General Washington's Spy System
John Bakeless (1959)

John Bakeless writes of Washington’s spy system with the appreciation of a former Army G-2 intelligence chief, who found when he took over the Balkan section in 1940 that the U.S. Army had only one old woman without a high school education and a stenographer to track five armies. With a raconteur’s relish, Bakeless describes the exploits of a succession of agents and double-agents, from Dr. Benjamin Church, who was eventually unmasked by a Newport baker, to the unfortunate Nathan Hale and the invaluable Jerseymen -- John Honeyman of Trenton fame, the impudent Lt. Louis J. Costigan (“Z”), John Merserow with the withered arm, and Captain Caleb Bruen, who plied his trade as a double agent on the staff of British intelligence Bakeless particularly delights in the pleasure Washington took in adroitly misleading and feeding false information to up to 50 known British agents.

When Quintus Horatius Flaccus, one of the most delightful of the ancient poets, in Ars Poetica voiced the narrative that begins, "In mediis rebus," is that classical or is that classical! I think I would like to try it on you. Horace was thinking of narrative rather than of history, but history is a narrative, and I should like to begin it.

Without being quite mathematically accurate, let us start in the first few days of December, 1777, when Colonel Elias Boudinot, a New Jersey officer, is reporting to General Washington at White Marsh, just outside of Philadelphia. The American Army has just been getting the licking of its life at Germantown and at the Brandywine, and is hanging around outside Philadelphia before it goes to Valley Forge not knowing what to do.

And in Philadelphia Sir William Howe is about to make what he hopes is going to be a surprise attack, coming out through the night and striking the Americans unaware just before dawn. Dawn, you know, is the time for a surprise attack, because everyone's courage is lowest in the early morning, and if you take the enemy by surprise just before dawn, you have the whole day for pursuit. You all know how that became so, which was a matter of routine in World War I, that all infantry used to wait for an attack every morning just before dawn to prevent surprise.

Colonel Boudinot had just met a poor looking miserable old woman, as he described her, at the Rising Sun Tavern just outside of Philadelphia. The British lines had been pushed pretty well forward out of Philadelphia. The Rising Sun Tavern was just inside the American lines on the Ricetown Lane. Boudinot was a good enough intelligence officer to know that the place for him was well forward where he could see what was happening.

The little old woman came in during the afternoon, talked a little bit, then handed him an old needle book and went away.
She was not part of any intelligence system he knew about. He opened the needle book, went through it, and wrapped up inside found a long roll of twisted paper, like a spill. That is to say, the twisted paper spills that you used to dip in the fire and use to light your paper.

When he opened it, he found written information stating that the British would attack at dawn next day; that they were moving out of Philadelphia; that they were bringing pontoons for river crossings on wheels, an item of information which was always given in Revolution intelligence reports if the agent would find out.

General Washington's orders were that intelligence officers reporting to him would give the facts without opinion. Boudinot stated merely the facts. General Washington sat there lost in thought. We know exactly what happened, because Boudinot told the story himself in a manuscript which was later published, and the original manuscript, now at Brown University, agrees with the printed version. In other words, Boudinot does not later trim up his narrative.

Washington listened silently and said nothing. He was so silent that Boudinot thought he hadn't heard, and repeated all the facts. And still Washington sat silent. Boudinot then started to give his own opinion, and said that the presence of boats on wheels--pontoons--indicated a river crossing, but there were no rivers between White Marsh, where the Americans were, and Philadelphia. He believed that Sir William was going to slip to the wrong side of the Schuylkill or Delaware to give the idea that he was going away, then slip back again, come in the American rear, and attack the Americans at White Marsh in their rear.

Washington at last came to life, and said, “Not at all. Our rear is perfectly safe. They will come down a given road,” which he named. Unfortunately, Boudinot doesn't name it, so I can't tell you which one it was. “They will come down a specific road on our left.” And Boudinot went away feeling, as many an intelligence officer has felt, that the General didn't appreciate him.
You would be surprised the number of generals who haven’t appreciated intelligence. I was very happy to see Boudinot feeling the same way.

Washington, disinclined to fortify the rear, ordered a little extra fortification on the front. Boudinot went back to the outpost lines, and he and everybody else at the Rising Sun Tavern went to bed after Boudinot had remarked that the “Old Man” was completely wrong. That remark about intelligence has been made by every staff in history. I have made it myself on many occasions, but will deny it if anyone quotes me.

Just as he was going to bed, it occurred to Colonel Boudinot that he was, after all, way out in front, that there was practically nothing except a patrol or two and a little cavalry between him and the enemy. And before going quite to sleep, he gave orders that all officers’ horses would be kept silent and would be brought to the Rising Sun Tavern the moment an alarm gun crashed. Remember,that at this time you had no field radio; you had no jeeps; you had no field telephones. The only way you could get a quick message of an attack was to shoot a few cannon, and usually there was an agreed code of an alarm gun. Three cannon at so many seconds’ intervals meant an attack was in progress.

Sure enough, in the middle of the night the alarm guns began to crash in every direction. Boudinot jumped into the saddle; all the other officers jumped into the saddle, and they rode for their lives to the rear. And when it was all over, Colonel Boudinot said he would never again, so long as he lived, question any opinion of General Washington.

That is the well-known story of the Philadelphia matron Lydia Darrow, to which I shall come back when I get back in mediis rebus again after some minutes. It is often scoffed at by people who have never done military intelligence, because they say Washington had plenty of information about that White Marsh raid. Lydia Darrow's message meant nothing.

Well, those fellows have just never been G-2s. There is nothing you are looking for like confirmatory information. It is quite true that almost a week ahead of time one divisional commander had the whole story of an approaching British attack. I should not say approaching--the British hadn’t started yet--but of an impending British attack.

Almost immediately afterward, Major John Clark's magnificent spy service in Philadelphia--which by this time was often able to have the information out of Philadelphia and on its way to Washington in a matter of four or five hours, and which occasionally could hang on the British tail and get three or four reports a day in to Washington--had also reported it, and two ladies coming out from Philadelphia.

One of the things that horrifies me about military intelligence in the United States Army, all the way down to World War II, is the way in which unidentified females just wandered around the camp, talking to anybody they wanted to, or came through the line merely because they smiled sweetly at a sentry.

These ladies had come out to Philadelphia. Major Charles Craig was on constant duty at Frankfort, which is now part of the city but was then outside, to collect just such information. He also had the information.

When the dawn came, there was a rattle of gun fire, and Major Allen McLean's cavalry, which had been in touch with the British column for an hour or so, if not more, fell back on White Marsh and down the very road that Washington had predicted. The Redcoats came.

The American Army had been ready for a week. It was entrenched, was ready; it was waiting. The surprise had failed.
The armies lay there for a day, glaring at each other, then the British disappeared. That was a little too easy, and they moved out on the right fringe and the British rear. There was a little rifle fire, and then the British turned back to Philadelphia, looking as one of their officers said later to the American spy, without knowing that she was an American spy, “like a parcel of damned fools.” I frequently felt that way myself after trying to do something very clever in the service.
Now, how did Washington get to this extraordinary pitch of efficiency in military intelligence? It had not always been that way.

I should now like to leave the middle of the war and go back to the days of Paul Revere, and show you how Washington learned, in addition to the other aspects of the art of war, the art of military intelligence, which has always, until the last World War, been the very weakest part of the American General Staff. The Revolution was unlike any other war in that the United States Army did start with a kind of intelligence service. I believe when we began the World War, we had a major and a captain running intelligence for the world.

I know that when I personally took command of the Balkan section of G-2 in 1940, it consisted of an old woman without a high school education and a stenographer. And with that we tried to cover five armies. Of course, we did better as the war went on.

Now, in the Revolution, Paul Revere, Joseph Warren, one of the Adamses--I have never been able to find out which--and one other man had set up a spy system all their own in Boston. It was pretty amateurish. For example, a fixed principle of military intelligence is that your agents shall never know each other. I have corresponded literally for years with people whom I have never seen, and whom today I wouldn't know if I saw them or if I saw their handwriting or if I passed them in the street. But these spies held a weekly meeting in the Green Dragon Tavern, so that any British counter-intelligence man who wanted to look in and count noses could do it.

Their only idea of maintaining security was to take an oath at each meeting to maintain secrecy. Then they reported to Dr. Joseph Warren; that was all right. They reported to whichever capital it was; that was all right. Then they gave a third report to Dr. Benjamin Church, who was General Gage's most important secret agent, and it was very nice for General Gage.

Dr. Benjamin Church was already a member of the Provincial Congress. I do not know when he began his espionage for Gage. My suspicion is that if Gage's predecessor, Governor Thomas Hutchinson, had not lost all his papers to a mob, that we would find that Church had been reporting to Hutchinson before he reported to Gage, certainly long before Lexington.

Dr. Church was submitting regular reports to General Gage, and was being paid once a quarter, after the regular British system. Indeed, there is one letter from Church to Gage in which he reminds him delicately “tomorrow will complete a quarter.” In other words, please remit.

They presently knew that their secrets were leaking, because General Henry Knox, who was still a bookseller, had married the daughter of the secretary of a colony, who of course was a British official. The Americans were foolish enough to let their secrets leak to Church. Church obviously passed them on to Gage. Gage was foolish enough to tell his secretary about it. His secretary told Henry Knox about it. Henry Knox rushed around and told the Americans that their secrets were leaking. Everybody was as careless as that. And the only thing the patriots could think of doing was to hold their meetings in a new place, but they had the regular weekly meetings of the spies club.

But please understand me; they were very useful. Materials for the repair of the forts in Boston which the British were going to need were shipped out to the island forts, and they always sank. The cavalry brought in hay, and the loads were upset and were delayed.

Major Adino Tucker, the local royalist militia commander, lost two of his brass field guns. He immediately posted a sentry, the net result being that the other two brass field guns went out the back of the armory, and were next seen in Concord. Now, when you can steal brass field guns, which are heavy, and can move them out of a guarded city and can get them all the way to Concord, you are not to be ridiculed, whatever your official shortcomings.

They did a great many other things. They raided a coast defense battery and got all the guns. They also raided a battery in Boston, and apparently were not able to get those guns away. Some of them they spiked. Other guns were found at the bottom of a neighboring pond. Apparently they carried off the light ones and threw them in the water, and spiked the other ones. I have no doubt the British got those guns back into service, but it was pretty good intelligence. They also set up a spy service which would remain in Boston undiscovered after Lexington and Concord. In the meantime, the British were doing fairly well.

Now, the British Secret Service has been a byword for its efficiency ever since I have known anything about military intelligence, and I do not know when it began. I do know that under Queen Elizabeth it was magnificent. Sir Francis Walsingham had passing through his hands all of the conspirators’ messages in the conspiracies in favor of Mary Queen of Scots. I know, because I have seen them. He read them all. He passed them on. He let the conspiracy go ahead, and when he was completely ready, he struck.

Just before the American Revolution, in the middle of the eighteenth century, Daniel Defoe was either head of the Secret Service, or a leading agent. We don't know which. Unfortunately, I don't know too much about the British Secret Service, because they won’t open their papers to me after 1650. But down to 1650 it was magnificent. And I know that during World War II they were equally magnificent, although I must say the only blonde spy I ever saw with my own eyes was a British woman agent who was magnificent but had a face like a horse.

In fact, the physical charms of lady secret service agents are greatly exaggerated. As a matter of fact, all this talk of sinister and sinful ladies as spies is grossly exaggerated. I had two very attractive little dancing girls working for me, and I soon discovered what the trouble was. You showed one of those pretty little things the plans for attack and she couldn’t tell whether it was a field gun or a grand piano, and she simply couldn’t report on it. She was just no use.

The British had not brought this magnificent secret service to the colonies. There had never been any real reason to use it, and they were so ill prepared for intelligence that there is still extant a letter in which General Gage asks his opposite number in Canada if he could have a code or a cipher, as he had nothing of the sort and had not a single officer in the army who knew how to make one. I do not know what the answer was to that. He had in a very short time a substitution cipher, which you can still see with the ciphers in the library of Congress. That was for the personal use of Dr. Benjamin Church, Director General of hospitals for General Washington's Army, working hard for General Gage.

Church continued his espionage until the very late summer of 1775. Indeed, when General Washington rode to meet his army in Cambridge, Dr. Church, the British spy, was in the reception committee which met him two hundred miles from his first command. And if you have your own secret agent riding with the enemy commander two hundred miles before he gets there, that is good work.

I admit that the British in World War I undoubtedly had an officer on the staff of the Crown Prince Ruprecht of Bavaria, who had been there for years and years and years, just waiting for his chance, meantime being an ornament of the German Army.
But I still insist, even at our own expense, that getting Dr. Church where they got him was a very neat piece of work. The trouble was, as it always is in these amateur organizations, that they are not trained and they make fatal slips. And the fatal slip that we and the British made all through the first years of the war included a failure to provide communications. Dr. Church soon found that he couldn’t get his messages into Boston. Dr. Church, I must admit with blushes, was not a model of all the Christian virtues. He had a girlfriend in Cambridge, ladies and gentlemen. I mean, you don't do these things in Cambridge.

Dr. Church had a girlfriend and she was a gir friend, if I may say so, of, shall we say, a great deal of experience. It was once my painful duty to report to my commanding general the exact scars on the carcass of a German lady spy, and I was a little embarrassed about it, because I feared the general might wonder how on earth I got that information. I got it from a sergeant who stopped at nothing in the service of his country.

The next time I saw General Tindall, I said, “General, I hope you understand that report of mine. I hope you don't think--.” He said, “Don’t give it a thought, my boy. I knew some people who wanted just that information, and I said, “Well, that girl is going to be a body one of these days, and I thought we had better have the marking if we ever have to identify her.’” And do you know that three years later in New York City I discovered that she had been found eight stories down under an open window in the Pierre Hotel. I don’t know who threw her out, but I would certainly like to give him a medal if I could find him.

Dr. Church was in the same situation. He had to reach Boston, and the only way he could think of doing it was to ask the lady to take a letter for him to Newport, Rhode Island, where she had a former boyfriend who was one of the most prominent bakers in all Newport, Rhode Island, who was famous for the biscuits which he made, the secret of which, I regret to say, is now lost, and who mingled with the very best society of Newport. It’s a new angle for Newport to me. I didn’t know bakers got around, but apparently they did. The girl came down and she gave him the letter and asked him if he would take it to Captain General Sir James Wallace, commanding <iIH. M. S. Rose<iI>, lying off Newport, or, if not, to one of two prominent Tories. Church had addressed it on the outside to Major Kane, Boston. He was as foolish as that. Obviously, it should have gone to a cover address of some sort. That, these innocent people never heard of.

The baker, whose name was Wendell and not Wendwood, as you will find it in the books, didn't like the sound of anything. He didn’t know what to do. He got rid of the girl. He was just about to get married. He wanted to get rid of that girl fast. He put the letter away. After about a month or perhaps two months, he got a letter from a lady back in Cambridge saying that the letter had not been received in Boston and what had he done with it, and adding: “There is a certain person here in Cambridge who would like to see you.”

This was too much for Wendell. He felt he was completely out of his depth. There was a school master teaching school near him. He applied to the educated man. The schoolmaster had no scruples at all. He opened the letter immediately, and they were greatly taken aback to find a succession of Greek characters and other characters which were not Greek to the extent of a page or two pages.

And they then did what they should have done in the beginning. They took it to the Secretary of Rhode Island Colony and told him the story. The Secretary took one look at the documents and sent them along to General Greene commanding Rhode Island troops outside Cambridge. Greene, after one look, took Wendell direct to General Washington and showed him the letter. And, fortunately, the girl had given her address to Wendell, so that Wendell could just go out and bring her in. The story is, which I cannot quite prove, which I believe is true, that Wendell located her and that Israel Putnam then brought her in. And the legend is that she rode down Brattle Street to the Craigie house and later the Washington house behind Israel Putnam riding pillion.

If you will recall Israel Putnam’s figure, Putnam was constructed so that he was of the same dimension in all directions. You can’t ride pillion with much dignity, because the only way the lady riding behind the saddle can hold on is to throw both arms around you tight. Otherwise she would go off. She has no stirrups. The spectacle of a Major General riding down Brattle Street, of all streets, with this disreputable creature clasped firmly about the middle, to the headquarters of the American command --well, all I can say is I would like to know what the sentry on duty that night said to the others when he got back to the guardhouse.

I’m sorry to say I once tried to speculate on what he said, and the J. P. Lippincott Company insisted that all that copy go right out the window. It took all night to break the girl down. She then gave the doctor’s name as having given it to her. They went right out and arrested Church, who insisted on his innocence, but did not offer a cipher. I have seen the documents of the deciphering people, and it took them only twenty-four hours to crack the cipher. One man worked alone, Elbridge Gerry, and a friend worked independently of him. So that they had two completely independent ciphers which exactly repeated each other.

It has always seemed to be a very remarkable achievement, not to crack that cipher, but to find people who could crack it with such extraordinary speed. As for cracking the cipher, I took the matter up with the distinguished Dr. William F. Freedman, the man who broke the Japanese code, but all I could get out of Dr. Freedman is that any fool could break that cipher. That’s all very well for Dr. Freedman in the twentieth century. If you were a country parson in the eighteenth century, it wasn’t so easy.

It was of course a very simple substitution cipher. You just took one character and substituted it for the ordinary alphabet, and, as anyone who has read Poe in the “Gold Bug” knows, all you have to do is count the characters, and the most frequent would be the “E”, and the next would be “T"” and the next would be “A”, and so on. The thing was so badly constructed there were no false symbols, there were no nulls. If any of you are thinking of a career of espionage, it's a very good plan to use two or three different symbols for “E”. It won't protect your code forever. Anybody can crack anything, but it takes time if you make it difficult enough. It will take so long to crack a cipher that the information has lost its value.

They then court-martialed Dr. Church, convicted him, and looked in the new Army Regulations to see what they could do about it, and discovered, yes, a court-martial could punish a man for communicating with the enemy. Then they looked on down to Article 50 to see what the punishment was, and discovered that nobody in Congress had ever dreamed of treason, and the only penalties for communicating with the enemy were loss of two months’ pay, a whipping, or dismissal from the service. There was absolutely no legal way of hanging Dr. Church. There was no trouble hanging poor Andre later, or a good many other people, because they changed the Regulations.

But there was nothing that could be done for Church. They just put him in prison and kept him there. I'm terribly afraid it wasn’t legal. He finally got permission to go overseas, and when the ship carrying him sank, everybody was just delighted.
General Gage had also a remarkable secret agent in Concord, who, for some unknown reason, always wrote in French. The French is so bad that it not only could not be a Frenchman, it could not be a Canadian; it could not be an illiterate Canadian. And why he wrote French I do not know. People at that time seemed to have felt that any kind of foreign language was a kind of code.

That man was never discovered, and has never been identified. He had located every single ammunition dump in Concord. He had full information on Paul Revere's movements back and forth, and reported them to Gage. He was able to tell practically everything the Americans were doing. He was never discovered, and I cannot now identify him. There is a gentleman in New Hampshire who thinks he has found him, and that his name was John Hall, but frankly, his identification rests on handwriting, and I myself am not convinced.

There were a number of very excellent British agents before the Revolution. Two groups of spies went down to Worcester, where ammunition was also being collected. They made a very bad blunder. In the first group that went out was the well-known Ensign DeBaine and Captain John Brown of the 10th Foot-- 10th Infantry, as we would say. They stopped at Watertown just outside Boston for dinner, and, posing as surveyors, said to the Negro girl serving them this was a very fine country. And the girl looked at them and said, “Yes, gentlemen, and we have some very fine fellows to defend it.” And they realized at once that the girl knew what they were. And when the host came around to ask how they liked their dinner, they said it was a very nice dinner. They said, “You have a saucy wench there.” “Yes,” said the host, “but she has been in Boston a long time and knows all the British officers by sight, and might take you to be some of them.”

By this time Ensign DeBaine was getting pretty discouraged. They got out of there as fast as they could. It would take the rest of the afternoon to tell their whole story. Let’s only say they got to Worcester and got their information, mapped the roads.

DeBaine was a very good map maker. We still use his map of Bunker Hill.

And as they came back down to Boston--remember, Boston in those days was a long, narrow peninsula--they met General Gage and General Holderman walking out together, and were delighted to see that neither general recognized their own officer, nor did the other British officers, which means that they were not quite as alert as the Negro wench in Watertown.
Gage then sent out on April 5th--mark you, that’s less than two weeks before Lexington-- he then sent out Lieutenant Colonel Francis Smith, who would later command the march to Lexington, and somebody named John Howe, whom I cannot completely identify. We know he went to Boston afterward. We know he was a kind of a journalist. We know he had a uniform. We know he wasn’t an officer. That’s as far as I can get. He was, however, one of the best secret agents that ever walked, but he and Colonel Smith both went to the same tavern in Watertown the other officers had breakfasted. And you can see how clumsy the British chieftain was. That place should have been spotted. They stopped for breakfast, and they talked and they said that it was a fine country. The same Negro girl said, “Yes, Smith, and you will find a lot of people to meet you if you ever come out into it." That was too much for Colonel Smith. The landlord came in and said they could find work up the road. They were looking for work, pretending to be laborers.

They went up the road and climbed a stone wall, held a consultation, and Lieutenant Colonel Smith, future commander at Lexington, then dodged all the way back to Boston through the burberry bushes and the pastures. And, as Colonel Smith was very fat, he must have made a fine spectacle. John Howe went all the way around to Worcester, came back through Concord, and came in with another report.

So that, as you see, the British were fully informed, knew exactly where everything was, except that the patriots had a last-minute warning and had managed to move a little of their material.

There is one amusing detail concerning Paul Revere, before he stood in front of the Old North Church while they hung the lantern. Of course, he was not across the Charles at that time. They discovered at the last minute that they had forgotten to bring any clothing to muffle the oars to row over the Charles, but Revere was a young man with resource. He said, “Come with me." He went to a certain house. He stood under a certain window; he whistled a certain whistle. The window went up; immediately a girl’s head came out. He whispered up what he needed, and a flannel petticoat fluttered down through the air. And Revere used to tell his children after the war that it was still warm when they picked it up.

After the siege of Boston began after Lexington had been fought, the intelligence problem was of course very different. I will only say here that the fishermen whom the British had to allow to go out if they were to have any food in the city, were a very convenient way of getting American spies in and out. A fishing crew would go down the bay, drop a man off, take an agent on, go on and fish, and come back to Boston with the agent. They wouldn’t have any more men than they had before. The American agent would make his observations and go out with the next fishing voyage, be dropped off, and a new agent would be taken on. That seems to have gone on pretty steadily.

There was also a very clever fellow called John Carnes, who was either a shoemaker or a grocer in Boston. And Carnes deserves to be remembered because he was the first man who had enough sense to use a cut-out.

One thing an agent should never do is to collect his information and then go to headquarters to turn it in himself. In the first place, the enemy certainly has an agent there, and he will be recognized. And what any sensible agent does is quietly turn his information over to some person who is beyond suspicion, and let the man to whom it was turned over turn it over to somebody else if necessary, and let it finally reach headquarters.

Carnes had a go-between who received the material in Boston so that Carnes never left the city. The go-between or cutout crossed the Charles, turned it over to a person called Baldwin on the American side, and Baldwin passed it on to Washington.

There also was a very resourceful British spy who went back and forth on the Chelsea ferry, and who knew where all the American emplacements were and just what General Washington was doing and what the orders were, and who even had dinner with a captain of the American guard, although he was tactful enough never to dine with Washington's guards when Washington happened to be present.

The extraordinary thing is that when the move to New York took place, they forgot all about this improvised organization, which really was pretty effective. All the time the Americans were in New York, every informed officer knew perfectly well that if the British made a serious attack, the city could not possibly be held. Nobody can hold New York against a land army supported by a fleet. But Congress insisted that it be held, and the Americans had not the courage to burn it when they evacuated. There was a fire, but where it came from no one knows. Knowing that they would have to evacuate, therefore, Washington or someone on his staff should have been setting up a secret service in the city, so that when the British came in, the loudest-talking Tory there would really be an American agent.

Now, it is true--it has been proved by Dr. Crary last month for the first time that the Tory publisher Irvington was an American agent. That has long been suspected. Dr. Crary has two American documents showing it. But Irvington does not seem to have been an American agent until far on in the war, when he saw which way the wind was blowing. There were a number of Tory spies who came in to offer their services toward the end of the war. Toward the beginning of the war there was no one, and that is where you get the tragedy of Nathan Hale.

I am trying in this talk to pay no attention to what most of us know, and I shall skip hastily over the Hale story, which we all know anyhow, only saying this: That Nathan Hale was given no instruction. He knew nothing about intelligence. He was so badly trained that he carried secret documents in his shoes.

I know a good deal about that, because I took some very incriminating correspondence across the Balkan peninsula in 1929. It wasn't an honest job, honest it wasn’t. It was a magazine assignment, although I must say that the intelligence officers seemed to pop up on my doorstep quite frequently when I got home. But I was well=advised and went wandering. I went through Yugoslavia with the purest baggage you ever saw. The gendarmerie searched until they were blue in the face, and I did not make a favorable impression, but there was nothing they could do. My documents were going forward by couriers who knew their business.

But that was not done with Hale, nor was any channel provided whereby he could get his information back. One carrier pigeon could have saved Hale’s life, but nobody through the whole Revolution ever used a carrier pigeon. Of course, carrier pigeons are annoying.

You know the story of the British officer in World War I who was sent forward with carrier pigeons, and after a long time the bird came back to headquarters, and they all rushed to see what the message was. And the message said, “I am absolutely fed up with carrying this bloody bird.”

As the result, Hale lost his life; Washington had no information. They had the most terrible time getting any agents in and out. They got practically none in and out. They were taken by surprise. They were forced off, and the total collapse of New York and Westchester followed. It was the worst intelligence show I have ever seen, and I can only suppose that Washington was so pressed with thousands of things and so completely without a trained staff that he just couldn't add this additional burden.

But the distinguishing thing about Washington is the contrast between this kind of situation in which a man's life is sacrificed for nothing, and the situation that immediately developed. Hale’s collapse, or Hale’s execution, Hale’s failure, was in '76. By 1777 the United States Army probably had the best intelligence service in the world. Of course, I don't know what the other intelligence services were.

I might pause, however, while we are talking about other intelligence services to say that two French secret agents watched the fighting at Lexington, proceeded to Cambridge, and looked over the American camp, of which they thought very little. They were there before Washington was, because they do not even mention him. And then proceeded to London, where they reported to the French ambassador, instead of going to Paris. We know all about them because British counter-intelligence picked them up in London. And one of the British counterintelligence agents made a mistake, which I have never known a British agent to make. He thought he could drink more champagne than a Frenchman, and his report shows that he was completely wrong about that. But he did establish that there had been two French agents here.

Now, as soon as the fighting in Westchester was over, as they fell back across New Jersey, Washington began to spread his intelligence net. You all know the story of the famous Jerseyman John Honeyman, who fled as a Tory to the British, was denounced by General Washington. General Washington got to be a wonder at denouncing as the war went on. Honeyman was with the British in Trenton until just a day or two before the attack, then came back out, managed to get himself captured, was taken at once to Washington.

It is the great British historian Trevelyan who says that the whole victory at Trenton was due to John Honeyman. I should say several thousand other men took a part, but he certainly was valuable. However, he is so well known in Jersey, that's all I'm going to say about him.

But all sorts of other intelligence agents now began to spread out over the state. Many of them were just farmers. I suspect that a good many of them were not soldiers in disguise at all. I suspect a good many of them were just Jersey farmers who were just farmers and could keep their eyes open.

The most interesting of the group, however, was a professional spy of great skill, a young fellow named John Merserow. There were two John Merserows. This is the nephew of the elder one, the son of the younger one, who is the son of Joshua Merserow. The Merserows were a Staten Island family. I strongly suspect they had given American espionage the minute the British landed on Staten Island, but I can’t quite prove it.

However, as the Continental Army found it would have to get out of New Brunswick, Washington asked Joshua Merserow to pick an agent to leave there. Merserow suggested that his son John, who had a withered arm so that he couldn’t lift a musket and who was eager to get into war service, should be left.

So what they didn’t do in New York they did in New Jersey. They left an agent behind and let the British come over him. The British found this young man of suitable Tory sentiments, returned him to Staten Island, and he spied there for several months, using as a courier an apprentice in his father’s shipyard until the apprentice was caught and died in prison.

Then Merserow himself paddled a raft across the Hudson, using what I think is the most ingenious device I have ever heard of to protect the secrecy of his dispatches. He put his dispatches in a bottle, weighted the bottle so that it would sink, tied to it a string, and towed it in the wash beside his raft. So far as I know, he was never challenged while he was on the raft, but if he had been, all he had to do was let go of the string and the bottle would sink. There would be no splash, nothing suspicious. The evidence would be at the bottom of the Hudson, and he would just be an innocent fisherman.

This lasted for some months until he was detected returning to Staten Island, was pursued, rushed for his lodgings, got into his lodgings just before the British pursuit, and got to his room. He knew he had not been recognized. But he would have been in a good deal of trouble if there had not been a British major in the house who was roaring drunk and shooed the patrol out the front door, saying there were no rebels in the house where he lived. That drunken British major saved young Merserow.

He returned at once to the American lines, and having been, as the saying is, blown in New York, never tried again. However, a young relative in Staten Island continued to work for some time.

In the meantime, Joshua Merserow, his father; and John Merserow the elder, his uncle; and a relative named LaGrange, and a lot of other people who were either native born Jerseymen or Jersey refugees from Staten Island, set up a magnificent network which brought information out of New York steadily to the end of the war, without ever having any men caught except three men--except Captain Baker Hendricks of the New Jersey Militia, Captain John Hendricks of the New Jersey Militia, and one of their assistants named John Meeker, who were arrested for consorting with the enemy--no; for trading with the enemy. They had been black-marketing in Staten Island, and the Hendricks brothers and John Meeker were in a dreadful pickle because they had orders from General Washington to trade with the enemy as cover for intelligence. And I can show you General Washington’s orders that they do so, but having been arrested by the Americans, they didn’t dare say anything, and the country they were serving was getting all ready to hang them.

Colonel Elias Dayton, also of the New Jersey Militia, who was also doing intelligence work, of course, in this area they used Jerseymen as much as they could --wrote Washington saying, “For heaven'’ sake, what can I do about these men?” And Washington wrote a letter to Governor Livingston telling the whole story. And what Livingston did, I do not know. All I know is that Baker Hendricks and his two assistants were busy spying for the next four years. I presume that they escaped like Honeyman, but at that stage the story disappears.

The most impudent spy in history, and also the most successful, I suppose, was Lieutenant Louis J. Costigan. I am not quite sure whether he was a Militia man or a Continental officer, but he was a Jerseyman, and he came from Brunswick, and he was ordered into Brunswick in ‘77 to see what information he could get, and he got into Brunswick and got out of Brunswick. He was on the way back to the American camp early in January when the British caught him. He was caught by Lord Harcourt's cavalry, the same people that caught General Charles Lee. In some way he must have been back in uniform, because the British tried him as an ordinary prisoner of war, sent him to New York, and paroled him. And a paroled officer, within limits, could walk about just as he wished. He was on his honor not to take any hostile action.

In some way Colonel Mathias Nottarun, another Jerseyman, got in touch with Costigan and then said something to Washington about letting Costigan spy while he was on parole. And there is a letter from Washington saying, “Oh, no; this must never be done. Doing anything of this sort--it’s not according to the rules of war.” I don't know what happened then, but presently Costigan was exchanged. That is to say, he was no longer on parole; he was an exchanged prisoner, and he was supposed to go back to New Jersey to his own regiment. Instead, he just stayed in New York.

Now, as far as that goes, I am on sound documentary ground. What I think happened here is that Costigan said, ”Well, here I am. I am an exchanged prisoner. I am at full liberty to take any part I wish in hostilities. The British are so used to seeing me around New York they will pay no attention to me.” At any rate, he stayed in New York for three months, and he spied all that time. And three of his messages signed “Z” are still in the Library of Congress. They are models of military intelligence.

I think nobody ever dared tell Washington what was happening, because there are several letters in which Washington says, "What has become of that remarkable secret agent ‘Z’ I don’t seem to be getting any information from him anymore.” And so far as I know, Washington never knew what was happening until 1782, when Costigan was safely back and couldn'’ collect his expense money, which is not an unknown situation in the secret service. And he thereupon wrote to Washington asking for it, and told the story.

An equally interesting espionage net operating out of New Jersey was run by Nathaniel Sackett. I won't tell you how I know it was Nathaniel Sackett, except to say that the letter that proves it I discovered myself not long ago at Newburgh, New York. He started a group into New York, and then you hear nothing more about it. And I think that they became part of the Hendricks-Merserow net, but I don’t know.

However, he sent one woman in at the end of March, who sometime in the first two or three days of April reported that the British would attack Philadelphia. The sequence of dates after that is very interesting. Sackett sent this information to Washington on the 7th of April, 1777. On the 10th of April, 1777, General Thomas Smithman was told to go to Philadelphia and get a spy net ready. When the British came in after Brandywine in the fall, the American secret service was reporting within a few days, and throughout the rest of that period it reported regularly.

It was during this period that George Washington told some of his most successful lies. There have been few men who lied as skillfully, as frequently and with such enthusiasm as the hero of the cherry tree. Not to shock you, let me say he lied, oh, how he lied--it was only for his country’s sake.

But I have never known of an officer who could deceive the enemy, and who took so much obvious delight in deceiving the enemy, and who had such a carefully worked out system; nor have I ever heard of an enemy that bit quite so hard as the British.

It began in the spring in Jersey when, as you know, he was hopelessly weak, and his officers having located a British spy. On General Washington’s orders every brigadier in the army wrote a false, exaggerated return of his strength. These were then left where the British agent got them. The American in charge was called to Washington’s headquarters, and the information was on its way to Howe almost immediately. The amusing thing is that a little while after that Captain William Lukes, a far better British agent, brought in a far more accurate report, and Howe very nearly hanged him for false information.

As Burgoyne came down the Hudson, it was very desirable to keep Sir Henry in New York, and to keep Sir William Howe down here, and Washington knew that his forces were enough to keep Howe in Philadelphia. He was afraid Clinton would come to Philadelphia too, in which case he might be outnumbered.

You can still see the orders in which General Dickinson in New Jersey, General Gates in New York and General Putnam in Connecticut are all ordered to prepare plans for attacking New York, and be sure they leak to the enemy's known agents. By that time we had a list of perhaps fifty British agents who were being carefully left alone and carefully fed.

The same information was then passed to Howe in Philadelphia. So that Clinton got the same story from three different sources; Howe got the same story from another source. They both exchanged information, and they both got ready for an attack on New York. Of course, Howe couldn’t go up there. It was all being cooked up by General Washington.

Then the remarkable Pennsylvania agent or intelligence officer, Major John Clark, had a double agent in Howe's headquarters, and found that Howe was very anxious to have information directly from General Washington. The letter still exists in which Clark says to Washington, “Would you be willing to help Sir William Howe with a few reports.” And Washington writes back, saying, “I will prepare them with my own hand.”

They were prepared; Clark sent a careful offer of treason to Sir William Howe, carefully informing Washington what he was up to. And he was so very clever, that the man who carried the message was told that the name would not be given in writing; it would be told to Sir William Howe orally by the agent, and Clark reported to Washington that Sir William smiled approvingly at the precaution. Howe was fed any amount of information which Washington prepared, passed to Clark, which Clark passed to a supposed double agent who passed the information to Sir William Howe.

And there is extant one letter by a British officer who was in headquarters when a secret agent came in, asked to see the general, was immediately shown to the general’s private room. And at this moment an aide came out, saying to the confidential staff in the outer room, “Well, gentlemen, there is absolutely reliable intelligence.” “How do you know?” said the other officers. “It comes directly from General Washington's headquarters,” said the aide. You cannot document this sort of thing.

And you will observe how matters have now changed. There was no agent worth having in New York. They knew all about the Hessians by the time they were ready to attack Trenton. They had a detailed map of every British installation in Trenton one day old when they advanced on Trenton. When the British came into Philadelphia, the whole machinery was there ready to go to work, and it was never defeated and never fooled. It did not pick up the British evacuation quite as fast as it should. It was certainly ten hours slow with that information.

It was a little too clever. It managed to place three American captains in the British intelligence service. One of them was Caleb Bruen of Newark. And the trouble Caleb Bruen gave me no one will believe. Sir Henry Clinton's papers are full of the magnificent espionage being done by the Jerseyman Caleb Bruen, and in my manuscript I had written of Caleb Bruen as a British spy and a Tory, and I turned in my manuscript, when I discovered, to my horror, that he had been working for Washington all the time, and in fact had been well-known in New Jersey from about 1820 down to about 1870, when people more or less forgot about him. There is no possible question. My face was very red. And then I thought, after all, I may be a fool, but think of Sir Henry Clinton.

There was also the remarkable Massachusetts officer, David Gray. David Gray was on a mission to New London when he met a British spy who said, “Come on over to New York with me.” “Don't mind if I do,” said the American. And he went over and was introduced to Arnold’s friend Beverly Robinson, and was invited to become an agent, and he became a courier for the Tories in New Hampshire and Vermont. He was given a mass of documents, and turned up in Washington’s headquarters to hand him the papers. Washington said, “Where did you get these?” And the captain said, “General, I'm in the British secret service now.” And Washington, having read the papers, which were probably only file papers--they probably weren’t very important, just in case--Washington said, “All right, take these along and deliver them. I've had all I want to do with them.” And Gray was so successful that after that you will find the Clinton papers telling what Gray brings in, and occasionally he brought in some honest intelligence.

For example, when the French moved across Connecticut, Gray was running right across their line of march, and he was clever enough to see that he had to report something. So that you will find in Sir Henry Clinton’s papers that Gray has come in and says the French are moving across Connecticut. That didn’t matter very much. The British already had that.
I wish I could take time to tell you how cleverly the March to Yorktown was concealed. I can only say that although the British secret service reported almost daily on the French march and had agents watching when the French came into camp on the Hudson, they never dreamed that Washington was moving on Cornwallis until after the army had cleared Philadelphia.

Part of that was again due to General Washington’s remarkable skill in, shall we say, imaginative fiction. He knew where there was a Tory agent. He called the Tory agent in and made careful inquiries as to the water supplies on Long Island and the water supplies in New Jersey and Staten Island approaching New York, just as if he were considering an attack there. Then the deceiving old sinner, if you will allow me, seemed to catch himself, and started to explain that of course the army had no intention of attacking there -- of course, that was perfectly true; they hadn’t--but he just liked to collect information about America, and the Tory must not suppose there was any interest in Long Island.

They were clever enough to send Elias Boudinot in to the same man that night, and Boudinot reported in a manuscript which still exists that the Tory was convinced there would be an immediate attack on New York. They put up some army bake ovens where the British could see them, and you can find in the British reports the conclusion that since they are building ovens they intend to stay in New Jersey, which must mean an attack on New York. By the time they found out where Washington was going, it was too late. They did not have really good information until about September 29th. That is three weeks after our army was through Philadelphia. That was a very clever example of deception.

While we are talking about General Washingtons criminal career, I think we might well talk about his plans for kidnapping. You all know the story of Sergeant John Champ who actually went into New York and became a member of Benedict Arnold’s force. That story has been questioned, because Light Horse Harry Lee, in telling the story, apparently got mixed up. Light Horse Harry says that it was originally done to save Andre’s life. In other words, if they could get in and capture Arnold, they thought Clinton--if they could hang Arnold, they wouldn’t have to hang Andre. The British documents show that Champ never actually got to the British lines until the 15th of October, when Andre had been dead for eleven days.
What I think happened is that the maneuver was originally planned to save Andre and couldn’t be started soon enough, and that Washington then went on trying to capture Arnold, whether it would save Andre or not.

However that may be, there was a second effort to get Arnold by Captain Aaron Ogden of the New Jersey Militia, who was sent in with a flag to the British at Paulus Hook, and he knew that the British army mess would invite him to dinner that night. It was a gentleman’s war, and he went in with his flag. He was invited to dinner, and he had orders to whisper to the commanding officer that Andre would be given up if Arnold was given up. The British officer left the mess table, went immediately to New York, was gone two hours, came back with a message from Sir Henry saying: “Deserters are never given up.Åh He came back with that message.

There was a third narrow escape for Arnold which no one ever seems to have heard about. I will not go into details, except to say that on the York River in Virginia while Arnold was down there, the American cavalry officer, Allen McLean, noticed that he rode out at a regular time on the York peninsula. McLean immediately planned to raid there and capture him, and just as he was ready to move, the British fleet anchored in the York River.

The third American captain in the British secret service was Eliza Hunter of Bedford, New York, who was generally known as a link to Sir Henry, and because he was very chin to chin, Washington found it very handy to have a mutual friend with Sir Henry.

I would like to say just a word about the finest of the British spies, the woman that I consider the finest woman spy in history. Mata Hari never amounted to anything, of course. She was merely notorious and very bad and clumsy.

This Yankee girl was Ann Bates, and was a Philadelphia schoolteacher who was married to a British ordnance repairman who came to New York with the British, and who, when the British could find no other agent, volunteered to go to Washington's camp and bring back all she should find. She made at least two trips to Washington's camp. She was in Washington's headquarters twice. She listened to a secret conference between one of Washington’s aides. She was eventually recognized by a British deserter while she was marching with Washington's own column, and she got back safely to the British lines.

After having met another American column, which was commanded by the chief of American intelligence, she was arrested and taken to him, and sweetly told him that she was a soldier’s wife. She was, too, only a British soldier. She got a pass from the American service, and returned to her own lines, rejoicing. I think we almost ought to be proud that she was an American girl, even if she was on the other side.

Well, you see how the service developed during the war, and you can see that it was entirely due to Washington. It was he who picked the skilled personnel who did it. It was he who, having made these terrible early mistakes, produced the really brilliant intelligence service of the rest of the war.

And let us remember that if he told untruths, they were absolutely justified, ruses of war. Only it’s a little funny, when you think of the hatchet and the cherry tree, and it is funnier still when you read the original documents and see what an unholy pleasure he took out of this deceit. I suppose it's because it is the only time he ever felt he could tell a lie and he enjoyed it.