At the beginning of the Civil War the city of Washington was a sieve and the organization on the Northern side so insecure that the size and movements of its forces were apparent to any interested observer. It has been said that the Confederate side never again had such good intelligence to help them as they did at the opening Battle of Bull Run.
One of the first events of the period which apparently pointed up the need for a secret intelligence service was the conspiracy of a group of hotheads in Baltimore to assassinate Lincoln on the way to his first inauguration in February, 1861. Allan Pinkerton, who had already achieved some fame working as a private detective for the railroads, had been hired by some of Lincoln’s supporters to protect him. Pinkerton got Lincoln to Washington without incident by arranging to have the presidential train pass through Baltimore unannounced late at night. At the same time Pinkerton’s operatives “penetrated” the Baltimore conspirators and kept a close watch on their activities.
Good as Pinkerton was at the job of security and counterespionage, he had little to recommend him for the work of intelligence collection except for one excellent agent, a certain Timothy Webster, who produced some good information entirely on his own in Virginia. Unfortunately, Webster was captured early in the war, thanks to a foolish maneuver of Pinkerton, and was subsequently executed. We next find Pinkerton working directly with General McClellan on military intelligence and right in the General’s headquarters. Pinkerton’s idea of military intelligence was to count the noses of the opposing troops and then to count them all over again to be sure the first figure was right. Since McClellan was famous for not going into battle unless he commanded overwhelming numbers, it is not likely that Pinkerton’s nose-counting contributed significantly to the outcome of any battle. Even with overwhelming odds in his favor, McClellan was outmaneuvered by Lee at Antietam. When Lincoln removed him from his command after this battle, Pinkerton resigned, leaving the Union virtually without a secret service.
The fact that Lincoln had hired an agent of his own on a military intelligence mission at the time of the Battle of Bull Run did not come to light until 1876, and then, as so often is the case, it was revealed in the form of a claim against the government for reimbursement. In March of 1876, the United States Supreme Court heard a case on appeal from the U.S. Court of Claims in which a certain Enoch Totten brought a claim against the government “to recover compensation for services alleged to have been rendered” by a certain William A. Lloyd, “under contract with President Lincoln, made in July 1861, by which he was to proceed South and ascertain the number of troops stationed at different points in the insurrectionary States, procure plans of forts and fortifications . . . and report the facts to the President. . . . Lloyd proceeded . . . within the rebel lines, and remained there during the entire period of the war, collecting and from time to time transmitting information to the President.” At the end of the war he had been paid his expenses but not the salary of $200 a month which Lincoln, according to the claim, had promised him. The case itself is interesting even with only these meager facts because of the light it casts on Lincoln’s foresight at this time and the security with which he must have handled the matter throughout the four long years of the war. As the Supreme Court stated in its opinion: “Both employer and agent must have understood that the lips of the other were to be forever sealed respecting the relation of either to the matter.”
Also, this case established the precedent that an intelligence agent cannot recover by court action against the government for secret service rendered. Said the Court: “Agents . . . must look for their compensation to the contingent fund of the department employing them, and to such allowance from it as those who dispense the fund may award. The secrecy which such contracts impose precludes any action for this enforcement.” This is a warning to the agent that he had better get his money on the barrelhead at the time of his operation.
After Pinkerton left the scene, an effort was made to create a purely military intelligence organization known as the Bureau of Military Information. The responsibility for it was assigned to Major (later General) George H. Sharpe, who appears to have been a fair-to-middling bureaucrat but is not known to have conceived or mounted significant intelligence operations on his own. However, good information was brought to the Union forces by occasional brave volunteers, most of whom generated their own operations and communications without good advice from anybody. One of these was Lafayette Baker, who posed as an itinerant photographer in the South and made a specialty of visiting Confederate camps in Virginia, taking pictures of the soldiers stations in them, at the same time gathering valuable military information. He later rose to brigadier general and took charge of the National Detective Police, a sort of precursor of today’s secret service. Where Pinkerton had excelled at counterespionage but had little to recommend him as an espionage operator, Baker excelled in the latter craft, but his failures as a chief of secret service lost us one of our greatest Presidents. To this day, no one knows where Baker’s men were on the night of April 14, 1865, when Abraham Lincoln was sitting in an unguarded box watching a play in Ford’s Theater, or why the assassins who gathered at Mrs. Suratt’s boardinghouse, whose fanatical opinions were well known throughout Washington, were not being watched by Baker. Nor was the capture of Booth and his accomplices the work of Baker, although he took credit for it.
Elizabeth van Lew, another volunteer in the South and a resident of Richmond, stayed at her post throughout the entire war and is accounted the single most valuable spy the North ever had. Grant himself stated that she had sent the most valuable information received from Richmond during the war. In Civil War espionage any “penetration” of an important headquarters, always the most dramatic high-level intelligence operations, is conspicuously missing, as are most of the more rewarding and devious undertakings of espionage. The closest thing to it, however, is alleged to have been achieved by Elizabeth van Lew when she procured a job for one of her Negro servants as a waitress in the house of Jefferson Davis, transmitting the intelligence this produced to Major Sharpe in Washington.
In the 1880s the first permanent peacetime military and naval intelligence organizations were created in the United States. The Army unit was known as the Military Information Division and came under the Adjutant General’s Office. The Navy’s Office of Intelligence, founded in 1882, first belonged to the Bureau of Navigation. During the same decade the first U.S. military and naval attachés were posted to our embassies and legations abroad, where they were to function as observers and intelligence officers.
Elbert Hubbard’s once-popular tale A Message to Garcia immortalized an exploit of American intelligence during the Spanish-American War that might otherwise have been forgotten. Actually, Hubbard got the story backward. The usual point of an intelligence mission is to get the needed information to headquarters from a target area. The Lieutenant Rowan of Hubbard’s story was, in real life, supposed to reach Garcia, which was not easy, but his chief purpose was to get information from Garcia about the disposition of Spanish troops and then bring it back. Obviously the latter part of the mission was more important that the former.
It is worth recalling that the man who dispatched Rowan on his mission, Col. Arthur L. Wagner, was one of the pioneers of American intelligence and even wrote a book on the subject. When he was assigned in 1898 to the Cuban Expeditionary Force as commander of the “Department of Intelligence in the Field,” General Shafter, at the head of this force, would have none of any such newfangled notions and refused to accept him. At the time of Wagner’s death in 1905, his commission as a brigadier general was lying on the President’s desk for signature. Wagner, like many of our earlier intelligence officers, was born a little too soon.
Since the 1880s also saw the founding of our Naval Intelligence, the Spanish-American War was the occasion for certain important intelligence exploits of our Navy. An unusual and romantic account has been preserved in the Navy’s ar
chives which tells the story of two young American ensigns who, disguising themselves as Englishmen and traveling under assumed names, went to Spain and Spanish-held territories to watch and report on movements of the Spanish fleet. They kept an eye on Admiral Cervera’s ships and followed them from Cadiz and Gibraltar all the way to Puerto Rico, and “several times narrowly escaped detection.”
In 1903, with the creation of an Army General Staff, the Military Information Division was incorporated into it as the “Second Division,” thus beginning the tradition of G-2, which has since remained the designation for intelligence in the American Army. This early G-2, however, from lack of interest and responsibility dwindled almost to the point of disappearance, with the result that World War I found us again without any real intelligence service. But this time our situation was different. We were fighting abroad, the whole period during which our troops were directly engaged lasted little over a year, and we had allies. There was no time to develop a full-fledged intelligence arm nor did we have to, since we could rely largely on the British and French for military intelligence and particularly for order of battle.
But we learned rapidly—due largely to a group of officers to whom I wish to pay tribute. There was, first of all, Colonel Ralph H. Van Deman, who is considered by many to be the moving force in establishing a U.S. military intelligence. His work is described in what I consider the best account by an American author of intelligence services through the ages, The Story of Secret Service, by Richard Wilmer Rowan. I worked personally with Colonel Van Deman in World War I when I was in Bern, and I can attest to the effective work that he and his successors and their naval opposite numbers did in building up the basis of our military intelligence today. But in peacetime they had far too little support in the military services.
By the time the war was over, the basic framework had been established for the various military and naval intelligence branches which continued to exist, even though in skeleton form, until the outbreak of the Second World War—G-2, CIC (Counter Intelligence Corps, which until 1942 was called the Corps of Intelligence Police) and ONI (Office of Naval Intelligence). Of equal importance was our initial experience during World War I in the field of cryptography, of which I shall have more to say in a later chapter. In this area, too, a skeleton force working during the interim years of peace succeeded in developing the most vital instrument of intelligence which we possessed when we were finally swept into war again in 1941—the ability to break the Japanese diplomatic and naval codes.
It was only in World War II, and particularly after the Pearl Harbor attack, that we began to develop, side by side with our military intelligence organizations, an agency for secret intelligence collection and operations. As I mentioned earlier, the origin of this agency was a summons by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to William J. Donovan in 1941 to come down to Washington and work on this problem.
Donovan was eminently qualified for the job. A distinguished lawyer, a veteran of World War I who had won the Medal of Honor, he had divided his busy life in peacetime between the law, government service and politics. He knew the world, having traveled widely. He understood people. He had a flair for the unusual and for the dangerous, tempered with judgment. In short, he had the qualities to be desired in an intelligence officer.
The Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor and our entry into the war naturally stimulated the rapid growth of the OSS and its intelligence operations.
It had begun, overtly, as a research and analysis organization, manned by a hand-picked group of some of the best historians and other scholars available in this country. By June, 1942, the COI (Coordinator of Information), as Donovan’s organization had been called at first, was renamed the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and told “to collect and analyze strategic information and to plan and operate special services.”
By this time the OSS was already deep in the task of “special services,” a cover designation for secret intelligence and secret operations of every conceivable character among which the support of various anti-Nazi underground groups behind the enemy lines and covert preparations for the invasion of North Africa were perhaps most significant.
During 1943, elements of the OSS were at work on a world-wide basis, except for Latin America, where the FBI was operating, and parts of the Far Eastern Command, which General MacArthur had already pre-empted.
Its guerilla and resistance branch, modeled on the now well-publicized British Special Operations Executive (SOE) and working closely with the latter in the European Theater, had already begun to drop teams of men and women into France, Italy and Yugoslavia and in the China-Burma-India Theater of war. The key idea behind these operations was to support, train and supply already existing resistance movements or, where there were none, to organize willing partisans into effective guerilla units. The Jedburghs, as they were called, who dropped into France, and Detachment 101, the unit in Burma, were among the most famous of these groups. Later the OSS developed special units for the creation and dissemination of black propaganda, for counterespionage, and for certain sabotage and resistance tasks that required unusual talents, such as underwater demolitions or technical functions in support of regular intelligence tasks. In conjunction with all these undertakings, it had to develop its own training schools.
Toward the end of the war, as our armies swept over Germany, it created special units for the apprehension of war criminals and the recovery of looted art treasures as well as for tracking down the movements of funds which, it was thought, the Nazi leaders would take into hiding in order to make a comeback at a later date. There was little that it did not attempt to do at some time or place between 1942 and the war’s end.
For a short time after V-J Day, it looked as though the U.S. would gradually withdraw its troops from Europe and the Far East. This would probably have included the disbanding of intelligence operations. In fact, it seemed likely at the end of 1945 that we would do what we did after World War I—fold our tents and go back to business-as-usual. But this time, in contrast to 1919 when we repudiated the League of Nations, we became a charter member of the United Nations and gave it our support in hopes that it would grow up to be the keeper of world peace.
If the Communists had not overreached themselves, our government might well have been disposed to leave the responsibility for keeping the peace more and more to the United Nations. In fact, at Yalta Stalin asked President Roosevelt how long we expected to keep our troops in Europe. The President answered, not more than two years. In view of the events that took place in rapid succession during the postwar years, it is clear that in the period between 1945 and 1950 Premier Stalin and Mao Tse-tung decided that they would not wait for us to retire gracefully from Europe and Asia; they would kick us out.
Moscow installed Communist regimes in Poland, Rumania and Bulgaria before the ink was dry on the agreements signed at Yalta and Potsdam. The Kremlin threatened Iran in 1946, and followed this in rapid succession by imposing a Communist regime on Hungary, activating the civil war in Greece, staging the takeover of Czechoslovakia and instituting the Berlin blockade. Later, in 1950, Mao joined Stalin to mastermind the attack on South Korea. Meanwhile, Mao had been consolidating his position on the mainland of China. These blows in different parts of the world aroused our leaders to the need for a world-wide intelligence system. We were, without fully realizing it, witnessing the first stages of a master plan to shatter the societies of Europe and Asia and isolate the United States, and eventually to take over the entire world. What we were coming to realize, however, was the need to learn a great deal more than we knew about the secret plans of the Kremlin to advance the frontiers of Communism.
In his address to Congress on March 12, 1947, President Truman declared that the security of the country was threatened by Communist actions and stated that it would be our policy “to help free peoples to maintain their free institutions and their national integrity against aggress
ive movements seeking to impose on them totalitarian regimes.” He added that we could not allow changes in the status quo brought about by “coercion or by such subterfuges as political infiltration,” in violation of the United Nations Charter.
It was by then obvious that the United Nations, shackled by the Soviet veto, could not play the role of policeman. It was also clear that we had a long period of crisis ahead of us. Under these conditions, a series of measures were taken by the government to transform our words into action. One of the earliest was the reorganization of our national defense structure, which provided for the unification of the military services under a Secretary of Defense and the creation of the National Security Council.
At that time President Truman recommended that a central intelligence agency be created as a permanent agency of government. A Republican Congress agreed and, with complete bipartisan approval, the CIA was established in the National Security Act of 1947. It was an openly acknowledged arm of the executive branch of government, although, of course, it had many duties of a secret nature. President Truman saw to it that the new agency was equipped to support our government’s effort to meet Communist tactics of “coercion, subterfuge, and political infiltration.” Much of the knowhow and some of the personnel of the OSS were taken over by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The two years between the end of World War II when the OSS was dissolved and the creation of CIA in the fall of 1947 had been a period of interdepartmental infighting as to what to do with intelligence. Fortunately, many experienced officers of the OSS remained on during this period in the various intelligence units which functioned under the aegis of the State and War Departments in the postwar period.
The Craft of Intelligence Page 5