Could you be James Bond?

Karen Neville

James Bond fantasies can easily unravel as Michael Smith reveals in his latest account of spies and secret lives

The popular image of a spy as epitomised by James Bond all too often leads people to imagine they can be spies.

FBI Special Agent Richard Miller was supposedly a professional paid to look for spies, but he was 48, seriously overweight and widely expected to be fired for a series of lapses that included leaving the keys in the door of the FBI offices overnight. He did have one potential asset.

Svetlana Ogorodnikova, a slim, pretty, blonde Russian, had emigrated to the US in the early 1970s hoping to become a Hollywood actress. She was all too happy to play a Mata Hari role by helping Miller to recruit the KGB man as his own agent, and turn himself into a hero, a top spy.

The KGB officers in San Francisco were rightly suspicious and rejected the approach. But their bosses in Moscow ordered them to go ahead. When the KGB said yes, Miller and Ogorodnikova celebrated and ended up making love. “It was just something that happened,” Miller said. “She was a very attractive woman. It just sort of came with the territory. I had a James Bond kind of fantasy.”

But the fantasy was spiralling out of control. The KGB sent Ogorodnikova to Moscow to be briefed on what to do and it was agreed that Miller would be paid $50,000 in return for handling over anything the KGB wanted. Ogorodnikova took Miller to the Consulate-General for a meeting with the KGB boss, but the normally teetotal FBI officer was so nervous that he had a few drinks to calm his nerves and became very drunk. He got out of the car in the full view of the FBI surveillance team watching the building, who photographed him with Ogorodnikova and soon identified him.

The FBI set up a surveillance operation against them Operation Whipworm – she was Whip, he was Worm. They bugged Miller’s and Ogorodnikova’s phones and cars, recording an agreement to fly to Vienna to seal the deal. But the trip never went ahead. They were both arrested and jailed.

* Read more stories about spies who never became famous in Michael Smith’s book The Anatomy of a Spy, published by History Press