George Washington, Elite Spymaster
George Washington’s battlefield record was hit-or-miss. Where he was truly great was in the shadows. With the British occupying New York City in 1778, Washington built a spy ring out of ordinary people on Long Island — a farmer, a merchant, a tavern keeper who carried the mail, and a whaleboat captain who rowed the intelligence across the Long Island Sound at night. They called it the Culper Ring, and for five years, inside occupied territory, the British never unmasked a single member.
Their tradecraft holds up by modern standards: aliases, compartmentation, dead drops, a courier chain, and an invisible ink called the “sympathetic stain” that no candle flame could reveal — only a second secret chemical brought the words out. Agents wrote ordinary letters about crops and family, and the real intelligence lived between the lines. In 1780, the ring’s reporting helped expose Benedict Arnold’s plot to hand West Point to the British, and helped protect the newly landed French army at Newport — the ally that helped win the war.
For America’s 250th anniversary, that’s the part worth remembering: American intelligence didn’t begin with the CIA. It began with farmers and shopkeepers who understood that a free country has to be able to keep a secret. This is part one of Founding Spycraft — a short series on how the founders actually ran intelligence.
Eric Garland is an intelligence analyst personally sanctioned by the Russian Federation in May 2022 for his work on Russian intelligence operations. He is the author of the 2016 “Game Theory” thread, named by The New York Times as one of the 25 most important tweets in history.
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SOURCES
George Washington’s Mount Vernon — “The Culper Spy Ring” and “Spy Techniques of the Revolutionary War,” mountvernon.org (primary institutional history)
Encyclopaedia Britannica — “Culper Spy Ring”
Stony Brook University Library — “George Washington and the Culper Spy Ring: Codes & Aliases”
Founders Online, National Archives — John Jay to George Washington, 19 November 1778 (the “sympathetic stain” invisible ink)
