Vince Houghton on Cryptology & Espionage 🕵️‍♂️

Interview of Wednesday, 30 December 2020 of Vince Houghton PhD, Director, National Cryptologic Museum, former Historian/Curator International Spy Museum. Interviewer - Host: James Hughes, AFIO President, a former CIA Operations Officer.

TOPIC: Vince Houghton and Jim Hughes discuss Vince's 2019 book, "The Nuclear Spies: America's Atomic Intelligence Operation Against Hitler and Stalin." Discusses the Alsos Mission, Gen Leslie Groves, Werner Heisenberg, Enrico Fermi, and other scientists working on Atomic weapons or the escape of that technology into Soviet or German hands. Touches on the misjudging of the technical and scientific capabilities of other nations, a misplaced national sense of superiority and invincibility which has come to haunt and surprise the U.S. repeatedly. Also mentions Moe Berg, and the differences between the wartime intelligence agency -- OSS -- versus the bureaucratic CIA it became.
The interview runs 32 minutes and includes numerous Q&As.

BIOS:
VINCE HOUGHTON PhD is the Director, National Cryptologic Museum. He is the former Historian and Curator of the International Spy Museum. He has a PhD in Diplomatic and Military History from the University of Maryland, where his research centered on US scientific and technological intelligence (nuclear intelligence) in the Second World War and early Cold War. His Masters, also from the University of Maryland, focused on the relationship between the United States and the Soviet Union. He has taught extensively at the middle school, high school, and university level, most recently at the University of Maryland, where he taught courses on the history of US Intelligence, US Diplomatic History, the Cold War, and the History of Science. Vince is a veteran of the United States Army, and served in the Balkans, where he worked closely with both civilian and military intelligence agencies in several capacities.
Dr. Houghton has made numerous media appearances, on a variety of media platforms. These include CNN, NBC News, Fox News, The Washington Post, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The Travel Channel, The History Channel, The American Heroes Channel, Vanity Fair, Maxim, ESPN.com, and many more.
Dr. Houghton has spoken publicly on hundreds of occasions. Audiences ranged from middle school and high school students, to the general public, to practitioners and experts in the field. Audience size ranged from dozens to hundreds.
Author of two books: Nuking the Moon (Penguin, 2019), and the Nuclear Spies (Cornell UP, 2019)

JAMES R. HUGHES currently serves as the 17th President of AFIO. His service began January 2015. He had a career of US Government service spanning 37 years in numerous foreign countries with a particular focus in the Middle East. He started in U.S. Military Intelligence in the late 1960s and then joined the CIA’s Clandestine Service. He served overseas as a Chief of Station several times, and at CIA Headquarters in a number of senior management positions, including as Chief of the Near East and South Asia Division, in the Directorate of Operations [today’s National Clandestine Service]. He was also named the Associate Deputy Director of Operations (ADDO) at the National Security Agency, 1998-99. Following his retirement from the government in 2005, he joined EDS in Herndon, Virginia, as the Client Industry Executive for the U.S. Intelligence Community. After the HP acquisition of EDS, he continued to serve in a similar capacity until his retirement in 2012. His parents were missionaries in Turkey in the 1950s, where Jim spent his formative years. He is fluent in Arabic.