Spying in America: Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War

9. The Counterspy as Tyrant: Lafayette Baker

  87 9 The Counterspy as Tyrant Lafayette Baker It’s doubtful if Baker has in any one thing told the truth, even by accident. US House of Representatives’ investigation of Lafayette Baker based on Baker’s testimony regarding impeachment proceedings against President Andrew Johnson, HR Report 7, 40th Congress Lafayette Baker was responsible for the first in a series of dark periods in American counterespionage history when the pursuit of spies led to political persecution. Governments throughout history have used the threat of espionage and subversion as a thinly veiled pretext to persecute their citizens because of opposing political views, religious affiliation, or ethnic heritage . The United States has largely been immune to these authoritarian tendencies because of its constitutional guarantees of civil liberties. Yet despite this tradition, whenever Americans felt most threatened, from the Civil War to the Vietnam War, they slandered, investigated, arrested, and interned their fellow citizens on baseless charges of espionage and subversion . Apart from the abuse of civil liberties, these witch hunts have rarely unmasked a real spy jeopardizing America’s national security. Lafayette Baker’s exploitation of Union paranoia in the Civil War set the unfortunate precedent. In the last two years of the conflict, Baker rounded up hundreds of suspects, trampled civil liberties, and missed genuine spies 88 The Civil War operating not only in the Union government but also in his own counterespionage service. Baker was born in upstate New York in 1826 and spent his youth wandering across the country to the West Coast. He wound up in California during the Gold Rush of the 1850s and joined an army of vigilantes who tried to bring order to the lawless chaos of San Francisco. His vigilante experience would shape his later approach to law enforcement and counterespionage investigations.1 At the start of the Civil War Baker traveled to Washington to volunteer his services as a spy to General Winfield Scott, then the Union army’s commander. Because the Union had no professional intelligence service, commanders routinely accepted such offers, and the elderly general tasked the young man to gather information about General Pierre Beauregard’s forces in Manassas. Posing as an itinerant photographer, Baker went behind enemy lines but got caught twice. He was released and managed to collect the information that Scott wanted (or at least Baker claims this in his autobiography). Scott recommended Baker to Secretary of State William Seward, who then hired him on contract for $200 to sniff out Confederate spies and subversives in Maryland and Virginia.2 Baker, a power-hungry zealot for the Union cause, thrived in a climate where fear of Confederate subversion reigned. The Union capital of Washington was, after all, a Southern city at heart and was surrounded by Confederate sympathizers in Virginia and Maryland. Seward was particularly concerned about Southern influence in the capital, and so he established an informal “Treason Bureau” that relentlessly tracked Confederate subversives in and around the capital. The bureau arbitrarily detained suspects on the flimsiest evidence, ignored due process, and harshly interrogated suspects. Seward dispatched Baker on his first mission to root out subversives in southern Maryland, where the ambitious counterspy ingratiated himself with his ruthless boss by ravaging the countryside, burning buildings, and randomly rounding up hundreds of alleged plotters. Seward was not alone in his aggressive hunt for subversives. Representative John Potter was concerned about “secession clerks,” who were rebel sympathizers still remaining in Union service and had access to information of obvious interest to the enemy. The threat was a real one, and Potter 89 The Counterspy as Tyrant • Lafayette Baker launchedacampaigntoweedoutthesepotentialspies.Althoughheclaimed “none shall be injured by mere malice or rumor,” he charged about two hundred clerks with subversion, a harbinger of Senator Joe McCarthy’s witch hunt against government officials in the early days of the Cold War.3 Despite these mass arrests, key rebel clerks still evaded the net and spied for the Confederacy. The most powerful supporter of a hard-line stance against spies and subversives was the president himself. Lincoln believed that the chief executive was not only entitled but also obligated to protect the republic by adopting measures in wartime that would ordinarily have been illegal. Early in the war he suspended the writ of habeas corpus whereby detainees could petition for relief from unlawful detention, a decision that gave Seward’s Treason Bureau free rein to hold suspects without trial. After Lincoln appointed...