Spies: Good, Bad, or In-Between?

From James Bond to Jason Bourne, we are culturally obsessed with spies. But are our perceptions of American spies and intelligence agencies true to life? Join Mary, Eryn, and special guest Vince Houghton, Director of the National Cryptologic Museum and former Historian and Curator at the International Spy Museum, as they explore spying's evolution through American history. How do we ensure the intelligence community is responsible while also having the autonomy to do its job effectively?

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Transcript

Intro/Outro (00:06)
From the Bill of Rights Institute. Fabric of History weaves together US history, founding principles, and what all of this means to us today. Join us as we pull back the curtains of the past to see what's inside.

Haley (00:19)
From James Bond to Jason Bourne. We are culturally obsessed with spies, but are our perceptions of American spies and intelligence agencies true to life? Join Mary, Eryn, and special guest Vince Houghton, director of the National Cryptologic Museum, as they explore spying's evolution through American history. How do we ensure the intelligence community is responsible while also having the autonomy to do its job effectively?

Mary (00:49)
Hi, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Fabric of History. Today, Eryn and I are sitting down with a special guest to talk about one of the world's oldest professions. Spies, espionage, intelligence; it has such a hold on our imagination, but it's a topic that's rooted in some pretty fascinating and complicated history. And that is why we're so excited to have our guest with us today. Dr. Vince Houghton is the former historian and curator of the International Spy Museum here in Washington, DC. He has a PhD in intelligence history. He's the author of two books on the subject, and he's currently the director of the National Cryptologic Museum in Fort Meade, Maryland. Thank you so much for agreeing to be with us today.

Dr. Houghton (01:39)
Of course, it should be fun.

Mary (01:41)
So I have to ask you for your origin story. So how did you become interested in this topic?

Dr. Houghton (01:49)
Yeah. So my expertise, if you want to use that word, as a confluence of two things. One is nuclear weapons and the other is in intelligence. And so I started the nuke side before anything else. And there's a very questionable parenting decision that happened when I was seven years old. My parents let me stay up way later than they should have to watch a TV movie that was the rage at the time. It ended up being the most-watched TV movie of all time. It was a movie called The Day After. And you guys are looking at you. You're way too young to remember this, but this is the day after. It started, like 09:00, and it was about a fictional World War III that could have happened. It was in 1983. We were scared to death of World War III happening, but it was a Midwest Kansas town, Manhattan, Kansas, basically being annihilated by the Soviets with nuclear weapons and all the aftermath and everything that everyone societal breakdown and all the horrible stuff that would come with that. And as a seven-year-old, they possibly should have called child services on my parents for letting me watch that.

Dr. Houghton (02:54)
It really, really screwed me up, and it screwed me up in a way that I became immediately fascinated with this subject. And I said I need to know more about this. And so I still played with GI Joe's, and I still listen to music and other things but in my spare time, I started paying attention to these crazy things called nuclear weapons. And I read a book that came out a couple of years later called The Making the Atomic Bomb by a guy named Richard Rhodes, which is to this day the Bible of the history of atomic weapons in the United States. It's not designed for a ten-year-old, so I only understood about one-fifth of it. But at twelve, I read it again and I got a little bit more out of it. And then at 15, I read it again and got a little bit more out of it. And then when I took physics in high school, I finally was okay, I got to get what's going on here. So I knew when I went to college that I wanted to study something surrounding kind of that dynamic, the idea that this is a weapon system, that is the most destructive weapon system that's ever been created on Earth, but conversely, it's kept the peace for decades and decades during the Cold War because of this crazy idea of deterrence.

Dr. Houghton (04:02)
And that just fascinated me that you kind of had this really interesting contradiction. So I thought, well, maybe I'll be an engineer. I'll develop nuclear weapons. I'll do something on the physics side. Then I got the college-level math and physics, and I said, I'm going to be a historian running into differential equations and multivariable calculus and linear algebra and stuff. You know what? I love the physics stuff. I'm not going to ignore it. I'm going to do something history of science, history of technology. About halfway through college, I decided I really didn't know what I wanted to do. I liked the history stuff, but I kind of realized I didn't need to start over from scratch. And I joined the army and I said, let me figure out what the hell I want to do. Let me kind of restart everything and get back to scratch. And while I was in the Army, I was deployed multiple places. But one of the places that I was deployed that was the most influential was the Balkans. So this is in the 1990s when Bosnia and Herzegovina are going through well, they just finished going through a lot of turmoil.

Dr. Houghton (05:11)
And I was there. And my longer bio has a very kind of snarky way of putting this is the only way I can do it. It has worked closely with both civilian and military intelligence agencies in multiple capacities. And that's kind of the level that publicly I can talk about. I wasn't jumping out of perfectly good airplanes with a Martini in one hand and a stupidly named blonde and the other, I wasn't James Bond, but I was working closely with people who are doing what we call today signals intelligence, people doing human intelligence, working to do everything from fine mass grave sites to discover where the Serbs were hiding weapons. And this is right when the Kosovo war was beginning in the late 90s. So there's a lot of intelligence happening around me on a day-to-day basis. And I realized that intelligence was key not just for decision-makers at the highest levels. Of course, the President needs to know stuff, but also for the boot soldier on the ground that needs to know where the minefields are and what the weather is going to be like in four days if he's not going to be back in base camp for a week.

Dr. Houghton (06:15)
So that got me really interested in the intelligence side of things. And so when I went back to school, I said, how can I marry these two things together? And the long and the short of it is, I did. I looked at the intelligence questions surrounding the beginning of the atomic age, about how were we successful in determining what the Germans were doing during the Second World War and building their atomic program, or lack of atomic program. And then how do we fall so flat on our faces in figuring out what the Soviets were doing and how did they surprise us so viciously in 1949? And all of that work turned into one of the two books that I've written called The Nuclear Spies, which is really focused on that really interesting dichotomy of just a couple of years apart. We do really well against one target and really horrendously bad against the other. And I tried to explain why, and I think I did a pretty decent job. Maybe it's not the perfect answer, but it's an answer that no one else is providing. So I felt pretty good about that. Then the long and the short of the story is my plan was to go into the intelligence community and do kind of intel work.

Dr. Houghton (07:21)
But this really cool Museum in Washington had an opening for a historian and curator that my predecessor grabbed me and said, you should apply this job. And I did. But I ended up over there for six and a half years, helping to design the content for the new Museum. If you haven't been in DC for a while, the National Spy Museum is a massive new building with a lot of new content, a lot of new artifacts. And so I spent a lot of time hunting down artifacts, interviewing people, doing content for that. And then, of course, once the new building opened, the job got less exciting than it was. And so, fortunately, around that time, the National Cryptologic Museum was looking for a new director to kind of do the same thing here. And so I worked my way to NSA after a painstakingly, long process of clearance, because everyone who works here has to be cleared at the highest levels. I am now here breaking stuff like I've been brought in to do at this Museum. So it should be fun once we get it all put back together, like Humpty Dumpty. But right now there's a whole lot of painting and drywalling and artifacting going on outside the door right now.

Dr. Houghton (08:29)
You thought that was a simple question. No. There's an origin story that just rambles and goes. But, yeah, that's the long and short of it.

Eryn (08:39)
Well, I mean, that's why we're here. That's why we have you as a guest, because you have a really fascinating background, and we're kind of going to go delve into spies in the Cold War. I think if anything is also a good reminder for everyone, like perseverance in passion and marry them together. It has some really significant benefits. And so I'm really excited to delve into that.

Dr. Houghton (09:03)
Let's do it. I'm ready to answer whatever questions I can with the caveat that I'm here under my own guise and not speaking in any way for the National Security Agency or for the national cryptologic that always has to be thrown out there. Just to cover all my bases.

Mary (09:21)
Why don't we take a quick break and then we will come back and dive into this topic of why spies capture our imagination so much. We're back from our break. And in his own personal story of how he came to be associated with this topic, Vince was talking about how he was not he was involved with the intelligence community, but he was not parachuting out of a plane with Martini in the hands. So, of course, we're referencing James Bond. And I think that's where a lot of our all these cool stereotypes of spies come from. So I think that's worth asking or talking about a little bit.

Eryn (10:08)
Yeah. I think it's interesting because a couple of years ago reading a novel called The Alice Network, and part of the story is about a female spy during World War I. It was such a dirty profession and look down upon if you are a spy, you're kind of like an outcast. And today I think spies are almost like idealized or idolized. And we have these James Bond movies, and it just seems like such a strong 180. Big pivot. And so I think it's really interesting to ask Vince this public opinion of spies and our perception of spies and how that's changed over time.

Dr. Houghton (10:55)
Yeah, this is why I ruin everyone's fun. No one likes watching spy movies with me because biggest party pooper in the world. That's not real. That's not real. That's not real. I guess it's like watching medical dramas with doctors or law and order with a lawyer. Unfortunately, there are very few pop culture perceptions or portrayals of spies out there that are good. It's just not done very well. And let me ruin a lot of the fun even more. And that terminology that we're using is actually interesting because I tended to ask this question when I gave tours the spy Museum and even with the groups of people who are in the government. And I got. All right. How many spies work at CIA and they kind of all looked at each other and be like, well, 5000 or someone will be like, less than that, 200 or whatever. And the answer is hopefully zero, because a spy, by definition, is somebody who is recruited by a foreign intelligence agency to give information about their country. So if there are spies working at CIA, we've got a problem. Now, there probably are spies working at CIA, but hopefully just a couple.

Dr. Houghton (12:03)
And they certainly have been in the past. The people who work at CIA or here at NSA or anywhere else, they're intelligence officers. Their job is to go overseas. If they're CIA, if they're human intelligence officers to recruit people to commit treason against their own country. I mean, it's simple as that, right? Let's not beat around the bush. You're convincing people to do the most heinous thing that can possibly do against their country is give you information that's not supposed to be given. And so is there a sexy side to that? Well, the movies make it look like there's a sexy side to it. The irony is James Bond would be the worst spy you could possibly have. He is a horrendous spy because the number one goal of an intelligence officer, other than getting information, is not being noticed. Right? So it was wonderful. Of course, I've seen all the James Bond movies. When Casino Royale came out with Daniel Craig, kind of the reboot. The greatest part of that movie was him. He drove a Ford Focus at the beginning of the movie. He's in the Bahamas driving a Ford, and I'm like, oh, my God, this is the most realistic thing in the world, right?

Dr. Houghton (13:09)
You're sent overseas. You don't get an Aston Martin DB Five, you get the Chevy Volts or whatever it is from the Hertz rent-a-car. The whole idea is to fit in. The whole idea is to not stand out. One of my first big press things I did, and it freaked me out. And I can't imagine. I just kind of did it not knowing what I was doing. I did an article, an interview with Vanity Fair, right? Vanity Fair is Vanity Fair. And they wanted to know about the Mission Impossible movie that came out. I don't remember which one it is. They all run together, but Tom Cruise is like hanging off the side of the plane, right? And they're like, Would he get a medal for being so brave? I'm like, no, the CIA would fire him for being so stupid because they spent millions of dollars training him and he's hanging off a damn plane, right? I mean, this is not the way intelligence agencies operate. The idea is, do your job to get information. It's not about assassinating people. It's not about overthrowing countries. Although back in the day it was a little different.

Dr. Houghton (14:05)
But the most important thing is intelligence, right? That's why they're called intelligence agencies, is getting information that allows policymakers, military leaders to make better decisions. And the only way to effectively do that is to stay in the shadows is to stay undiscovered, is to make life boring. And I used to joke that if you find yourself running through Moscow, being chased by the KGB in a gun battle, you've done something really wrong. You are a very bad intelligence officer. If no one's ever heard of you, if you fly into Moscow, do your job, and then fly out commercial and no one ever notices, then you're an exceptionally good intelligence. So the sexy movies are bad intelligence. If you made a real movie about the way the spy community works, it would be the most boring movie ever made. The cure for insomnia, because a lot of it would just be sitting on a computer because that's really what a lot of intelligence officers do. But I mean, even something like recruiting someone. If I'm recruiting someone overseas, I'm spending weeks doing reconnaissance. And I don't mean, like, with camo paint on, crawling through the bushes reconnaissance.

Dr. Houghton (15:18)
I mean, I'm walking to markets, I'm buying pears, I'm walking to where they work, I'm taking cabs. I'm looking at where the actual public transportation system works. I'm looking at egress routes. I'm trying to figure out what are their patterns. I'm doing all this really boring stuff that would not make for a good movie. And so the kind of perception that the public has of what the intelligence binge is all about is almost the polar opposite of the reality. And we're laughing along with what I'm saying. It's kind of a chuckle word of the conversation, but in the end, it's actually really dangerous. And I think that one of the things that I've found is that James Bond is pretty harmless because everyone knows how ridiculous James Bond is, right? He dispatches the bad guy who throws a hat at somebody and he makes a quip. No one watches that and goes, that's exactly how MI6 actually is. The problem we've run into lately is there a lot of spy fiction that's pretending to be realistic and rugged. I'm thinking of Homeland. I'm thinking of The Americans, which is an amazingly entertaining show, but it's nonsense. 

Dr. Houghton (16:33)
Homeland is the biggest offender of all these because it comes across as being this rugged inside the CIA thing. If you want to look this up, the Wall Street Journal had me review Homeland for two seasons, and I did kind of like a write-up after each episode where I just trashed it and I wasn't supposed to. Right. They originally brought me in to say, we want you to do what they get right and what they get wrong, but it got so hard to do what they got right. And it really just turned into, like, here's all the garbage that they did. And I thought that was, for me, a public service because so many people watched Homeland, thought it was realistic that she's unstable. She's running around killing people. It is the opposite of what the CIA wants to hire and actually wants their intelligence officers to be like. For me, that was really problematic. And I think that the more that comes out that appears to be realistic, the harder it is for people like me who kind of make it their mission to try to deprogram that idea from people's heads. That's a really long answer.

Dr. Houghton (17:44)
It might not even be the question that you ask. I just decided to go off. This is the interview 101, right? Don't answer the question they ask. You answer the question that I wanted to be asked. So there you go.

Eryn (17:54)
Interview and debate 101. Right. And I think that was definitely part of this conversation we're having. Like, there is this James Bond, quote, unquote idea of what a spy is or all these other shows and books and movies. That is not realistic. Right. But I think there's also like a historical side to it. We didn't always have, I think, as much positive perception towards spies. I think as we do today.

Dr. Houghton (18:31)
I would argue that there is not as much positive and not as much negative. I think that like everything else, there's been a pretty extreme polarization of people's view toward the intelligence community. I think back in the 50s and the 60s and even in the early 70s, people didn't know anything about the intelligence community. So some people were slightly interested in what was happening. Even the NSA is a great example. The joke until the 1980s was NSA stood for no such agency did not exist. The NSA did not exist. You could not find it under any federal budget because it was just all part of the black budget. The former executive director at the International Spy Museum, Peter Earnest, who spent 36 years at CIA when he was recruited in the CIA, had never really heard of it. Think of some of these government agencies, these three other government agencies that maybe we haven't heard of, the Office of something, something that was kind of what CIA was at the time if you can believe it. Right. And so people didn't have strong views either way. There are certainly people in Guatemala that had strong views about the CIA and people in Iran that had strong views about the CIA around the countries that were being overthrown or others.

Dr. Houghton (19:43)
Cuba certainly had strong views about the CIA, but a lot of the American public didn't because there wasn't a lot of knowledge about them. But I think since 9/11 when these agencies really came into the forefront. When it became clear that you had this intelligence community. And part of it was the debate over the 2004 IRTPA, the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act, which is what created the Office of the Director of National Intelligence that created, obviously, Homeland Security and some of these other agencies, this big intelligence community and all of a sudden all these agencies are in the forefront. Right. I mean, if you ask somebody who controls our satellites, they might say the Air Force. But there's an entire agency that has developed the National Reconnaissance Office. And people even know terms like geospatial intelligence. Not everybody, but more and more. Right. So the agency called NGA, which is in the suburb of DC and Springfield, Virginia, people are like, oh, I know what these guys do. They make maps, actually. They created the model compound in the bin Laden for the bin Laden raid. Right. So people have learned that stuff. And so I think that you see a much more polarized view of these agencies.

Dr. Houghton (21:00)
Intelligence first and foremost, its goal is not to help win wars. Its goal is to help us win the war without fighting it. Right. The goal is if you go to war, the intelligence agency has kind of failed to prevent that war by helping us get our national security objective without going to war. People start to realize that whether it's slowing down production of particular weapons systems, whether it's finding out information that you can use diplomatically to push back a certain country into going with another country. I'm being very circumspect here because I have to be. But these are things that people understand. If I lay down information about a country saying, I know you've done this, and here's how. So knock it off. And that prevents a war from happening or that prevents some kind of conflict, then the intelligence community has done an exceptional job of keeping people alive, not just American soldiers, but also people around the world. And that's why I think people are seeing that. So I think you're half right. I think that there is a larger appreciation, but also the same time, I think there are people who just despise what intelligence agencies do much more than they ever did before.

Eryn (22:16)
It's interesting that you say all this, Vince because we're kind of wondering, why did it seem like the Cold war was like this connection with intelligence officers or spies, whichever way someone might be phrasing it. But some of the questions I was asking myself, like, was it because the media was a bigger thing at the time or why this kind of perception grew? And then one of the other questions I was asking was, did spies or intelligence officers, now that we know the proper term, stop the Cold war from boiling over into a physical conflict?

Dr. Houghton (23:00)
The second part is easy. Multiple times. There are multiple times where intelligence stopped The Cold War from getting hot, whether it's the Cuban missile crisis or operations that happen that are starting to become declassified about intelligence, about invasions that were going to happen, that never did, because intelligence was there to kind of stop them and say, we know that you're going to do this. This is where the historian comes out in me. I think we actually have to go back. Let's go. Let's go back to the beginning of the country. There was a very unique pattern in American history about intelligence and about our relationship with intelligence. And it goes back to the revolution, the revolutionary period. The British had a very robust intelligence system that we wanted to break away from. Washington understood that he needed intelligence to help win the war, and intelligence really does help win the Revolutionary War. But when the war ends, there's no attempt whatsoever to maintain a peacetime intelligence apparatus. It seemed as being too much like the British, too tyrannical. Secret societies, secret services, get rid of it. So it went to nothing. War of 1812, it kind of inched back up a little bit.

Dr. Houghton (24:10)
But that war was kind of weird. We really depended on a lot of the French and a lot of the Europeans to give us information on the British. Civil War peaked back up again. Right. Intelligence agencies were developed within the army were developed both on the north and the south. Most of them went away during peacetime. Two of them kind of didn't, but they were the military side. So the army and the Navy both maintained an intelligence apparatus. But there was no major peacetime intelligence that went away. World War I, we built it back up. After World War I, the world endow wars, it went down to nothing again. World War II, we get caught with our pants down, literally. It was an intelligence failure that drags us into World War II at Pearl Harbor. So we build this robust intelligence apparatus during the war, the OSS, and then the OSS is actually disbanded at the end of the war. So you can see this pattern, right? During wartime, we jack it up. During times of crisis, we realize that we need intelligence, a secret service, and then during peacetime, it goes away.

Dr. Houghton (25:11)
And that was thought to be the case after World War II. For the first couple of years, there was no real push to create a peacetime intelligence agency. In fact, a lot of people you can even read the congressional record were arguing in Congress about we don't want to create another Gestapo. Right. Kind of the image of the secret police of the Nazis during the Second World War was something that we didn't want to create. We had to. Right. The idea that the Soviets were becoming so strong, the Iron Curtain, as Winston Churchill said, was dropping over all of Europe, and we're in a position where we had to know what was going on. So in 1947, the CIA was created the first time ever in American history we had a permanent peacetime intelligence agency. And at that point is where do you start to see the need for this and why the CIA was created? Actually, what's fun about as a historian is for the first couple of years, the CIA had no idea what the hell it doing. Not that it was bad at its job. It actually did not know its mandate.

Dr. Houghton (26:15)
It did not know what it was going to become. And so the first couple of directors of CIA essentially created the CIA we all know and love today, especially Allen Dulles. When Allen Dulles takes over as the first civilian director of CIA and Eisenhower, he creates the framework that we have today of the agency. And I think to get back to your question, and this is kind of the crux of the issue, what allows the CIA to be created in the first place and what allows the CIA to become as powerful as it does is the desperation we felt during the Cold War is the idea that you had an enemy that could, for the first time in American history since at least the War of 1812, could actually challenge the sovereignty of the United States. The Cold War when you start talking about the ability of the Soviets to produce atomic weapons, when you start talking about the ability of the Soviets to deliver atomic weapons, which by the mid-1950s, they could on one-way flights with bombers, certainly by the end of the 1950s, they could with Intercontinental ballistic missiles. Then everyone's kind of freaking out a little bit.

Dr. Houghton (27:15)
And the key in the nuclear age is you can't have a Pearl Harbor and expect to survive it. Right? We got surprised at Pearl Harbor, but Pearl Harbor destroyed the Pacific Fleet, not all of it. The aircraft carriers weren't there. But we did what Americans do. Right? We bucked up and we joined the Navy and joined the army. And we had the time to do that because there was still an America left over. But if you talk about the nuclear age, a first strike in the nuclear age, there's no country left to recruit members for the army and the Navy. There's no civilization left. There's no day two in a nuclear war. So like December 8, when FDR gives his day living infamy and everyone's lined up around the corner to join the Navy, that doesn't exist in the nuclear universe. So how do you stop that from happening? When you build a robust intelligence agency, you build a lot of robust intelligence agency, the CIA, the NSA, the DIA, eventually the NRO, the NGA, and all these other agencies. So you don't get caught with your pants down for a nuclear Pearl Harbor. So people are much more willing to accept that because of the possible damage.

Dr. Houghton (28:19)
The great example of this is the 1990s. To see the converse of this. In the 1990s, when the Cold War ended, you had people like Daniel Patrick Moynihan in Congress saying, let's get rid of the CIA. We don't need it anymore. Right? We won. The CIA was created to make sure the Soviets didn't surprise us. The Soviets are no longer. We won. And there's a lot of talk about that. You may have heard of the peace dividend. Of course, the peace dividend at the end of the Cold War, where the Defense Department was slashed un the Clinton administration, while the intelligence community got even farther than the military did during the peace dividend time in the 1990s. And of course, that leads us to 9/11, where we're caught even more with our pants down attack on the United States, on New York, on Virginia, on Pennsylvania. And you see that pendulum swing way back up again, where the public is much more willing to accept things they never would accept it before. They're willing to accept levels of surveillance they never would have otherwise. They're willing to allow their military to kill people individually with machines that don't have pilots.

Dr. Houghton (29:28)
That's something that I don't think they would have agreed to do beforehand. Assassination was banned back in 1975, and then later on an executive order twelve triple three, which is a presidential order. I don't know what else you can call killing an individual with a Hellfire missile than an assassination, but we call it a targeted killing or something to affect so that we can get around. So people are willing to accept things. And then ten years after 9/11, when there wasn't another attack, people are less willing to accept things. And so you see the pushback that begins against torture, against surveillance, against drone strikes, against all these things that we were so willing to allow to happen when we were afraid. And I think that's a pattern that we've seen throughout our history.

Mary (30:14)
And that I think reminds me we've discussed movements a lot on our podcast. And the idea that we think of like Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat. And the civil rights movement was born or the 19th moment was passed, a woman could suddenly vote. And there's a lot of boring groundwork of letter writing and the boring day-to-day that goes on to make those things happen. So I think that's interesting. I guess we're just maybe as human beings, as story-craving animals, we want the danger. We want that glamor to it. And the other thing that I think is very interesting and what you're describing is that there's definitely this idea of turning points in these pendulum swings over time. And I think it's fair to say I mean, from what you're saying, it sounds like the Cold War, ad certainly, 9/11 are turning points if we're talking about the history of intelligence in the United States. So I was hoping we could take a quick break and then maybe back go back a little bit to the Cold War and explore that a little bit further.

Dr. Houghton (31:17)
Sure thing.

Mary (31:25)
We're back from our break. Before we left you there for a minute, we were talking about this idea of turning points. And you mentioned that the Cold War, this dawn of the nuclear age, is really a turning point. When we talk about intelligence in US history. So I am curious, you had written that when the Soviets detonate their first atomic bomb in 1941, no one in the American intelligence saw it coming. So I'm curious, what effect does that have both on intelligence and what and also on the public because you had mentioned before that a lot of Americans weren't aware of American intelligence in the 50s and 60s. So how palpable, how real was this Soviet threat, and what effects did that have?

Dr. Houghton (32:16)
Yeah, this is a really complicated answer, but I'll try to make it really simple. It was shocking to American intelligence because they were pretty confident they knew when the Soviets were going to detonate their first atomic bomb. And it was years later. And they were so confident, they kept putting out the same analysis over and over again, saying the most likely time would be 1953. The earliest possible time might be 1951 if they are able to kind of cut corners. And they kept saying this again and again. In fact, they actually put out the office reports and estimates at CIA, which was the office in charge of this, actually put out that estimate a couple of weeks after the Soviets had detonated their first atomic bomb. But before we had discovered they had. So they were predicting, I'm using quotes around the word predicting another four years before the Soviets were detonated their bomb after the Soviets had already detonated their atomic bomb. Not so good. And so there was a bit of a kind of a, let's reassess how we're doing things moment, certainly with intelligence. And Congress helped this by having a bunch of hearings to try to say, how did we miss this?

Dr. Houghton (33:24)
How do we not see this coming? And so there was kind of a lot of navel-gazing about how the hell do we prevent this from happening again? When you talk about the fear, though, I think that's one of the foundations of how we can possibly understand the decisions that were made during this time. I always argue, and this is my personal philosophy as a historian. The number one most important thing historians can do is to get their audience, if they're writing a book or get their students if they're teaching or they themselves to become empathetic with their subjects. You can try to learn all you want to learn about people in the past. But if you treat them as though they belong in 2021, then you're not giving them a fair shake. You have to understand what it was like to live in 1949 or 1957 after Sputnik was launched. You have to put yourselves in their shoes and you can't use the hindsight that we have now. You can't know that the Cold War ended peacefully. You can't know that the Cuban Missile Crisis didn't kill everybody. You can't know that the Soviets didn't get to the moon first and didn't have battle stations up in space dropping bombs on us.

Dr. Houghton (34:44)
You can't possibly know that we win the Cold War. So with that, it's hard to do, right? It's hard not to allow hindsight to change the way that we judge those in the past, but it's possible. It's hard, but it's possible. And so what I try to tell everyone is be empathetic, pretend that you only know what you know, and then how would you feel at that point in time if it looked as though the Soviets had beaten any possible estimate to get the atomic bomb? They were way ahead of where we thought they were going to be. We were no longer geographically isolated from the rest of the world. And then, God forbid, in 1957, when the Soviets launched Sputnik, they had beaten us at our own game. We were the country that was supposed to be the technological science country of the world. We invented everything. We invented the airplane, we invented the atomic bomb, we invented chocolate chip cookies, we invented microwave popcorn, the Etch A Sketch. That was an American invention, right? And all of a sudden, they beat us into space, and everyone's kind of looking at each other going, how in the world did that happen?

Dr. Houghton (35:49)
Not only was it a shock to the system as far as science technology was concerned, but Sputnik was launching space on top of an ICBM, right? I mean, that's what it was. It was on a civilian program they were designing here, which meant that if the Soviets were able to find ways to miniaturize their atomic weapons, which only took them a very short time period, they could be dropping bombs on us in 30 minutes. Again, it's hard for us to even fathom that. I mean, imagine how everyone felt on 9/12, 2001 times 1000, right? 3000 people died on 9/11, and it was a horrible experience. Everyone was shocked to the core. Everyone. This idea of invulnerability was gone. One large nuclear weapon dropped on New York City. You're talking about 3 million people being dead instantaneously or a full barrage. You're talking about 300 million people being killed instantaneously. We can't even imagine that today. But people our age, kids in middle school, we're being taught that we're being told to imagine that and then being told to hide under their nuclear weapons proof desk for whatever reason. We laugh at that. There is a reason for it is because if the blast is nearby, flying glass and debris is the thing that might kill you, and so the desk might protect you against that.

Dr. Houghton (37:09)
But the idea of people having to live with this on a day-to-day basis is not something that we understand today. Right. It may be something we understood on 9/12 and 9/13 about, oh, my God, is there going to be another attack? Is it going to be my city this time? But it's really difficult to kind of consider that at the scale that our parents, grandparents had to think about in the 1950s and 60s. And so that doesn't justify a lot of the things that our government did in our name that were sketchy, that doesn't justify the kind of abuses to the Constitution, to kind of other countries to everybody else that we did. I think it explains it. It's not an excuse, it's not a justification. But to me, as a historian, it's my job to explain. And I think that does a good job in explaining why we did the things that we did because of the fear that we had because everyone was desperate to do anything they possibly could to slow down the Soviet threat, which really, until the 1970s looked as though it was winning, in most cases, the Cold War.

Dr. Houghton (38:21)
And even up until 1979, they invaded Afghanistan. Right. The Carter Doctrine, it looks like they're going to roll right into the Middle East and take everyone's oil. So for decades, it looked as though the Soviets were winning this thing. And so I get it. I don't excuse it. I don't think it was the right decision in certain cases, like everything from McCarthyism to the Red Scare, being used to crackdown on civil liberties and everything, whatever you want to talk about.

Mary (38:49)
But I understand we have covered a lot of ground in our conversation today, and I'm left wondering, what does this mean for the average American listening to this today?

Dr. Houghton (39:01)
I think one of the great things about where we are today versus where we were just a generation ago is the impact the average person can have on the entire intelligence community. You might think, what are you talking about? Like, these are secret agencies. How can I possibly have impact on this? But what people don't quite grasp is the level of oversight that exists that's been built into our government, our society, since the 1970s. And that's really where a lot of this happened. That allows us to be much more than just by standards, allows us to be participants in the way the intelligence community is run. And part of this is because both the House and the Senate have permanent intelligence committees made up of members of Congress, and usually, they're prominent ones, but they can certainly be voted out of office if you don't like what they're doing. There are people who are guiding and overseeing the intelligence community, and those are places that we can have direct influence on the direction of the intelligence community. There's also our ability to understand things like the Freedom of Information Act, which is glorious in every respect, certainly for researchers, which kind of flips the burden of proof.

Dr. Houghton (40:10)
I mean, you used to have a burden as a researcher, as a citizen, to convince the government why you should have access to information with the Freedom of Information Act does in the simplest form, is it reverses that burden. It forces the government to say why you shouldn't have access to that information. The assumption is that information belongs to you. And if something is out there, the intelligence agencies are now being forced to say why you shouldn't have it. And in some cases, they have really good reasons why you shouldn't have it. They're going to tell you you're not going to get it. But FOIA has completely changed the perception the public has had with intelligence, because information that should be released get released, and then you can change your views on major events around the world. You can change your views on for me, oversight was a key consideration. I thought the intelligence community was running amok. I didn't really understand kind of how it was reined in. And just the amount of lawyers and intelligence agencies rivals the amount of actual intelligence officers just to make sure that this is being done correctly.

Dr. Houghton (41:15)
And so we as citizens have opportunities to get our voice out there, to push Congress to make changes if we think changes should be made to push the courts under FISA laws, the change if we need to be changed to elect presidents because presidents have a pretty extraordinary executive power over this to make sure that the presidents that we elect are going to hold the intelligence community in check or listen to the intelligence community or whatever you want your President to do in relation to the intelligence community. We have that opportunity to kind of force that debate. And I think that every single time that we have a major election, the public is more and more informed about intelligence. If you look back at some of the 2016 and 2020 primary seasons, they were talking about Section 230 of these bills, talking about FISA here, talking about human intelligence, like the fact that this terminology is being used in a public setting and that most of the audience kind of understands what that person is saying. It's just dramatically different than what you saw a generation ago. But we now have the opportunity to get more and more involved as the day goes on.

Eryn (42:31)
I think that's a great reminder to our listeners and frankly, to everyone because I don't think we automatically think that we have a say in participation in the intelligence community.

Dr. Houghton (42:46)
The government is making these decisions in our name. Right. And sometimes they have to keep it secret, right. Sometimes. And look, there probably isn't an intelligence professional out there that wouldn't love to let every American know what we're doing in their name. But you can't do that. You can't tell every American without telling the rest of the world. Right. So things have to be kept secret from our own citizens. We don't want to, but you just got to do that. The good intelligence agency relationships with people come into play is when there's trust when there's trust that what we, the intelligence community is doing in your name is good, is the good stuff, then I think that everything runs nice and smoothly. But it's your job as a citizen to make sure that you know everything you could possibly know. To make sure that you're engaged in what our intelligence community is doing in our name, as citizens, to know whether or not you think that it should be moving in a different direction. If you just sit back and let us do whatever we want to do, we're still going to do things the right way.

Dr. Houghton (43:52)
But how would you know? You got to stay engaged. You got to be part of this because like everything else, this is a participatory process. And yes, we're not practicing democracy here in the intelligence community. We're preserving it. But we're still part of where your neighbors were, your friends were your kids or your girlfriends. boyfriends, husbands, wives. We're just Americans just like everybody else. But we need to be held to the same standard as you held everyone in government and speaking out in your name as Americans.

Mary (44:23)
That's all for us today. Dr. Vince Houghton, thank you so much for your time and your expertise. You can find Dr. Houghton at the National Cryptologic Museum in Fort Meade, Maryland, where he serves as the Museum director. You can also check out his books on intelligence, 'Nuking the Moon, and Other Intelligence Schemes and Military Plots Left on the Drawing Board,' and 'The Nuclear Spies: America's Atomic Intelligence Operation against Hitler and Stalin.' We have our marching orders. Stay informed, stay engaged. And speaking of engagement, we'd love to hear from you. Do you have any comments or insights on today's episode or topics you'd like us to tackle? Write to us at Comments@fabricofhistory.org until next time, everybody take care.

Intro/Outro (45:14)
The Bill of Rights Institute engages, educates, and empowers individuals with a passion for the freedom and opportunity that exists in a free society. Check out our educational resources and programs on our website mybri.org. Any questions or suggestions for future episodes? We'd love to hear from you. Just email us at comments@fabricofhistory.org and don't forget to visit us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram to stay connected and informed about future episodes. Thank you for listening.