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Q: Did the CIA officer perform consular functions too?
MILLER: Reluctantly. He was a good man. We went on many field trips together. He was
helpful. I learned much from him about CIA, and the mentality of those engaged in covert
activities.
Q: How about just the mundane – but Iranian students were the bane of most consuls
existence in Europe and elsewhere cause they were all over the place looking for visas.
Did you have that?
MILLER: I had to issue visas. It was my first post, I expected to issue visas. I issued
about 50 a year.
Q: That’s not many.
MILLER: No, and I even issued four passports, two of which I mangled in the seal
embossing machine. We had a malfunctioning hand crank machine. I couldn’t get several
of the passports out of the machine. It was a rather comic scene.
Q: So then mainly your work was …
MILLER: I was the political officer, I was the economic officer, I was the coordinator of
our mission and I was the deputy chief of mission, and I helped in communications. I did
everything. I encrypted, decrypted, acted as a courier as way of getting to Tehran and so
on. There wasn’t any consular function I didn’t do. I buried the dead. I picked up pieces
of Americans who crashed themselves into the top of mountains, put dead bodies in
embalming fluid and then put them in caskets. I got American travelers out of jail. I went
to the ports to handle shipping.
Q: How did people get in jail there?
MILLER: The normal ways, traffic accidents, or theft …
Q: Was drugs a problem at that point?
MILLER: No, not noticeably. You have to remember this was really and still is a very
remote part of the world. The only people who came through were the most adventurous
and of course, there were those who were often traveling on 50 cents a day of their own
and ten dollars of someone else’s money a day. Some travelers proved to be burdens
because they expected to be put up in your house or your apartment. Most travelers to
Isfahan tended to be wonderful people like Agatha Christie, otherwise known as Mrs.
Mallowan and her archaeologist husband. There were people like Anne K. Hamilton, the
quiet Persian scholar who was a British Political officer during the war. Also Lawrence
Lockhart, the art historian and historian of the Safavid period; Donald Wilber, and Cuyler
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