Cloak and founders.(Washington's Spies: The Story of America's First Spy Ring)(Book review)

Washington's Spies: The Story of America's First Spy Ring, by Alexander Rose (Bantam, 384 pp., $26)

THE History Channel recently gave us Washington the Warrior; thanks to Alexander Rose, we now have Washington the Spymaster. This fascinating and carefully crafted book shows us a side of the Father of Our Country that hero-worshipers since Reverend Weems never imagined--and the almost forgotten covert side of the Revolutionary War. We see George Washington advising his agents about invisible ink and encryption pads; brushing letters with a chemical wash to expose secret messages; wondering whether one of his spies might be a double agent; and trying to arrange an exchange of captured spies with the British, as if in a scene from a Hollywood espionage thriller.

Is it so surprising? Alex Rose reminds us that Washington started his military career in secret ops, working as the equivalent of an intelligence officer during the French and Indian War. As supreme commander in the American Revolution, he understood that--in the words of his subordinate Nathaniel Greene--"intelligence is the life of everything in war." (Millennia earlier, Sun Tzu was even blunter: "All warfare is deception.")

Indeed, Washington's first act as commander of the Continental Army was to launch a disinformation campaign. Upon appointment by the Continental Congress, he had been assured that there were 300 barrels of gunpowder waiting for him in Boston. When he arrived in July 1775, he learned that there were only 30--barely enough for one round per soldier. So Washington put it about that he was actually sitting on 1,800 barrels--enough to fight a major war. He knew Loyalist spies in Boston would carry the story back to British headquarters, which they did. The deception convinced General Howe to hold off on attacking Washington's outnumbered troops; and in March 1776, the British army evacuated Boston without firing a shot.

That summer, the theater of war was shifting from Boston to New York City, and Washington desperately needed information about British plans. The espionage duel began in earnest. Washington's first agent was to become the most famous, Nathan Hale. But as Rose points out, Hale was probably also the most ineffectual. He never entered into the spirit of the thing; unlike Washington, he couldn't convince himself that espionage was a proper calling for a gentleman. Even his handlers thought Hale too open and honest to make a good spy.

And so the British scooped Hale up almost before he got started, and left him dangling from a tree in what is now Manhattan's East Side--at 3rd Avenue and 66th Street. Nathan Hale's last words (which Rose concludes he never uttered)--"I regret that I have but one life to give for my country"--put him in the pantheon of American revolutionary martyrs. But as an intelligence agent, Hale would have been laughed out of the Aruba Secret Service.

His successors proved a better fit for the business of cloak and dagger. Their story is the heart of Rose's book, and he gives us a compelling portrait of this 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 Carre novel.