American Notes Espionage

After 21 months and two trials, former FBI Agent Richard Miller was found guilty last week of spying for the Soviet Union. A lackluster agent who was enticed into a love affair with Soviet emigre Svetlana Ogorodnikova, Miller, 49, was convicted by a Los Angeles jury of a plot to exchange information about the bureau's antispy work for $65,000 in gold and cash; his first trial last year ended in deadlock. The 20-year bureau veteran, who claimed that he was trying to salvage his career by infiltrating the KGB, faces two possible life sentences.

Miller was the first agent ever charged with espionage and the latest in a string of Government employees convicted of selling secrets. To U.S. Attorney Robert C. Bonner, the case "demonstrated graphically the KGB's effort to recruit Americans" as spies. Half the Soviet diplomatic officials in the U.S. are intelligence officers, Bonner said. At week's end the FBI supported that contention by apprehending Colonel Vladimir Izmaylov, the Soviet air attache in Washington. He had approached a U.S. Air Force officer and allegedly offered to pay for information about the Strategic Defense Initiative and other weapons projects.