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Breaking the Silence
The German Who Exposed the Final Solution.
Walter Laqueur and Richard Breitman
Brandeis University Press, 1994
Through unparalleled historical detective work, noted scholars Walter Laqueur and Richard Breitman reveal the inspiring tale of Eduard Schulte, the Breslau business leader who risked his life to gather information about such Nazi activities as the revised date of the German attack on Poland and the Nazi plan for mass extermination of European Jews. First published in 1986, Breaking the Silence is reissued with both a new foreword and afterword by the authors.
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Cast in Deathless Bronze
Andrew Rowan, the Spanish-American War, and the Origins of American Empire
Donald Tunnicliff Rice
West Virginia University Press, 2016
In 1898, when war with Spain seemed inevitable, Andrew Summers Rowan, an American army lieutenant from West Virginia, was sent on a secret mission to Cuba. He was to meet with General Calixto García, a leader of the Cuban rebels, in order to gather information for a U.S. invasion. Months later, after the war was fought and won, a flamboyant entrepreneur named Elbert Hubbard wrote an account of Rowan’s mission titled “A Message to García.” It sold millions of copies, and Rowan became the equivalent of a modern-day rock star. His fame resulted in hundreds of magazine and newspaper articles, radio shows, and two movies. Even today he is held up as an exemplar of bravery and loyalty. The problem is that nothing Hubbard wrote about Rowan was true.
 
Donald Tunnicliff Rice reveals the facts behind the story of “A Message to García” while using Rowan’s biography as a window into the history of the Spanish-American War, the Philippine War, and the Moro Rebellion. The result is a compellingly written narrative containing many details never before published in any form, and also an accessible perspective on American diplomatic and military history in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
 
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Classical Spies
American Archaeologists with the OSS in World War II Greece
Susan Heuck Allen
University of Michigan Press, 2013

“Classical Spies will be a lasting contribution to the discipline and will stimulate further research. Susan Heuck Allen presents to a wide readership a topic of interest that is important and has been neglected.”
—William M. Calder III, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Classical Spies is the first insiders’ account of the operations of the American intelligence service in World War II Greece. Initiated by archaeologists in Greece and the eastern Mediterranean, the network drew on scholars’ personal contacts and knowledge of languages and terrain. While modern readers might think Indiana Jones is just a fantasy character, Classical Spies disclosesevents where even Indy would feel at home: burying Athenian dig records in an Egyptian tomb, activating prep-school connections to establish spies code-named Vulture and Chickadee, and organizing parachute drops.

Susan Heuck Allen reveals remarkable details about a remarkable group of individuals. Often mistaken for mild-mannered professors and scholars, such archaeologists as University of Pennsylvania’s Rodney Young, Cincinnati’s Jack Caskey and Carl Blegen, Yale’s Jerry Sperling and Dorothy Cox, and Bryn Mawr’s Virginia Grace proved their mettle as effective spies in an intriguing game of cat and mouse with their Nazi counterparts. Relying on interviews with individuals sharing their stories for the first time, previously unpublished secret documents, private diaries and letters, and personal photographs, Classical Spies offers an exciting and personal perspective on the history of World War II.

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Cold War Exile
The Unclosed Case of Maurice Halperin
Don S. Kirschner
University of Missouri Press, 1995

In 1953 Maurice Halperin was called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee to defend himself on charges of espionage. He was accused of having supplied Soviet sources with classified material from the Office of Strategic Services while he was an employee during World War II.

The Cold War was in full force. McCarthyism was at its peak. Caught up in the rapids of history, Maurice Halperin's life spun out of control. Denying the charges but knowing he could never fully clear his name, Halperin fled to Mexico and then, to avoid extradition, to Moscow. Among the friends he made there were British spy Donald MacLean and Cuban revolutionary leader Che Guevara. Disenchanted with socialism in the Soviet Union, he accepted Guevara's invitation to come to Havana in 1962. There he worked for Castro's government for five years before political tension forced him to leave for Vancouver, Canada, where he now resides.

Was Halperin a spy or a scapegoat? Was he a victim of Red- baiting or a onetime Communist espionage agent who eventually lost faith in Communism? Halperin's accuser was Elizabeth Bentley, a confessed Soviet courier who accused more than one hundred Americans of spying. Yet Bentley had no proof, and Halperin continues to maintain his innocence. One of them was lying. As Kirschner unravels the engrossing facts of the case--utilizing FBI files and dozens of interviews, including extensive interviews with Halperin himself--the reader becomes the investigator in a riveting real-life spy mystery. Along the way Kirschner offers new material on the OSS and further disturbing information about J. Edgar Hoover's use of his considerable power.

Maurice Halperin has lived a life like few Americans in our century. A left-wing American exile, he experienced two socialist worlds from the inside. In recounting the unclosed case of Maurice Halperin, Cold War Exile is both a gripping account of that remarkable life and a significant contribution to our understanding of a fascinating and controversial era in American political history.

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Dr. Benjamin Church, Spy
A Case of Espionage on the Eve of the American Revolution
John A. Nagy
Westholme Publishing, 2013
Newly Discovered Evidence Against a Man Who Has Long Been Suspected as Being a British Agent and America’s First Traitor 
Dr. Benjamin Church, Jr. (1734–1778) was a respected medical man and civic leader in colonial Boston who was accused of being an agent for the British in the 1770s, providing compromising intelligence about the plans of the provincial leadership in Massachusetts as well as important information from the meetings of the First Continental Congress in Philadelphia. Despite his eminence as a surgeon—he conducted an autopsy on one of the victims of the Boston Massacre—and his own correspondence and the numbers of references to him from contemporaries, no known image of him exists and many aspects of his life remain obscure. What we do know is that George Washington accused him of being a traitor to the colonial cause and had him arrested and tried; after first being jailed in Connecticut and then Massachusetts, during which he continued to profess his innocence, he was allowed to leave America on a British vessel in 1778, but it foundered in the Atlantic with all hands lost. The question of whether Dr. Benjamin Church was working for the British has never been conclusively demonstrated, and remains among the mysteries of the American Revolution.
In Dr. Benjamin Church, Spy: A Case of Espionage on the Eve of the American Revolution, noted authority John A. Nagy has scoured original documents to establish the best case against Church, identifying previously unacknowledged correspondence and reports as containing references to the doctor and his activities, and noting an incriminating letter in the possession of the Library of Congress that is a coded communication composed by Church to his British contact. Nagy shows that at the cusp of the revolution, when the possibility—let alone the outcome—of an American colonial rebellion was far from assured, Church sought to align himself with the side he thought would emerge victorious—the British crown—and thus line his pockets with money that he desperately needed. A fascinating investigation into a centuries-old intrigue, this well-researched volume is an important contribution to American Revolution scholarship.
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Foreign Intelligence
Research and Analysis in the Office of Strategic Services, 1942-1945
Barry M. Katz
Harvard University Press, 1989

Much has been written about the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)--the forerunner of the CIA--and the exploits of its agents during World War II. Virtually unknown, however, is the work of the extraordinary community of scholars who were handpicked by "Wild Bill" Donovan and William L. Langer and recruited for wartime service in the OSS's Research and Analysis Branch (R&A). Known to insiders as the "Chairborne Division," the faculty of R&A was drawn from a dozen social science disciplines and challenged to apply its academic skills in the struggle against fascism. Its mandate: to collect, analyze, and disseminate intelligence about the enemy.

Foreign Intelligence is the first comprehensive history of this extraordinary behind-the-scenes group. The R&A Branch assembled scholars of widely divergent traditions and practices--Americans and recent European émigrés; philosophers, historians, and economists; regionalists and functionalists; Marxists and positivists--all engaged in the heady task of translating the abstractions of academic discourse into practical politics. Drawing on extensive, newly declassified archival sources, Barry M. Katz traces the careers of the key players in R&A, whose assessments helped to shape U.S. policy both during and after the war. He shows how these scholars, who included some of the most influential theorists of our time, laid the foundation of modern intelligence work. Their reports introduced the theories and methods of academic discourse into the workings of government, and when they returned to their universities after the war, their wartime experience forever transformed the world of scholarship.

Authoritative, probing, and wholly original, Foreign Intelligence not only sheds new light on this overlooked aspect of the U.S. intelligence record, it also offers a startling perspective on the history of intellectual thought in the twentieth century.

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The Hunt for Nazi Spies
Fighting Espionage in Vichy France
Simon Kitson
University of Chicago Press, 2007
From 1940 to 1942, French secret agents arrested more than two thousand spies working for the Germans and executed several dozen of them—all despite the Vichy government’s declared collaboration with the Third Reich. A previously untold chapter in the history of World War II, this duplicitous activity is the gripping subject of The Hunt for Nazi Spies, a tautly narrated chronicle of the Vichy regime’s attempts to maintain sovereignty while supporting its Nazi occupiers.

Simon Kitson informs this remarkable story with findings from his investigation—the first by any historian—of thousands of Vichy documents seized in turn by the Nazis and the Soviets and returned to France only in the 1990s. His pioneering detective work uncovers a puzzling paradox: a French government that was hunting down left-wing activists and supporters of Charles de Gaulle’s Free French forces was also working to undermine the influence of German spies who were pursuing the same Gaullists and resisters. In light of this apparent contradiction, Kitson does not deny that Vichy France was committed to assisting the Nazi cause, but illuminates the complex agendas that characterized the collaboration and shows how it was possible to be both anti-German and anti-Gaullist.

Combining nuanced conclusions with dramatic accounts of the lives of spies on both sides, The Hunt for Nazi Spies adds an important new dimension to our understanding of the French predicament under German occupation and the shadowy world of World War II espionage.
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Invisible Ink
Spycraft of the American Revolution
John A. Nagy
Westholme Publishing, 2010

The Critical Role of Espionage During the War of Independence and the Techniques Spies Used
During the American Revolution, espionage was critical to the successes and failures of both Continental and British efforts, and those employed in cloakand- dagger operations always risked death. While the most notorious episode of spying during the war—the Benedict Arnold affair—was a failure, most intelligence operations succeeded. Spycraft was no more wholly embraced than by the American commander-in-chief, George Washington. Washington relied on a vast spy network and personally designed sophisticated battle plan deceptions and counterintelligence efforts, some surprisingly modern in form. In Invisible Ink: Spycraft of the American Revolution, award-winning author John A. Nagy briefly traces the history of spy techniques from ancient China through Elizabethan England before embarking on the various techniques used by spies on both sides of the war to exchange secret information. These methods included dictionary codes, diplomatic ciphers, dead drops, hidden compartments (such as a hollowed-out bullet or a woman’s garter), and even musical notation, as well as efforts of counterintelligence, including “Black Chambers,” where postal correspondence was read by cryptologists. Throughout, the author provides examples of the various codes and ciphers employed, many of which have not been previously described. In addition, the author analyzes some of the key spy rings operating during the war, most notably the Culper ring that provided information to Washington from inside British-controlled New York City. Based on nearly two decades of primary research, including the author’s discovery of previously unrecognized spies and methods, Invisible Ink is a major contribution to the history of conflict and technology.

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My Life as a Spy
Investigations in a Secret Police File
Katherine Verdery
Duke University Press, 2018
As Katherine Verdery observes, "There's nothing like reading your secret police file to make you wonder who you really are." In 1973 Verdery began her doctoral fieldwork in the Transylvanian region of Romania, ruled at the time by communist dictator Nicolae Ceausescu. She returned several times over the next twenty-five years, during which time the secret police—the Securitate—compiled a massive surveillance file on her. Reading through its 2,781 pages, she learned that she was "actually" a spy, a CIA agent, a Hungarian agitator, and a friend of dissidents: in short, an enemy of Romania. In My Life as a Spy she analyzes her file alongside her original field notes and conversations with Securitate officers. Verdery also talks with some of the informers who were close friends, learning the complex circumstances that led them to report on her, and considers how fieldwork and spying can be easily confused. Part memoir, part detective story, part anthropological analysis, My Life as a Spy offers a personal account of how government surveillance worked during the Cold War and how Verdery experienced living under it.
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Nathan Hale
The Life and Death of America's First Spy
M. William Phelps
University Press of New England, 2015
Although famous for his purported last words—“I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country”—few people know the real Nathan Hale. M. William Phelps brings into focus the life of this famed patriot and first spy of the American Revolution, charting Hale’s rural childhood, his education at Yale, and his work as a schoolteacher. Like many young Americans, he was soon drawn into the colonies’ war for independence and became a captain in Washington’s army. When the general was in need of a spy, Hale willingly rose to the challenge, gathering intelligence behind British lines on Long Island, and in the end bravely sacrificing his life for the sake of American liberty. Using Hale’s own journals and letters as well as testimonies from his friends and contemporaries, Phelps depicts the Revolution as it was seen from the ground. From the confrontation in Boston to the battle for New York City, readers experience what life was like for an ordinary soldier in the struggling Continental Army. In this impressive, well-researched biography, Phelps separates historical fact from long-standing myth to reveal the truth about Nathan Hale, a young man who deserves to be remembered as an original American patriot.
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The Nazi Spy Ring in America
Hitler's Agents, the FBI, and the Case That Stirred the Nation
Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones
Georgetown University Press, 2021

The first full account of Nazi spies in 1930s America and how they were exposed.

In the mid-1930s just as the United States was embarking on a policy of neutrality, Nazi Germany launched a program of espionage against the unwary nation. The Nazi Spy Ring in America tells the story of Hitler’s attempts to interfere in American affairs by spreading anti-Semitic propaganda, stealing military technology, and mapping US defenses.

This fast-paced history provides essential insight into the role of espionage in shaping American perceptions of Germany in the years leading up to US entry into World War II. Fascinating and thoroughly researched, The Nazi Spy Ring in America sheds light on a now-forgotten but significant episode in the history of international relations and the development of the FBI.

Using recently declassified documents, prize-winning historian Rhodri Jeffreys-Jones narrates this little-known chapter in US history. He shows how Germany’s foreign intelligence service, the Abwehr, was able to steal top secret US technology such as a prototype codebreaking machine and data about the latest fighter planes.

At the center of the story is Leon Turrou, the FBI agent who helped bring down the Nazi spy ring in a case that quickly transformed into a national sensation. The arrest and prosecution of four members of the ring was a high-profile case with all the trappings of fiction: fast cars, louche liaisons, a murder plot, a Manhattan socialite, and a ringleader codenamed Agent Sex. Part of the story of breaking the Nazi spy ring is also the rise and fall of Turrou, whose talent was matched only by his penchant for publicity, which eventually caused him to run afoul of J. Edgar Hoover's strict codes of conduct.

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Policing America’s Empire
The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State
Alfred W. McCoy
University of Wisconsin Press, 2009
At the dawn of the twentieth century, the U.S. Army swiftly occupied Manila and then plunged into a decade-long pacification campaign with striking parallels to today’s war in Iraq. Armed with cutting-edge technology from America’s first information revolution, the U.S. colonial regime created the most modern police and intelligence units anywhere under the American flag. In Policing America’s Empire Alfred W. McCoy shows how this imperial panopticon slowly crushed the Filipino revolutionary movement with a lethal mix of firepower, surveillance, and incriminating information. Even after Washington freed its colony and won global power in 1945, it would intervene in the Philippines periodically for the next half-century—using the country as a laboratory for counterinsurgency and rearming local security forces for repression. In trying to create a democracy in the Philippines, the United States unleashed profoundly undemocratic forces that persist to the present day.
    But security techniques bred in the tropical hothouse of colonial rule were not contained, McCoy shows, at this remote periphery of American power. Migrating homeward through both personnel and policies, these innovations helped shape a new federal security apparatus during World War I. Once established under the pressures of wartime mobilization, this distinctively American system of public-private surveillance persisted in various forms for the next fifty years, as an omnipresent, sub rosa matrix that honeycombed U.S. society with active informers, secretive civilian organizations, and government counterintelligence agencies. In each succeeding global crisis, this covert nexus expanded its domestic operations, producing new contraventions of civil liberties—from the harassment of labor activists and ethnic communities during World War I, to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II, all the way to the secret blacklisting of suspected communists during the Cold War.

“With a breathtaking sweep of archival research, McCoy shows how repressive techniques developed in the colonial Philippines migrated back to the United States for use against people of color, aliens, and really any heterodox challenge to American power. This book proves Mark Twain’s adage that you cannot have an empire abroad and a republic at home.”—Bruce Cumings, University of Chicago

 “This book lays the Philippine body politic on the examination table to reveal the disease that lies within—crime, clandestine policing, and political scandal. But McCoy also draws the line from Manila to Baghdad, arguing that the seeds of controversial counterinsurgency tactics used in Iraq were sown in the anti-guerrilla operations in the Philippines. His arguments are forceful.”—Sheila S. Coronel, Columbia University
 
“Conclusively, McCoy’s Policing America’s Empire is an impressive historical piece of research that appeals not only to Southeast Asianists but also to those interested in examining the historical embedding and institutional ontogenesis of post-colonial states’ police power apparatuses and their apparently inherent propensity to implement illiberal practices of surveillance and repression.”—Salvador Santino F. Regilme, Jr., Journal of Current Southeast Asian Affairs
 
“McCoy’s remarkable book . . . does justice both to its author’s deep knowledge of Philippine history as well as to his rare expertise in unmasking the seamy undersides of state power.”—POLAR: Political and Legal Anthropology Review
 
Winner, George McT. Kahin Prize, Southeast Asian Council of the Association for Asian Studies
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A Private War
An American Code Officer in the Belgian Congo
Robert Laxalt
University of Nevada Press, 1998

In this vivid memoir, Laxalt recalls his service during WWII as a code officer in the Belgian Congo. In this remote jungle outpost, a secret war was being fought for control of the world’s future. Deep in the Congo lay a mine that produced a little-known substance called uranium, and for reasons no one then understood, the Allies and the Germans were struggling ferociously to control this mine and its ore. The cloth edition is a limited numbered, signed edition.

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Secrets in a Dead Fish
The Spying Game in the First World War
Melanie King
Bodleian Library Publishing, 2014
How did German intelligence agents use a dead fish to convey critical information to their operatives? What did an advertisement for a dog in the Times have to do with the movement of British troops into Egypt? And why did British officers suddenly become suspicious of the trousers hanging on a Belgian woman’s washing line?

Throughout World War I, spymasters and their networks of secret agents developed many clever—and sometimes comical—methods of covert communication. Stacks of bread in a bakery window, puffs of smoke from a chimney, and even woolen pullovers were all used to pass on secret messages that were decipherable only to the well-trained eye. Drawing on the memoirs of eight spies, Melanie King divulges these and other tricks of the trade while sharing details from their astonishing stories. Among her informants are British intelligence officers working undercover in Germany and France, including a former Metropolitan police officer who once hunted Jack the Ripper; a German secret service officer codenamed “Agricola;” an American newspaperman; and an Austrian agent who disguised himself during his career as everything from a Jewish peddler to a Russian officer.

A fascinating compendium of clever and long-forgotten ruses—interspersed with the stories of the spies themselves—Secrets in a Dead Fish sheds new light on the shadowy world of Great War espionage.
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Soldiers, Airmen, Spies, and Whisperers
The Gold Coast in World War II
Nancy Ellen Lawler
Ohio University Press, 2002

The fall of France in June 1940 left the Gold Coast surrounded by potentially hostile French colonies that had rejected de Gaulle's call to continue the fight, signaling instead their support for Marshall Pétain's pro-German Vichy regime.

In Soldiers, Airmen, Spies, and Whisperers, Nancy Lawler describes how the Gold Coast Regiment, denuded of battalions fighting in East Africa, was rapidly expanded at home to meet the threat of invasion. Professor Lawler also shows how the small airport at Takoradi was converted into a major Royal Air Force base and came to play a vital role in the supply of aircraft to the British Eighth Army in North Africa.

The importance of the Gold Coast to the Allied war effort necessitated the creation of elaborate propaganda and espionage networks, the activities of which ranged from rumor-mongering to smuggling and sabotage. The London-based Special Operations Executive moved into West Africa, where it worked closely with de Gaulle's Free French Intelligence. Lawler presents a vivid account of SOE's major triumph—masterminding the migration of a substantial part of the Gyaman people from Vichy Côte d'Ivoire to the Gold Coast.

As she looks at the plethora of military and civil organizations involved in the war, Lawler throws light on decision making in Brazzaville, London, and Washington. This is an account of World War II in one colony, but the story is firmly set within the wider context of a world at war.

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Spies, Patriots, and Traitors
American Intelligence in the Revolutionary War
Kenneth A. Daigler
Georgetown University Press, 2014

Students and enthusiasts of American history are familiar with the Revolutionary War spies Nathan Hale and Benedict Arnold, but few studies have closely examined the wider intelligence efforts that enabled the colonies to gain their independence. Spies, Patriots, and Traitors provides readers with a fascinating, well-documented, and highly readable account of American intelligence activities during the era of the Revolutionary War, from 1765 to 1783, while describing the intelligence sources and methods used and how our Founding Fathers learned and practiced their intelligence role.

The author, a retired CIA officer, provides insights into these events from an intelligence professional’s perspective, highlighting the tradecraft of intelligence collection, counterintelligence, and covert actions and relating how many of the principles of the era’s intelligence practice are still relevant today. Kenneth A. Daigler reveals the intelligence activities of famous personalities such as Samuel Adams, George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Nathan Hale, John Jay, and Benedict Arnold, as well as many less well-known figures. He examines the important role of intelligence in key theaters of military operations, such as Massachusetts, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and in General Nathanael Greene’s campaign in South Carolina; the role of African Americans in the era’s intelligence activities; undertakings of networks such as the Culper Ring; and intelligence efforts and paramilitary actions conducted abroad.

Spies, Patriots, and Traitors adds a new dimension to our understanding of the American Revolution. The book’s scrutiny of the tradecraft and management of Revolutionary War intelligence activities will be of interest to students, scholars, intelligence professionals, and anyone who wants to learn more about this fascinating era of American history.

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The Spy Who Loved Us
The Vietnam War and Pham Xuan An's Dangerous Game
Thomas A. Bass
University of Massachusetts Press, 2019
Pham Xuan An was one of the twentieth century's greatest spies. While working as a correspondent for Time during the Vietnam War, he sent intelligence reports—written in invisible ink or hidden inside spring rolls in film canisters—to Ho Chi Minh and his generals in North Vietnam.

Only after Saigon fell in 1975 did An's colleagues learn that the affable raconteur in their midst, acclaimed as "dean of the Vietnamese press corps," was actually a general in the North Vietnamese Army. In recognition of his tradecraft and his ability to spin military losses—such as the Têt Offensive of 1968—­into psychological gains, An was awarded sixteen military medals.

After the book's original publication, WikiLeaks revealed that Thomas A. Bass's account of An's career was distributed to CIA agents as a primer in espionage. Now available in paper with a new preface, An's story remains one of the most gripping to emerge from the era.
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Spying in America
Espionage from the Revolutionary War to the Dawn of the Cold War
Michael J. Sulick
Georgetown University Press, 2012

Can you keep a secret?

Maybe you can, but the United States government cannot. Since the birth of the country, nations large and small, from Russia and China to Ghana and Ecuador, have stolen the most precious secrets of the United States.

Written by Michael Sulick, former director of CIA’s clandestine service, Spying in America presents a history of more than thirty espionage cases inside the United States. These cases include Americans who spied against their country, spies from both the Union and Confederacy during the Civil War, and foreign agents who ran operations on American soil. Some of the stories are familiar, such as those of Benedict Arnold and Julius Rosenberg, while others, though less well known, are equally fascinating.

From the American Revolution, through the Civil War and two World Wars, to the atomic age of the Manhattan Project, Sulick details the lives of those who have betrayed America’s secrets. In each case he focuses on the motivations that drove these individuals to spy, their access and the secrets they betrayed, their tradecraft or techniques for concealing their espionage, their exposure and punishment, and the damage they ultimately inflicted on America’s national security.

Spying in America serves as the perfect introduction to the early history of espionage in America. Sulick’s unique experience as a senior intelligence officer is evident as he skillfully guides the reader through these cases of intrigue, deftly illustrating the evolution of American awareness about espionage and the fitful development of American counterespionage leading up to the Cold War.

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Stealing the General
The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor
Russell S. Bonds
Westholme Publishing, 2007

Selected by Civil War Interactive as One of the Top Civil War Books of All Time
On April 12, 1862—one year to the day after Confederate guns opened on Fort Sumter and started the Civil War—a tall, mysterious smuggler and self-appointed Union spy named James J. Andrews and nineteen infantry volunteers infiltrated north Georgia and stole a steam engine called the General. Racing northward at speeds approaching sixty miles an hour, cutting telegraph lines and destroying track along the way, Andrews planned to open East Tennessee to the Union army, cutting off men and matériel from the Confederate forces in Virginia. If they succeeded, Andrews and his raiders could change the course of the war. But the General's young conductor, William A. Fuller, chased the stolen train first on foot, then by handcar, and finally aboard another engine, the Texas. He pursued the General until, running out of wood and water, Andrews and his men abandoned the doomed locomotive, ending the adventure that would soon be famous as The Great Locomotive Chase. But the ordeal of the soldiers involved was just beginning. In the days that followed, the "engine thieves" were hunted down and captured. Eight were tried and executed as spies, including Andrews. Eight others made a daring escape to freedom, including two assisted by a network of slaves and Union sympathizers. For their actions, before a personal audience with President Abraham Lincoln, six of the raiders became the first men in American history to be awarded the Medal of Honor—the nation's highest decoration for gallantry.

Americans north and south, both at the time and ever since, have been astounded and fascinated by this daring raid. But until now, there has not been a complete history of the entire episode and the fates of all those involved. Based on eyewitness accounts, as well as correspondence, diaries, military records, newspaper reports, deposition testimony and other primary sources, Stealing the General: The Great Locomotive Chase and the First Medal of Honor by Russell S. Bonds is a blend of meticulous research and compelling narrative that is now considered to be the definitive history of "the boldest adventure of the war."

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Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War
Exposing Confederate Conspiracies in America’s Heartland
Stephen E. Towne
Ohio University Press, 2015

A History Book Club Reading Selection

Surveillance and Spies in the Civil War represents pathbreaking research on the rise of U.S. Army intelligence operations in the Midwest during the American Civil War and counters long-standing assumptions about Northern politics and society. At the beginning of the rebellion, state governors in Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois cooperated with federal law enforcement officials in various attempts—all failed—to investigate reports of secret groups and individuals who opposed the Union war effort.

Starting in 1862, army commanders took it upon themselves to initiate investigations of antiwar sentiment in those states. By 1863, several of them had established intelligence operations staffed by hired civilian detectives and by soldiers detailed from their units to chase down deserters and draft dodgers, to maintain surveillance on suspected persons and groups, and to investigate organized resistance to the draft. By 1864, these spies had infiltrated secret organizations that, sometimes in collaboration with Confederate rebels, aimed to subvert the war effort.

Stephen E. Towne is the first to thoroughly explore the role and impact of Union spies against Confederate plots in the North. This new analysis invites historians to delve more deeply into the fabric of the Northern wartime experience and reinterpret the period based on broader archival evidence.

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