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Welcome to Spycast.

My name is Dr. Andrew Harmon, a historian and curator here at the International Spy Museum in Washington DC.

Every week, Spycast explores a world of intelligence and espionage by bringing you in-depth conversations, spies, spy masters, intelligence officers and authors.

We explore the stories, secrets, tradecraft and technology of a world that looms beneath the surface of every day life.

Welcome to a special edition of Spycast.

To celebrate Juneteenth, we have three African-Americans from different vantage points discuss three African-American spies from American history.

This episode is timely because literally an hour ago, Juneteenth was made that 11th Federal holiday here in the United States.

Each of our guests introduces their chosen spy before we have a great conversation on America and the African-American experience.

First up, we have Kaya Shivers and Harriet Tubman. Kaya founded the magazine Art Republic and is an academic entrepreneur and activist.

Next up, we have Ambassador Ruben Bridgeti on Ralph Bunch. Ambassador Bridgeti is the current Vice-Chancellor of the University of the South and former US Ambassador to the African Union.

And last but not least, we have Mel Gamble on Willie Meckerson, Jr.

Mr. Gamble is a retired senior intelligence officer at the Central Intelligence Agency where he was among many other things, chief and deputy chief of stations in Africa and Latin America. Hope you enjoy.

Well, I was thinking a good way to start would be for each of you just to give us five minutes on each of the figures.

Tell our listeners a lot about more about who they are, why the story interests you.

And anything else, the significant that you would like to share with our listeners, we're going to start off with Kaya.

Speaking about Harriet Tubman, then we're moving on to Ruben is speaking about Ralph Bunch and then finally Mel Gamble is speaking about Willie Meckerson, Jr.

So Kaya tells a lot about more about Harriet Tubman.

All right, so thank you so much for having me. Harriet Tubman is the patron saint to me of America.

She is so revered and so celebrated and almost has become a difficult like character. So we're going to bring some humanists to her, but also just talk about how dope he is.

So before she gets into the union army, she joins union army. She has been living for about 12 or 13 years as a self emancipated woman, meaning that she escapes slavery.

She also has traveled anywhere between nine to 13 times back down to the Maryland area in order to free about 75 of her family members.

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