National archives. Find the chief Service Branch which is a fancy way of saying i run the public side of the buildings. And to provide the welcoming remarks today. Im pleased you could join us in the room were participating on facebook or youtube and also those of you joining us on cspan today. Allan pinkerton, elizabeth and baker. The correspondent for newsweek and he has authored six books on military and intelligence including bestsellers into the commandos and critically acclaimed question of loyalty. James mcpherson described the book as a fast paced narrative of union intelligence operations in Eastern Theater with the fabrications that grew up. It is my honor to be here today and a pleasure to welcome back someone who spent countless hours if not months researching the holdings especially when it culminates with such a good narrative as this one. The section is a testament to the research conducted. You will find numerous. This narrative opens with chapters devoted to the agents and then provides the chronological approach from 1861 to 1865 with a final chapter culminating in the experience. Before we hear about the work id like to let you know about another program coming up next week to present a lecture on the cia and the post9 11 world to discuss how after 9 11 the cia transformed into a war fighting Intelligence Service to help attacks. Please welcome the archives. Without further ado please join me in welcoming Douglas Waller to the stage. [applause] he and his team spent countless hours with me helping me out. I dont think he could get from one part of the building to another without tackling me at one point. I spent a number of years at the archives researching my last four books not only trevor at mitch in the audience guided me through world war i records. They helped me out immensely with world war ii records Mary Mcdonald and john taylor were extremely helpful and retired from the civil war as an archivist i harassed him for information. Im a little intimidated here because i want a little truth in advertising your. Ive covered the cia for number of years and my last two historical biographies as mentioned were major intelligence figures during world war ii. The other one became cia directors. For my next book i decided to switch and write an ensemble biography of the union spies during the civil war. In the photographs that always puts me to sleep and on the battlefield where thousands die like picketts charge and if that happened it was like the world had ever seen. Things like the rifle can and must its good to deliver more accurate deadly fire and the railroad that could move supplies quickly to the front and a telegraph to connect the War Departments anfour departmed battlefields with rapid communications. This also solves the change in how the maneuver against each other instead of the old napoleonic tactics with soldie soldiers. They had loose order tactics without incurring these tremendous casualties. But the commanders quickly discovered with all of these new weapons and tactics they needed far more Accurate Information on where the enemy was ahead of us. He boiled down to four things before he started the battle. A number of troops is important information. The generals in command on the other side. They usually know how the other guy on the other side of the battle would react to certain situations. The fourth thing jackson wanted to know is the locatio note is e headquarters of the enemy commander. They certainly increase the odds of success and can stave off. The cloak and dagger sent spies intand the other to the tory. These secret operatives spoke the same language and knew the other side so they were not dropping him with a Foreign Language that they were not aware of. The new war technologies also offered a new type of spy back then it was reading the messages tapped out on the morse code each side suspected the other was tapping into what is transmitted so they were using fairly primitive codes. It was found to be a spy tool. I saw the reconnaissance used in this particular way by the union side, hydrogen gas filled balloons were sent high into the air as high as 1,000 feet to scope out the battlefield and incidentally they had little baskets spinning around. These were the forerunners we have today. They are using signals on morse code and aerial drone seen operating over afghanistan and in the middle east. To deliver an electrical charge in order to activate the camera. Great idea. They eventually rejected this proposal. For this book i decided to focus on three men and one woman who spied for the union. I did so for several reasons. I found union operatives to be far more interesting than the confederate counterparts. One was a failure and the other was a scoundrel so i had a good mix of characters here to deal with and also, movies often have durables outperforming with yankees and espionage but that wasnt the case. For most they get had a much me comprehensive and infected intelligence gathering operation in the confederates could ever feel. So by the end of the conflict, Ulysses Grant had a better idea of the forces then we would ha have. She is in the upper left. Friends believe he was gifted with unusual powers of observation born in scotland in 1819 as a young man he trained and ended up spending more time working as a labor agitator falling under the spell of the scottish revolutionaries. In 1842 he immigrated to america with his young wife ended up essentially in chicago he thought his parents had been atheists and as a detective he had a sixth sense to anticipate the activity. It was set deeply under the wide brow and very often his upper lip which he occasionally shaved. He was a master publicist and was shameless about airbrushing endeended in february of 1861 oe evil of the civil war, by then he had become somewhat famous as a private guy and launched a covert operation to sneak Abraham Lincoln in a railroad car for baltimore. The detective that happened to be investigating the threat at the time uncovered evidence that they wanted to assassinate the new president elect at a stopover at baltimore in order to keep them from being inaugurated in washington. The next spy is Lafayette Baker in the generals uniform. He was a handsome man, brown hair, fulllength beard and eyes that were almost hypnotic. He was 5 feet 10 inches tall. He was upset with roman history and he was an unsavory detective who creates the secret police force. The schooling taught him to read and write and for the next ten years he drifted from job to job with others in states and often having to flee the city after a gunfight with another man. He finally ended up in San Francisco by the mid1850s joining a Vigilante Committee and lynched the ones they both deserve the death penalty. When the civil war started, baker was back on the east coast rode into washington hoping to land a good paying job in the army. He was outraged when they captured fort sumter on apri april 14. Baker had no spy training beyond what he might have picked up that he was a fast talker and managed to talk Winfield Scott into giving him a job as a secret service agent. Scotts nickname he loved military and had no spy to speak of. The next is george sharp on the bottom left. His superiors considered him a natural military leader. He had a magnetic personality that made them want to follow him. And you can see he had a balding head and sad eyes and a droopy mustache that gave him a both a combat commander. In the pocket of his uniform he always kept a book of verses by his favorite poets that he had routinely read it to his men and they never objected. He was born in kingston new york a small town on the hudson river the son of a wealthy merchant who received the finest education you could have at that time. He graduated from Rutgers University and have a law degree from yale university. Before setting up this practicee as an attorney in kingston, he spent four years in europe studying french in paris and working as a secretary to the u. S. And vienna rome. When the war broke out he first commanded the company of the federal militiamen from the kingston area and let a voluntary infantryman as a colonel. It prepared him for the most important job he would have as the union armys preeminent spymaster. Now on the lower right that he was a child of privilege but in a very different setting. Elizabeths father was a hardware merchant and her mother was a highly educated socialite with a fashionable Church Hill Neighborhood with almost 600 bucks. Elizabeth developed an early empathy she saw being beaten on the streets was sent in philadelphia to be educated. They lectured her on the slavery and she returned to richmond with a featurette of human bondage. When her father died in 1843, elizabeth spent much of her sizable inheritance which was about 350,000 helping them lee north. She was a short woman whod been quite beautiful but when the civil war started, she was in her 40s, unmarried and considered by Richmond Society to be an old maid. She loved her state. She always spoke in a soft southern accent. She wore her hair and dark curls. It looks brown that you ca but e the tight curl. She had a thin nervous looking face with high cheekbones. She was almost always in the antebellum style and a bonnet. To the point she was decidedly feisty. They were with her own sense of right and wrong. Elizabeth acknowledged that made her life intensely sad and earnest as she put it. Yet when she thought it would help her have her way she could be flattering. She knew how to cultivate men to get what she wanted. It became makeshift jails and they brought them to the pows and the minister to the Union Soldiers who were wounded or ill. It made her a pariah in the cities and they publish dark warnings and she should be showing compassion. A clue club Clan Organization sent a note threatening to burn down the mansion but it this was a unionist who couldnt be intimidated. Soon they began heading up the capital of the confederacy. Honest abe lincoln didnt even like the name honest abe when it came to the arts of intrigue or subterfuge during his brush with military service in the 1832 black hawk war he spent several weeks in the unit and best buy co. That kerry about the reconnaissance operations. He often wrote newspaper columns under these aliases to attack opponents and he secretly bought a german monk which newspaper to print pieces that he thought were an important voting bloc in illinois. And during the race for the presidency, he was careful reader and a value greater of intelligence. Once in the white house, he ordered the generals got to deliver a daily Intelligence Report on the enemy and have freelancers send them information and their sympathizers. He provided his military commanders to accept new technologies for the aerial reconnaissance. He had no qualms about launching these covert operations into the south. He found the propaganda useful to undermine the border states that joined the confederacy. And to keep the one that remained in the union under his control. And lincoln could be ruthless when he thought he had to be for the writ of habeas corpus allowing them to shed his papers considered hostile to the administration. Clearly this was a president who knew how to keep a secret and how to operate. So, we will start with Allan Pinkerton he became the spymaster for the charismatic Young Napoleon as he was called the allimportant and the entire army. Mcclellan was the man that they had high hopes for defeating the south quickly into bringing this rebellion to a speedy end. But this Young Napoleon had a huge ego and even bigger complex he turned out to be better than organizing and training and creating the army then needed fighting with it. He brought about 20 employees to the chicago Detective Agency and recruited more from the army and thandother sources had said he s operating on 6,000 a month budget which was a lot of money back then. He used the cover name in all of his communications and worried about security she refused because by their initials. He used them in to infiltrate the social circles and recruited runaway slaves to collect information that infiltrated spies and he spent mcclellan reports on what they found and succeeded in breaking up the confederate espionage ring in washington. But he ended up in the military intelligence office. The detectives were accustomed slowly working cases until they had enough evidence to arrest a suspect and bring them to trial. They then violated the Cardinal Rule that will d they told themy wanted to hear what they needed to hear. They had to be scrupulous in ascending the accurate a sending the Accurate Information and have to be to develop the truths to the leaders. It became practically delusional and he peppered with lincoln with memos demanding more troops before they could move against the confederates. During the numbers that were lower mcclellan would likely have ignored it. By nature he was the commander winning on the battlefield. It only made them more timid. They also revered as mcclellan and at one point he even spied on lincoln from political intelligence he thought might be useful for the general. Lincoln soon realized they had a chronic case and he fired mcclellan in early november of 1862 after the battle. He followed this entr and resigs the potomac Army Intelligence chief and now to the necknext. Think of him as lincoln j. Edgar hoover i guess only with a couple of important differences, first baker didnt have much interaction as hoover did only with president s. Even though baker often bragged to others that which wasnt the case and second, baker was far more corrupt. He ended up working as a secret agent fo for edward stanton, a y ruthless secretary who became the star for internal security. They became detectives and more counter espionage and criminal investigations and actually collecting intelligence. Simple crime back then was considered a National Security threat for the union as espionage. So the secret Service Organizations often spend more time chasing smugglers, contractors and counterfeiters than they did on the cloak and dagger. They set up a headquarters in the building on pennsylvania avenue not too far from here near the capital. The ideal operatives are somebody that was a shrewd, courageous and couldnt be bribed but the men, many of them former california vigilantes with pistols hardly lived up to that standard. And then to maintain a firstclass hotel, a lot of cash in the pocket and riding around washington on top of the black stallion fit for general but he did so by using his expense account from the secret service and ingeniously finding ways to shake the money tree. For example those that were caught if the detectives were paid a bribe the biggest transmit failure came at the assassination of lincoln but uncovering threats was. Baker would like to brat back bragg but here to be mandated that is not the case met with John Wilkes Booth and with those accounts on eighth street in washington just nine blocks from bakers headquarters. By the calvary detachment and then with the other man in front now the third spy when general joseph took command of the potomac he summoned to the headquarters and was fluent in french. And wanted to translate a book and did it quickly so the general appointed the regimental to have a bland cover name with the bureau of information to be concealing the true intent. Although wellversed within the military he knew nothing about spying but he proved surprisingly adept and some of the correspondence he began to use the code name and all of them knew they were working for union espionage agency. Knows the infiltrated Enemy Territory while wearing uniforms caring thousands of dollars of confederate dollars for bribes. That then captured bags for exchange between major virginia and maryland and what amounted by propaganda one of the officers rigged a kite and with defeat. And also not shy about torture that he thought it was sometimes they were tied by their thumbs which they found painful for long periods. But more important with the spy agencies all sorts of intelligence coming into the army of the potomac and also the interrogation for deserters and prisoners for the air mounts and balloons it with that flag signal messages and then analyzed the flood of information highly accurate intelligence with the most comprehensive picture of the enemy they ever had. That sounds pretty obvious. That the intelligence was not done before sharp that was decades ahead of the time. So the leather bound 14 page booklets with that Accurate Information on the regiments for those divisions the estimate on the number of men of lees army was fought by only one quarter of 1 percent of the actual number that is truly remarkable. Sharps best agent those who everybody dismissed with their opinions moving quickly from war prisoners to organizing sophisticated capital that the security agents could never crack. And the spy network turning out an average of three reports per week and richmonds defenses and those movements between the confederates and shenandoah valley. And the morale of the residents. And those additions and then to pick from her garden for each celebrity. That was a nice touch at the breakfast table. Then was several dozen agents and careers each one carried a sheet to identify as a member of a network. Many were factory workers or storekeepers recruited. Others were africanamerican servicemen and then the Generals Office to provide those reports on the rental units. And on the Engineering Department with those rebel to face defenses and the intelligence summaries for the Union Generals she often goes by codename certainly referred to the documents and called our friends in richmond to play sensitive papers in their own intelligenc