Miller Says He Believed He Had Infiltrated KGB

Former FBI Agent Richard W. Miller told a federal court hearing Saturday that he thought his involvement with two suspected Soviet agents was the most significant achievement of his law enforcement career.

Miller said he believed he had accomplished what no other FBI agent before him had--infiltration of a unit of the Soviet KGB.

Instead, his association with the two Russians led to his dismissal and arrest on espionage charges.

During a rare weekend session in the downtown Federal Courthouse, Miller opened his testimony by speaking of a meeting he had Sept. 27 with P. Bryce Christensen, the head of the counterintelligence unit in the Los Angeles FBI office, during which Miller described his involvement with two Russian emigres as an attempt to catch them as Soviet spies.

“I was excited and enthusiastic about what I had to tell Mr. Christensen,” Miller testified under questioning by defense attorney Joel Levine. “This was the most significant thing I’d done in my bureau career. I felt what I told Mr. Christensen would be totally accepted.”

The former FBI agent also said that a “spiritual lecture” from Richard T. Bretzing, head of the FBI’s Los Angeles office, before his arrest on espionage charges made him believe he was going to lose his family and his chance of going to heaven.

Miller, an excommunicated member of the Mormon Church, said his goal was to be reinstated in the church and that he was badly shaken by the Sept. 29 private meeting with Bretzing. During the session, Bretzing, who is also a Mormon bishop, urged him to “confess” any wrongs he had committed.

“It was a blow to me,” Miller said. “It really hurt me. What first came to my mind was that I am losing my family. I’m not going to the Celestial Kingdom. In a lot of these things (in the Mormon religion), it’s the equivalent of going to hell.”

Miller, 48, took the stand for the first time in his own defense in the fourth day of a hearing called by U.S. District Judge David V. Kenyon to determine the merit of a long list of pretrial motions presented by both defense and prosecuting attorneys in Miller’s scheduled Feb. 12 espionage trial.

Kenyon scheduled the 11-hour weekend session in order to speed up the hearing process, but concluded after the hearing Saturday that at least several more days of testimony, beginning Tuesday, will be required.

The government claims that Miller conspired with Svetlana Ogorodnikova and her husband, Nikolai Ogorodnikov, to pass secret FBI documents to the Soviet Union for $65,000 in gold and cash. He is the first FBI agent in history to be charged with espionage.

Miller’s testimony Saturday about his involvement with the Russian couple was made in connection with his attorneys’ request that Kenyon dismiss all admissions made by the former agent after the meeting with Bretzing on grounds that they were not voluntary statements but the result of religious pressure.

The 20-year FBI veteran said he had no idea that the agency had been investigating him for more than a month at the time he went to Christensen. It was after that meeting that a five-day interrogation period began, ending in the arrests of Miller and the Ogorodnikovs on Oct. 2.

The heavy-set former agent, occasionally smiling broadly as he testified, said he first met with Bretzing on Sept. 28, but nothing was said about religion. Miller said he took the occasion to “thank” Bretzing for suspending him without pay for a two-week period earlier in the year because of his weight problem.

He was questioned at length by FBI agents and a polygraph expert that day and again on Sept. 29, Miller said. His belief, he testified, was that he was somehow being tested and would be given a chance to attempt to catch the Ogorodnikovs as Soviet agents.

“I was under the impression that I had done what no one else had ever done in the history of the bureau--infiltrate a unit of the Soviet KGB,” Miller said. “I thought I was going through an evaluation because of my lack of experience in foreign counterintelligence.”

But that impression changed after the encounter with Bretzing at the end of the FBI’s second full day of interrogation on Sept. 29, Miller continued.

“Mr. Bretzing told me he had something to tell me and he didn’t want me to say anything back to him. Just listen,” Miller recalled. “He said he wondered if I had considered the spiritual ramifications of what I had said . . . and that I would do well to confess and bare my soul.”

Miller said he was “really upset” after the meeting with Bretzing. That night, he was driven back to his home in the San Diego County community of Valley Center by Christensen, and the questioning resumed the next day.

It was after the meeting with Bretzing that Miller began to make statements about a variety of past transgressions that did not relate directly to the espionage charges. He began telling agents about the sale of confidential FBI information to an employee of a private investigator in Riverside, the misappropriation of FBI funds intended as payments to informants, and also said for the first time that he had provided FBI documents to Ogorodnikova.

Miller’s attorneys contend he made the statements only because he was exhausted by the interrogation process and emotionally shattered by Bretzing’s spiritual advice.

“I was spiritually, physically and emotionally disintegrated,” Miller said Saturday. “There was practically nothing left of me.”

The questioning of Miller by his attorneys was followed by cross-examination from a three-member team of federal prosecutors headed by U.S. Atty. Robert C. Bonner.

Miller admitted to Bonner that each time before his eight meetings with FBI superiors he waived his constitutional right to silence before making incriminating statements.

“Each time you were given a waiver of rights form and you signed it, didn’t you?” Bonner asked.

“Yes, but it wasn’t voluntary. It was involuntary,” Miller said without elaborating.

Bonner also attacked the credibility of Miller’s claims that he was seriously concerned with getting back into the Mormon Church.

The prosecutor brought out the fact that Miller was excommunicated for adultery with another woman in January, 1984--several months before he met Svetlana Ogorodnikova.

“This may have some bearing on Mr. Miller’s chances of getting into the Celestial Kingdom,” Bonner said in justifying the need to discuss the matter in court.

Bonner also said that Miller had an adulterous relationship with Ogorodnikova and that it continued from the time he met her in late May, 1984, until Sept. 20, and that as recently as Sept. 27 Miller had been having a sexual affair with yet another woman.

“Would you agree with me that this is not the way to regain membership in the church?” Bonner asked Miller.

“Yes,” the former agent replied.

Questioning by Judge Kenyon also joined in the questioning of Miller. “We all have our different beliefs,” the judge noted. “In the eyes of God, if you were telling the truth and nobody believed you, would you be excluded from the Celestial Kingdom?”

Miller, listening intently, responded: “In the eyes of God, if a man’s telling the truth, that’s all that’s important.”

Throughout his three hours of testimony, Miller was slow to respond to questions and seemed nervous at times. At one point, counting on his fingers to compute the number of months between his first meeting with Ogorodnikova and their last sexual encounter Sept. 20, he estimated the time at three and a half months.

“It’s four and a half months,” said Bonner.

“I can’t count,” Miller replied, smiling almost apologetically.

Christensen, also a Mormon who described himself as a “friend” of the former agent, later testified about his role as a combination chauffeur and confidante to Miller during the interrogation process and the meeting between Bretzing and Miller.

It was Christensen who drove Miller to and from his homes in Valley Center and Lynwood, later passing on statements made by Miller to the FBI agents who were questioning him. He also escorted Miller to the meeting with Bretzing.

Christensen said that Bretzing’s demeanor had been “basically straightforward” during the session with Miller. “It was Mr. Bretzing’s idea that he could speak to him and perhaps appeal to his sense of moral values . . . to get the truth,” Christensen said.

Bretzing is scheduled to be the first witness when the hearing resumes Tuesday.

The trial of Miller and the Ogorodnikovs is scheduled to begin Feb. 12.