Prologue
Successful intelligence operations are warfare in the realm of ideas, and nothing illustrates that 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 counter-intelligence 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 monarch, military, nobility, and servants of the divinely anointed monarch, such beliefs did not and could not exist, and there-in 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 after Yorktown, 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.
Tags: Intelligence, Revolutionary War