Miller, His Freedom Waning, Proclaims Innocence

Richard W. Miller says he tends “to eat more” when under stress, and these days the former Los Angeles FBI agent is under considerable stress.

Miller, 53, was convicted by U.S. District Judge Robert M. Takasugi on Tuesday of espionage--the first FBI agent ever found guilty of spying. His sentencing is set for Jan. 7, and he faces a maximum sentence of two life prison terms plus 50 years.

Until he learns his sentence, “R.W.,” as his family calls him, expects to experience the gnawing anxiety which, he said, partially explains why about 300 pounds now hang on his 5-foot, 10 1/2-inch frame.

“I have three months of freedom,” he said. “What happens after Jan. 7, I don’t know.”

Miller’s girth belies his personality. He appears more teddy than grizzly. In an interview this week, he betrayed a shyness, a tentativeness, in talking to a reporter. Some of this he attributed to a diagnosed hearing problem.

“It is in such situations as this, that it really clicks in,” he said.

The verdict in the nonjury trial was Miller’s second conviction for espionage (the first conviction was overturned by a federal appellate panel) and his third trial (the first, in 1984, ended with a hung jury).

In the interview, Miller again proclaimed his innocence.

“I was absolutely not a spy,” Miller said quietly. “I never was. I never will be.”

Miller served five years in prison before he was given a new trial; it’s been about a year since he posted bail and walked out of a Minnesota penitentiary. Since then, he’s assisted a private detective, helped set type for a weekly newspaper and honed his skills as an artist, cartoonist and poet.

Miller was interviewed in the small, comfortable Downey home of his sister, Maryann Deem, who sat beside him on a sofa. He spoke of the uncertainty that has pervaded his life since he was first accused, and he seemed haunted by his adulterous affair with convicted Soviet spy Svetlana Ogorodnikova--to whom, the government successfully argued, Miller passed secret documents in exchange for the promise of $65,000.

He called the affair with Ogorodnikova, now serving an 18-year prison sentence, a “dumb” thing to do and added, “It seems to get dumber as I go through the court system.”

Nonetheless, Miller said he believes a handful of FBI bureaucrats “without scruples” came down on him with a vengeance.

“They know who they are,” he said. “I’m not going to name names.”

Then Miller’s bespectacled face lit up. “I am a very fortunate fellow,” he said. “I have so many blessings I can’t count them.”

Miller explained that he was primarily referring to the fact that Takasugi, over the prosecution’s objections, let him remain free on $337,000 bail until his sentencing so he could enjoy the holiday season with his family.

Conscious of a weight problem that got him into serious trouble at the FBI, Miller said he has been riding a bicycle daily and even cycled on occasion about 12 miles to the federal courthouse in downtown Los Angeles during his trial.

But Albert Sayers, a retired FBI agent who hired Miller last year to work at his Manhattan Beach-based detective agency, said Miller sees food as an antidote for stress.

“When he’s stressed, he eats,” Sayers, the case investigator for Miller’s lawyer, said recently. “He’ll go out and buy a gallon of ice cream and eat it at one sitting.” In prison, at the Federal Medical Center in Rochester, Minn., Miller developed calligraphy skills. He proudly displayed for his visitor a series of greeting cards he produced for fellow inmates.

“Dearest Becky,” began a Miller-designed birthday card, “We have loved, we have cried, we have laughed, we have sighed. And it’s nice to recall in the Spring or the Fall, all the times we did share, all the times we did care. . . .”

Miller also is fascinated by cartoon characters. The stars of his comic strip closely resemble the ubiquitous Kilroy character of World War II vintage.

Miller also developed considerable computer skills while in prison. So far, it has allowed him to hold a part-time $8-an-hour job on a weekly newspaper, the Los Angeles Downtown News, where he used a computer to lay out ads.

The newspaper’s publisher, Sue Laris-Eastin, said she didn’t know when Miller was hired six months ago that “this was the R.W. Miller of this case.” Then, one morning before his trial started, Miller asked for a private meeting.

“He told me he was going on trial and that he wanted to keep his job,” Laris-Eastin said. “I told him it wasn’t my place to decide his innocence or guilt.”

So Miller stayed on the job, often being dropped off by Levine at the paper’s 1st Street office after his daily court appearance during the seven-week trial.

Laris-Eastin likes Miller’s work. “He’s very accurate with what he does,” she said.

Sayers, one of Miller’s former FBI supervisors, made clear he loves Miller like a brother and believes he’s absolutely innocent. And Sayers, too, said Miller performed well on the job. “The FBI doesn’t hire dummies,” Sayers said.

Miller’s downfall, Sayers suggested, stemmed from a serious personality defect--naivete.

“He could fall in a barrel of lollipops and come up sucking his thumb,” Sayers said.

Sayers described Miller as “a kind of peculiar personality . . . a kind of a loner,” Sayers said.

Miller was even uncomfortable carrying a revolver, added Sayers, a former FBI weapons instructor.

“He wouldn’t harm a fly,” he said. “He hated to carry that gun.”

His personality also played a role in Miller’s defense. His attorney, Joel Levine, painted a picture of a bumbling agent who, more often than not, tripped over his own feet.

Levine told the court that once, while stationed at the FBI’s Riverside office, Miller “even went so far as to be the last one out of the office at night and he left the keys to the office in the door when he left. And when we hear something like that, it doesn’t sound like somebody who’s an FBI agent.”

So it follows, according to Levine’s closing argument, that Miller finally got in “over his head” when his James Bond-style mission to use Ogorodnikova to penetrate the KGB backfired.

The government prosecutor, Assistant U.S. Atty. Adam B. Schiff, said the “bumbling agent” theory is his “pet peeve.”

“The defense has been pretty successful in packaging Miller in a certain way,” Schiff said in an interview after the verdict. But the portrait that emerged from testimony of his fellow agents, he said, was of a capable individual who allowed personal problems to take control of his professional life.

This was a reference to the fact that Miller, a divorced father of eight children, was being hounded with financial and domestic problems, had been the target of disciplinary action for not conforming to the FBI’s weight standards and had been excommunicated from the Mormon church for adultery.

Moreover, Miller’s dilemma went beyond personal crises, Schiff said.

“Miller had no plan of infiltrating anything,” he said. “He was an intelligent, conniving individual who chose to go down in flames because the prospects offered by Svetlana far outweighed the prospects of serving his country.”

Miller is a Wilmington native who was recruited by the FBI shortly after graduating from Brigham Young University in Utah. His children, ages 8 to 24 years, live with his ex-wife, who has remarried and resides in Utah.

Miller expressed regret over his dealings with Ogorodnikova. He said he had somehow got it into his head that he could emulate James Bond and single-handedly penetrate Soviet intelligence.

“In the movies it works; in real life it doesn’t,” he said.