Richard Miller
On October 3, 1984, Miller was arrested with Svetlana and Nikolai Ogorodnikov, Russian immigrants who had moved to Los Angeles in 1973 to seek refuge, but who actually accessed agents of the Soviet KGB. Miller was alleged to have provided classified documents, including an FBI Counterintelligence manual, to the Ogorodnikovs after demanding $50,000 in gold and $15,000 cash in return.
Miller was a mediocre agent at best. He was described as disheveled and unsophisticated. Other agents often asked why Miller was allowed to stay at the FBI. He, at least on the surface, was not the picture of a professional FBI agent.
That portrait of Miller was more than surface deep. He took three-hour “lunches” at the 7-Elevens near his Los Angeles office, gorging himself on stolen candy bars while reading comic books. He cheated his own uncle by selling a muscle-relaxant device he’d patented, skimmed cash from Bureau coffers and ran auto-registration checks and searched FBI criminal indexes for a local private investigator at $500 per search. He was adulterous and shady in every way and even found himself excommunicated from the Latter Day Saints church.
Everything about his behavior, work product and moral choices should have alerted the FBI they had a bad apple. They missed it.
On October 9, 1990, Miller was convicted on all counts of espionage for the second time and on February 4, 1991 was sentenced to 20 years in Federal prison.
