Alexander Rose - Washingtons Spies: The Story of Americas First Spy Ring

Fascinating tells how the work of the spies proved to be the tipping point in the summer of 1778, helping Washington begin breaking the stalemate with the British [and] brings to light their crucial help in winning American independence.

The Dallas Morning News

Gen. George Washington, who brushed counter liquor across seemingly innocuous letters to reveal messages written in invisible ink, knew that intelligence is a mosaic formed from many small parts, some fitting more precisely than others. In Washingtons Spies, Alexander Rose has done an admirable job of investigating and reporting on Washingtons wartime intelligence service.

The Virginian-Pilot

After working on Washington, I knew there was a story to tell about his reliance on spies during the Revolutionary War. But I believed the story could never be told because the evidence did not exist. Well, I was wrong, and Alexander Rose tells this important story with style and wit.

JOSEPH J. ELLIS , author of His Excellency: George Washington

First in war, first in peace, first in covert opsAlex Rose unfolds the story of a Long Islandbased spy ring of idealists and misfits who kept George Washington informed of what was going on in enemy-occupied New York. Making brilliant use of documentary sources, Rose gives us intrigue, crossed signals, derring-do, and a priceless slice of eighteenth-century life. Think of Alan Furst with muskets.

RICHARD BROOKHISER , author of Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington

This fascinating and carefully crafted book shows us a side of the Father of Our Country that hero-worshippers since Reverend Weems never imaginedand the almost forgotten covert side of the Revolutionary War. [Rose] gives us a compelling portrait of [a] rogues gallery of barkeeps, misfits, hypochondriacs, part-time smugglers, and full-time neurotics that will remind every reader of the cast of a John le Carr novel.

ARTHUR HERMAN , National Review

Offers fascinating new research on how Washington organized an intelligence-gathering network that helped turn the American Revolution in his sides favor.

Chicago Tribune

2014 Bantam Books eBook Edition

Copyright 2006 by Alexander Rose

Maps copyright 2006 by David Lindroth, Inc.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.

B ANTAM B OOKS and the H OUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by

Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, in 2006.

ISBN 978-0-553-39259-3
eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-7982-9

www.bantamdell.com

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I will keep my mouth with a bridle, while the wicked is before me.

Psalm 39

I n passing him they did not even see him, or hear him, rather they saw through him as through a pane of glass at their familiars beyond.

Thomas Hardy, J UDE THE O BSCURE

W orse than having no human sources is being seduced by a human source who is telling lies.

Report of the Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, 2005

L ord, now lettest thou thy servant depart in peace.

Luke 2:29

I ntelligence is the life of every thing in war.

Letter, General Nathanael Greene to Major John Clark, November 5, 1777

The Yankee soldier, flinty once but now wizened and gnarled, flashed in and out of lucidity. Sometimes his memories of a war fought sixty years before gushed liberally from his lips, but more often, for half hours at a time, he would slouch in vacant-eyed silence. His visiting relative, R. N. Wright, recorded despondently that Asher Wright is now in the eighty-second year of his life, and besides the infirmities of advanced age, has been affected in his mind, ever since the melancholy death of his young master, Captain Nathan Hale. What is gathered of him, can be learnt only at intervals and when he is in the humor of conversation.

One evening in 1836, though, Asher was particularly loquacious, and spoke so excitedly his companion taxed himself hard to scribble down the old mans words. Wright the Younger used whatever came to handa blank leaf in the book he had been reading (Humes History of England, as it happened)for he knew that he was listening to one of a diminishing band of brothers of the Revolutionary War. Indeed, Asher was a particularly venerated member of that generation: Not

When he left us, he told me he had got to be absent a while, and wanted I should take care of his things & if the army moved before he returned, have them moved too. He was too good-looking to go so. He could not deceive. Some scrubby fellows ought to have gone. He had marks [scars] on his forehead, so that anybody would know him who had ever seen himhaving had [gun]powder flashed in his face. He had a large hair mole on his neck just where the knot come. In his boyhood, his playmates sometimes twitted him about it, telling him he would be hanged.

One of those playmates might well have been Asher Wright. A local boy, he had grown up with Hale, but they had parted ways after Nathan went off to Yale, a place far beyond the modest means of Wrights family. They met again during the war, when Hales first waiter, his servant, had fallen sick, and though the man eventually recovered (Wright ascribed it to Hales practice of praying for him), he could not continue in the post. Capt. Hale was [of] a mind I should take his place, recalled Wright. And I did & remained with him till he went on to Long Island.

Tired of his exertions, Wright could add little more to his recollectionsapart from one nugget. Nathan Hale, today immortalized as the Martyr-Spy of the Revolution, wasnt even supposed to have become a spy in the first place. James Sprague, my aunts cousin he was desired by Col[onel] Knowlton, to go on to Long Island. He refused, saying, I am willing to go & fight them, but as for going among them & being taken & hung up like a dog, I will not do it. No soldiers, let alone officers, in Knowltons RangersHales regimentwanted to take the ignoble job of secret agent, an occupation considered inappropriate for gentlemen, and one best suited for blackguards, cheats, and cowards. And it was then, remembered Asher, that Hale stood by and said, I will undertake the business.