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

came directly to the State Department from OSS. The Soviet analysts and the Middle East
experts, were highly valued. They really had a superb group of experienced, brilliant
analysts, even though their filing systems were often of the shoebox variety.
Q: I can remember I was in INR, I think in ’67, and I had the heart of Africa, and I had
just taken it and there was a reported coup against Haile Selassie. I had to go down to
the basement of the State Department and borrow a flashlight to look in a bunch of,
literally, shoeboxes to find the papers.
MILLER: People like Hal Sonnenfeldt and Baraz were writing excellent analyses of the
Soviet Union. There were some really astonishing intellects of the kind that reflect the
closest parallels, in the outside world, to the world of Smiley and his colleagues in the
great Le Carré spy novels.
Q: A spy that came in from the Cold War …
MILLER: Yes, and the woman in charge of shoebox memory that Smiley went to, saying
“What do you know of Karla …?”
Q: Were we seeing – at that time you were looking at Iran, did you see a – this is well, 15
years before the overthrow of the shah, but did you see a stable, destabled, troubling
situation there, when you were looking at this?
MILLER: No, I said there’s a coming revolution, and I even titled some dispatches, “The
Coming Revolution.” An Iranian friend of mine, who I still am very close to, Hossein
Mahdavy, who I had met at Oxford when I was a student, wrote an article for Foreign
Affairs, which I helped get into Foreign Affairs, called “The Coming Revolution in Iran.”
He laid out the difficulties of democratic groups under the shah and the pressure that
difficulty was creating in society, and laid out with remarkable accuracy what eventually
happened.
My view, based on my direct experience in Iran was that the shah was imposed, that he
was not popular, that the vast majority of Iranians wanted more openness, and a share of
governance. The Shah would be removed if he didn’t respond to the people.
Q: Did you run across in this as you were – at your level, but right above you, was there
an almost entrenched Iranian club that felt the shah would go on forever?
MILLER: Yes, there was. There was the shah’s “linchpin of the stability group.” That
was the phrase that was used in Iran policy documents. Their argument was, this is a
traditional monarchical society and had been for thousands of years. This is the way it has
been and the majority of the Iranian people are used to it. The democratic idea is a
western idea. It wouldn’t work in Iran. Further, we have good relations with this shah. He
does what we want. We put him there. He’s our man.
70