Retired cia operative Kenneth Daigler looks at u. S. Intelligence efforts and revolution were and the war in defeating the british. From George Washingtons interest and use of counterintelligence practices, an Espionage Network operate in your city. This is just under one hour. Good afternoon and welcome to the International Spy museum. My name is vince houghton, oms pod museum the story and curator of like to welcome all of you to another author debriefing. Today subject will be the american revolution, and intelligence. Were joined by an exceptional often will introduce momentarily. Before that i watched a couple words about the revolution itself and history about intelligence. This is one subject that is vastly underrepresented in historical literature, the impact of intelligence on the revolution. Most of us when we went through school, even in College Level dont delve into the importance of intelligence operations on the american revolution. Thats quite problematic because if you look at the strategic imbalance of the revolution, the advantages the british had over the americans, ignoring intelligence aspects you dont get the story about how the United States wins the war. The british at almost every advantage. That a modern professional our method and Battle Tested was the colonists did not. They had a small army reinforcereinforce d by malicious that could not be counted on to win the battle begin. The british had the greatest navy in the world. The americans didnt have a navy to speak out. Of. We have privateers, pirates essentially that we gave the ability to steal and pillage for their pay. Most of the americans didnt actually support independence. Less than half of continental americans supported independence. Thousands fought for the british. Many of the others just want to be left alone. Thats not to mention the thousands of german soldiers and the thousands of native americans that sided with the british cause. Not to mention the fact that the british had the worlds greatest economy. The United States didnt have one at tha the time. We had no central bank and we had a very hard time raising money. So how did we win . Its not that we just wanted it more than they did pick it have a lot to do with the fact we used intelligence better than the british did. That George Washington among others was really good at utilizing information they came in from a network of spies, a network of intelligence apparatus that the setup during this time. Thats what i just will talk about today. Kenneth daigler holds a ba in history from the Center College of kentucky and the masters in history from the school at syracuse university. After he cut his majesty served in the United States marine corps in the late 1960s and quickly thereafter joined the cia. He was a cia Operations Officer in East Asia Division of the National Clandestine service from 1969, 2003 when he returned. Hes written of the things. Under the a pain in the author the Founding Fathers of american intelligence and black dispatches, both written for the cia, both available to the public on the cias website. I advise you to check those out. Hes written numerous articles for Intelligence Community publications industry name as well as pseudonym regarding american intelligence activities from 1765 all the way through the end of the civil war including articles about intelligence with the cia studies of intelligence and the association of former Intelligence Officers journal. He is here to talk about his newest book, spies, patriots, and traitors american intelligence in the revolutionary war id like to introduce him now, wherever he may be. There he is. Please join me and the International Spy museum and welcoming Kenneth Daigler. [applause] thank you. Okay. Let me start by telling you when you write a book, the person youre supposed to do is have a business plan. I did it kind of backwards. I just wrote the book and assume someone would actually read it. Heres the point i want to make. This is the cover of the book, a very distinct of cover. Not my choice but was the publishers choice and they were correct about it. My point is ive just come back from the beach. I thought im going to walk around the beach, maybe a little over at do it and take a look and see what teenagers are reading my book. Ive had to take, i found not one single male or female teenager reading my book. So off you say thats not the target audience. The target audience instead really consists of people are interested in the revolutionary war, because as the introductory said, this is a brandnew way of looking at the war. To see where intelligence activities have impacted that we accept t a popular myth as with the revolutionary went on. The second audience are my fellow colleagues in the intelligence profession. Because here a very interesting opportunity to learn history. As we get into the revolutionary war you find all three of the key elements in the intelligence profession, positive intelligence, counterintelligence and covert action, lady key role in the americans ability to win. And because im doing something that is 250 years old i had the latitude here of naming names, aiming identities, naming sources of information, show what the intelligence reports looked like, showing what the impact they had and talking about sources and methods. Something i cant do obviously in my own background. Why this is the city is because over history, intelligence methods dont change. The fact that the culper ring left her parchment reports in a leather pouch under a rock in a long island cow past year and effective today someone will lealeave an encrypted notes on n obscure website, its the same technology in terms of communication and separation of the individual reporting in the individual who is going to receive the information and use it. So theres a real learning experience here i believe in studying the revolution activity strictly from the point of view of being an intelligence officer. Before i get into the book ive been told by much more experienced officers the first thing youre always asked is why did you write the book. Out the exact started writing the book. I have retired from the agency and spent time consulting with the department of defense. After about four or five years you have really done all you can in terms of transferring what experience and capability of to another organization. So i decided i would retire again and this time i would actually retire and take up a lot of my own personal interests and hobbies and what have you. That worked for about two, two and a half weeks. It all came to conclusion when one saturday, my wife was quite a good potter, had gone to a stooge work and i decide i was going to fix myself lunch it was going to be a bit more than he himself which. I found a vacation was very disorganized. I could not find what it wanted in terms of the ingredients but i couldnt find the plates and glasses i wanted. I had to prepare times are we organized the kitchen. That didnt work out too well. Shortly thereafter i went to work actually writing a book. But the genesis of the book actually comes from over 20 years ago. In the mid 1990s i was in a management position at the agency, and you got to take this timeframe into consideration. This is the mid 90s, the cold war is over with. We defeated the soviet empire. But the issue here is that now, like we always do, because we have one, were going to downsize because we dont have any other enemies out there. Everything is going to be peaceful and wonderful. The order came down from above from the senior management, budgets going to be cut, we will have to do more with less. That phrase normally strikes fear in the heart of any government employee. But the way we decide to do it at the agency was to increase our efforts latest on. So from the security and intelligence liaison. First step was have to a larger facilities so they could hold more meetings with them. So for reasons that are esoteric to the job i was in, i had to create some new spaces. Luckily i had technical architects and interior designers and others who could handle the hard lifting and all i have to do is centralize a little bit. I found out if i went around talking to divisions of the handle the actual liaison, that one of the main issues was well, the Liaison Services understood we had money compared to them to spend. We are very good technically, but we hadnt done it been in business that long, only since world war ii and maybe we didnt quite understand how to handle the more sophisticated aspects of human intelligence. We had to address this problem. I did a Little Research and ended up writing a pamphlet that you had mentioned, the Founding Fathers of american intelligence where we identified George Washington as a key figure in the collection of positive for foreign intelligence, Benjamin Franklin as a key figure in terms of covert action, particularly propaganda. And john jay, surprise a enough, as the key figure in terms of counterintelligence. Wrote the pamphlet. It was kind of well received. We put a printer copies in the liaison rooms and we named each of them after one of these principal figures. Over the years its become institutionalized and as was mentioned it is nowebsite and ir download on the website. Somewhat to my surprise actually quoted in some history books on the revolution. So that basically is the way this all came about. As i said before, the key point behind this book is to look at the revolution intelligence point of view. Im not history but i wouldnt claim to be i have got about 40 years and intelligence so i can claim a little expertise or knowledge in that area. They key is as we go to the revolutionary revolution started in 1765 right through the evacuation of new york in 1783, the book chronicles who was involved in intelligence, the impact it had, the mistakes that were made and how it was done. When we first start, rather than review the book for you i think probably the best approach is to take a couple of key issues that probably everybody in this room knows about from the basic history on the american revolution. I guess weve got to start with one principle that always comes to my when you talk about the revolution, and that, of course, is George Washington. George washington was as chief of the Continental Army, they key consumer for all intelligence during the revolution. Is a small battle staff was his analytical arm, ma but in addition to that he also functioned very much because of economies of scale, his relationship to the small number of troops he had. He also functioned as one of the key intel managers to would actually write specific orders on tradecraft to various and sundry spy rings. Very unusual. Youve got the key consumer, a chief Operations Officer. And even though it was a rather small element then, the tensions that exist today with the same tensions that existed there. Consumer wants the information right away. The operator wants to get it as quick as possible to protect the forces, but if they have the capability to information once again. You see that when you look to what washington did. Washington ran an incredibly sophisticated operation when you consider who he was and all the other issues he had to do with in terms of logistics, military strategy, leadership and the politics of the time. Washington was an expert at what i would say is probably the most ethical aspect of intelligence, exception planning. Deception planning. Deception planning allowed him on many occasions all strategic to completely fool the british commanders as to the size of his arm and what he planned to do with it. Yet for deception operations you need three key factors that are very hard to put together. Number one, youve got to be able to control the information that is coming out from your site. So theres a steady stream only of what you want done. No leaking and also often falsifying internal reporting to Junior Officers so that they can inadvertently say whats going on. Number two, youve got to have sources, Double Agents primarily or people who are friendly with the adversary to whom you can purposefully leak information so that you know the information is going to the adversarys command. And thirdly, if this is really the key that most people forget, youve got to have the sources within any command to know that your message is not only Getting Better but also that is coming back and you can reverberate it back in way to make the enemy truly believe theyre making the decision and providing a validation for that information. Pretty darn sophisticated for a guy who was busy with a lot of other stuff. So how did he get to learn this . Obviously its not something you just learned by thinking about it. If you go back to his early diaries as early as 1753, you find the first time he was sent to the ohio country by the royal governor of virginia to see what the french were doing, he started to own his skills not only in elicitation and debriefing, but also in observation. One key point he makes in his journal from the fall of 53 is very fascinating. He was kept at a certain french for intel the Commanding Officer from the French Forces would come in seeking. They knew he was important. He was able to observe and have a good memory are good enough to write it down of what the fort looked like, the number of french soldiers, the number of cannon, et cetera but he could have no feel for those French Forces that were outside the fort or the indian allies ahead. What did he do in his spare time . He walked up and down the river bank and counted all the canoes and extrapolated from their exactly what type of a force could be moved at any given time. You get to 1754, he goes back out and involves himself in fighting with the french and to find he is able to use disorders not on in terms of very sophisticated debriefing but also in terms of getting this information and using them as propaganda value to encourage more assertions from the enemy. I the time you get to 1755 when hes an unofficial aide to general braddock, you find hes also running a great deal about the operational secured aspects of the military movements, of putting out advanced troops, but also the mistake braddock made which was he did not have any intelligence forward of his main attacking force. So 20 years before in august 1775 he takes over the army, hes already starting to develop the intelligence experience. Its not unusual with someone like him it has worked to his advantage. One of the things you need if youre going to start a revolution is you need political organization. In 1765 with the stamp act, you start to have small groups in all of the coastal cities and some of the inland cities who decided theyre going to organize politically against the stamp act and that type of taxation. In the course of 10 years a Group Calling themselves the sons of liberty evolve into a sophisticated United Front Organization as anything weve ever seen that when norma associate with communist party type of organization, the soviet union and the chinese. Whats fascinating is in most American History texts you look at the sons of revolution and you see a caricature, you see a caricature of drunken people, maybe tar and feather in some government administrator are writing him around on a log or dancing drunkenly around a liberty bowl. Let me take him there was a lot more sophisticated than that. Starting in the mid1760s, gentlemen sam adams who gets a lot less credit than he deserves start to organize the various groups of individuals calling themselves sons of liberty all along the coast, although with the massachusetts down to charleston. By the time you get to the mid1770s, this is an organization that is put its people in all the key Political Leadership to the prudential congresses, committees of safety, the militia units and what have you. Youve got a United Front Organization that started out with a very broad idea that they were going to oppose taxation. And by the mid 70s youve got an organization that has decided they want political independence. An organization that can not only put people in the street, often mobs, often much more sophisticated type of groups to send a message, youve got a propaganda element where the majority of the printers who in those days were actual newspaper publishers, members of the sons of liberty and have established a courier route so that within weeks the same perspective on a political event or an opposition approaches to the administration of the brisk in, all the way from massachusetts down to the southern colonies with exactly the same message. A very Strong Political force. In addition youve got a paramilitary force. By the time you get to about 1773 the british recognized where they dont physically have military, i have virtually no control. These paramilitary forces, these militia forces are at this point making sure that they take over the powder, take over the arms from the various ministerial colonies. By the time you get to 73 and 74, youve got these forces forming up, not engaging in forming up to stop British Forces from coming back to try and these arms or try to we occupy a force. By the time you get to 1775, of course you have concord and lexington. What is fascinating about this is that the very final evolution of the United Front Group from an intelligence point of view, it becomes an Intelligence Org