Spy vs. Spy Saga

By Alessandra Stanley. Reported by Anne Constable/Washington and Joseph J. Kane/Los Angeles

For love and money, an FBI misfit becomes a double agent

Me was middleaged, married and misunderstood. She was understanding.

They managed furtive meetings, sometimes in her apartment, occasionally at a fast-food cafe or ill-lit parking lot and, once, during a reckless, heady weekend in San Francisco. Yet theirs was no ordinary tale of frustrated needs and petty betrayals.

Richard Miller, 47, was a 20-year veteran of the FBI whose counterintelligence work gave him easy access to secret documents dealing with the activities of Soviet aliens. Apparently for love and money, he passed a broad sampling to Svetlana Ogorodnikova, 34, a Russian emigre and suspected spy for the Soviet KGB. Last week Miller, Ogorodnikova and her husband Nikolai, 51, were arrested. Miller was the first FBI agent ever charged with espionage, and his case shocked an agency that had prided itself on its professionalism. FBI Director William Webster called it "an aberration on the proud record of patriotic and dedicated service of thousands of agents throughout our history."

Miller was hardly the model Government agent. Grossly overweight (close to 250 Ibs.), slovenly and inefficient, he was transferred three years ago from a local office in Riverside, Calif, to the FBI's counterintelligence division in Los Angeles, where he could be kept under closer supervision. His glaring personal problems should have alerted his superiors: on a $50,000 salary, he supported a wife and eight children, including a deaf son, and maintained a Los Angeles bungalow and an eleven-acre farm in San Diego County. Once suspended for selling Amway household goods out of the trunk of a Government car, Miller was regarded by colleagues as a harmless, pathetic buffoon.

Ogorodnikova was almost as familiar to the FBI as Miller. She had arrived in the U.S. with her husband in 1973, and the couple clashed conspicuously with their fellow expatriates. "We laughed at them," says Alexander Polovets, publisher of a Russian-language newspaper. Ogorodnikova collected welfare, rented Russian-made films to show in neighborhood theaters, and bragged openly of her high-level Soviet contacts. FBI agents, who interviewed Svetlana often after 1980, welcomed the tidbits she freely offered about her frequent visits to the Soviet consulate in San Francisco, but never considered that the shrill, boastful housewife could actually be a dangerous spy.

Last May, Miller began meeting with Svetlana after work. As their relationship blossomed, he poured out his financial and personal woes. On Aug. 12, Ogorodnikova told Miller that she was a KGB major and asked him to sell her information. Less than a week later, in a Malibu restaurant, he agreed but demanded to meet the paymaster first. Ogorodnikova led Miller to her apartment and husband, whom she introduced as Nikolai Wolfson, a KGB operative well versed in transactions "on this level." Miller demanded $50,000 in gold; Wolfson agreed.

A week later, Svetlana and Miller drove her Mercury to San Francisco in order to hand over her reports and messages to the Soviet consulate. Among the items: a 1983 FBI handbook titled Reporting Guidance: Foreign Intelligence Information, which contains a detailed picture of U.S. counterintelligence activities and techniques. Miller had photocopied it in his office. As she dropped Miller off at a restaurant three blocks from the consulate, the Soviet spy asked him for his black leather FBI credential case containing his ID and badge to prove his authenticity to her Soviet contacts. He handed them over and waited patiently at the table for her return.

The FBI belatedly became aware of their liaison a week afterward, put them under full surveillance and bugged her phone. Agents spotted Miller handing his companion a legal-size envelope in a parked car in a darkened lot. Days later they observed him transferring a briefcase from the trunk of her car to his. Wiretaps revealed that Miller had agreed to fly to Vienna with Svetlana on Oct. 9 to meet with a high-level KGB official and that he had already secured his passport, she their tickets. On Sept. 28, Miller was called into the Los Angeles field office, then given lie-detector tests, fired and arrested. A search of his bungalow uncovered an embarrassing array of classified documents, including the original file on Svetlana Ogorodnikova. In her rundown Hollywood apartment, investigators found a spy kit, complete with microdots land cipher pads.

As the FBI tried to determine the full extent of the security breach, critics -- inside the agency and out "questioned how so unreliable a man could have been assigned to sensitive security work. Says a retired agent on the West Coast: "Why was he on that job, of all jobs? You should bury him working draft dodgers or stolen cars." One theory, which has been raised by many agents but with little substantiation, is that Miller, who was a Mormon, had been given some protection by fellow Mormons within the bureau. He had been transferred to intelligence after the Los Angeles division director, Richard Bretzing, also a Mormon, was appointed. One FBI co-worker charged that Bretzing and Bryce Christensen, another Mormon who is Miller's supervisor, might have taken Miller in to protect him from getting fired. Both men vehemently denied any favoritism. Miller, in fact, had been excommunicated from the Mormon Church three months before.

Just one day before Miller was arrested, federal authorities nabbed two other suspects in unrelated, but equally intriguing, cloak-and-dagger cases:

· In 1981 a U.S. Army sergeant stationed in West Germany was approached by a Soviet agent code-named Misha. He reported the contact and was instructed to play along. Reassigned to the Army Intelligence Agency at Fort Meade, Md., the sergeant was twice sent by the Soviets to their Mexico City embassy. Along with $6,500 and a promise of a monthly $500 retainer, he was given a miniature tape recorder, secret writing paper and a deciphering code for microdot messages.

He was then ordered to read from classified documents into the tape recorder, remove the tape, hide it in a cigarette pack and hand it to a 67-year-old female courier. He was assured that the FBI "would never suspect an older woman." Agents seized the courier as she was preparing to board a plane for Czechoslovakia. Her real name turned out to be Alice Michelson, an East German citizen who taught Marxist studies at an East Berlin institute.

· Samuel Loring Morison, too, hardly seemed an obvious suspect. A quiet and scholarly analyst at the Naval Intelligence Support Center in Suitland, Md., he is the grandson of the Pulitzer-prize-winning naval historian Samuel Eliot Morison. He was arrested last week after his fingerprints were found on the originals of three classified satellite pictures of a new Soviet aircraft carrier that appeared in the Aug. 11 issue of a British defense magazine.

Morison earned $5,000 a year as a part-time U.S. editor of Jane's Fighting Ships, one of a series of authoritative defense reference books. He gave the photographs to the company's new magazine, Jane's Defence Weekly. British intelligence sources claim that Morison leaked the pictures out of "patriotism." Morison, they suggested, wanted to publicize Soviet shipbuilding to help the Navy lobby in Washington. Morison's office typewriter ribbon, examined by FBI agents, told a different story. In a letter to Editor Derek Wood, Morison complained that the naval office job was a "pit." Wrote Morison: "My loyalty to Jane's is above question."

-- By Alessandra Stanley.

Reported by Anne Constable/Washington and Joseph J. Kane/Los Angeles

With reporting by Anne Constable/Washington and Joseph J. Kane/Los Angeles