Auburn Journal from Auburn, California • 4

PAGE A-4 AUBURN JOURNAL Sunday, October 13, 1985 9 FSSD silent cihmk allegations if 'Mormon Mafia By Catherine Gewertz UPI Reporter LOS ANGELES By most accounts, Richard W. Miller was a dismal failure as an FBI agent and ev eryone Knew it. he mention of his name prompted joRes and peals of laughter, yet he held one of the FBI's most coveted jobs. Miller, a portly, ex-communicated Mormon, remained on the Soviet counterintelligence squad despite numerous professional and moral failings through the good geles, now runs the FBI's El Paso office. Last year, he filed a complaint with me Equal Employment Opportunities Commission claiming religious discrimination.

No decision has been made on the complaint. Perez testified he believes Christensen and Richard Bretzing a Mormon bishop who heads the I-os Angeles FBI kept Miller from being fired. "I wanted to fire Mr. Miller from the FBI but Mr. Bretzing was opposed to it," Perez said.

"I told him that if Mr. Miller could not lose weight for some medical reason he should be given a medical discharge and if he could, he should be fired for insubordination for not 'osing the weight as other agents are required to do." Perez said Bretzing told him to "let Mr. Christensen handle it." "I believe that happened because they are both Mormons," Perez said. "I saw it happen with other Mormons and only Mormons." Miller's attorneys argue that the same religious ties that cushioned him for years turned to shackles in Bretz-ing's hands. They say it was Bretzing's impassioned religious plea to "repent" on Sept.

29, 1984, that coaxed repeated false confessions from the distraught, exhausted agent. After that meeting, a tearful Miller began changing the version of the story he had revealed voluntarily to Christensen two days earlier, finally telling FBI interrogators he had given secret documents to Ogorodnikova. made, including an admission that Miller's faith was a factor in winning him the spot on the Soviet counterintelligence squad. P. Bryce Christensen, a Mormon who headed the squad, said Miller's bosses at the Riverside field office transferred him to the prestigious Soviet squad in 1981 because he needed maximum supervision.

"They also indicated they were transferring him to my squad because of our common religious background, thinking I could possibly be a role model," said Christensen, now an assistant special agent in charge in Los Angeles. The portrait of Miller that emerges from detailed testimony about his work shows an agent whose wide girth earned him several censures and suspensions without pay. His performance was good on selected projects, but his usual pattern was one of shoddiness and tardiness. One of his supervisors testified he took Miller off sensitive street work in 1982 because an FBI psychiatrist feared a mental breakdown. Miller's moral character has also been sullied by his own admissions of petty thievery and adultery.

Perez, whose testimony was laced with bitterness about the alleged favoritism, said Miller had no place in the FBI. "From my personal knowledge, he was a bumbler," Perez said. "He was in all sorts of trouble. He was more than the office joke. He was the FBI joke.

There were R.W. Miller jokes all through the office." Perez, once the second-ranking FBI official in Los An because of their shared faith and later singled him out for unusually harsh treatment including dismissal and prosecution when his misdeeds multiplied. They claim Miller, 48, was just the example the Los Angeles FBI needed to quell allegations of Mormon favoritism raised by Bernardo "Matt" Perez, an FBI supervisor who claims his Roman Catholicism kept him from being promoted. Three weeks after Miller's arrest, FBI Director William Webster said he doubted inept Mormon agents were being protected by fellow Mormons in the Los Angeles office. "Every assignment has been based on merit and I have no reason to believe that anybody offered any kind of blanket of protection," he told United Press International.

But the agency has been silent on the issue since. "It would be inappropriate for the FBI to respond to that," an FBI spokesman said recently in Washington, D.C. "The courtroom would be the proper forum to litigate that." The Mormon Church has has also refused to deal publicly with the issue. "Comment from the church on a matter in litigation would be terribly inappropriate," said Don LeFevre, a Mormon Church spokesman from Salt Lake City. Faced in court with allegations of the existence of the "Mormon Mafia," FBI supervisors responded with repeated denials.

But several startling disclosures were graces oi me ieuow Mormons wno conirouea me squaa and the Los Angeles FBI, his attorneys say. Those claims, advanced during Miller's 11-week espionage trial, placed the FBI under a rare magnifying glass, raising questions about the competency of the massive investigative agency. When the FBI handcuffed Miller on Oct. 2, 1984, he became the first FBI agent charged with espionage. The government claims he gave secret documents to his Soviet lover, Svetlana Ogorodnikova, for a promised $65,000.

He denies the charges, claiming he was trying to ap-i pear "recruitable" in an attempt to infiltrate the KGB and save his otherwise lackluster FBI career. The federal court jury was expected to hear closing arguments this week. An unusual element of Miller's defense is the conten-, tion that his Mormon supervisors coddled him for years Cigarette': Country-western star Williams dies "He tried to quit but he couldn't," she said. Williams, the first president of the West Coast-based Academy of Country Music, overcame polio as a child to become a major country-western singer and movie actor for more than 20 years. He was perhaps best known, however, for his single "Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette" which became Capitol Records' first million-selling hit.

Born in Fayette County, 111., on Aug. 23, 1917, Williams launched his music career in high school with a radio program on station WJBL in Decatur. Upon graduation, he moved to Washington state and joined a country-western band called the Reno Racketeers. NEWHALL (UPI) Country-western songwriter and entertainer Sollie "Tex" Williams, a heavy smoker best known for his tune "Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette," died following a yearlong battle with cancer, his daughter said. He was 68.

Williams, an actor, singer and band leader who also played the guitar, banjo and harmonica, died of kidney failure Friday at Newhall Community Hospital just north of Los Angeles, Sandi Aiello said. "We knew that it was coming, but that doesn't help much." Aiello said her father, who was diagnosed a year ago as having cancer, smoked two packs of cigarettes a day, dropping to about a pack a day before he died. Tex's band was a frequent guest on numerous radio and TV programs in the 1950s, including the Grand Ole Opry, Spike Jones, Dinah Shore, the Jo Stafford Show and National Barn Dance. His band split up in 1965 because, as he said, he "had no use for a band. When you have a band, you have to keep those guys working." But by that time Tex had begun to slow down the hectic pace he had lived for the past 30 years, although he continued to record and perform on his own.

Services will be held today or Monday at Eternal Valley Cemetery in Newhall, Aiello said. Williams is survived by his wife, Dallas, and Aiello, his only child, and a 3-year-old granddaughter. While in Washington, Williams met country singing star Tex Ritter, father of comedian-actor John Ritter, and appeared alongside the cowboy in a movie called "Rollin' Home to Texas." The movie launched him on a film career that lasted more than 20 years, from the 1930s through the 1950s. When not appearing in movies, Williams played as a sideman with the Spade Cooley band, which released the hit song "Shame on You" in 1943. He formed his own band Western Caravan in 1946.

The group's biggest hits, "The Rose of the Alama" and "Smoke, Smoke, Smoke That Cigarette" topped the charts in country and pop. Loyal 'Trekkies' flock to see Spock OUR SUCCESS? BIGGEST SELECTION! AT LOWEST PRICES! JUST ARRIVED! 3 NEW STYLES By Michael Collins UPI Reporter LOS ANGELES Thousands of loyal "Star Trek" fans from around the world, drawn by a chance to meet the show's pointy-eared, half-breed Vulcun, Dr. Spock, launched a "warm-up" convention Saturday to celebrate the series' 20th anniversary next year. Convention organizers said they expected more than 2,000 "Trekkies" to pay as much as $20 each to attend the event at a Universal City hotel, where scores of merchants peddling "Star Trek" souvenirs waited in anticipation. Actor Leonard Nimoy, who played the alien character Dr.

Spock for nearly two decades, will highlight the convention. Organizers said Nimoy, who is currently directing and starring in the fourth "Star Trek" movie, was scheduled to speak Saturday and today. "This is a rare opportunity to meet Mr. Nimoy," organizer Adam Mahn said. "We're very lucky to have him." The "Star Trek" television series first appeared in 1966 and was canceled in 1969 because of declining audience interest.

Since then, however, the program has been very successful in re-runs, developing a fanatical cult following in the 1970s when new fans dubbed "Trekkies" lobbied to bring the sci-fi series back to network television. Set 200 years in the future, "Star Trek" followed the adventures of the starship USS Enterprise, a cruiser-sized spacecraft whose mission included reconnaissance of previously unexplored worlds and transporting supplies to Earth colonies in The NBC series starred William Shatner as Capt. James Kirk and Nimoy as Spock, whose decidely green complexion, pointed features, totally logical mind and lack of emotion immediately made him a favorite among viewers. "Trekkie" conventions have been held annually since the 1970s, but Malin said next year's event will be a "major celebration." "This is just sort of a warm-up," Malin said of the weekend festivities. "Next year will be the really big celebration." Malin said the 1986 anniversary gala is planned for June 21 and 22 at the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim.

Young and old fans of the legendary series and subsequent movies were drawn Saturday from all over the United States and as far away as Tokyo, Malin said. "Some of these are people who have been watching the show for 20 years." Attractions at the convention include a trivia contest for those who "think they know everything there is to know" about the classic science-fiction show and its characters. There was also a costume contest, a screening of the third "Star Trek" movie, an audience participation play and slideshows about the series. Malin said his firm, Creation Conventions, has been producing "Star Trek" get-togethers and similar conventions for 15 years. "1 "ANNA" Suede cowhide Tl leather, It.

brown, heel Hudson interview airs today Enjoy watching your favorite team on our Wide Screen TV! 25 Hot Dogs Enjoy Monday Night Football here too! TUESDAY TALENT NIQHT Cash For Talent! pear, he said, "I wouldn't miss it. You can count on me," she said. "I'll never forget the last time he arrived here in Carmel. It was heartbreaking. He didn't say anything about his illness, only that he had been suffering with the flu, and it had caused him to lose weight," Day said.

When Day suggested calling off the taping until Hudson felt better, the actor replied, "Forget it. I came up here to work with you again, and that's exactly what I intend to do," she said. "If not for my deep faith, I would feel much sadder than I do today," Day said. LOS ANGELES (UPI) Actor Rock Hudson's last television interview, shot three months before he died of AIDS, will air today on the cable TV show "Doris Day's Best Friends," a spokewoman for the program said. The segment was taped in Carmel on July 15, less than three months before Hudson, 59, died at his Beverly Hills home of the deadly immune system disease Oct.

2. Day says in the introduction to the segment that when she first began taping for the show "the person I wanted most was Rock Hudson." When she called Hudson to ask him to ap THE WINE CELLAR 150 Sacramento St. Historic Old Auburn 823-0373 Aubum's Coziest Cocktail Lounge "MARNA" Smooth golden brown cowhide, leather heel and sole. Third term for murderer HISTORICAL FLAMISH HUTCH Bevelled glass door Handcarved solid oak doors and rails Outstanding workmenship "RACK" Smooth black cowhide leather, stacked leather heel and sole. i i i NEVADA CITY (UPI) A Reno man serving two life terms for first-degree murder without possibility of parole was sentenced Friday to another life term for a California murder.

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