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MILLER: Very ephemeral. It’s only there as long you are tolerated. There were a number
of occasions where I had friends who were being pursued by case officers in order to put
them on the payroll of the case officer. It was proprietary distinction made which I
thought was unseemly and unnecessary.
Q: Well, I would imagine that at a certain point just to get a feel for this, within a
bureaucracy, that if you took a case officer with you, you’d be reluctant to bring them up
against one of your friends or a good contact because you’re afraid – they could poison
the well.
MILLER: As it happened, no. That was certainly always a possibility, but the Iranians
knew who the spooks were. There was never any question in their mind and they saw the
United States government as a whole – whether you were a diplomat or a spook, it was
the United States. It was only after that was understood that they made a distinction about
individuals as friends or assets, and these distinctions about individual Americans were,
in the end, the most important.
Q: What about the – we’re showing an awful lot of concern, I gather, about the Tudeh
Party, being the Iranian Communist Party. How about your time in Isfahan? Did this …
MILLER: I knew all the Tudeh leaders that weren’t in prison. The shah and SAVAK, the
secret police, trained by CIA and the Israelis, and connected to other security
organizations, had the Communist movement – movements, which were several, more or
less under control. Yet, there were respected politicians who were either present Tudeh,
or lapsed Tudeh. In Iran there was debate at the highest intellectual levels on the burning
questions of social justice. They were asking, “What’s the best way to organize our
society?” Even in Isfahan there was extensive intellectual discussion about the strands or
variants of communism. There were the Chinese strands, Indian strands, there was the
Soviet version, and then there was an indigenous Iranian strand that came out of Gilan,
near the Caspian, where there was an uprising of Communists. The Communists tended
to be in the factories there, the new spinning mills and mechanical fabrication places and
where there were modern assembly lines. The new factories had networks that could be
organized in trade union kinds of social-political structures. Factory based communist
cells were most evident in Isfahan where there were thirty-two spinning factories.
The cell structure of militant subversives was the main target of the secret police. The
trade unions were difficult to deal with because they were transparent and acceptable to
the public. Trade unions were expressing their sense of social value legitimately. For the
worker, Trade Unions were a form of organization that brought them better wages and
working conditions. I knew the trade union leaders, many of whom were of tribal origin.
They were tribal leaders who could no longer lead tribes so they were leading unions.
They were people who understood the social problems of the workers many of whom
were tribesmen. This was so particularly with oil workers who were recruited from the
tribal regions where the oil fields were. As part of the intellectual firmament about the
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