Miller Lawyers Seek to Block Pair’s Deportation

Lawyers for Richard W. Miller, the former FBI agent accused of selling secrets to the Soviet KGB during an adulterous affair with a Soviet emigre, said they will ask a judge to block attempts to deport the woman and her husband.

Both Svetlana Ogorodnikova and her husband, Nikolai Ogorodnikov, are serving prison terms after pleading guilty to espionage charges, but the U.S. attorney’s office in Los Angeles has said that the husband could be released and face deportation as early as Jan. 4.

The wife is not expected to be released soon, but attorneys Stanley I. Greenberg and Joel Levine say she has been included in their request for a court order as a precaution.

“The potential testimony of each of these two witnesses is material and relevant to the defense of Mr. Miller” in his upcoming trial, currently set to begin May 15, Levine argued in a motion filed Monday in U.S. District Court in Los Angeles.

Federal prosecutors already have tried Miller twice on espionage charges. The first trial in 1985 ended in a mistrial when jurors failed to reach a verdict. The second, in 1986, lasted about four months.

During the trials, Miller, an excommunicated Mormon and father of eight who was constantly in trouble as an FBI agent, claimed his relations with Ogorodnikova and her husband were attempts to become a secret double agent, penetrate a KGB spy ring, return to his superiors with the news in a “blaze of glory” and rescue his failing FBI career.

The government countered that the 250-pound agent feared he was about to be fired for obesity and decided to pass confidential information to his lover in exchange for sex, $65,000 in gold and cash and a $675 trench coat.

Ogorodnikova admitted in a sealed court record that Miller had passed her a confidential intelligence document, but later, in dramatic court testimony, she proclaimed that Miller “is not a traitor to his country” and denied receiving the document.

Her husband did not testify, but Greenberg and Levine contend in their motion that Ogorodnikov provided them with information “regarding the lack of a criminal conspiracy between Mr. Miller and the Ogorodnikovs, as well as the lack of conveyance of any classified information to either of them.”

The jury in the second trial convicted Miller, and he was sent to a federal penitentiary in Rochester, Minn., to begin serving two life sentences and an additional 50 years in prison.

But last April, a federal appeals court overturned the conviction, ruling that jurors had been allowed to hear too much testimony about Miller’s failure to pass lie-detector tests during interrogation by FBI agents.

Three weeks ago, Miller, now 52, was released on $337,000 bond.