by Jeffrey Steinberg –
Prologue
Successful intelligence operations are warfare in the realm of ideas, and nothing illustrates this principle better than the American Revolution, whose success was never guaranteed, and whose partisans were never certain about their survival, financially, or bodily. What motivated the Citizen-Patriots who made up the earliest espionage and counterintelligence operations was not loyalty to George Washington or a monarch or a political party, but loyalty to ideas: ideas that all men are created equal in the eyes of the Creator; that all human beings are endowed with inalienable rights – Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness; that the purpose of government is to serve and protect the common good of humanity.
To the British monarchy, military, nobility, and servants of the divinely-anointed monarch, such beliefs did not and could not exist, and therein lay the seeds of their defeat. One of the leading British intelligence officials in North America, at the end of the American Revolution, after the British had conceded defeat at Yorktown and after the Treaty of Paris was negotiated, made the admission: the Americans didn’t defeat us in fighting, they beat us in the spy war.
In 2025-2026, author Jeff Steinberg gave a series of university lectures on unknown aspects of the history of American intelligence. Here, in American System Now, Jeff’s story of George Washington and the American Revolutionary War intelligence miracle has been adapted from his lectures and will appear in several parts.
Part I: Citizen Patriots Give Birth to an Intelligence System
As we approach the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, it is altogether fitting and proper to bury the myth that the United States learned its methods of intelligence gathering from the British Special Operations Executive, MI-6, or other agencies during World War II. Even before 1776, it was the superiority of the American intelligence system, especially under the later leadership of citizen-soldier-statesman George Washington, that won the Revolution.
Victory was largely accomplished because the forces of the American Citizen-Patriots, even before the first volleys of the American Revolutionary war, conducted more effective intelligence operations than the British. The foundation of that intelligence capability was the unprecedented high literacy rate of the population of the 13 colonies, which made for a thriving industry of newspapers, pamphlets, and books unrivaled anywhere in Europe, including England. The Americans were politically and theologically literate.
For the British, who at that time controlled the largest and most powerful empire on the planet, to acknowledge that intelligence superiority tells you a lot about the history and culture of the American Patriots and the strengths and advantages that those forces had.
During the American Revolution, both the Continental Army and the British engaged in intensive espionage and counter-espionage operations, and everything we think of today as the sort of critical activities conducted by intelligence agencies, was conducted by both sides.
One of the first well-known events was the case of Nathan Hale, a trusted officer and colleague of General Washington. Soon after taking command of the Continental Army, Washington deployed Hale to spy on the British in the New York City area. Unfortunately, Hale was captured and sentenced to be hung as a spy. And his last words were: “I only regret that I have but one life to give for my country.” 
It was an inspiring message, and though the operation itself failed, it was not the end of Washington’s espionage vision, but the beginning.
During the American Revolution, spies were recruited, operations were run behind enemy lines, intelligence reports were produced and communicated through dead letter drops. Both sides were deeply involved in encryption and in decoding the enemy’s secret communications. This proved to be a critical element of the victory of the Americans at Yorktown.
Both sides engaged in disinformation. Because of the intensity of the espionage operations back and forth, there was a great deal of counterintelligence work that was done scoping out and capturing British spies that were operating in the midst of the American sectors. Similarly, the British were looking to catch American spies operating inside their controlled areas.
Interrogations, sabotage operations, all of these things that we think of in terms of modern spy craft, were fully operationalized during the American Revolution. At the same time, it would be 100 years before the United States established a permanent peacetime, as well as wartime, intelligence system—the Office of Naval Intelligence. It would take 170 years before a permanent civilian intelligence organization—the CIA—was created.
This was largely because there was a general distrust among the American Patriots of establishing a permanent military and espionage apparatus. It was feared that such a permanent military/intelligence structure would concentrate too much power in the Executive Branch and lead to monarchy.
Instead, the principle on which the United States was built was that of the citizen-soldier, and George Washington set the example for that, when after the successful conclusion of the revolution, he resigned his commission as the commander-in-chief of the Continental Army and went back to farming at Mount Vernon.
The espionage networks and organizations that existed during the Revolution were disbanded following the signing of the Treaty of Paris, and there was no permanent organization or institutional memory preserved for the next decades.
While this sort of vacuum was a vulnerability, it is necessary to recall that long before a formal revolutionary structure was created to take on the British and before the first shots of the Revolution were fired, the American Patriots had begun their spy organizations, recognizing that the British System was an enemy occupation that would have to be defeated.
Pre-Revolution Espionage
In 1764, Committees of Correspondence were established in Boston, and Patriot Samuel Adams was one of the key players in organizing it, along with John Hancock and Joseph Warren. (1)
This was an intelligence network formed to monitor the activities of the British military forces and those who were loyalists to the British. There was not yet large-scale support for a fight for independence, but nevertheless, those committees were the first institutional formation, and were to play an important role in furthering the revolutionary cause.
Concrete intelligence organizations were created in secrecy, springing up initially in Massachusetts, but eventually throughout all of the 13 colonies within 10 years. Again, the profile of these operations was to monitor what the British were doing through open observation and through spying. It was equally important to know what the British loyalists were doing.
These committees were responsible for organizing the first Continental Congress that occurred in 1774. This was two years before the Declaration of Independence. They constituted a proto-independent government. By that point, the secret spy organization, the Committees of Correspondence, had an estimated active membership of between 8 and 9,000 partisans in all thirteen colonies.
In each of the thirteen colonies, there were hundreds of people acting as a unified and organized network. Within that, a paramilitary force was engaged both in espionage, and later, in sabotage operations.
One of the most prominent of these groups was the Sons of Liberty. They played a critical role in the period leading up to the full outbreak of the Revolution, carrying out the Boston Tea Party and other actions against the British military occupation of Boston.
Fighting Oligarchy in the International Sphere
The second Continental Congress convened a year after the first one, and on November 29th, 1775, they established a Committee of Secret Correspondence, whose objective was not only to maintain intelligence operations about British doings in North America, but to also to deploy key personnel to Europe to set up an intelligence operation overlapping with American diplomacy.
Key figures were Benjamin Franklin, John Dickinson, John Adams, Silas Deane, and Thomas Jefferson, who were sent to Europe and engaged in a combination of diplomacy and espionage. This was the first official US foreign intelligence and diplomatic corps, and their assignment was to maintain intelligence on what the British were up to, operate in France to recruit agents, and cultivate allies.
In this international intelligence domain, the indications of the American Patriots’ superior philosophical outlook became obvious. The Patriots understood the weaknesses of the British oligarchy and the fault lines of the entire oligarchical system against which they were fighting. The Americans were quite aware of the fact that there were rivalries among the European colonial powers, and some of the espionage and diplomatic activities in Europe aimed to exploit those fault lines, which intensified after the British defeat of the French in the Seven Years War (1757-1763).
The American diplomat/intelligence operatives worked to arrange covert arms deliveries, and toward the ultimate objective of drawing Spain and France into an alliance with the Americans.
So, while the primary warfare was taking place in North America, an indispensable dimension of the war was being fought through espionage and diplomatic activities in Europe, including Russia.
The French and Indian War
The first American spy chief was George Washington; he had a history of intelligence missions dating back to when he served in the British Army during the French and Indian War (as the Seven Years War was called in North America). He had been a surveyor and had been brought into the British conflict with the French as a loyal British subject.
Both the British and the French had certain Indian tribes that they were working with. Washington was deployed on the staff of General Edward Braddock, who was the British commander in North America until he was killed in combat near what is today Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
When Braddock was killed, Washington took immediate battlefield charge of the British forces and organized the retreat. Washington was later deployed on a dangerous reconnaissance mission to profile the French and Indian battle plans. He and a guide who spoke the Indian languages spent over two months in the field.
After 78 grueling days in the woods working his way back, Washington arrived at Williamsburg, Virginia to brief British Royal Governor Robert Dinwiddie about details of the French and Indian military collusion. Though he’d had little sleep, the urgency of the situation prompted Washington to immediately sit down and write a 7,400-word detailed intelligence report.
Washington Takes Command of a Revolution
That experience and that appreciation of the importance of intelligence in warfare informed what Washington did for the American revolutionary cause. As Washington was taking command, the first of the espionage wars were already underway. It centered on the “shot heard around the world” at Lexington and Concord, Massachusetts on April 18-19, 1775.
The British, through their own spy networks, learned that there was a major arms cache of the colonial militias hidden in Concord, and they had plans to seize those weapons and simultaneously kidnap and arrest two of the Massachusetts leaders, Samuel Adams and John Hancock.
But the Sons of Liberty, by then a bona fide American intelligence network, discovered through their own espionage what the British plans were, and rapidly mustered hundreds of armed militiamen to confront the British troops and prevent the seizure of the weapons. The incident marked the first overt combat on a large scale between American militiamen and the British Army. It enshrined the name Paul Revere in the history books as Revere carried word of the British troops’ movements to the Sons of Liberty militias.
Immediately, express riders were sent to Philadelphia to brief the Second Continental Congress on what had happened at Lexington and Concord. On June 15, 1775, the Continental Congress named George Washington the commander-in- chief of the Continental Army. Washington assumed formal command on July 3, 1775. At that point, the army, largely based in Massachusetts and drawn from local militias, started out with 15,000 troops.
A week later Washington, in his role as commander-in-chief, authorized the creation of a special separate fund to establish a spy network to track the British naval deployments in and around Boston and conduct other vital reconnaissance. The question was not only control over the Boston harbors, but also learning how many additional troops the British were going to be sending for the pending war.
During that same time frame, John Jay, who would later become the first Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, was named by the Continental Congress as the Director of Counterintelligence. He was assigned to establish a team to root out Tory spies and break the British Army and Navy codes. James Lovell became America’s first official code breaker and would play a critical role in the intelligence wars that produced the American victory
Washington understood that New York was the center of the entire British presence in North America, and Nathan Hale, who we mentioned earlier, was a member of a New York militia cavalry group known as Knowlton’s Rangers. He stepped forward and volunteered to infiltrate the British stronghold on Long Island and work his way into Manhattan.
Hale was arrested and hung, but is honored today as the first American intelligence hero. In Langley, Virginia, if you go to CIA headquarters, outside the main building you’ll see a statue of Nathan Hale. He was a Yale graduate, and there is another statue of Hale on that campus.
After Hales’ capture, it became clear to Washington that there had to be a durable and extended spy network, not reliant on a single individual.
Tallmadge, the First Spymaster
Key among the people he turned to was a young Colonel in the newly established Continental Army — Benjamin Tallmadge. A pre-Revolution teacher and businessman from Connecticut, Tallmadge had business that carried him into the counties of New York, north and east of New York City, including Long Island. Based on his knowledge and contacts in this important British-dominated area, Washington personally designated Tallmadge to recruit and create espionage networks.
Some years back, a TV series called Turn: Washington’s Spies, was created, loosely based on the actual history of one of Tallmadge’s projects called the Culper Ring. This network operated throughout the Revolution in New York City and Long Island and ran a courier network to deliver their intelligence to wherever Gen. Washington or Tallmadge were located.
So protected was the Culper Ring that the individuals’ identities were only first discovered in the 1920s, when an historian found copies of written intelligence reports and realized that some of the handwriting matched letters he had found from one of the Culper Ring members who had previously been presumed to be a leading Manhattan Tory. Ultimately, he put the jigsaw puzzle together. But for a long period, from the 1770s until the 1920s, while the existence and success of the spy ring was known, its members were only known by their code names.
The first Culper Ring recruit was one of Tallmadge’s friends, Abraham Woodhull. Woodhull was a wealthy merchant on Long Island, with trade in New York City, enabling him to travel back and forth, recruiting agents. Washington understood that New York City was the hub of British operations, and having an active intelligence window into British planning and resources in New York would be crucial to victory. Thus, New York City was to be of highest priority in intelligence gathering.
British Blunders
Woodhull recruited Robert Townsend, a New York City Quaker, who became a major asset to the American cause (it was Townsend’s handwriting that matched with Culper Ring reports), ironically because of Britain’s arrogant and wrong assumption. The British thought that because the Quakers were anti-war in general, they would not collude with the American revolutionaries. It was a big mistake. Townsend was a prominent city merchant, and he in turn recruited another member of the Culper ring named James Rivington, one of the city’s most prominent publishers.
Rivington printed one of the major pro-British Tory newspapers and his print shop was deeply involved in the operations of the British military in New York City. Ultimately, Rivington and Townsend jointly purchased a pub that became (because of Rivington’s reputation as one of the most important Tories) a hangout for off-duty British officers; a British miscalculation that provided the Americans with indispensable intelligence.
Agent 355 was a woman who was also a critical figure in the Culper Ring. While her identity has never been fully confirmed, it is widely believed that Agent 355 was Anna Smith Strong, a Citizen-Patriot who was captured, charged with being a spy, and who ultimately died in British custody. If Anna was Agent 355, she would be the only Culper Ring member to die in British custody.
Agent 355 was a critical player in the Ring, providing signals to Tallmadge’s couriers that there was fresh intelligence that had been smuggled from Manhattan to Long Island, to be delivered to Washington. Once the arrival of the intelligence and the location of the drop points had been conveyed through signals from Agent 355, a network of couriers brought the documents to Washington or Tallmadge. Caleb Brewster, a local Long Island blacksmith and boatsman, played a vital role in bringing the Culper reports to the drop points, sometimes delivering the material directly to Tallmadge. Brewster was skilled at evading British surveillance of Long Island Sound and other routes.
Even by today’s standards, the trade craft of the Culper Ring was of the highest quality.
Washington, by pre-design, never knew the identities of the members of the Culper ring; only Colonel Tallmadge knew their real names. There were no uniforms, ID cards, or paraphernalia that would compromise them. Yet the intelligence was invaluable and contributed to vital operations such as defeating the plot by the treasonous Benedict Arnold to turn over the Fort at West Point to the British, thus cutting off New England from the rest of the country.
These events will be described further in the second part of this story, along with details of General Washington’s personal involvement in developing his spies. A third part will focus on the crucial international role of Benjamin Franklin and the team of American spy/diplomats who were sent to Paris, Amsterdam, St. Petersburg, and other European capitals to win support for the American cause and create covert programs for securing military supplies.
End of Part I
(1) See “1768: The King’s Military Occupation of Boston Awakens American Resistance” by Colin Lowry
