The Secret World of Eighteenth-Century Intelligence
Apologies for the long absence, but I’ve been swamped by work: namely, that U-boat book I’ve mentioned before.
The good news is that you know you’re finally coming to grips with the complexity of Enigma when you can read something like the below and say, “Yeah, that sounds about right”:
The bad news is that I’m still behind schedule, but it’s time for a break.
For a change of scene I thought it’d be interesting to survey the world of 18th-century intelligence vis-à-vis George Washington. I’ve touched on parts of this before—in the Casanova and John Honeyman posts (see links below)—so you’ll see a few overlaps and several repetitions, but also some rethinking.
I’m glad to have finally been able to give the subject more time. So much time, in fact, that this will be Spionage’s first Very Special Episode, or rather episodes, because it’s so long it has to be split in two.
The first part covers Intelligence in the Era of the American Revolution, and the second, Intelligence During the American Revolution. I’ll post Part 2 in a little bit.
And so, let us begin . . .
But first, a quick word from our sponsor (er, me), as something has to keep the lights on when one is handing out freebie subs on Substack. Click the advertisement to purchase the Greatest Book Ever Written on Civil War Espionage!
Once you’ve done that, read on.
Intelligence in the Era of the American Revolution
These days, it’s become a truism that George Washington, the essential Founding Father, was also the Founding Father of American intelligence.
That’s why there’s a statue of Nathan Hale outside Langley. CIA Director William Casey used to get annoyed that the agency was celebrating someone who got caught, but I think he missed the point. As America’s first spy, sort of, Hale serves as the intel equivalent of Abraham to Jews.
From him descends, via his covenant with Washington, an unbroken line of service that began in 1776 and continues through the present. Thus the CIA, indeed the modern intelligence community, has its origins in the Revolution, with Washington serving as its first proto-Director.
As I said, it’s become a truism, but it’s as false as god as Baal. Aside from some cosmetic similarities, 18th-century spying has little in common with its modern variant. Washington was a master of spies, but he cannot be considered a “spymaster” in the way we conceive the term.
The reason for identifying Washington as a kind of bewigged “M” figure is that intelligence during the War of Independence isn’t looked at with much historical perspective. Which is why, before anything else, we need to know what spying was like in the era of the American Revolution before we can understand what it was like during it.
There are three basic characteristics of late 17th and 18th-century espionage that distinguish it from today’s form.
1: Patronage
The first was that spies, of whatever stripe, worked for a patron, a great man, a jefe. This setup descended from the Renaissance-era style of personal rule but had come to reflect the structure of politics at a time when parties and institutions had not yet quite formed and so loyalties were dictated by personal affinity and private ambition.
Success hinged on retaining the patron’s interest by rendering '“useful services,” as they put it, and crossing your fingers that his fortunes continued to prosper. A fine example of what happened when a patron moved on, in one way or another, is provided by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Louis XIV’s Controller-General of Finance—and chief spy.
This was a time when there was a shift away from citing received wisdom as a source of authority and towards using hard information to help make decisions. Colbert’s great achievement was to create an encyclopaedic state-intelligence system that harvested Big Data, the Palantir of its time. His agents cast their nets wide, drawing in colossal amounts of information from neighboring realms on their finances, demographics, laws, land holdings, election results, army commanders, and family trees of the leading noble families.
Advanced stuff, except that it was the slave of one man’s patronage. So when Colbert died of a kidney stone, his successors couldn’t hope to manage the vast database he’d amassed and it fell into decrepitude. At one particularly low point it was even being directed exclusively towards suppressing irreverent gossip about the king’s numberless mistresses.
The same thing happened with the so-called Black Chambers. These were secret offices that specialized in intercepting, opening, forging, and decrypting diplomatic and domestic correspondence. Though ostensibly run by the government, they in fact reported to a single master and their sway hinged on his continuing interest.
Under Prince Kaunitz, the State Chancellor of Austria for nearly four decades from 1753 to 1792, the Habsburg Black Chamber was remorselessly efficient.
That was mostly owed not only to Kaunitz’s desire to be the best informed man in Europe, but also his proximity to the Empress Maria Theresa, who took an equal interest in reading other people’s letters. After her death and his resignation, however, the Black Chamber declined in tandem with its baroque empire.
The lesson we can draw from this is that the great difference between then and now was that then there was no impartial, institutional foundation for intelligence-gathering and -evaluation. So when the boss went, along with his patronage, there was no institutional memory left behind to allow others to continue the work.
2: Impermanence
The second characteristic feature of the era, related to the first, was Impermanence. Owing to the patronage system, there may have been a lot of spying but there weren’t many spies, at least not long-term ones.
Nearly all worked only occasionally or were hired for one-time jobs to steal information or to perform some dark deed for raison d’etat.
Frederick the Great, for instance, paid Friedrich Wenzel, a clerk in the Saxon archives, to sell him a copy of the Austro-Russian Alliance Treaty of 1746. But, unlike standard practice today, Frederick never thought of keeping Wenzel on as a mole able to pass on secrets for years.
The reason is that, because there was no standing intelligence agency, hefe Frederick could not train long-term agents in tradecraft or to nail down secure means of transmission. It’s revealing that while there were plenty of military manuals approving the use of spies, none of them actually told readers how to spy. In other words, there were no standard operating procedures to run agents in the field on a permanent basis. It was all ad hoc.
Without knowing how to take elementary precautions, many spies, predictably, didn’t last long. A good example here is Dr. Hensey, an Irish physician recruited as a French spy in London in the late 1750s. He didn’t bother with a code, left incriminating documents lying casually around his rooms, and recycled the same low-grade intel—smatterings he’d picked up in coffee-houses—among his patron the Chevalier d’Affray and the Spanish and Austrian ambassadors. You simply can’t get away with that kind of sloppy tradecraft without being caught. And indeed, the Post Office—the British version of Kaunitz’s Black Chamber—had in fact been intercepting all his mail from the get-go. Hensey was of course arrested and sentenced to hang, and he only saved his neck by snitching on all the other French spies in the capital, whose careers were soon similarly truncated just, unhelpfully, as the Seven Years’ War was kicking off—when they might have been of some use.
The Wenzel and Hensey episodes throw into relief the absence of ideology, religious or political, among spies at the time. This shouldn’t surprise us. The eighteenth century was a much more cosmopolitan time than our own in several respects. Because bonds of nationhood and shared citizenship would not truly emerge until the French Revolution, treason was defined differently than today.
Today it means that you’ve betrayed your country. Then it meant compassing the king’s death or counterfeiting his coins. But if you weren’t doing that then switching sides and working for a different king was like someone today taking a job at a rival firm for better salary and benefits.
Henry Lloyd, for instance, was one of the most eminent soldiers of the age—Washington was a fan of his bestselling military textbook. He was was born in Wales, joined the French army against the Austrians, accompanied the Jacobites to Scotland to fight the English, then joined the Austrians against the Prussians, then the Prussians against the Austrians—during the same war—after which he fought with the Corsicans against the French, and finally became a major-general in the Russian army to fight the Turks, all along serving as a British double agent and undertaking all sorts of secret service gigs. This was regarded as perfectly normal behavior in many quarters.
I should add that Benedict Arnold, Lloyd’s contemporary and a man equally unburdened by ideology, was cut from the same cloth. He wasn’t anywhere near as successful as Lloyd, but they both worked an international market in soldiering and spying where the highest offers from the best patrons attracted the most talented. In Arnold’s case, the British were bidding higher than the Americans for his services and so he made the decision to change horses.
Spying, then, was just business—and a fast-moving one at that.
3: Gentlemanliness
Which brings us to the third feature of 18th-century spying: gentlemanliness. There was a class system within the secret world whose currency was honor, meaning that when we talk about “spying” we need to distinguish between the various types if we want to understand personal motivations.
At the top, and so counted as most honorable, were the diplomats and military officers. For nearly two centuries, ambassadors had circulated within their hosts’ palaces and chancelleries extracting gossip and policy scoops from courtiers and nobles. All of this was compiled into lengthy reports and sent to their home countries. Over time, after a few too many indiscretions (one Spanish ambassador was asked to leave London owing to an impolite habit of instigating Catholic plots), a set of ground rules evolved about what was permissible to snoop into and what was off-limits. This upper-class etiquette eventually became as stiffly ritualized as Kabuki theatre.
Also at the top was military intelligence, which was mostly the preserve of officers, who were, naturally, gentlemen. This was the most ancient form of espionage, and one can find references to it in Homer, Thucydides, and Julius Caesar. With that kind of pedigree, it was accordingly promoted by Europe’s poshest commanders, like Maurice De Saxe, who gloried in the magnificent title of “Marshal of All the Armies of France” and believed it was “impossible to pay too much attention to spies.” (Frederick the Great, a king no less, not a mere count like Saxe, would echo that opinion.)
This type of espionage focused on acquiring operational and tactical intelligence in the field, usually by dint of uniformed officers probing enemy fortifications and positions while others specialised in the new science of cartography.
The Duke of Marlborough, the greatest soldier of the early 18th century, seems to have been the first to appoint an actual intelligence chief while on campaign during the War of the Spanish Succession. This was William Cadogan (later an earl—actually, his descendants are still earls, if I recall correctly), whose task was to estimate the location, provisions, and strength of the enemy forces so that Marlborough could plan his countermoves and masterstrokes.
Moving down this espionage hierarchy were the middle-class cryptographers and professional clerks of the Black Chambers. These were respectable occupations, paid decently, and came with any number of benefits. A typical Viennese cryptanalyst worked a shift of one week on, one week off, and was paid a lavish bonus whenever he cracked a new diplomatic code.
At the same level were the merchants and engineers who pursued what we’d call industrial espionage. The French had long been particularly zealous in their efforts to “transfer” (as the euphemism has it) technology, especially in the metals, steam-engine, glass, and textiles sectors. By the later decades of the century, Britain’s economy had become a powerhouse, its manufacturing machines the envy of the world. And so after the Revolution, the Americans, who were trying to kickstart their own independent economy, joined their gallant French allies in stealing from the best. In 1787, for instance, the British consul in Philadelphia, Phineas Bond, stumbled across four advanced spinning jennies that had been smuggled into the US, which he commandeered and sent home.
It wasn’t that stuff, though, but the lowest form of espionage, that made it a byword for dishonorable behavior. Its practitioners infested the underbelly of Europe as the frogs and lice did Egypt, serving as informers, infiltrators, and agents provocateurs. As Voltaire, who knew a thing or two about being informed upon, put it in his History of Charles XII, these type of men “make their living by selling their friends’ secrets and subsist on accusations and slanders.”
Many were lowborn, but anyone down on his luck could work for scraps. The most famous was Casanova, once renowned throughout Europe for his amatory adventures but by the 1770s an aging, painted roue reduced to supplying the Venetian Secret Service with scurrilous tips about illicit pamphlets (by Voltaire, among others) and opera-box fumblings with the local talent (also by Voltaire, probably). As he pleaded to his patron, please don’t let anyone know what I’ve been forced to do, as “I would risk being driven out in disgrace, a fatal misfortune for my poor honor.”
And right there, in that pitiful entreaty, you can detect the link between honor and gentlemanliness that fixated his contemporaries.
As you can see, the three characteristics of 18th-century intelligence—Patronage, Impermanence, and Gentlemanliness—are very different from those of today, which is why we need to examine the practice of espionage during the American Revolution using the eyes of the past, not of the present.
So, on that bombshell, look out for Part 2, when we’ll do just that.