Booze Blurs Memory in Miller Case, Spy Says

Convicted Soviet agent Svetlana Ogorodnikova, testifying that she was drunk almost every day for two years and frequently suffered alcoholic blackouts before her arrest as a spy, claimed loss of memory Monday about two meetings with Richard W. Miller in 1984 when she allegedly tried to recruit the former FBI agent for the Soviet Union.

She also denied ever seeing any secret FBI documents found in Miller’s Lynwood house shortly before his arrest Oct. 2, 1984--including a copy of the FBI’s Positive Intelligence Reporting Guide--which Miller allegedly gave her to relay to the Soviet KGB.

Ogorodnikova, 35, said she could not recall the details of an Aug. 5, 1984, meeting at a Malibu restaurant at which Miller claims she identified herself as a major in the Soviet KGB and offered him “a lot of money” for information.

“All those months, I was drunk every day. . . . I was always drunk,” she said.

Code Names Recalled

Nor could she recall another meeting three days later at which she allegedly introduced her meatpacker husband, Nikolai, to the former agent as an “important money man” in Soviet intelligence.

She did recall, however, that Miller used two different code names when leaving messages for her at her home--Boris and Pedro.

“He said he would change his voice and use the name Pedro so that my husband wouldn’t recognize who was calling,” she said, adding that Miller spoke in a Spanish accent while posing as Pedro and a Russian accent while using the name Boris in his phone calls.

Ogorodnikova was sentenced to 18 years for espionage conspiracy in June and her husband received an eight-year sentence for the same crime, after both pleaded guilty.

Her heavy drinking began in 1982, Ogorodnikova said, at the end of an alleged love affair with FBI counterintelligence agent John Hunt, now retired, who has testified that he was trying to recruit her as an FBI informant during that period, but was never sexually involved with her.

“I started to drink from the moment when I broke up with Hunt,” Ogorodnikova testified last week. “I wanted to forget everything.”

Fifth Day on Stand

Starting her fifth day of testimony as the first defense witness in Miller’s espionage retrial, Ogorodnikova resumed her account of her drinking problem as it progressed during the summer of 1984, when she, her husband and Miller were allegedly conspiring to pass secret FBI documents to the Soviet Union.

Frequently telling the jury that she could not remember crucial conversations and events that followed her first meeting with Miller on May 24, 1984, Ogorodnikova said that besides drinking heavily, she had begun taking large amounts of Valium and other pills.

“I always took all kinds of pills,” she added. “The doctor gave me lots to cure my nerves. In August, I was looking after an old woman. I was taking her pills, too.”

While Ogorodnikova said she could not remember conversations with Miller in early August, she gave a vivid account of a trip to the Soviet Union a month earlier, where she met in Moscow with a man she identified as Anatoly.

Testifying that the man identified himself only as being with “the government,” Ogorodnikova said the Moscow interview focused on Hunt, rather than Miller.

Trip Proposed

“I told him we were meeting, but not very often, but we were still friends and had a close relationship. He told me, ‘Svetlana, what do you think? Can you invite your friend, Mr. Hunt, for a trip abroad?’ ”

While in the Soviet Union, Ogorodnikova testified, she was given permission to visit her mother in her hometown of Iefrimov, a village outside Kiev. While there, she said, she was “beaten up” by the town’s local militia, but said she could not remember what caused the incident.

“It’s a small town,” she said. “I went with the husband of my aunt at night to a place where people were dancing and showing films. I can’t remember what happened, but they took us and beat us up--the militia, the police--and they told me in the morning I would be dead.

“They put me on a bed,” she said, crying softly as she testified. “One policeman sitting on me holding my hands. Other pulling my hair, hitting my head against the wall and I was all in blood. They told me I was an American whore.”

Ogorodnikova said she recounted the meeting to the mysterious Anatoly after returning to Moscow. “He said not to get upset. It was just a mistake,” she said. “Anatoly said I shouldn’t hold this against him--they took me as if I was an easy woman. That’s all.”

Ogorodnikova said she passed the information about Anatoly to both Hunt and Miller when she returned from Moscow, but could not recall their responses.