1 The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign ...

was doing to me and I set the rules of what CIA personnel could do. The basic rule was
they could do nothing without telling me first and had an obligation to keep me fully and
currently informed.
Q: Well, I mean, sometimes you want to cross – where do you go for advice and all. I was
interviewing Phyllis Oakley, and she was the head of the Intelligence and Research
Bureau, which was State Department's intelligence thing, and she was excluded from
briefing Secretary Albright. They'd say, "Well, Secretary Albright has already been
briefed by a CIA person." This is where you start running into – but that's a judgment
call on the part of the secretary of state.
MILLER: It's a mistake that she wasn't included.
Q: Yes, it was a serious problem, but it shows how this is an ongoing battle all the time.
MILLER: I'll tell you, before I went to Ukraine, of the briefings that I had. Of course, the
directors have to be directed, the chief of operations and down the chain to country. My
station chief was someone I knew from the Iran times. We worked very well together, and
his successors were just as good, just as helpful. So I think the experience that I had in
this case, maybe it is a little different than for most ambassadors, gave me the ability to
handle this particular question in the field. I knew quite a bit about the intelligence world
from the experience I had, particularly in Iran, but also the great experience of the
intelligence committee from 1975-1981.
Q: This whole investigation was taking place when?
MILLER: Between 1975 - 1976.
Q: Was Iran looked at? I mean, you must have.
MILLER: Yes, yes.
Q: Because this is the place where sort of the State Department was frozen out and the
CIA had close ties to the SAVAK, and, oh, he's a flag understood. I mean, it was not a
good situation.
MILLER: We looked at all of the instances of covert action. We had about a dozen
hotspots at the time, in 1975, and we looked at them all in depth as case studies. We did
very thorough case studies, and in depth.
Q: What about Iran? Was this sending up warning signals to us about the relationship
between the CIA and the Iranian ...
MILLER: No, the pattern was consistent. It was the same noise that was coming out of
Iran from the embassies and the analysts here. There was an opposition, they said, but it's
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