The Craft of Intelligence (4 page)

—B.F.
2

Once when the British lodged an official diplomatic protest with the French regarding the latter’s support of the American cause, they based the protest on a secret report of Bancroft’s, quoting facts and figures he had received from Franklin and even using Bancroft’s wording, a bit of a slip that happens from time to time in the intelligence world. Bancroft was mortally afraid that Franklin might smell a rat and suspect him. He even had the British give him a passport so that he could flee on a moment’s notice if necessary. Franklin did express the opinion on this occasion that “such precise information must have come from a source very near him,” but as far as we know he did nothing else about it.

The British, also, had reason to suspect Bancroft. George III does not seem to have fully trusted him or his reports since he caught him out investing his ill-gotten pounds in securities whose value would be enhanced by an American victory.

Bancroft’s duplicity was not clearly established until 1889, when certain papers in British archives pertaining to the Revolutionary period were made public. Among them, in a letter addressed to Lord Carmarthen, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, and written in 1784, Bancroft set down in summary form his activities as a British agent. It seems the British government had fallen behind in their payments to him and Bancroft was putting in a claim and reminding his employers of his past services. He closed with the words: “I make no Claim beyond the permanent pension of £500 pr an. for which the Faith of Government has often been pledged; and for which I have sacrificed near eight years of my life.”

Franklin’s own agents in London were apparently highly placed. Early in 1778 Franklin knew the contents of a report General Cornwallis submitted in London on the American situation less than a month after Cornwallis had delivered it. The gist of the report was that the conquest of America was impossible. If Franklin’s agents had penetrated the British government at this level, it is possible that they had caught wind of the intelligence Bancroft was feeding the British.

In the Civil War, even more than in the Revolution, the common heritage and language of the two parties to the conflict and the fact that many people geographically located on one side sympathized with the political aims of the other made the basic task of espionage relatively simple, while making the task of counterespionage all the more difficult. Yet the record seems to show that few highly competent continuous espionage operations, ones that can be compared in significance of achievement and technical excellence with those of the Revolution, existed on either side. No great battles were won or lost or evaded because of superior intelligence. Intelligence operations were limited for the most part to more or less localized and temporary targets. As one writer has put it, “There was probably more espionage in one year in any medieval Italian city than in the four-year War of Secession.”

The reasons for this are numerous. There was no existing intelligence organization on either side at the outbreak of the war nor was there any extensive intelligence experience among our military personnel of that day. Before the Revolution, the Colonial leaders had been conspiring and carrying out a limited secret war against the British for years and by the time of open conflict had a string of active “sources” working for them in England and moreover possessed tested techniques for functioning in secret at home. This was not the case in the North or the South before the Civil War. Washington was an outstandingly gifted intelligence chief. He himself directed the entire intelligence effort of the American forces, even to taking a hand personally in its more important operations. There was no general with a similar gift in the whole galaxy of Federal or Confederate generals. Lastly, the Civil War by its very nature was not a war of surprises and secrets. Large lumbering armies remained encamped in one place for long periods of time, and when they began to move word of their movements spread in advance almost automatically. Washington, with far smaller numbers of men could plant false information as to his strength and could move his troops so quickly that a planned British action wouldn’t find them where they had been the day before, especially when Washington through his networks knew in advance of the British move.

At the beginning of the Civil War the city of Washington was a sieve and the organization on the Northern side so insecure that the size and movements of its forces were apparent to any interested observer. It has been said that the Confederate side never again had such good intelligence to help them as they did at the opening Battle of Bull Run.

One of the first events of the period which apparently pointed up the need for a secret intelligence service was the conspiracy of a group of hotheads in Baltimore to assassinate Lincoln on the way to his first inauguration in February, 1861. Allan Pinkerton, who had already achieved some fame working as a private detective for the railroads, had been hired by some of Lincoln’s supporters to protect him. Pinkerton got Lincoln to Washington without incident by arranging to have the presidential train pass through Baltimore unannounced late at night. At the same time Pinkerton’s operatives “penetrated” the Baltimore conspirators and kept a close watch on their activities.

Good as Pinkerton was at the job of security and counterespionage, he had little to recommend him for the work of intelligence collection except for one excellent agent, a certain Timothy Webster, who produced some good information entirely on his own in Virginia. Unfortunately, Webster was captured early in the war, thanks to a foolish maneuver of Pinkerton, and was subsequently executed. We next find Pinkerton working directly with General McClellan on military intelligence and right in the General’s headquarters. Pinkerton’s idea of military intelligence was to count the noses of the opposing troops and then to count them all over again to be sure the first figure was right. Since McClellan was famous for not going into battle unless he commanded overwhelming numbers, it is not likely that Pinkerton’s nose-counting contributed significantly to the outcome of any battle. Even with overwhelming odds in his favor, McClellan was outmaneuvered by Lee at Antietam. When Lincoln removed him from his command after this battle, Pinkerton resigned, leaving the Union virtually without a secret service.

The fact that Lincoln had hired an agent of his own on a military intelligence mission at the time of the Battle of Bull Run did not come to light until 1876, and then, as so often is the case, it was revealed in the form of a claim against the government for reimbursement. In March of 1876, the United States Supreme Court heard a case on appeal from the U.S. Court of Claims in which a certain Enoch Totten brought a claim against the government “to recover compensation for services alleged to have been rendered” by a certain William A. Lloyd, “under contract with President Lincoln, made in July 1861, by which he was to proceed South and ascertain the number of troops stationed at different points in the insurrectionary States, procure plans of forts and fortifications . . . and report the facts to the President. . . . Lloyd proceeded . . . within the rebel lines, and remained there during the entire period of the war, collecting and from time to time transmitting information to the President.” At the end of the war he had been paid his expenses but not the salary of $200 a month which Lincoln, according to the claim, had promised him. The case itself is interesting even with only these meager facts because of the light it casts on Lincoln’s foresight at this time and the security with which he must have handled the matter throughout the four long years of the war. As the Supreme Court stated in its opinion: “Both employer and agent must have understood that the lips of the other were to be forever sealed respecting the relation of either to the matter.”

Also, this case established the precedent that an intelligence agent cannot recover by court action against the government for
secret
service rendered. Said the Court: “Agents . . . must look for their compensation to the contingent fund of the department employing them, and to such allowance from it as those who dispense the fund may award. The secrecy which such contracts impose precludes any action for this enforcement.” This is a warning to the agent that he had better get his money on the barrelhead at the time of his operation.

After Pinkerton left the scene, an effort was made to create a purely military intelligence organization known as the Bureau of Military Information. The responsibility for it was assigned to Major (later General) George H. Sharpe, who appears to have been a fair-to-middling bureaucrat but is not known to have conceived or mounted significant intelligence operations on his own. However, good information was brought to the Union forces by occasional brave volunteers, most of whom generated their own operations and communications without good advice from anybody. One of these was Lafayette Baker, who posed as an itinerant photographer in the South and made a specialty of visiting Confederate camps in Virginia, taking pictures of the soldiers stations in them, at the same time gathering valuable military information. He later rose to brigadier general and took charge of the National Detective Police, a sort of precursor of today’s secret service. Where Pinkerton had excelled at counterespionage but had little to recommend him as an espionage operator, Baker excelled in the latter craft, but his failures as a chief of secret service lost us one of our greatest Presidents. To this day, no one knows where Baker’s men were on the night of April 14, 1865, when Abraham Lincoln was sitting in an unguarded box watching a play in Ford’s Theater, or why the assassins who gathered at Mrs. Suratt’s boardinghouse, whose fanatical opinions were well known throughout Washington, were not being watched by Baker. Nor was the capture of Booth and his accomplices the work of Baker, although he took credit for it.

Elizabeth van Lew, another volunteer in the South and a resident of Richmond, stayed at her post throughout the entire war and is accounted the single most valuable spy the North ever had. Grant himself stated that she had sent the most valuable information received from Richmond during the war. In Civil War espionage any “penetration” of an important headquarters, always the most dramatic high-level intelligence operations, is conspicuously missing, as are most of the more rewarding and devious undertakings of espionage. The closest thing to it, however, is alleged to have been achieved by Elizabeth van Lew when she procured a job for one of her Negro servants as a waitress in the house of Jefferson Davis, transmitting the intelligence this produced to Major Sharpe in Washington.

In the 1880s the first permanent peacetime military and naval intelligence organizations were created in the United States. The Army unit was known as the Military Information Division and came under the Adjutant General’s Office. The Navy’s Office of Intelligence, founded in 1882, first belonged to the Bureau of Navigation. During the same decade the first U.S. military and naval attachés were posted to our embassies and legations abroad, where they were to function as observers and intelligence officers.

Elbert Hubbard’s once-popular tale
A Message to Garcia
immortalized an exploit of American intelligence during the Spanish-American War that might otherwise have been forgotten. Actually, Hubbard got the story backward. The usual point of an intelligence mission is to get the needed information
to
headquarters
from
a target area. The Lieutenant Rowan of Hubbard’s story was, in real life, supposed to reach Garcia, which was not easy, but his chief purpose was to get information from Garcia about the disposition of Spanish troops and then bring it back. Obviously the latter part of the mission was more important that the former.

It is worth recalling that the man who dispatched Rowan on his mission, Col. Arthur L. Wagner, was one of the pioneers of American intelligence and even wrote a book on the subject. When he was assigned in 1898 to the Cuban Expeditionary Force as commander of the “Department of Intelligence in the Field,” General Shafter, at the head of this force, would have none of any such newfangled notions and refused to accept him. At the time of Wagner’s death in 1905, his commission as a brigadier general was lying on the President’s desk for signature. Wagner, like many of our earlier intelligence officers, was born a little too soon.

Since the 1880s also saw the founding of our Naval Intelligence, the Spanish-American War was the occasion for certain important intelligence exploits of our Navy. An unusual and romantic account has been preserved in the Navy’s archives which tells the story of two young American ensigns who, disguising themselves as Englishmen and traveling under assumed names, went to Spain and Spanish-held territories to watch and report on movements of the Spanish fleet. They kept an eye on Admiral Cervera’s ships and followed them from Cadiz and Gibraltar all the way to Puerto Rico, and “several times narrowly escaped detection.”

In 1903, with the creation of an Army General Staff, the Military Information Division was incorporated into it as the “Second Division,” thus beginning the tradition of G-2, which has since remained the designation for intelligence in the American Army. This early G-2, however, from lack of interest and responsibility dwindled almost to the point of disappearance, with the result that World War I found us again without any real intelligence service. But this time our situation was different. We were fighting abroad, the whole period during which our troops were directly engaged lasted little over a year, and we had allies. There was no time to develop a full-fledged intelligence arm nor did we have to, since we could rely largely on the British and French for military intelligence and particularly for order of battle.

But we learned rapidly—due largely to a group of officers to whom I wish to pay tribute. There was, first of all, Colonel Ralph H. Van Deman, who is considered by many to be the moving force in establishing a U.S. military intelligence. His work is described in what I consider the best account by an American author of intelligence services through the ages,
The Story of Secret Service
, by Richard Wilmer Rowan. I worked personally with Colonel Van Deman in World War I when I was in Bern, and I can attest to the effective work that he and his successors and their naval opposite numbers did in building up the basis of our military intelligence today. But in peacetime they had far too little support in the military services.