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

12. Espionage Before World War I

109 12 Espionage before World War I Weary of war and burdened with debt, the American people eagerly turned to filling out the nation’s frontiers and exploiting its rich resources. Nathan Miller, Spying for America A half century passed before the United States was again embroiled in a conflict on the scale of the Civil War. During this time the nation turned inward to heal the wounds of the Civil War and accelerate the growth of its economy. Americans constructed railways linking the country from coast to coast, discovered huge deposits of oil, illuminated their cities with Thomas Edison’s electric light, and communicated across the vast expanse of the country with Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone. Oneareathatdidnotexpandwasthemilitary.Theprosperingnationfaced no threats from within or without and remained reluctant to support a large standing army in peacetime. The military, however, did take the first steps toward an intelligence collection ability. In 1882 the US Navy established the Office of Naval Intelligence, and the army followed a few years later by establishing the Military Intelligence Division. Though both these units were small and inexperienced, they represented the nation’s first institutionalized intelligence services and wereasignificantimprovementoverthe amateur organizations that had been cobbled together during past conflicts. Espionage during the World Wars, 1914–45 The intelligence services were tested for the first time in the SpanishAmerican War, the nation’s first major conflict since the Civil War. As the nineteenth century drew to a close, Cuba began to rebel against the oppression of its Spanish masters, and the tabloid press in America stirred up public opinion over Spanish atrocities against the island’s citizens. In February 1898 an explosion aboard the USS Maine in Havana Harbor killed 266 naval personnel. Although sabotage was never proven, the American press blamed Spain and was soon pushing the nation toward war. Unlike the conflicts of the late twentieth century, the Spanish-American War was immensely popular with Americans, many of whom viewed it as a just cause in the fight for liberty against the European imperialism they had come to loathe. The United States won the war after a few short months, and America’s fledgling intelligence services contributed to the victory. Counterespionage , however, was another matter. The United States had still not established a counterespionage agency following the Civil War, and the government’s only investigative capability rested with the US Secret Service , which focused almost exclusively on counterfeiting. The Secret Service was given the mission of combating Spanish espionage, which fortunately proved to be grossly inept. After the United States declared war, Spanish diplomats in Washington returned home, but Ramon Carranza, Spain’s naval attaché, went to Canada to organize a spy network against the American enemy. Carranza was not an intelligence professional and never noticed the US Secret Service agent, known to history only as “Tracer,” who tracked him into Canada.1 Compounding the mistake, Carranza met a recruited agent in a Toronto hotel room as the Secret Service eavesdropped on the conspiratorial pair from an adjoining room. The spy, a retired naval petty officer tasked with gathering information on coastal defenses, was arrested while mailing a letter in Washington to his Spanish handlers. After the arrest a Secret Service agent entered Carranza’s rented house in Montreal as a prospective tenant and blatantly stole a letter that the careless Spaniard had left on his desk. This letter included sufficient detail about his spy tasks and was given to the Canadian authorities, which expelled Carranza and ended Spain’s hapless foray into espionage against the United States.2 110 111 Espionage before World War I America’s quick victory and Spain’s luckless espionage attempts provoked little support for a national counterespionage agency after the conflict . The Secret Service’s spy-catching mission was abruptly ended, and its agents were again limited only to investigations related to Treasury matters . On the eve of America’s entry into a world war, the country still had no federal agency tasked with the responsibility to combat espionage. The spark that ignited World War I was lit on June 28, 1914, by a radical Bosnian student named Gavrilo Princip. Princip stepped out from a crowd lined along a cobble-stoned Sarajevo street to watch the passing motorcade of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria. He pulled out a pistol and killed the Austrian nobleman and his wife and blew the lid off a simmering cauldron of...