The Craft of Intelligence by Allen W. Dulles Read Free Book Online Page B

situation less than a month after Cornwallis had delivered it. The gist of the report was that the conquest of America was impossible. If Franklin’s agents had penetrated the British government at this level, it is possible that they had caught wind of the intelligence Bancroft was feeding the British.
    In the Civil War, even more than in the Revolution, the common heritage and language of the two parties to the conflict and the fact that many people geographically located on one side sympathized with the political aims of the other made the basic task of espionage relatively simple, while making the task of counterespionage all the more difficult. Yet the record seems to show that few highly competent continuous espionage operations, ones that can be compared in significance of achievement and technical excellence with those of the Revolution, existed on either side. No great battles were won or lost or evaded because of superior intelligence. Intelligence operations were limited for the most part to more or less localized and temporary targets. As one writer has put it, “There was probably more espionage in one year in any medieval Italian city than in the four-year War of Secession.”
    The reasons for this are numerous. There was no existing intelligence organization on either side at the outbreak of the war nor was there any extensive intelligence experience among our military personnel of that day. Before the Revolution, the Colonial leaders had been conspiring and carrying out a limited secret war against the British for years and by the time of open conflict had a string of active “sources” working for them in England and moreover possessed tested techniques for functioning in secret at home. This was not the case in the North or the South before the Civil War. Washington was an outstandingly gifted intelligence chief. He himself directed the entire intelligence effort of the American forces, even to taking a hand personally in its more important operations. There was no general with a similar gift in the whole galaxy of Federal or Confederate generals. Lastly, the Civil War by its very nature was not a war of surprises and secrets. Large lumbering armies remained encamped in one place for long periods of time, and when they began to move word of their movements spread in advance almost automatically. Washington, with far smaller numbers of men could plant false information as to his strength and could move his troops so quickly that a planned British action wouldn’t find them where they had been the day before, especially when Washington through his networks knew in advance of the British move.
    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