Dead Drops and Disguises - A Female CIA Officer in 1980s Moscow (441)

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0:37Susan:This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast instead of doom scrolling? Smart move. Another smart move? Getting help from one of State Farm's 19 ,000 local agents when you choose to bundle home and auto. Bundling. Just another way to save with the personal price plan. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings, and eligibility vary by state. They had these full masks. And so my mask was made to make me look like, and now I resent this, by the way, a 60-year-old Russian woman.

1:16This is Cold War Conversations. If you're new here, you've come to the right place to listen to Cold War history. please make sure you follow us in your podcast app so you don't miss future episodes i explore the remarkable journey of cia operations officer susan miller who transitioned from a quiet childhood in california to the thrilling world of espionage what began as a joke application to the cia turned into a life-changing opportunity the episode delves into a rigorous training including paramilitary courses that prepared her for the realities of fieldwork and thrilling stories from a time in Moscow during the 1980s.

1:56Susan also gives tradecraft insights on surveillance techniques and the unique challenges faced by women in intelligence roles during that era. I'm delighted to welcome Susan Miller to our Cold War conversation. I went to college at California Polytechnic San Luis Obispo. Got a degree in journalism. Went down to the journalism school to get an application to different newspapers. And I found an application instead to CIA. And I sent it in as a joke. And 40 years later, it wasn't a joke, clearly. Not at all. Not at all. And when you were a kid, what did you think you were going to do for a job?

2:37All I know is I wanted to go overseas. I found California so boring. I wanted to get out of it. You know, as a kid, I'm going to say this is starting more like eighth grade, ninth grade, as you're starting to think about what you want to do for a career. And so that's what I wanted to do, something that would get me out there. I knew I wasn't going to be an engineer. I liked math. I was good at math, but I didn't love it that way. I knew I wasn't going to be a scientist, and this sounded like a really fun thing. And so I got into the J school at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo and I ended up by the end of it being one of the editors on the daily newspaper that they had then.

3:16And you fancied yourself sort of like a roving journalist getting international scoops all around the world. I did. I wanted to live overseas. You know, believe it or not, when you live in California your whole life, you're like, this is so boring. I want something different. And so when I saw this thing for CIA, I'm like, I think I can go overseas. And then they interviewed me. They came to the they have interviewers stationed like in many of the big states. And, you know, and so she came and we met in a room in Morro Bay. And she told me at the end of it, she goes, OK, I think I'm going to move you forward.

3:57But you've got to know from now on, you've got to tell people that this interview didn't work. You're okay to tell your parents and your brothers, but nobody else. And I'm like, okay. And then the next thing was bringing me out to Washington for a polygraph, for a psychological test, and for, you know, some additional type of things, physical tests, things like that. And so they flew me out to Washington, I want to say like a month later, for all of that. And that was loads of fun. the first time I'd ever been on the plane by myself without my parents and all the rest of the stuff. And I got here and I landed and I kind of got here a couple of days early.

4:40And I stood on the, you know, the mall, you know, right in front of where the White House and the Capitol building is. I'm like, I'm in the right place. I really enjoyed it. Yeah. And so then I then I went to started about a week later. Yeah. What age were you then when you arrived in Washington? Twenty one. My birthday falls in September, so I landed here and I actually started at the CIA when I was 21. Presumably the CIA also did some vetting of your background and asking neighbors and stuff like that. They did. And that was pretty funny because a lot of the questions, I think because I was in California, according to my friends who called me later, and were about how much pot did she use?

5:30How much drugs did she use? This, that, and the other thing. And I'd never done a drug in my life. Yes, I will admit to underage drinking, but I'd never had done a drug in my life. And yeah, so that was a lot of the questions were about that. Has she ever tried to subvert the United States? And one of my friends laughed out loud, I'm like, how? I'm from California? Now, most of the states hate California. They wouldn't mind if we were subverted, you know. Anyway, it was pretty funny. Brilliant. Brilliant. So this is 1985. What sort of roles are they offering for women in the CIA at this point?

6:10So here's the interesting thing. The person who interviewed me was a woman. And she actually said to me, one of the things that we are really focused on is getting more women into this line of work. At that point, she had already told me it looked like I could be hired as long as I passed the security stuff. And so I asked her at that time, you know, well, how many women are going to be in it? And she goes, well, you'll probably be about, you know, a tenth or an eighth of your class. And she said, we're trying to up it because we know we need more. They didn't call it diversity. We just needed different people.

6:53You know, we just needed to do that more. And she said, and we're also trying to hire more people of color, of every color, you know, every background kind of thing. I was like, oh, that's really cool kind of thing. And so then it was a couple of weeks later, I was got on the plane and came out to do the polygraph and which was stunning because, you know, he's asking me, have you ever subverted the United States of America? I'm like, no. I mean, why would I have a chance in California, of course? But it was a good question because you want to know, have you ever talked to a Russian? No. Well, there was a Russian place in San Francisco where I bought, you know, some pastries once, you know, kind of thing.

7:32It was such a stupid, you know, and the guy's just rolling his eyes at me because I had nothing. I hadn't really traveled overseas either, you know, at that point. and um yeah so the he also asked uh the the polygrapher also asked have you ever done drugs and I'm like no and he goes you're from California you had to have done them no I didn't and he kept saying over and over and he goes I'm gonna fail you I'm gonna fail you I'm gonna fail you and I'm like I swear to god I will drink everything I I've snuck down across the border to Mexico just so I could get cheap booze there without being carded you know I mean I can I can tell you I'm not like perfect, but anyway, it turned out he left and then somebody else came in and said, we're going to start all over.

8:17And that person had been watching him and he was bullying me, basically. And so I ended up passing it. And so next thing I knew, I was getting all of this information about when to show up, where to show up, how to show up, what they would reimburse, what they wouldn't, and getting out to Washington. And were you nervous at that polygraph test? I was nervous just because I didn't know what it was, but I wasn't nervous because I thought I was going to lie. And I'm not a liar. I might have lied to some people over the years when I was undercover and told them I worked for State Department. But that was work.

8:58But I'm not a liar. So I wasn't going to lie then and I don't now. so you know you you said you sort of almost accidentally applied for the CIA did you think well you know if I don't get this I can I can do the journalism or yes or something like that or did you really want to do this role so I wanted to get out of California and so I really was interested in this because it was so unique and different and everything else and so no matter what, I would have gotten out of California somehow. But I was excited about the idea of going all the way across the country to our capital and doing something adventurous.

9:42And if you talk to my parents, they will say, oh, yeah, from the time Susan was four to about 10, she was always on suicide watch, wanting to jump over cliffs and things like that. So they weren't surprised. You know, when they're inducting you, are they telling you what sort of roles you could be doing? Yeah, they gave us, at the time there were four directorates. There was the Directorate of Operations and there's a couple of different career tracks you could take there. And they couldn't describe them in great detail, but they said, one will bring you overseas and you will be working with the people who were spying for us.

10:20Another would bring you overseas less times, but you would still be supporting the spying, but it would be from our headquarters. And then they kind of went through the DSMT, which is the science and technology, and I'm not a scientist, that was clear. The DDI did not exist then, which is our digital innovation ones, the ones that do ones and zeros that didn't exist the DA really tried to hire me too which is the analyst and I was like how soon will I be able to go overseas as an analyst because I thought that could be fun too and they're like well if you work really hard in 10 years you could probably get a tour overseas and I'm like crossing that one off and then and that was it you know so and then the directorate of support which was not something you have to understand like budget and stuff like that that clearly wasn't even offered to me.

11:11So what was that initial training like? What were they training you on? So it was kind of hilarious. So I get to CIA headquarters. We're told, you know, go stay in this hotel. We'll pay everything. We'll pay for a rental car, blah, blah, blah, and drive up to CIA headquarters and, you know, stop at the gate, have your driver's license, tell them you know that you're here for the new ct class and blah blah blah and so it was first of all extremely nerve-wracking to turn down that place where there's people with guns standing and you know all the rest of this stuff and i'm just kind of going by feeling like an imposter honestly and so i get up to the gate and they show me where i got to go in and i got to show the driver's license.

12:01I get back in the car and they say, okay, now you got to go up here and here's where you park. And I said, well, where do I go in after I park? And they say, you go in the main entrance. How do you get there from that parking lot? Well, they had to tell me that. Okay. So I finally go, park the car and I get to the main entrance and I go in and I see a whole bunch of other people standing in line, like my age, around in their twenties, maybe a couple of them were 30 with their license licenses out and things like that. And then so we got in and the first thing they wanted to do was get us our real badge so that we didn't have to do this.

12:41We could just badge in from now on. We didn't have to do this anymore. So I go and I get in the badge line and I'm standing in that badge line and there's a whole bunch of guys. And somehow, however it ended up, four of us girls ended up out of eight of us in the class. four of us girls ended up in the same area and we were all talking. Hey, where are you from? Blah, blah, blah. You know, that kind of thing. Does anybody have a permanent home yet? A permanent place? No, none of us do. Hey, why don't we get together and try to find a place together? And we, so we did, you know, so we badged in and we went to the first course where they taught us about what the different parts of CIA do and, and everything else and how we would do it and how our course would be.

13:25So long story short, me and those girls, we did find a house in Old Town that we went to and we stayed in for like four years. And then we started splitting up because we started going overseas. But we just became, you know, super, super good friends. And it was so clear that this was cool. And see in that line, like I said, there was eight of us, but, you know, all the guys were really nice too, et cetera. So we started in this thing where they sat us down. It's called CTDC. It was called the Career Trainee Course, which is my course. And it was the very first course in the course. I forget what DC stands for, discovery something or other.

14:08And it tells you then about what each of the directorates do and how they do it and blah, blah, blah, blah. And it also lays out where your program was going to be. And so they divided us in half. And the first half of us was going to go to paramilitary course first. And that was because, and it was a three-month paramilitary course down at the farm, which is now openly Camp Perry. and because the big Soviet-U.S.-Europe fight was going on, and that included in places like Nicaragua and South America and Africa. And so they wanted all of us to be trained in how to do bombs, how to throw things to insurgents that were supporting from an airplane, how to do machine guns, Uzis, grenades.

15:05Yeah, we almost got killed by a grenade when somebody threw it and threw it right at our feet. And all of us were in line going, ah! And luckily, an instructor saw it and just barely got it over this little hill and saved our lives. But anyway, so yeah, what could go wrong there? And so we had a ball doing that. And we all, I would say it was a fabulous thing because we all still are friends from that class. I mean, some have moved away, but whenever they're back, we get together with them. And there's a couple people we didn't really like and a couple people who quit early. That's true. But it was just a really good class.

15:45And so that's what we did. And then after that, you at that point, you came in like you're going to be either an analyst, an ops officer, S &T, or whatever. And they'd put me in as an analyst. And I realized once I found out what all of it did, it wasn't going to work. And so I went and talked to somebody. I was brave. It was so scary. I remember one of the instructors, and I told him, I think I really want to be an ops officer. I don't want to be an analyst. And he helped me change it. And they were very willing to change it at the time. And so that's how I got into the operations side. I wanted to live overseas.

16:19Yeah. Yeah. With the paramilitary training, was that a bit like basic training? Were they focusing on physical fitness as well as use of weapons? So it was like a basic training course for being in the army. Every morning we had to run and we weren't good runners at the beginning, but by the end, we had to be able to do a mile. And it wasn't like a four minute mile or something like that. We had to be able to do a mile in 10 minutes or something like that to get through that course. and then on the shooting they didn't really care they were looking for people who could shoot well but they were also looking for people who listened and handled the guns safely and so like I grew up shooting not things or people but I grew up shooting my dad was a duck hunter and he would take my brother's duck hunting and it was boys only so I would always like you know from like fourth grade on, I'd be like, what about me?

17:16I want to go shoot a gun. And he's like, okay, fine. So he got me trap shooting. And so I did trap shooting and rifle shooting with him, like on ranges and stuff and had a ball. So hilariously during the paramilitary course, we had done some Uzis. We'd already done some rifle shooting. And now we were going to be doing shotguns and we're going to shoot trap. And they had a little trap thing set up out there. And this one guy, he was hilarious. We loved this guy. His name was Pete. He was a lovable guy, but he could also be kind of crotchety and stuff. And so, again, I'm only one of a few girls, and I happen to be the first girl up to do the shotgun.

17:58And Pete, as I'm walking up, says, hey, everybody, you got to look at the little blondie from California getting knocked over by the shotgun. And I looked at him and I did this. I looked with my eyes and he's like, he kind of, oh, what's going to happen here? And bottom line, I powdered all five. I was the only one in the whole class that powdered all five. And after I powdered the last one, Pete stood up and saluted me. And we were good friends after that. Brilliant story. Were you also trained on Soviet weapons? Yeah, we had Uzis. And we also had, I forget the name of the Soviet rifle, Kalishnikov, I think.

18:44The AK-47. The AK-47, yeah. We had to learn how to do those too. And that was interesting too, yeah. You said that you managed to then get onto the path of being an operations officer. So what did the training for that involve? So the first part of the course was like a year-long course of doing different things. And we had to do different interims in between, like go and work in the China Center, work in the counterterrorism center. You know, and we were just like the little guys that were often just bringing papers different places, but we would also write some things. And so you learn a little bit there.

19:21And one of the ones I had was Russia or it was the USSR desk. And so I was there and on an interim and I really enjoyed it. And I really wanted to go someplace, not only exotic, but something that really mattered to the United States. I didn't want to go someplace like an island somewhere that didn't really matter. So I was really looking at that or China or, you know, something else, you know, like that. And so when I finished the course, My advisor came with the guy from headquarters that was going to tell us where we're going. And the guy from headquarters said, so you said that you wanted to go to someplace really interesting, like the Soviet or East European or China or something like that.

20:11And I said, 100 percent. And he goes, good, because that's where you're going. And I said, which? And he goes, Moscow. And I'm like, woohoo. Because it could have been anywhere. because we had a Soviet unit in every single station around the world. I was thinking that when they told me I was going to be going to do, you know, the Soviet stuff, I'd go down to someplace warm and do it there and do the recruiting job there. But they sent me to Moscow and I was totally thrilled and challenged by that. And it did involve about three more months of training. I mean, Moscow is a really plum posting, isn't it?

20:49Isn't that where anybody would want to be? Because that's sort of like the sharp end of the Cold War. Yeah, no. So a lot of people did not want to go to places like that. They spoke Chinese, or they spoke Arabic, and they thought they'd be going somewhere else. But a fair number of us, and I would say probably not quite half the class, ended up going to Soviet or East European type jobs, whether you were an analyst or an ops officer or whatever. And so there was one other guy that went to Russia house, as we called it, the Soviet East European division. And there was one other guy that went there, but he didn't go into Moscow.

21:34He ended up going to one of the other places and others were scattered around. and there was something that went to China, etc. How much Russian did you know at the point you were told you were going to Moscow? Zero. And so what they do is they first want to make sure you pass what's called the Soviet East European Internal Ops Course, which is like what we did at the farm, but on steroids. You need to be able to really detect surveillance without knowing that. And when you do surveillance down in Williamsburg, let's be honest, detecting it is not hard. So this was up here in the D.C. area. And so it was we had training on it first.

22:21And then they would we would go on these routes and they would really look to see, could you detect surveillance? Because if you cannot and some people can't and no harm, no foul, you'll get another job. But some people can't. And it's a it's a minority that can't. I was able to find it every time. And they want you to be able to find it without like looking around for it. Because if I'm undercover, I need to be, you know, in my car just looking for it, not like being obvious. Later on in your tour, once they know who you are, it doesn't really matter, right? But at the beginning, when you're undercover and they want you to be undercover for as long as possible, that's what they want you to do.

23:02And so that was another thing that was part of the course as well was understanding that. And so to get my Russian, they put me in a course for one year, eight hours a day, five days a week. Wow. Chevy is called the heartbeat of America for a reason. With SUVs made to move with your rhythm. The versatile Equinox tackles your entire day. The spacious Traverse fits your crew and your whole weekend. And tracks bring style with value you can count on. all infused with tech that has your back. So your drive always hits the right chord. Chevrolet. Together, let's drive. Tomorrow morning is knocking.

23:49Stock your fridge now. How about a creamy mocha frappuccino drink? Or a sweet vanilla? Smooth caramel, maybe. Or a white chocolate mocha. Whichever you choose, delicious coffee awaits. Find Starbucks frappuccino drinks wherever you buy your groceries. Wow. And had you got a sort of ability for learning languages prior to this point? or not? The only language I'd taken prior to this point was French in high school. And I took some French in college and I got A's. But French is kind of English light sometimes, you know. So I was a little bit nervous about the Cyrillic letters. And I was a little bit nervous because I knew it was a completely different grammar system, Slavic grammars.

24:31And so, but when I got into the language course, I realized I'm good at math. I can't apply it anywhere, but I'm good at it. It's very mathematical. And so that is what I loved about it. It wasn't like French where for every rule, there's like 25 exceptions for the rule. Like on a Monday, you say this, on a Tuesday, you might do that. And in Russian, it's always the same. You might change things, but the thing will change like it is. It might be moved to the front because you want to emphasize that more of the sentence versus the back of the sentence. I loved it. And deciphering the letters and stuff like that, it was like deciphering a code, like when you're in fifth grade and you're writing in code to your friends and trying to dodge the teacher.

25:16It was really fun. So I was good at that. And I ended up with a four level in Russian. Wow. Wow. Just going back to the surveillance, I mean, how do you know that you're being surveilled? I mean, I've heard stories of, you know, that people trying to follow you will change clothes, hats, stuff like that, but they rarely change their shoes. And that can be a giveaway. I mean, were there other tricks like that that you sort of... The shoes were 100%. But first, you want to know, because the first part of the surveillance detection route, I guess sometimes we do just walk out of the embassy and start the walking door and we never get in the car.

25:53But mostly you kind of get in a car because you just want to see what's out there. And so you get in the car and you have a route like on a Saturday and you're going to go and you're going to go to a shopping area, which was back in the day, hard to find in Moscow. And you would go there and you'd go do a couple of things. You'd see if anybody's on you. And if you didn't see anybody obvious, then you would go outside the comfort zone a little bit more. And then you'd see, does anything follow me from inside to outside? And then from outside to outer side. And then you would go like crazy and do really provocative things just to triple check that you didn't have surveillance.

26:37And so that's what you would do just to make sure. And at that point, then you would find a way to ditch your car, get on the subway and go do what you needed to do and in your obviously usually um after as you're ditching the car you're also putting on a disguise so that they don't rec you know they don't accidentally recognize you on a subway or on a bus or on a tram or something like that and when you say a disguise that's clothing generally is it or something else it's it was usually just something that changes your profile it's clothing and some a wig you know like if i'm blonde i might be more dark hair and they might try to change my skin color to look a little bit more, you know, just like I've got a tan or something.

27:21I don't know, something like that. But there was, we also had, and these are on display. I was just down at the Spy Museum for an event. They have these, they had these full masks as well. And so I, my mask was made to make me look like, and now I resent this by the way, a 60-year-old Russian woman. And, you know, back then I was like, oh, that's so old, whatever. And so that was what mine looked like. The problem, the guy who made the masks for us, CIA, after Planet of the Apes, went out to that guy and said, we have a job for you. We want to do something like that, but we want to have masks that can change.

28:07And he helped us with that program. And that's the guy that did that. And so anyway, so I had one that made me look like probably a 56-year-old Soviet woman and things like that. And then I also had a disguise to go with it that was padded to make me look a lot heavier and had all the Soviet clothes, you know, that you would get that we had collected over the years and things like that. And so one day, I got to use that a couple of times, but the best one was the first time I used it was when the boss really, really, really, really needed something done. It had to be done. It had to be done that day.