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.