The First Conspiracy

by Brad Meltzer

  Now the baker is even more uneasy. How did she know the letter hadn’t been sent? Why was she so concerned about it? And what business did she have delivering a coded letter to the British, anyway?

  What’s more, with tensions high in Rhode Island between Loyalists and Patriots, and with members of both groups frequenting his bakery and buying his famous biscuits, the last thing the baker needs is to get caught in the middle of some secret military scheme.

  This time, the baker takes preemptive action. He carries the letter to a local Patriot leader, Rhode Island Secretary of State Henry Ward, and tells his story. Ward, immediately alarmed that someone in Cambridge is trying to deliver a coded letter to British officers in Rhode Island, sends the baker to meet with Gen. Nathanael Greene—also stationed in Rhode Island—who becomes similarly concerned. Greene beckons the baker to travel with him to Cambridge, to present the letter and his story to George Washington.

  And so here they are now, in the Commander’s headquarters.

  The baker recounts his story once again to Washington. Satisfied that the man is telling the truth, Washington quizzes him for everything he knows about the woman and commends him for taking the letter to the proper authorities.

  Clearly, to get to the bottom of this episode, Washington must speak to the woman herself.

  For this, Washington enlists the help of another general, Israel Putnam, a Connecticut native sometimes known as “Old Put,” who had become a hero here in Massachusetts for his leadership at Bunker Hill. Washington gives Putnam the order to track down the woman in Cambridge, arrest her, and bring her to headquarters.

  A few days later, Washington looks out the window of his Cambridge headquarters to see a rather extraordinary sight: Old Put, famously rotund, is galloping on horseback up Brattle Street toward the headquarters, with a young woman—the baker’s former paramour and current lady of the night—riding pillion, sitting on the horse just behind the large general and trying her best to wrap her arms around his waist.

  Minutes later, the young woman is sitting quietly before both General Putnam and the tall Commander-in-Chief. Washington, who had once been an examining magistrate in Virginia, puts to use his skills as an interrogator and questions her.

  It doesn’t take long for her to break. She admits she traveled to Newport with the letter, intending to deliver it to designated British officials stationed on a ship at the wharf. She couldn’t get to them herself, so she left the letter with her former boyfriend, the baker, who happened to operate a shop in Newport. She says she has no idea what’s in the letter—she never opened the seal or saw the contents. She was just delivering the letter for a friend.

  So who was this friend? Who in Cambridge was trying to deliver a secret encrypted document to the British military, and sending a prostitute to do so?

  The woman won’t say. She refuses to reveal his name.

  With matters of war at stake, the generals continue to press her, and Washington threatens her with punishment for crimes of treason against the colonies if she doesn’t buckle. “For a long time, she was proof against every threat and persuasion, to discover the author,” as Washington later described the situation to John Hancock. But then, after several hours of interrogation, “at length she was brought to a Confession.”

  Finally, the woman agrees to reveal the identity of the man who gave her the encrypted letter and asked her to deliver it to the enemy.

  When she whispers the name, George Washington can scarcely believe it.

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  At last, the young woman whispers a name.

  To this day, we have no idea how Washington reacted at that moment—but his face must have been frozen in shock.

  Dr. Benjamin Church.

  The trusted one. The first surgeon general of the Continental army—and one of the two men who greeted and escorted Washington into Cambridge when he first arrived. Dr. Church, the Harvard-educated surgeon, personal physician of John Adams, former member of both the Sons of Liberty and the Massachusetts Provincial Congress.

  It simply doesn’t make sense that one of the most respected Patriots in Massachusetts would secretly be sending coded messages to British officers.

  Washington turns to the woman again. How does she know Dr. Church? And how was it that he gave her a message to deliver to the British?

  The woman explains that she is Church’s secret mistress. Church, a married man, is her “benefactor,” as they called it then. The woman says that Church asked her to deliver the mysterious letter to the British officers in Newport, said that it was urgently important—and told her that she absolutely mustn’t tell anyone else about it.

  The embarrassing personal details about Church are mortifying enough. But the idea that such an esteemed man could be secretly consorting with the enemy seems unthinkable.

  For Washington, there’s only one way to learn the truth.

  Within hours, officers detain Dr. Church at his home and bring him to Washington’s headquarters for questioning. Washington later describes Church’s explanation:

  Upon his first examination he readily acknowledged the letter, said it was designed for his brother Fleming, and when deciphered would be found to be nothing criminal.… [He] made many protestations of the purity of his intentions.

  Church proclaims his devotion to the Patriot cause and explains that because his brother-in-law Fleming lives within Boston, behind enemy lines, he sometimes sends letters through British channels to reach him. That’s all.

  It’s a dubious story, but a man of Church’s reputation deserves the benefit of the doubt. Washington decides that the only way to determine the truth is to discern the text of the letter itself.

  Unfortunately neither Washington nor any of his inexperienced officers have any idea how to decipher the coded letter. The Continental army barely has any gunpowder, let alone a cryptography service. So with Dr. Church still detained, Washington inquires around Cambridge and eventually finds a few civilians who can do the one thing he needs: break codes. He quickly hires all of them.

  To double-check their work, Washington divides these cryptographers into two teams and instructs them to independently try to crack the cipher in the letter. After several hours, both teams separately break the code, and their resulting translations match almost perfectly.

  Church’s “innocent” letter is in fact a report on the status of the Continental army, including some details about troop numbers, weapons, supplies, and plans. It’s critical and confidential information.

  Even worse, although ostensibly written to Church’s brother-in-law, the letter is in fact intended for a British officer—and not just any British officer, but Gen. Thomas Gage, the Commander of all British forces in America and the most senior British military official in the colonies.

  Dr. Benjamin Church, long one of the most respected Patriots in Boston, is a full-fledged traitor and a spy, secretly delivering intelligence to the enemy.

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  The Church affair stuns every Patriot in Massachusetts. It stuns the members of the Continental Congress. Most of all, it stuns George Washington.

  For a man whose entire life has been based on the pursuit of honor and integrity, the reality that a supposedly trustworthy Patriot could so terribly betray his countrymen is surely beyond unsettling. Church’s actions are, as a committee of the Massachusetts Provincial Congress will soon put it, “wicked and detestable practices” for which the punishment should be severe. To set an example, the colonial authorities must “testify to the world their utmost abhorrence of such deceitful conduct, horrible ingratitude, and breach of trust.”

  While Church is held in custody to determine his fate and punishment, the disgraced surgeon writes a letter to George Washington himself, in which he again changes his story. Church claims that the encrypted letter was in fact a clever ruse to confuse the British with misinformation. He writes that “I can honestly appeal to Heaven for the purity of my intentions” and begs “the magnanimous, the compa
ssionate George Washington to shield me from undeserved infamy.”

  Unconvinced, Washington convenes a council of war with his top officers to discuss the evidence of the case, and the council unanimously agree that Church is guilty. Because the army’s rules of conduct lack the scope to determine adequate punishment for this treasonous act, Washington sends Church’s case directly to the Continental Congress to review. Meanwhile, Church himself is sent to a Connecticut prison to contemplate his wrongdoings from behind bars.

  In fact, Church’s crimes were even worse than Washington and the Congress realized at the time. Dr. Church had been secretly consorting with the enemy for a period of almost two years, providing intelligence on the early Patriot movement in Boston, and later sending dispatches to the British with details from his visits to the Continental Congress.

  His motives? Apparently nothing more than money. British officers were paying him handsomely for each report. His spying supported a lavish lifestyle. He wore fine clothes, built a grand home in Cambridge, and kept a paid mistress, the very mistress who tried to deliver the letter to British officers in Rhode Island.

  For the Commander-in-Chief of the Continental army, the entire episode raises a profound question: If you can’t trust a man like Dr. Benjamin Church, who can you trust?

  In the revolutionary era, the answer is: No one, really.

  George Washington’s previous military experience had not prepared him for this sort of subterfuge. In the French and Indian War, British soldiers were fighting French soldiers in wilderness battlefields. The two sides wore different uniforms and spoke different languages. You always knew who the enemy was.

  In the revolutionary era, the two sides are porous and always changing. Unlike in a conventional war, where one nationality or one religion is facing another, here the lines are constantly blurred. In this war, the ability to discern loyalties—in soldiers and citizens alike—is just as important as military planning. Allegiance in the conflict is not determined by language, birthplace, or race, but simply by whatever a person declares his or her loyalty to be at any given moment.

  Washington should know this from his own army. Two of his top generals, Horatio Gates and Charles Lee, were in fact born in England, and came of age in the British military before recently switching sides to join the colonists’ cause. Many other rebel soldiers or leaders were also born in Great Britain. Even Thomas Paine, the great writer of the revolutionary movement whose hugely influential treatise Common Sense would soon be published, was an Englishman who had moved to the colonies only two years earlier.

  Similarly, many people born and raised in the colonies choose to support the British side; these are the Loyalists. Many of these British sympathizers will choose to bear arms for Great Britain or otherwise provide aid to the Crown for reasons of family, business interests, or political conviction.

  Apart from the Patriots and Loyalists, yet more colonists have allegiances that are up for grabs. They’ll switch to whichever side will benefit them at any given moment, or whichever side will pay them more, or whichever side they think is most likely to win.

  Throughout the colonies, these divided and shifting loyalties create an environment of distrust and confusion within cities, within neighborhoods, even within families. Dramatic examples abound, even among the most prominent players on both sides of the struggle.

  For example, Thomas Gage, the top British commander in America, had lived and worked in the colonies for decades; during this time he married a young New York woman named Margaret Kemble. Once the hostilities began, Margaret’s brother and other family members became prominent Patriots, while her husband oversaw the British occupation of Boston. To this day, many suspect that Margaret shared top-secret British military intelligence with her Patriot brothers.

  Divided loyalties also rip apart the family of one of the most beloved Patriot heroes. Benjamin Franklin’s own son, New Jersey Governor William Franklin, becomes a Loyalist in the years leading up to the war, and as hostilities begin he uses his position to fight the revolutionary movement and give aid to the British. The father and son stop speaking, and when colonial authorities later arrest William, his father does nothing to intervene or prevent his imprisonment.

  Then there’s the case of Robert Rogers, a decorated veteran of the French and Indian War. During the revolutionary era, he has a bizarre series of adventures in which he is arrested by the British for committing treason, then arrested by the Americans on suspicion of being a traitor, and for a while travels the countryside disguised in Native American garb to avoid capture by either side.

  One thing is clear: With so many divided loyalties and shifting allegiances, the landscape is ripe for treachery, spying, and double-crossing. Espionage and intelligence gathering are a critical part of warfare—in many cases more so than pure military might.

  George Washington is not entirely new to the world of spies. As a young officer, he had some experience with intelligence gathering during the French and Indian War. Continental army ledgers also show that one of Washington’s first big expenditures upon his arrival in Cambridge was payment for a spy posing as a Loyalist he sent to cross into Boston and gather information about the British army.

  Not much is known about this spy, but obviously Washington was at least pursuing some avenues of espionage. Later in the war, Washington will become a much more sophisticated spymaster, overseeing teams of secret agents—including the legendary Culper Ring—who are versed in the use of ciphers, codes, and invisible ink.

  However, what the Church episode plainly reveals is that sending out spies to gather intelligence is only part of the equation.

  The more vexing question is: How to prevent the enemy’s agents and spies from plotting, scheming, and infiltrating one’s own side? When it comes to espionage in time of war, how do you play defense as well as offense?

  Clearly, Washington caught Dr. Church later than he should have—and only because a biscuit maker in Rhode Island voluntarily came forward to report his story. Otherwise, Dr. Church may have continued to sell intelligence to the British indefinitely. No one was on Church’s trail, despite the doctor’s often reckless methods of spying.

  In fact, completely unbeknownst to Washington at the time, there are more spies around him than just Dr. Church. One enemy agent has infiltrated the Cambridge camps with pro-British informants including a blacksmith and a butcher who serve undercover in a Continental artillery company. Likewise, Washington has no idea that a Boston artist named Henry Pelham has been surveying and sketching the Continental army’s encampments in Cambridge and the surrounding areas. He was commissioned by British generals to secretly observe Washington’s forces and create a detailed geographical map showing the Continental army’s positions.

  So, the lesson from Dr. Church and these other spies is obvious.

  Espionage is important; but so is counterespionage.

  Intelligence is important; but so is counterintelligence.

  This is the defensive side of spycraft—and it isn’t easy.

  To be clear, there was no such word as “counterintelligence” in the colonies of the late eighteenth century. The term didn’t emerge until the early World War II era, when American intelligence agencies matured and modernized. By this time, the notion of counterintelligence as a distinct discipline is codified within the larger umbrella of the intelligence services.

  However, even if the term didn’t exist in the North American colonies in 1775 at the onset of the war against England, the need for counterintelligence was dire, as much so as during any other war.

  Just as the Continental army itself had to be created almost from nothing, Washington and his men will have to devise a whole new set of methods and tools to win the complicated intelligence war against their enemies. Working from scratch, they will adapt and devise new systems that will pioneer a brand-new field of intelligence warfare.

  For now, in the fall of 1775, Washington’s army is so deficient in counterespion
age that they don’t even have someone on staff who can break the code on an intercepted letter, let alone a team to combat the widespread and sophisticated espionage efforts of the British in and around Boston.

  But Boston isn’t the only place where spies are on the move.

  A few hundred miles south, in New York City, another ring of spies is also at work, led by a man with a set of motives all his own.

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  New York, New York

  October 1775

  Although Boston is the epicenter of British military command in the colonies through the fall of 1775, the besieged city is far from the only place where British and Loyalist spies operate.

  All over the colonies, in every major city, British officials recruit or cultivate Loyalists who can pose as Patriots and infiltrate rebel organizations. Whether it’s a prominent citizen like Dr. Church, or a local tavern keeper or blacksmith who is likely to overhear rebel gossip, spies are everywhere. Some are paid for their service; others do it out of political conviction.

  In particular, a web of informants pushes information up and down the northeast coast, using a network of British ships and Loyalist merchants who control many harbors and docks. The spies pass documents, intelligence, and contraband along trade routes from Philadelphia to New York City to Boston to Providence.

  One person in particular is a key player in this operation: William Tryon, the Governor of New York. Based in one of the busiest trading hubs in the colonies—New York City—Tryon follows the flow of information as well as anyone.

  The Patriots may now control many legislative bodies and local committees in New York, but this hasn’t stopped the Governor from wielding power and influence in the city. Tryon conducts business from the Governor’s residence inside the fort at the southern tip of Manhattan, and in City Hall meets regularly with his council—an appointed group of close advisers—and with other prominent Loyalists on how to save New York from further rebel influence. He still controls much of the commerce so essential to the city’s fortunes, and his spies keep him informed on enemy activity throughout the city.