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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.