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

I was interested in them. Many of the religious leaders became friends. I would see them
in normal circumstances, and it was perfectly acceptable for us to be friends.
Q: If I recall, going back to my Foreign Service history, I think we lost at least one
consular officer in Iran, by a mob, who made the wrong kind of gesture – not necessarily
a rude gesture, but some how got a mob incited.
MILLER: Yes, we had one officer who was murdered by a mob. The Russian emissary
was torn apart by a mob in the early 19 th century because he was rumored to have defiled
a sacred place. It was long before the Bolsheviks. If Russians had listened to their
Oriental secretaries they wouldn’t have gotten into such a dangerous fatal situation.
Q: Keep from making the wrong kind of gestures at the wrong time.
MILLER: Most clerics were and are perfectly normal people. In Isfahan, which has
hundreds of mosques, I, because of my interest in Iranian architecture, went to every one.
I photographed them all and described them.
Q: You didn’t have any problem going in or anything like that, because –
MILLER: No, I was always welcome in the mosques and holy shrines, but I was always
very careful to have a clerical host. This was made clear to me by my Persian mentors that
I was coming into another man’s house. I was told, “He will welcome you as your guest,
but he has to welcome you.” Visits to the holy places were easily arranged.
Q: I think back to my time slightly before this, ’58 to ’60, in eastern province of Saudi
Arabia where the Wahabis, you just steered clear of the religious side because these were
not friendly people.
MILLER: Field trips were also a way of getting to know and work with other parts of our
government. I would take – I took a number of trips with spooks.
Q: You might explain, for the non-initiate, what spook is.
MILLER: An employee of CIA, usually a case officer. A characteristic of embassies and
consulates symptomatic of the structure of our foreign affairs in the 60’s, was the
extensive CIA case officer presence within embassies and diplomatic establishments. It
was – this is a reflective, after the fact thought that such a presence was a mistake,
because most of the case officers were doing things that political officers of the Foreign
Service should normally do – that is, make contacts and friends. The CIA approach was
to buy informants and information from among their contacts, which I thought was a huge
unnecessary mistake since Iran was an open society. If information was needed, it was
only necessary to ask.
Q: It’s ephemeral, anyway.
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