George Washington, Spymaster (February/March 2000 | Volume: 51, Issue: 1)

George Washington, Spymaster

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Authors: Thomas Fleming

Historic Era: Era 3: Revolution and the New Nation (1754-1820s)

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February/March 2000 | Volume 51, Issue 1

George Washington - a master of espionage? It is commonly understood that, without the Commander-in-Chief’s quick mind and cool judgment, the American Revolution would have almost certainly expired in 1776. It is less well known that his brilliance extended to overseeing, directly and indirectly, extensive and very sophisticated intelligence activities against the British.

Washington had wanted to be a soldier almost from the cradle and seems to have acquired the ability to think in military terms virtually by instinct. In the chaos of mid-1776, with half his army deserting and the other half in a funk and all his generals rattled, he kept his head and reversed his strategy. The Americans had started with the idea that a general action, as an all-out battle was called, could end the conflict overnight, trusting that their superior numbers would overwhelm the presumably small army the British could afford to send to our shores. But the British sent a very big, well-trained army, which routed the Americans in the first several battles in New York. Washington sat down in his tent on Harlem Heights and informed the Continental Congress that he was going to fight an entirely different war. From now on, he wrote, he would “avoid a general action.” Instead he would “protract the war.”

In his 1975 study of Washington’s generalship, The Way of the Fox, Lt. Col. Dave Richard Palmer has called this reversal “a masterpiece of strategic thought, a brilliant blueprint permitting a weak force to combat a powerful opponent.” It soon became apparent that for the blueprint to be followed, Washington would have to know what the British were planning to do, and he would have to be able to prevent them from finding out what he was doing. In short, espionage was built into the system.

He was involved in figuring out how to burn down New York City despite orders not to.

Washington had been acquainted with British colonial officials and generals and colonels since his early youth, and he knew how intricately espionage was woven into the entire British military and political enterprise. Any Englishman’s mail could be opened and read if a secretary of state requested it. Throughout Europe every British embassy had its intelligence network.

Thus Washington was not entirely surprised to discover, shortly after he took command of the American army in 1775, that his surgeon general, Dr. Benjamin Church, was telling the British everything that went on in the American camp at Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was surprised to find out, not long after he had transferred his operations to New York in the spring of 1776, that one of his Life Guard, a soldier named Thomas Hickey, was rumored to be involved in a plot to kill him.

By that time Washington had pulled off his own opening gambit in a form of intelligence at which he soon displayed something close to