Thomas Fleming - George Washington: Spymaster Extraordinaire

George Washington a master of espionage? It is commonly understood that without the Commander-in-chiefs 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 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 despair 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 Americas shores. But the British sent a huge, well-trained army, which routed the rebels 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.

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.

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 Englishmans 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 a genius: disinformation. Shortly after he took command in Cambridge, he asked someone how much powder the embryo American army had in reserve. Everyone thought they had 300 barrels, but a check of the Cambridge magazine revealed most of that had been fired away at Bunker Hill. There were only 36 barrels - fewer than nine rounds per man. For half an hour, according to one witness, Washington was too stunned to speak. But he recovered and sent people into British-held Boston to spread the story that he had 1,800 barrels. He spread the same rumor throughout the American camp.

In chaotic New York, grappling with a large and aggressive British army, deserting militia, and an inapplicable strategy, Washington temporarily lost control of the intelligence situation. That explains the dolorous failure of Captain Nathan Hales mission in September 1776. Hale, sent to gather information behind British lines, was doomed almost from the moment he volunteered. He had little or no contact with the American high command, no training as a spy, no disguise worthy of the name, and an amorphous mission: to find out whatever he could wherever he went.

There is little evidence that Washington was even aware of Hales existence. He was involved in something far more serious: figuring out how to burn down New York City in order to deprive the British of their winter quarters, despite orders from the Continental Congress strictly forbidding him to harm the place. He looked the other way while volunteers, probably including members of Hales regiment, slipped into the city; the Hale men were experts at starting conflagrations, thanks to a tour of duty on fire ships - vessels carrying explosives to burn enemy craft - on the Hudson.

On September 21, a third of New York went up in flames. The timing was disastrous for Hale, who was captured on Long Island the same day. The British caught several incendiaries setting fires and hanged them on the spot. They gave Hale the same treatment: no trial, just a swift, humiliating death. Hales friends were so mortified by his fate, which they considered shameful, that no one mentioned his now-famous farewell speech I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country - for another fifty years. Yale College, seeking Revolutionary War heroes among its graduates, immortalized him.

Washington never said a word about Hale. His only intelligence comment at the time concerned New York. The fire had destroyed Trinity Church and about 600 houses, causing no little discomfort for the British and the thousands of Loyalist refugees who had crowded into the city. In a letter, Washington remarked that Providence, or some good honest fellow, has done more for us than we were disposed to do for ourselves.

One of Hales best friends, Major Benjamin Tallmadge, never got over his death. He probably talked about it to Washington, who assured him that once they got the protracted war under control, all espionage would be handled from Army headquarters, and no spys life would be wasted the way Hales had been.

Surviving long enough to fight an extended conflict was no small matter. In the weeks after Hales death, disaster after disaster befell the American army. Washington was forced to abandon first New York and then New Jersey. On the other side of the Delaware, with only the shadow of an army left to him, he issued orders in December 1776 to all his generals to find some person who can be engaged to cross the river as a spy and added that expense must not be spared in securing a volunteer.

He also rushed a letter to Robert Morris, the financier of the Revolution, asking for hard money to pay a certain set of people who are of particular use to us. He meant spies, and he had no illusion that any spy would risk hanging for the paper money the Continental Congress was printing. Morris sent from Philadelphia two canvas bags filled with what hard cash he could scrape together on an hours notice: 410 Spanish dollars, two English crowns, ten shillings, and two sixpence.

The search soon turned up a former British soldier named John Honeyman, who was living in nearby Griggstown, New Jersey. On Washingtons orders, Honeyman rediscovered his loyalty to the king and began selling cattle to several British garrisons along the Delaware. He had no trouble gaining the confidence of Colonel Johann Rall, who was in command of three German regiments in Trenton. Honeyman listened admiringly as Rall described his heroic role in the fighting around New York and agreed with him that the Americans were hopeless soldiers.

On December 22, 1776, having spent about a week in Trenton, Honeyman wandered into the countryside, supposedly in search of cattle, and got himself captured by an American patrol and hustled to Washingtons headquarters. There he was publicly denounced by the Commander-in-chief as a notorious turncoat. Washington insisted on interrogating him personally and said he would give the traitor a chance to save himself if he recanted his loyalty to the Crown.

A half-hour later, the general ordered his aides to throw Honeyman into the guardhouse. The next morning, he stated, the Tory would be hanged. That night, Honeyman escaped from the guardhouse with a key supplied by Washington and dashed past American sentries, who fired on him. Sometime on December 24 he turned up in Trenton and told Colonel Rall the story of his narrow escape.