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Monday, December 28, 2020

Committee of Secrets

War in the Shadows

Students of insurgencies have long understood the need to deprive the insurgents of external support. In the course of history, few insurgencies or rebellions have succeeded without outside help, which could take the form of moral support, funding, training, weapons, equipment, supplies, political support, and military forces. 


                                                Moro insurgents vs US Army  in Philipines

Early on in the insurgency that would explode into rebellion after Lexington and Concord, the Americans established a means to maintain dialogue and coordination among the colonies and later states. It soon became clear America would need to reach across the Atlantic as well. Winning over Americans were just one piece of the complex struggle now underway. Tapping support in Britain, building alliances with sympathetic countrymen, would also be an important component in gaining recognition for the new nation. And the European powers would also provide a fertile ground for support, if properly “tilled.”


                                                    Burning of Revenue Cutter, Gaspee at 
                                                      Warwick, RI early act of Insurgency

A Secret Committee

By the time the Second Continental Congress met in Philadelphia in 1775, this need for international support resulted in the formation of the Committee of Secret Correspondence via two resolutions of 29 November:

RESOLVED, That a committee...would be appointed for the sole purpose of corresponding with our friends in Great Britain, and other parts of the world, and that they lay their correspondence before Congress when directed.

RESOLVED, That this Congress will make provision to defray all such expenses as they may arise by carrying on such correspondence, and for the payment of such agents as the said Committee may send on this service.

Due to the secret nature of the work involved, the members soon added the word “Secret” to its name. The committee received considerable authority from Congress to perform multiple functions: public and secret diplomacy, intelligence gathering, and public relations/influencing opinion. In many ways, it operated as a State Department and CIA. It was the Continental Congress’s eyes and ears in Europe and would soon become its arm in Europe.



                                                  Extract of Committee's Secret Instructions


First Members

Congress did a good job selecting the initial members of the committee, coming up with such luminaries as Benjamin Franklin, Benjamin Harrison, Thomas Johnson, John Dickinson, John Jay, and Robert Morris. Others were added later, including James Lovell, former schoolmaster, Bunker Hill veteran (arrested by the British for spying), and member of Congress, who developed the committee’s first codes and ciphers.  One must surmise Dr. Benjamin Franklin, who for many years represented the American colonies with the British government, provided a trove of ideas and actions based on his experience abroad. John Jay and likely the others had experience organizing secret meetings and activities along the road to rebellion while surrounded by rings of Tories anxious to root them out.


                                                       The Committee at Work

Tactics and Tradecraft

It is a tribute to the American leaders of the age that they were so quick to learn and adopt the most sophisticated techniques and practices so long employed by the great powers of Europe. They used clandestine agents overseas, employed covert actions, created codes and ciphers, employed propaganda, and conducted covert postal surveillance of official and private mail. They employed open-source intelligence by purchasing foreign publications, which they analyzed.  Most significantly, they put in place an elaborate communication system, using a variety of couriers.  Another critical innovation was establishing a maritime capability separate from the Continental Navy, for purposes of smuggling, moving agents, and correspondence and interdicting British ships.

                                                  Secure communications were essential


First Actions

The committee moved quickly. They initiated regular correspondence with English Whigs and Scots who supported the ideas if not all the actions, of the Americans.  The experienced and worldly Benjamin Franklin was the most active, initiating correspondence with a wide array of contacts he had developed in Britain and Europe in a sophisticated campaign to build sympathy for the patriot cause.

                                                 Dr. Franklin's experience in London proved 
                                                         invaluable to the new committee

Franklin initiated secret correspondence with Spain, via Don Gabriel de Bourbon, a member of the Spanish royal family and an associate of Franklin. Franklin gave not so subtle reference to advantages to Spain, an American alliance might yield.


                                                                Don Gabriel de Bourbon
                                                         one of Franklin's A-List contacts

Agents at Home

But curiously, it was France who reached out first dispatching Julien Alexandre Achard de Bonvouloir to Philadelphia to examine the feasibility of covert aid and political support.

                                                                 Achard de Bonvouloir

 In December 1775, the committee members Benjamin Franklin and John Jay staged a secret meeting with the French intelligence agent,  de Bonvouloir, who was using the cover of a Flemish merchant. 

Franklin and Jay wanted to know if France would aid America, and at what price. They stressed an urgent need for arms and munitions, which would be exchanged for American tobacco, rice, and other crops. De Bonvouloir advised the French government eschewed any role in transactions with the rebels. Instead, private merchants would be used.


                                     

                                      Father of American Counterintelligence - John Jay

Franklin assured de Bonvouloir America would not reconcile with Britain and that once it declared independence, France should form an alliance. This was the beginning of a long term campaign to bring not only French aid but also French arms into the struggle.


                                                                            Silas Deane

Agents Abroad

Franklin and Jay were heartened by French interest in the American cause. In early March 1776, the Secret Committee appointed Connecticut lawyer Silas Deane as a special envoy to negotiate in Paris with the French government. His mission was to establish covert aid and gain political support through Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, Louis XVI’s Foreign Minister. Vergennes was a master of public and secret diplomacy for the French king and ran both with a steady hand.


                                                      Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes

The committee eventually included an American living in London. Arthur Lee, a member of the famed Lee family of Virginia. Lee had contact with the French playwright Pierre-Augustin Caron de Beaumarchais, a  polymath, playwright, clockmaker, and diplomat who was also a secret French agent. Using a letter sent by the committee, Lee provided Beaumarchais with information about American successes – much of which was propaganda to influence French thinking. As an interesting aside, people today might recognize Beaumarchais, not for his devotion to freedom (and money-making) but for his composing the Figaro plays Le Barbier de Séville, Le Mariage de Figaro, and La Mère coupable. These later became adapted as operas that are still enjoyed today.


                                                                            Arthur Lee

But Beaumarchais was a champion of the American cause and needed no puffed-up reports to stir his passion for freedom. Working with Deane back in Paris, he helped influence French Foreign Minister Charles Gravier, Comte de Vergennes, and King Louis XVI to provide the colonies with clandestine shipments of gunpowder and war material. Support critical in the early years of what was now, a war. The vehicle was the front company Rodrigue y Hortalez (R&H), chartered as a Spanish trading company. R&H was the vehicle for shipping surplus French arms and munitions to the West Indies (primarily the Dutch colony Saint Eustatius), where American agricultural products were exchanged for the war goods.

                                               Beaumarchais: Polymath and Freedom-Lover

Deane was responsible for the earliest aid to America’s struggling army resulted from his efforts. Besides arranging for clandestine shipments (R&H was just one covert operation), he recruited French officers, made introductions, sought out ships for privateering, and touted the American cause with the French cognoscenti.  Some of the officers recruited by Deane included the Marquis de Lafayette, Baron Johann de Kalb, Thomas Conway, Casimir Pulaski, and Baron von Steuben. A who's who of ex-pat freedom fighters.


                                                                   Marquis de Lafayette

The American commissioners in Paris rode a whirlwind of intrigue as they wooed and seduced the French and fended off Sir William Eden’s British secret service. Eden had dispatched an American named Paul Wentworth to Paris when Silas Deane arrived. Deane was acquainted with Wentworth and soon he was reporting on Deane’s activities and later, Franklin’s. Wentworth also recruited the American Commission's secretary, Edward Bancroft.


                                                        William Eden,1st Baron Auckland
                                                                     & British Spymaster

But Lee was now in Paris. So was Benjamin Franklin himself, who sailed for France in December 1776. Throughout 1777 the full-court (sic) press was on. The British and French were opening the American commission's mail in a variety of clandestine operations. Servants and friends were recruited to spy, influence, and report. Bancroft provided inside reporting to Wentworth and Eden. And so it went. Meanwhile, Franklin charmed all men and women in sight, was the toast of Paris and continued to influence. He knew his every word and gesture were reaching Versailles and London and every step he took had that in mind.

                                            Franklin's every move and comment were tracked,
                                                             and he acted accordingly

What's in Name?

The Committee of Secret Correspondence became the Committee of Foreign Affairs in April 1777 but retained its intelligence functions. As the first American government agency for both foreign intelligence and diplomatic representation, it was essentially the forerunner of both the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as today's Congressional intelligence oversight committees. Despite the name change, the Foreign Affairs Committee still served an essential and critical function for Congress, as the eyes and ears of the country in Europe. 

Note: Perhaps to confuse the British, Congress created a separate "Secret Committee" in 1775 to obtain supplies, which by its nature needed cloaking from British eyes and British ships. Many of its members also served on the Committee of Secret Correspondence. It became the Committee of Commerce around the same time as its 'sister" committee became the Committee of Foreign Affairs.

 

                                                The Committee of Foreign Affairs combined
                                                 the roles of State and CIA, plus "Oversight"

Payoff

The Committee of Secret Correspondence/Secret/Foreign Affairs Committee’s efforts paid off in a big way when an American army, using arms and munitions covertly provided by France forced the surrender of a British army at Saratoga in October 1777. No one in France could recall the last time a British army surrendered to the French.  The long and winding road to a treaty with France was now a superhighway. But the committee was not done. The details of an alliance, future loans to America, the basis for negotiations and peace, were all work to be accomplished by the committee. The capitals of Europe were also a target as the commission sought to bring Netherlands, Prussia, Spain, and Russia to the side of the cause. But these are tales for another time.