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

Young and his archaeologist son, T. Cuyler Young, Jr. came.
Q: He was an archeologist.
MILLER: Yes. Another extraordinary person was Wilfred Thesiger, a great explorer, and
of course all the archeologists in the region like Ezatollah Negahban, many of whom are
now gone, but some of them are still alive and working, like David Stronach, who was
head of the British Institute and is now at Berkley in California.
Q: With these connections you were developing, in the first place the language. I imagine
this was a hot house for getting into Farsi and Persian.
MILLER: Yes. Well, immediately upon arriving I had a tutor, several tutors. Since there
were very few people in Isfahan who spoke English or any other foreign language, you
had to learn Persian. It was a wonderful obligation and necessity. The atmosphere in
Isfahan was such that the rhythm of life and the language fit it. It was a good place to
begin to learn a language as subtle as Persian. The pace of life allowed me the luxury of
having tutors during the day in the office. I rarely sat for a whole day at the desk. The
paper work was minimal since we were a consulate in a very remote area. The traffic of
consular work wasn’t, even in the embassies, anywhere near the scale we have now. It
was expected that my job was to learn about Iran, so I was on the streets of Isfahan every
day. Two weeks of every month I was on the road in other parts of Iran. Over the five
years that I was in Iran I visited every part of Iran. I’ve been to every city, most towns,
and there is no region that I haven’t visited, and almost every archeological site, every
mosque. I met every major religious leaders, every political leader throughout the country.
So I knew the country backwards and forwards.
Q: Were there any restrictions or no-nos? For example, you said the governor was
incredibly corrupt, though he was a nice man. Was this a matter of reporting all the
time?
MILLER: How did I know that?
Q: How did you know that and also were you reporting that?
MILLER: Oh yes, I was reporting the issues as I understood them. Yes, I reported on
corruption and popular discontent with the Shah’s regime from the outset. To do so
wasn’t a problem for political officers in the field. It did get to be a problem for me in
Tehran. I’ll tell you about that later.
Q: I am trying to pick up now because our work in Iran later on, particularly in the 70’s,
was renowned for restrictions put on our officers about reporting. What about then?
MILLER: No restrictions. The only curbs on one’s writing were technical considerations
of formal style, punctuation, and normal editing.
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