This post is about espionage during the American Revolution.

 

It is also about the bad guys, for one particular spy against the American Patriots provided his Royal employers with hundreds of reports. Many were written in invisible ink between the lines of — you can’t make this stuff up — love letters. Talk about a forbidden relationship. But a great excuse for hiding the letters in a public park, which he did.

In this clandestine correspondence the spy reported the progress the American Patriots were making in arranging a formal alliance between America and France; what commercial trade deals they were arranging with France; how the Americans were obtaining credit and investors; how the French were smuggling arms and ammunition into America; on which particular ships that weaponry was being smuggled; from which French ports those ships departed; on which dates they departed; to which American ports they were headed; and anything else which King George III might consider of interest.

The spy was able to report all this because he just happened to be the private secretary to an important American official.

Benjamin Franklin.

The spy’s name was Edward Bancroft. An American by birth, he was a medical doctor and likewise a scholar across several fields of interest, including anthropology, the natural sciences, economics, and political science. At that point in history, Bancroft decided that the smartest thing to do was to stay in the good graces of both sides — and therefore get paid double.

Bancroft needed the money, or at least he wanted the money, because he lived very expensively and liked to gamble in the stock market, not always successfully. When the overseas needs of the Revolution took Ben Franklin to Paris — with a mission to sway the royal courts of Europe in favor of democracy in America, where they hoped democracy would stay — Bancroft became Franklin’s personal secretary. Franklin even asked Bancroft to spy a bit on the British. Bancroft did. But he spied a bit more on Franklin himself.

Have you ever heard of the United States of America? If so, you can guess how well Bancroft’s information helped the British. Albeit, it was excellent information, but not all of it constituted what spies call actionable intelligence — that is, information which gives you an advantage over your opponent because you can actually use it. Consider, for example, this piece of intelligence: “General Washington wears false teeth. Most people think his teeth are made of wood, but in fact they’re made from animal teeth.”

Excellent actionable intelligence if you sell dentures. But how could this tantalizing tidbit help the British Army? “Sorry, blokes, but according to the latest intelligence, we’ll have to drop our plan to lure General Washington to dinner by serving corn on the cob. Try porridge.”

Now consider this piece of intelligence: “General Washington plans to attack Trenton, New Jersey, on the morning after Christmas, 1776.”

Well, if you’re the Hessian commander and you get this tidbit before the morning after Christmas (and you don’t stuff the note into your pocket, unread, which the Hessian commander actually did), you can outwit General Washington.

That is, if — and this is a big if — you have the right technology. A great limitation of eighteenth century endeavors was technology, and I don’t just mean Washington’s teeth.

Imagine, for example, that you are a Captain in His Majesty’s Navy and you’ve just been ordered to subdue a French cargo ship, the bountiful Escargot. Due to the espionage performed by Dr. Bancroft, you learn that the Escargot plans to set sail from the French port of Brittany, headed for Boston, on May 13th, 1778.

Well then, as the nautical nemesis of those naughty French smugglers, go forth and find the Escargot! God save the King!

And God help you — because you have no tracking satellites, no radar, no radio, no diesel engine, no steam engine, no engine at all. Sometimes some wind. In fact, the Escargot can sail nearly as slowly as a snail and still avoid becoming your dinner.

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So, back to the story. Before France and America had a formal alliance, they had an informal alliance whereby the French smuggled to the Americans plenty of guns and ammunition. So what did the British do? The British took the fine intelligence collected by their spy in Paris and — perhaps the word security had a different meaning back then — they told the French.

Yes, indeed. They paid a courtesy call and, being the prim proper dignified diplomats the English epitomize, they threw a temper tantrum.

One wonders what the British expected the French to do. Stop the smuggling? Oh yeah, like that was in character.

“Egad! This behavior of you Frenchmen just isn’t Cricket!”

“Not Cricket? Monsieur, why do you Englishmen name your national sport after an insect? In France insects are for eating. Like chocolate-covered grass-hoppers. We would eat crickets too, but we not want to offend you.”

“Balderdash! I didn’t come here to converse about your cockamamie cuisine! Stay on the subject!”

“Stay on the subject? Monsieur, you sound so Américain! Very well, Monsieur, are you accusing we French, zee most honest people in zee world, of smuggling a dozen ships full of cargo illégal to your brethren, zee Yankee Doodles? Yes?”

“Most emphatically! Categorically! Indubitably! Do you deny it?”

“Of course we deny it. A dozen ships? Ridiculous!”

“Oh? And just why is that so ridiculous?”

“Because we sent two dozen.”

“Two dozen! You gorbellied boil-brained flax-wench! I should have guessed! In the words of Shakespeare, ‘He can speak French — and therefore he is a traitor!’”

“A traitor? Well, Monsieur, in zee words of Monsieur Shakespeare, your brain is as dry as zee remainder biscuit after a voyage.”

“You read Shakespeare?”

“Of course. In French.”

“In French! How dare you!”

“Monsieur, how dare you imply zhat we French — how you say? — are chintzy parsimonious tightwads! Only twelve ships? Monsieur, even a baker’s dozen is thirteen! Whoever your spy is, you should fire him. Now, if you please, I must go. I am expected at Versailles for some very French experiences. Au revoir!”

After the British lost the war and therefore lost their American colonies, Edward Bancroft settled himself in England. Prodigious polymath that he was, he entered the dye industry and made a small fortune. In 1891, nearly seven decades after his death, the British government publicly revealed that Bancroft had been their spy. They even released all of the secret reports he wrote. Throughout his career he had never been caught.

Or had he? Arthur Lee, a fellow member of the American delegation in Paris, did warn Benjamin Franklin more than once that Bancroft lived “in open defiance of decency and religion,” that Bancroft evinced a “notorious character” in his stock market dealings, and that Lee himself had “evidence in my possession that makes me consider Dr. Bancroft a criminal with regard to the United States.”

Franklin just ignored him. (Lee should have warned himself. His private secretary was also a British spy.)

For Franklin already knew that, in Paris, he was surrounded by spies. Spies were so plentiful in Paris that a common saying of the time was, “When two Parisians converse, a third listens.” Have you noticed that espionage is a French word? So Franklin just laughed it off. In a letter to a friend, he wrote:

“I have long observed one rule which prevents any inconveniences from such practices [as spying]. It is simply this: to be concerned in no affairs I should blush to have made public, and to do nothing but what spies may see and welcome. When a man’s actions are just and honorable, the more they are known, the more his reputation is increased and established. If I was sure, therefore, that my valet de place was a spy, as he probably is, I think I should probably not discharge him for that, if in other respects I liked him.”

Not fire his valet for being a spy? — which he probably is?

Talk about a great boss!

Respectfully (because all my readers deserve respect),

Reginald Dipwipple

Secret Agent Extraordinaire

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