Susan Miller was four years out of Cal Poly’s journalism program in 1989 when she worked as a cashier at the U.S. embassy in Moscow. Unbeknownst to her coworkers, however, she was really working under deep cover as a spy for the CIA.
Just a short walk from Red Square, she would sneak upstairs to her real office to plot meetings and dead drops with informants, handing off everything from cash to diamonds and gold bars in exchange for crucial security information. Once, she handed a source the equivalent of $2.5 million in a suitcase.
On her second and third tours outside of Russia, she charmed potential sources at cocktail parties and bowling alleys before persuading them to pass on Soviet secrets.
She served nine times overseas and eventually rose to become the CIA’s Chief of Counterintelligence, where in 2016, she authored the initial report proving the Russians interfered in the 2016 election in an attempt to sway the presidential election in Donald Trump’s favor. She was grilled for eight hours during the historic Barr-Durham trial in which President Trump pressured the then-attorney general into pressing criminal charges against her.
Now that she has retired — and retains the same security clearance as the U.S. president minus the nuclear stuff — Miller reached out to Mustang News to share her story and explain how a young woman from Sunnyvale would go on to an adventurous and decorated career as a CIA agent.
“Cal Poly 100% gave me my career,” Miller said.
From Cal Poly to the CIA
Miller was born in Sunnyvale, California and lived there until she was around 9, when her dad’s job inventing chips for Hewlett and Packard relocated two hours north to Santa Rosa. She applied to Cal Poly as a journalism major.
While attending Cal Poly she worked as a copy editor for the Mustang Daily, the former name of Mustang News, and she loved getting to be in another part of California. She hoped to eventually live abroad and thought journalism could take her there.
As graduation approached, Miller and a friend walked into Cal Poly’s career center in search of open positions at newspapers like the San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times. That’s when her friend spotted a blank application for the CIA.
“‘They hire people?’” Miller asked her friend. “I mean, I thought they only hired, like, assassins and stuff.”
Decades later, in January 2020, she watched live and gave the go ahead to assassinate the leader of a terrorist group in Iraq, Qasem Soleimani, via drone strike. All while on the phone with the director of Israeli intelligence at the time.
Not long after Miller sent in her initial job application, she got a a call from a recruiter asking her to meet up in a hotel in Morro Bay. There was one condition: “‘Don’t tell any of your friends that you’re coming to meet me.’”
The meeting went well. Miller was asked how her skills in journalism could translate to espionage, saying that she would use the sourcing and writing skills to produce reports in the same way, just for a different, less public audience. Then, the agency soon flew her out to Washington D.C. for a week, where she went through four to six hours of interviews and psychological testing every day.
Her recruiter told her at the end that she was a good fit as long as she didn’t “start using cocaine or anything like that.” In other words, the CIA was hiring her to be a spy.
Training and the early years
On September 15, 1985, a young analyst-in-training named Liz S. stood in line to get her identification cards on her first day of CIA training. Next to her, a freshly graduated Californian started chatting her up.
“It was actually kind of cute how we met,” Liz said.
By the time they got to the front of the line, Liz and Miller had agreed to move into a house together — Liz described their 15-minute interaction as “very telling about Susan’s personality,” saying she is extremely personable and open to others. The pair ended up rooming together in D.C. with two other women from their training class.
“We had this amazing, large townhouse that we couldn’t furnish because we were all stupid, out-of-college poor,” Liz said.
So, on weekends, the group would troll the yard sales of Washington’s wealthiest neighborhoods, ending up with a stunning sofa, two love seats and a nice coffee table.
The four of them lived there for two years until Liz got married and moved out. Liz said those years were fun and social, hosting parties for their fellow training class members and getting to know the inner workings of the CIA.
Miller said the training class culminated in three months of paramilitary exercises that ranged from shooting Uzi submachine guns, shotguns and pistols to learning air operations and jumping out of planes. It was more of a fun, team building course than a preview of her future career.
“Like they were going to jump a blonde from California into Nicaragua,” Miller said.
After the general and paramilitary training, Miller and the other trainees were given their first assignments and sent into specialized training courses to prepare.
This is about how her conversation with her boss to get that first assignment went:
Boss: “You’re going to go to Moscow.”
Miller: “Moscow?”
Boss: “Yeah, that’s the capital of the USSR.”
Miller: “I know, but that’s where I’m going? I’m a Californian. I’m supposed to go someplace warm.”
“I actually said that,” Miller said. “And he laughed his head off.”
After three tours in Eastern Europe and a stint as the Chief of Russia Operations in D.C., she moved to warmer Tel Aviv, followed by three years in Prague and another three in the even warmer Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.
She then became Deputy Chief of the East Asia Division in Washington once again, before taking on roles as the Chief of Station in Tokyo, Deputy then Assistant Director of Counterintelligence (where she caught 4 spies within U.S. agencies), Chief of Station in Tel Aviv and the Assistant Director for the new China Mission Center.
Back in the U.S.
Initially, Miller was hired to be the Associate Director of Counterintelligence with a reputation as being a strong, no-nonsense leader, said Sheetal Patel, her deputy at the time and close friend to this day. Patel also recently retired from the CIA.
When she first met Miller, she was struck by Miller’s sense of humor.
Their friendship is a crash course in “trauma bonding.” They quickly became close and stayed that way even while they split off into creating various mission centers.
Patel recalls Miller’s unique ability to make one of the most consequential jobs in the government feel enjoyable.
“The more serious of the job and decisions the less serious you have to take yourself,” Patel said.
Miller kept a nerf gun in her office that she would shoot at the glass pane between their adjoining offices when she wanted to get Patel’s attention. And when Patel was promoted to Miller’s job after she left, Miller left the desk full of “dumb ass plastic bananas” to greet her on Patel’s first day.
Patel later retaliated with tiny minions when Miller returned from abroad.
Another colleague, Mike Lacombe who worked with Miller as her deputy when she was chief of the East Asia division, said she got a few of her officers to put over 40 stickers depicting cats, unicorns, the rainbow coalition logo and more across the back of his red pick-up truck, and it took him 2-3 weeks before he noticed.
Another time she had a semi-permanent sign installed in his designated parking spot that read “Yankees fans only,” a good-humored slap in the face to Lacombe, a well-known Red Sox fan. It stood there for three months.
Miller made it easy to be a part of a team, Patel said, the type of person who doesn’t need to reassure you to know she’s got your back. And she’s never seen her get angry or flustered, even when people got up in her face during briefings.
Patel and Miller worked with their team to produce a report on whether or not the Russians tried to interfere in the 2016 election. To them, it was cut and dry: the Russians have tried to interfere in every presidential election in recent memory but there is no feasible way to tell if their efforts affected the outcome.
The standard analytic report became a political lightning rod. When Trump was briefed by the director of the CIA, he was not happy, Miller said. Both Miller and Patel said Trump saw the report as a “deep state” conspiracy and a “witch hunt,” instructing his attorney general to criminally charge those involved in compiling it.
That meant Miller and Patel.
Miller was dragged into an eight-hour interrogation about her methods for crafting the paper targeted at discerning political bias. The investigation eventually found none and she never officially heard from them again.
Whispers of Trump trying to prosecute them again have haunted Miller and Patel. Just a few months ago the report’s name surfaced again.
“That’s just the gift that keeps giving,” Patel said of the papers.
Family and Personal Life
Miller and her husband Andy, who she met and became engaged to in Warsaw while he was stationed there for the state department, managed to align their careers to never give up either of their career growth. Their “proposal” was basically Andy agreeing to move to Lithuania with her when she was offered the position in Vilnius.
Miller started her first tour in Tel Aviv weeks after giving birth to her twins, even after the Middle Eastern branch chief questioned her ability to do her job after giving birth behind her back after congratulating her on her pregnancy. Miller had lined up childcare before arriving and was working within weeks of giving birth.
More recently, she had a surgery to remove a non-cancerous brain tumor that could have turned her blind. Lacombe claims he saved Miller’s life by telling her to go to the doctor when her vision went blank for a few moments, but she said that Lacombe, in fact, caused her years of pain.
“Ask Andy who saved her life,” Lacombe said.
But Miller was back in the office and asking for travel clearance to get on a plane not long after. She took on a project at work during her designated recovery time because she knew she was the right person to complete the task.
Andy and Miller now set travel goals for each year, last year making it to all seven continents starting with Antarctica and ending in Africa. This year they’ll watch a baseball game at every MLB stadium in the country.
Reflecting on a Respected Career
Miller is set to receive the Hidden Hero Award from the International Spy Museum in D.C. come November, recognizing those who make “outsized contributions to the Intelligence Community yet have gone relatively unrecognized for their work,” the website says. She’s also attending Cal Poly Journalism’s Mustang Media Fest in October as a keynote speaker.
Throughout her career, she crossed paths with numerous consequential politicians: she briefed the then-president George Bush during a NATO summit in Prague, corrected Bush’s defense secretary for perpetuating misinformation in the same meeting, sat in a cloud of smoke in the office of Cambodian leader Samdech Hun Sen and remains close friends with Caroline Kennedy after the two worked together while Kennedy was an ambassador — to name a few.
“It was a great, great 39 years and met a husband out of it, who I still sort of like,” Miller said, chuckling. “And I got kids out of it, and I have just stories galore.”
Lacombe said Miller worked in some of the most difficult locations across the world and she faced more barriers as a woman in what was, when she began there, still a male-dominated CIA.
“She was hitting that glass ceiling and trying to break through that glass ceiling to show that she can do this,” Lacombe said. “I think a lot of female officers in our organization try to look up to her as a standard bearer.”
Lacombe also said Miller had not only one of the most accomplished files in the agency, but her “hallway file,” or how co-workers perceived her, was one of the best. He added that while maybe a handful of people would consider him to be one of their best friends in the agency, it’s likely that Miller held that credit for 40 to 50 people at the office.
Once she started thinking of retirement, Miller and Liz, who had started at the CIA on the same day, decided they would walk out the door together. They picked a date in August 2024.
After they popped a bottle of sparkling apple cider in Liz’s office with their two daughters who work at the state department and NSA, the long-time friends walked down the stairs arm-in-arm into the CIA lobby where hundreds of people gathered to give them the ritual “clap out” to celebrate their retirement.
They walked through the turnstiles and handed in their ID cards.
“We went high-five,” Liz said. “And everybody who was inside the building just roared.”