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

1. Espionage and the Revolutionary War

15 1 Espionage and the Revolutionary War There is one evil I dread, and that is their spies. George Washington, March 24, 1776. Quoted by US Central Intelligence Agency, Intelligence. Espionage played a crucial role in the turbulent conflicts of eighteenthcentury Europe, where ruthlessly ambitious monarchs clashed over trade, territory, and religious differences. Among European nations, Great Britain had few rivals in espionage, and it had developed an effective intelligence service two centuries earlier under Francis Walsingham, Queen Elizabeth I’s spymaster. By the mid-1700s, Walsingham’s successors had seeded spies inside the royal courts of Britain’s European neighbors to protect its empire, which had become the major economic and military power on the globe. Before the Revolution, the British were too preoccupied with threats from European rivals to spy on their American colonies and had little need to do so. The relationship between the Crown and its subjects across the Atlantic was mutually beneficial for both sides. The British were content to let the colonies govern themselves as long as trade flourished and the Crown benefited. The colonies purchased half the ironware, cotton, and linen produced in Britain, which in turn was the major consumer of raw materials from its New World subjects. From 1700 until the Revolutionary The Revolutionary War 16 War, colonial exports to Britain grew sevenfold, and trade between the colonies and the mother country increased from £500,000 to £2.8 million.1 The British economy, however, began to suffer from the heavy costs of defeating France in the Seven Years’ War (1756–63). To recover their losses, King George III and his Parliament imposed a series of taxes on the colonies . Tensions between the Crown and its subjects escalated from protest to covert resistance and finally erupted into armed conflict in Massachusetts, the hotbed of colonial opposition to the taxes. Britain’s stubborn refusal to compromise and its rejection of appeals for negotiations only drove the colonists further along the road to revolution. Despite British intransigence, colonial support for independence was hardly unanimous even after the harsh taxes were imposed. Even the most vocal opponents of the king’s taxes, including founding fathers like John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, initially opposed independence and simply sought a colonial voice in Parliament regarding any decisions to tax the colonies. Even after the first salvos of the war in Lexington and Concord in 1775, the Second Continental Congress advocated negotiations to reconcile with London. The assemblies of two colonies, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, instructed their delegates to Congress to oppose any move to secede from the British Empire. As John Adams later claimed, before the war one-third of the colonial population supported independence, one-third opposed it, and the remaining one-third was neutral.2 These divided loyalties facilitated espionage by both sides. Recruiting spies was a relatively simple task because the colonists, whether Tory or revolutionary, spoke the same language and shared the same heritage. Espionage swiftly became as important to the British in the colonies as it was in the royal courts of Europe. To suppress the independence movement, the British relied on spies to gauge levels of colonial unrest, troop strength, and stockpiles of munitions and supplies. The Crown spared little expense to fund this espionage effort. Within a few years after the first shots of the American Revolution were fired, the budget of British intelligence chief William Eden doubled.3 Espionage was even more important to the Revolutionary cause. The colonials faced a better-armed and more experienced enemy, and colonial commander in chief George Washington realized that intelligence on Brit- Espionage and the Revolutionary War 17 ish troop strengths and movements could even the odds. As the intelligence historian Thomas Powers notes, espionage played a central role in the American Revolution: “The American cause was born in secrecy in the coffeehouses of Boston, it was nurtured in secrecy in the Committees of Correspondence , it was pressed by citizens disguised as Indians who dumped tea in Boston harbor. . . . Behind the pageant lay all the hidden web of espionage , propaganda, secret diplomacy. In truth, it was the clandestine arts as much as American armies which won American independence.”4 Espionage, in fact, was the spark that ignited the war. General Thomas Gage, the royal governor of Massachusetts and commander of British forces, received a report from a spy that New England colonists were hiding stockpiles of weapons because they...