Floyd Miller

Who is Floyd Miller?

Floyd Cleveland Miller was a member of the Communist Party USA, who confessed in 1954 to having worked for the Soviet intelligence agencies.

Miller was born in South Bend, Indiana and attended school in Michigan. In 1934, he moved to New York and began writing soap operas for radio station WMCA. Miller joined the Communist Party of the CPUSA in 1936. That same year, Gregory Rabinowitz recruited him to do “opposition work,” against rival political organizations. Miller's first year in the business was listening to a wiretap on Trotskyist leader, James Cannon's home. Later, he was to infiltrate the Socialist Workers Party and become an activist, while sending reports to the CPUSA and Soviet intelligence. The Trotskyists assigned him to the Sailors Union of the Pacific in 1941, and he became editor of the union's journal, in addition to writing on military affairs for the Fourth International, a Trotskyist journal, during World War II. Miller's position gave the Communists a spy in the upper ranks of a rival union. Miller stated later, "My job as a Stalinist was to keep track of the sailing of all Trotskyite seamen so a Stalinist agent would be at the port and have surveillance on whatever Trotskyites entered the Soviet Union."