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

exception, they found intelligence committee work extraordinarily interesting and highly
desirable as a kind of professional upgrading of their work, in a sense, and it was
something they could use in their other more public world – it had a multiplier effect, and
it was, for most of them, extremely interesting, so they enjoyed it, and it was also a way
of working outside of public scrutiny, for the most part.
Q: How long were you running this committee?
MILLER: A year and a half on the investigative committee and then from ’76 on I stayed
with the oversight committee until 1981, when the Reagan election took place and I
thought I had had enough. It was a very high pressure and very demanding time and I
needed a change in 1981, so I decided to leave at that point and go to the Fletcher School
of Law and Diplomacy as associate dean and adjunct professor of international politics.
Q: Back to the committee – how did you find – when Carter came in, he really had sort of
come in with more of a populist approach, didn’t he? How did this affect you all?
MILLER: Carter was extremely helpful in a direct personal way. He had a sense of
intelligence needs; he had been a submarine commander, and he had that kind of
disciplined approach to information that really made it possible for a submarine to
survive and do its work. Carter’s people were very accessible, and on this issue of
intelligence they were open. So Carter, personally, was extremely helpful. He was
interested, he endorsed the idea of shared information, he instructed his cabinet officers to
cooperate fully, and he kept himself informed about it. I went with Senator Inouye, I
suppose we had about seven or eight meetings with Carter, the oversight committee, in
working out the final arrangements. On this set of issues the heads of the intelligence
agencies were extremely important, they were satisfied with the equilibrium that had been
achieved, and they did what they had to do to make it work.
Q: How did you find – taking two of – let’s start with the FBI. I would think, since the
Hoover legacy of collecting political dirt and all that – was that around any more? Were
you able to get to that?
MILLER: Yes, I think there was – with people like Webster, William Webster, and the
idea that there would be a term limitation on the director of the FBI, a long term, ten
years, but still not a lifetime. It was very important, that the FBI should be apolitical it
should not be used by presidents to get dirt on their political enemies. Mind you, there
was a recent background of several presidents who were very aggressive in the use of this
kind of knowledge.
Webster made a big difference. All of the post-Hoover directors were very sensitive to
what had happened to Hoover in his later years, so under Webster on the question of
constitutional protections for Americans, the FBI was really on-board and very
disciplined. The difficulties between the FBI and the CIA, the territory of where domestic
intelligence work and foreign intelligence work met, and what the boundaries were, was
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