Covert City: The Cold War and the Making of Miami - by Dr Vince Houghton and Eric Driggs

Interview of Monday, 20 May 2024 with Dr Vince Houghton and Eric Driggs on their new book: Covert City: The Cold War and the Making of Miami (PublicAffairs Books, Apr 2024) on the history of how the entire city of Miami was constructed in the image of the US-Cuba rivalry. From the Bay of Pigs invasion to the death of Fidel Castro.

Host: AFIO President James Hughes, a former senior CIA Operations Officer.
They discuss secret operations, corruption, crime, and a city teeming with spies: why Miami was as crucial to winning the Cold War as Washington DC or Moscow.
The interview runs 48 minutes.
Covert City may be purchased here: https://www.hachettebookgroup.com/tit...

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.
Author of three books: Covert City: The Cold War and the Making of Miami (2024), Nuking the Moon (Penguin, 2019), and the Nuclear Spies (Cornell UP, 2019)

ERIC DRIGGS currently works for the United States Southern Command out of the Pentagon as a Congressional Liaison. He spent the previous 10 years as the Governmental & External Affairs Officer for Coast Guard Seventh District, which oversees Coast Guard operations in South Carolina, Georgia, the peninsula of Florida, Puerto Rico, the US Virgin Islands and the Caribbean Basin. He has also worked as a Cuba Analyst at the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies.

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, VA, 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.

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