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Union also was modified, and the major targets were changing, too, so the once perceived
necessity for covert actions was lessening, and the nature of what was needed to be
known was also changing and so too the means of doing these things were changing.
The great success of satellite imagery and the collection of anything that was
electronically conveyed – telephones, telegraph, messages of that kind – took on the
highest priority and the biggest amounts of money expended on that sector – satellite
coverage had the highest yield for military intelligence. So-called HUMINT was under far
greater control.
Q: That’s H-U-M-I-N-T, which means human intelligence, which means spies, people you
bought to give information.
MILLER: What was interesting, I’d say, about post-1975 presidents, in all presidents
since that time up to Bush, is they understood, fully, not only the vocabulary of
intelligence but they had a sense of its limitations. It wasn’t a gee-whiz, whiz-bang kind
of game, they had some sense of its value and limitations.
Q: Part of that, of course, came from John F. Kennedy, when he was …
MILLER: Deceived and misled.
Q: On the Bay of Pigs. He learned never, never to complete trust those bastards again in
the CIA and the Pentagon, the assurances that he got.
MILLER: Yes, and the whole Bay of Pigs exercise that we’ve seen from the postmortems
showed his wisdom in looking at his own Cabinet, and in different ways
depending on the importance of the issue and the pressures on a particular secretary of a
department. That was extremely illuminating and what it shows, in part, is that the airing,
pf a dangerous crisis even in the Cabinet room, with a large group, a group large enough
and competent enough to raise contrary views is extremely helpful.
Q: We’re going through a period right now, in December 2003, particularly the conflict
in Iraq, where there is concern that maybe one power, being particularly the Pentagon,
under Rumsfeld, is dominating and overwriting a lot of contrary views, particularly those
of Secretary of State Colin Powell, and others. The full story isn’t out there, but it is
developing right now.
MILLER: Yes. The intellectual capacities of a president is a defining factor. The
willingness to sit down and hear a variety of arguments and study them varies from
president to president, as we have seen. This only underlines the wisdom of not allowing
any president to have sole access to anything that touches on great power. There have to
be checks and balances in place even in time of war.
Q: How did you find – did you have – during the time you were there, did you have any
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