He Moved Mountains to Correct the Maps

It took seven years, dozens of letters, a low-key media blitz and the direct intervention of the secretary of state and the deputy director of the CIA, but Martin Miller has proof that bureaucrats can be moved to correct a mistake.

As he looks back wearily on the project he undertook in 1981, Miller, a retired Treasury Department official who lives in Silver Spring, Md., shakes his head and wonders what he is going to do with his spare time now that he has accomplished the bureaucratic equivalent of moving a mountain.

As a result of Miller’s relentless one-man campaign, the State Department and the CIA have changed their official maps to show that the Kingdom of Jordan does not have any sovereign claim over the Israeli-occupied West Bank.

A small thing? Not for Miller, who cares passionately about rectitude.

“For the first time, an official U.S. government map of Israel will not mislead the President, the secretary of state, other policy-making officials and the general public,” he says.

The new maps published by the CIA in 1988, for the first time in history, show that the West Bank is not an inherent part of Jordan. In fact, the West Bank was never part of the Jordanian kingdom, although it was administered by Jordan until 1967. In 1974, at the Rabat conference of Arab states, King Hussein gave up that administrative claim.

When Miller noted the discrepancy in official U.S. maps--which are used as the basis for commercial maps and such things as encyclopedias--and called it to the attention of the Office of the Geographer at the State Department in 1981, the reaction to Miller’s suggestion was a series of yawns, bland statements about the matter “being under review,” glazed eyes--and no action.

Miller, who knew George P. Shultz at the Treasury Department, wangled a 15-minute appointment with the secretary of state in his seventh-floor office at the State Department in April of 1984. With a carefully prepared series of maps and letters, Miller convinced Shultz that the maps put out by the State Department were misleading and misrepresented U.S. foreign policy.

Shultz said, according to Miller: “You know, I had no idea about any of this,” and promised to assign it to a staff assistant. That was in 1984, and Shultz, prophetically, warned Miller that on the basis of his government career “you of all people should know you can’t move the bureaucracy.”

Shultz was wrong. Miller discovered that you can move bureaucrats if you have a lot of time, fanatical determination and endless ingenuity, including writing Op-Ed articles and providing newsmen with explanations (most of which ended up in newsroom wastebaskets).

Four years later, the State Department had changed its maps and background notes, labeling the 2,200 square miles between Israel and Jordan as “the West Bank” and giving no indication of Jordan’s claim to the territory.

It took another few months to persuade the CIA, which also puts out maps, to change its publications. That happened only after Miller had been stonewalled by the CIA’s public affairs office and he went once again to the top, to Robert M. Gates, deputy director of the CIA and director of the National Intelligence Council.

Miller called Gates and said: “Your people are not living up to your standards in an important area.”

Two days later, Miller was at CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., with his well-rehearsed show-and-tell about the map errors. One month later, a CIA spokeswoman called to say: “The map of Jordan will be replaced and the map of Israel will be corrected one year later.”

An unintended footnote in Miller’s struggle is that the U.S. government maps, which are often later used as the basis for atlases and scholarly publications, now also show for the first time the Israeli provincial names for the West Bank--Judea and Samaria--names that deeply offend the Palestinian residents of the Israeli-occupied territories.