problems, which led to his excommunication from the Mormon Church in 1984 for adultery. Only after his arrest did he inform the FBI that he also had sold FBI information to a Riverside private investigator, embezzled funds intended for FBI informants and even shoplifted candy bars from a 7-Eleven store near the FBI’s offices in Westwood.

While Bonner did not suggest how the FBI could avert another Miller case, the FBI has been reviewing ways to tighten internal security and explore changes in personnel policies since Miller’s arrest.

One option was to push forward with a controversial policy of unannounced spot polygraph testing for all FBI counterintelligence agents, and agents said the FBI secretly began instituting that simple change on a limited basis soon after Miller’s arrest.

“I think the polygraph could go a long, long way toward being a good deterrent,” said Herb Clough, an ex-agent who once headed the FBI’s Los Angeles office and now is an executive with a private security firm. “It was proposed before, but never instituted in the last 10 years.”

The FBI refused to discuss the implications of the Miller case until the jury has reached a verdict--if then. But some former agents, nostalgic about the J. Edgar Hoover era, said a better solution than spot polygraph testing would be tightened disciplinary standards for FBI agents.

“Miller would have been fired with prejudice--no sympathy, no nothing--if he had pulled some of his stunts under Hoover,” said one ex-agent who later became a Los Angeles judge. “Hoover demanded that all details be adhered to and felt that compliance with even the minor things would assure there would be no major violations.”

But Hoover remained head of the FBI until his death in May, 1972. Not only had he hired Miller, he had kept him as an agent for eight years during which time Miller lost his FBI credentials for the first time. He personally approved a hardship transfer for Miller from the FBI’s Tampa office to Los Angeles in July, 1969.

The reason for the hardship transfer was that the second of Miller’s eight children, a son named Drew, then just a year old, had contracted meningitis the previous year while Miller was stationed in Puerto Rico. The boy lost his hearing, and the Millers needed to find a special school for him.

Miller, who had spent two years in Puerto Rico after serving previously in New York as well as San Antonio, requested assignment to the Los Angeles office after his son’s illness to be near the John Tracy Clinic in Costa Mesa. He was transferred instead to Tampa.

“That was the turning point for Richard,” Miller’s wife, Paula, said in an interview. “We’d been in New York for two years, then Puerto Rico. He was happy. Everything was going well, and we had our three little boys. Then we went to Tampa. We were talking here the Middle Ages. They didn’t have any special facilities for Drew.”

Miller appealed directly to Hoover for the Los Angeles post.

“I came out to California and I wrote to Richard, ‘I still love you, but I’m not going back to Florida,’ ” Paula Miller continued. “That’s when he wrote to Hoover for the hardship transfer. From then on, I think they had him red-tagged as a troublemaker.”

During Miller’s trial, FBI official Patrick Mullany disputed that claim, saying it was common for Hoover to personally approve such moves and that the FBI would never begrudge a hardship transfer because of a serious family problem. Mullany suggested Miller’s problems resulted from his own conduct after the move to Los Angeles.

Miller, who was born in Wilmington, had grown up in Lynwood, so the assignment to Los Angeles was a homecoming. Before heading off to Brigham Young University, he had graduated from Lynwood High School and spent two years on a Mormon mission in Texas. He had also met his future wife in Los Angeles.

“I was 11 and he was 16 when we first met,” Paula Miller said. “It was at the Lynwood ward of the . . . church. I was a little girl with pigtails and he was our ward teacher. Then we both ended up at Brigham Young and started dating. We were married Feb. 7, 1964, just before he reported to the FBI. Our honeymoon was going to Washington.”

Early in his first years in the Los Angeles office, Miller was reprimanded for selling Amway products out of the trunk of his FBI car. Still, he received mostly “excellent” ratings for his work until 1976, when a supervising agent named Homer A. Porter Jr. gave him only a “satisfactory” rating for three straight years.

Attempting to explain the FBI’s rating system, Mullany testified that about 90% of the FBI’s 8,000 agents received ratings of excellent. He said a satisfactory rating “would be somewhat of a warning to an agent he was not performing to the level of other agents.”

Porter’s own testimony in the Miller trial suggested that the “satisfactory” ratings he gave to Miller reflected an even lower assessment. He said he tried to have Miller fired on at least three occasions for poor judgment, bad work habits and failure to keep his weight in line with FBI standards.

Miller was subsequently assigned to the Riverside field office of the FBI, then transferred back to Los Angeles in December, 1981.

Miller’s family eventually settled in Valley Center in San Diego County, although Miller lived in Lynwood during the week.

Hoping that his work might improve under the supervision of a fellow Mormon, non-Mormon FBI officials placed him on the Soviet counterintelligence squad headed by P. Bryce Christensen.

While Miller’s lawyers claimed that Mormon officials coddled Miller for years, Miller’s trial established that it was under Christensen and Richard T. Bretzing, a Mormon bishop who arrived as head of the Los Angeles office in 1982, that Miller came closest to being fired.

He was suspended without pay for a week in September, 1983, because of his weight, which ballooned at times to 250 pounds, compared to the 180 he weighed when he entered the FBI. For his height of 5 feet, 10 inches, FBI rules established a maximum weight of 193 pounds.

By the time of his arrest on Oct. 2, 1984, along with convicted Soviet spies Svetlana and Nikolai Ogorodnikov, Miller had been suspended for another two-week period and was on probation because of his weight problems. One agent testified at his trial that Miller had told him Bretzing was out to fire him.

But that had not happened yet. Instead, he had been taken off his usual cases and assigned to a job monitoring FBI wiretaps, often complaining that he found the work meaningless and unworthy of an agent of his experience.

“What happened--for good or bad--was that the FBI finally started lowering the boom on him,” Bonner told the jury last week. “Maybe, in hindsight, that exacerbated the problem. When the FBI really came down on him and threatened to fire him, he became disgruntled and he felt unjustly treated. That was the state of Mr. Miller’s mind in May, 1984, when he met Svetlana Ogorodnikova.”