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

Introduction: The Peril of Disbelief

1 Introduction The Peril of Disbelief To counter espionage, you must first understand it. To do this, you must be aware of its history Mark Lloyd, Guinness Book of Espionage Can you keep a secret? Maybe you can, but the US government cannot. Nations both large and small, from Russia and China to Ghana and Ecuador, have stolen the most precious secrets of the United States since the country ’s birth. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and its allies acquired American military secrets that would have jeopardized the nation’s defense if the two superpowers had clashed in open warfare. The Soviet Union spied on America by various means—such as satellite reconnaissance, electronic eavesdropping, and code breaking—but its greatest achievements in espionage stemmed from its collaboration with American spies inside the US government. Thanks to one Cold War spy, naval warrant officer John Walker, the Soviets knew every move of America ’s nuclear submarine fleet, which was considered the most invulnerable leg of the nation’s land, air, and sea defense triad. Fortunately, however, the superpowers never triggered a nuclear war. Yet even if the superpowers had only engaged in a conventional war in Europe, the Soviets would still 1 Introduction • The Peril of Disbelief 2 have had a distinct advantage—a spy in the US Army, Sergeant Clyde Conrad , had given their Hungarian ally NATO’s complete defense plans for the continent. All nations have been victims of espionage, but the United States has proven to be particularly vulnerable to spies who endangered the national defense during the Cold War. By the time the Cold War ended, spies in the US government included Americans from every agency involved in national security and every branch of the armed forces except the coast guard.1 However, although many Americans associate espionage with the superpower rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union, the betrayal of US government secrets by spies is hardly a Cold War phenomenon. The Soviet intelligence services and their allies in the Soviet Bloc were certainly aggressive in spying against the United States, but America’s vulnerability to espionage was more deeply rooted in the nation’s past. America ’s susceptibility to the threat of espionage in the Cold War and thereafter developed, ironically, from the very qualities that catapulted the nation to superpower status and made it a symbol of democracy: an exceptional geography and a tradition of individual liberties. These attributes shaped American attitudes toward national security and bred both disbelief about the threat of espionage and a distrust of countering it at the expense of these cherished liberties. America’s exceptional geography blessed the country with abundant natural resources, a thriving economy, and the natural border of two oceans that comfortably separated it from squabbling European nations to the east and emerging Asian powers to the west. For more than a century after its birth, the United States was rarely challenged by security threats from abroad and thus felt little need for vigilance against espionage. For the first 120 years of US history, the only major conflicts in the nation involved citizens who spoke the same language, shared the same heritage, and even worked side by side in the same fields and factories. The lack of a serious threat from foreign aggressors in the nineteenth century only reinforced America’s disbelief that its citizens in positions of trust would spy for another nation. This disbelief spawned a “national capacity for naiveté,” as former Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) counterintelligence chief Paul Redmond dubbed it, which surfaced as early as the American Revolution.2 George Introduction • The Peril of Disbelief 3 Washington feared British espionage, but even he was shocked that Benedict Arnold, one of the era’s greatest military commanders, could betray his country. However, the British were actively trying to persuade high-level colonial officers to defect, and rumors had circulated that a top patriot general was collaborating with the British. Washington’s intelligence chief, Benjamin Tallmadge, had also received information about a highly placed spy inside the colonists’ ranks. Arnold, however, remained above suspicion, even though he was involved in shady business deals and had grumbled loudly about his unfair treatment by the Continental Congress. Americans from the commander in chief down simply refused to believe that a general of Arnold’s caliber and achievements could betray the cause. American disbelief regarding espionage has persisted throughout the...