How American Intelligence Was Born in the Trenches of World War I
The Great War forced the US to create a modern spying and analysis apparatus
In 1920, a perceptive British correspondent titled a book he’d just written about the conflict that had so recently laid waste to much of Europe, The First World War. And indeed, there was plenty of evidence that the stones had been laid for yet another global conflagration. Germany, carved up by the victorious allies in the Treaty of Versailles, was descending into political and economic chaos under the humiliating defeat and impending weight of war reparations. In Italy, Benito Mussolini’s fascists were terrorizing towns and beating up labor leaders. In Russia, the Bolsheviks were mopping up Western-supported forces in its civil war, even as Ukraine declared its independence. In Paris, meanwhile, the League of Nations gathered for its inaugural session—without the participation of the U.S., the world’s foremost industrial nation, thereby virtually dooming it to irrelevance.
Americans, repulsed by the meaningless horrors of trench warfare, wanted to rid themselves of Europe's endless internecine barbarism. Barrelling into the 1930s, the so-called “waves of the future”—Soviet Communism, Italian Fascism and German National Socialism—seemed only a prelude to something worse on the continent. In Japan, the wreckage of Europe’s colonial powers gave the emperor’s militarists the confidence that they had a free hand in the Far East, starting with China.
This sweep of history is addressed superbly by historian Mark Stout in World War I and the Foundation of American Intelligence. He offers not only a profound work of scholarship that illuminates the origins of today’s U.S. intelligence community, but he puts this larger canvas to good use to reveal much that’s generally unknown about America’s rise to global primacy.
Step by step, readers grasp the growing intelligence capabilities and professionalism that arose from what was all too briefly called “The Great War.” He not only breaks new ground, but relates the early history of U.S. intelligence to the present lives of both ordinary Americans and, specifically, to those who chose careers within the intelligence community.
The details that Stout assembles for some chapters, such as on aviation and electronic intelligence, might overwhelm the general reader, as can the number of minor characters who pop up and disappear. But his story is nonetheless propulsive, and for those of us who enjoy American history, especially U.S. military and espionage history, World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence is riveting.
Many readers will discern similarities between the first two decades of the twentieth century and those of the twenty-first, following Al Qaeda’s attacks on the World Trade Centers and Pentagon. The Wilson administration’s search for German saboteurs in 1917, for example, led to the widespread violation of civil liberties, much like, almost a century later, the George W. Bush administration rationalized its illegal intercepts of U.S. person’s communications and Black Site torture in its desperate efforts to prevent further terrorist attacks. Likewise from 1914 through 1918, the departments of State, War, Navy, and Justice all had divisions that, in one way or another, were involved with intelligence, yet no central body had the authority to coordinate them. Similar lapses prevented U.S. intelligence in 2001 to prevent the 9/11 attacks.
As a result of post-9/11 reforms that included the creation of the Directorate of National Intelligence, information-sharing relationships exist today among the principal spying and analysis services of the CIA, NSA and FBI as well as state and local entities. That said, cooperation across organizational boundaries remains difficult, according to numerous reports. Today’s IC has to prioritize resources, as did their Great War predecessors. Debates continue over how time, money, and talent is to be divided between needs for analysis, for stealing secrets, and for political warfare.
Altogether, Stout has written a meticulous account that reaches as far and wide as the impact of WWI.
Both as a scholar and practitioner, he is the ideal author for such an ambitious project. Since 2010 he has been a senior lecturer at the Johns Hopkins University Advanced Academic Programs in Washington, D.C., where he also directed its Global Security Studies curriculum, as well as Hopkins’s post-Baccalaureate Certificate in Intelligence. Before taking up teaching, he was an intelligence analyst, first with the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research and later at the CIA, where he was a team chief in its Conventional Weapons and Technology Group. Additionally, he served on the Army Staff in the Pentagon and at the Institute for Defense Analyses.
As a writer, he’s known for astute essays in Studies in Intelligence, and Intelligence and National Security, as well as in other defense-related periodicals (including SpyTalk, where in 2022 he contributed a review of a controversial new book on the hunt for a Russian mole at CIA). Readers will feel from the first chapter that they are in the hands of an expert.
Stout tells us why he tackled this subject. When he asked fellow scholars and government officials about the origins of U.S. intelligence, they would often reply vaguely that it all started with the OSS during World War II, or maybe with the National Security Act of 1947, which established the CIA and authorized covert action. Basically, he says, no one realized its foundations lay in the Great War.
It was Europe’s plunge into war in 1914 that motivated Washington to start building a modern intelligence apparatus, which soon involved creating an entirely new profession–composed of different types of experts –devoted to collecting, evaluating, and disseminating stolen enemy secrets. It’s a highly original observation to place the origin of these professions in World War I rather than Second World War II or the 1947 National Security Act.
In Washington’s approach to intelligence, for instance, Stout asserts on page one that “virtually everything that followed [World War I] was maturation, reorganization, reinvigoration, or reinvention.” And “everything” includes most of the major subsets in today’s IC, from codebreaking to counterintelligence to paramilitary activities. That was a surprise to this reviewer, who was equally surprised to learn that, by war’s end, the various U.S. intelligence services—such as they were at the War, Navy, State, Justice, and even Treasury departments—had become comparable in size and quality to their centuries-old, tentacular European counterparts.
As a former analyst himself, Stout believes that we can’t fully grasp the ways that many of today’s intelligence practices are executed without understanding their beginnings. Therefore, his book is as important for intelligence professionals as for historians. In fact, anyone intrigued by the conduct of U.S. international security policies will find The Foundation of American Intelligence to be eye-opening.
A third of Stout’s book examines America’s approach to intelligence before the nation declared war in April 1917. What existed before then was the Office of Naval Intelligence (established in 1882) and the War Department’s Division of Military Information (established in 1885) which were largely limited to dispatching uniformed attachés to U.S. embassies abroad. But much was changing in America’s runup to joining the fight against the Central Powers (Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria).
Major General John J. Pershing’s 1916-1917 Punitive Expedition into Mexico, for example, contained many of the practices that he would use on the Western Front when commanding the American Expeditionary Forces (AEF) in France. In Mexico, “Black Jack,” as he was nicknamed, deployed spies, electronic intercepts (i.e., tapped telegraph lines), input from different government agencies, and aerial reconnaissance to track the guerilla leader Pancho Villa. He also employed assassins, Stout writes. In July 1916, a cavalryman on Pershing’s staff, Captain W. C. Reed, provided poison to four shadowy operatives who weren’t part of the Army. One morning they managed to lace Villa’s coffee with the deadly substance, but the wily commander didn’t drink enough of it to slow him down, according to the Stout.
Once in Europe, with a force that grew to 1.9 million men, Pershing’s AEF routinized such practices as aerial reconnaissance and tapping telegraph lines. From Britain's secret services, the AEF also learned that intelligence should be a discreet and specialized function of war strategy and tactics. Quick learners, the Americans established their own schools in France for covert operations, as at Tours. AEF headquarters also began dispatching U.S. operatives, usually of French or German background, behind the lines—independent of their British tutors.
Pershing called his novel capabilities a “secret service force.” Previously, spies had largely been used merely to observe the deployments of enemy military forces or their logistical infrastructure. Now the emphasis was put on extracting secrets from enemy bureaucracies, picking up rumors and assessing enemy morale.
Their covers would be familiar to operatives today: U.S. “consular, commercial, scientific, and others” stationed or traveling within Germany and the occupied regions of France.
Policymakers in the Wilson administration came to realize that this was a line of work that required some highly unusual people.
Intel Aptitudes
Stout reveals precisely how unusual. “American intelligence did many morally questionable things”—and not for the last time, of course. For instance, the brigadier general heading AEF intelligence funded a plan to get female agents close to French Prime Minister Georges Clemenceau, British Prime Minister David Lloyd George, and Italy’s foreign minister Sidney Sonnino—all U.S. allies, or “associates” in the diplomatic parlance of the day. The outcomes of such would-be seductions are unknown.
The Americans took other novel steps, though ones long familiar in Europe. The State Department, for instance, realized the importance of cooperating with the spy services of neutral nations, which is what Allen Dulles—later to become the CIA’s longest serving director—was doing in Switzerland during WW I.
For the first time as well, Washington was also adopting a systematic, professionalized counterintelligence capability, designed to root out enemy moles and sympathizers and thwart the movement of spies in the U.S. In two chapters, Stout gives the subject equal weight to U.S. espionage overseas. These chapters are full of scholarly detail, yet they read like a thriller.
Even before entering the war, Americans found themselves facing a chilling new threat: enemy “terrorists” inside the U.S. In July 1916, German agents blew up a munitions depot on Black Tom Island, off Jersey City, N.J., just southeast of Manhattan. What Stout calls “counterintelligence in depth” followed, with closer than usual cooperation between the Army, Navy, State and Justice departments. Moreover, Justice developed its own subterranean liaisons to gather intelligence from private grassroots organizations, such as the YMCA and the quasi-official American Protective League, an outfit composed of volunteers dedicated to neutralizing antiwar activists, draft dodgers, anarchists, German sympathizers and spies.
Other bridges to the future of U.S. intelligence were laid during the Great War. Stout devotes one detailed chapter to Aerial Reconnaissance, another to Radio Intelligence. A new level of “precision and fine-grained truth” emerged as the Americans adopted what Stout calls “technology-centric intelligence disciplines,” including codes and ciphers.
The arrival of new technology was a key reason why U.S. intelligence capabilities caught up so quickly to the centuries-old secret services of Britain, France, and Germany. Everyone was starting fresh with radio and combat aircraft, among other new information-gathering capabilities. Before 1914, aerial recon, as well as electronics, had barely existed as distinct forms of technical intelligence. As the world’s greatest industrial power since the 1870s, America had an edge going into the war, which, with few exceptions, it generally kept for the next century.
Following the 1918 armistice, however, America withdrew from great power competition and let lag its top tier intelligence capabilities. “A broad postwar demobilization was underway of which the intelligence services were a part,” Stout writes. In 1929, Secretary of State Henry Stimson, who himself had served as an artillery officer in France, shut down the code-breaking operation known as the Black Chamber, infamously scolding that “Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”
The proposals for truly centralizing intelligence capabilities that had first arisen in Washington during 1917, meanwhile, had gone nowhere. The departments of War, Navy, State and Justice maintained their own intelligence components, only informally coordinating with each other. No fully professionalized clandestine foreign intelligence-gathering and operations service would exist until Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Office of Strategic Services in June 1942.
Still, some innovation was happening out of sight.
The State Department, for example, inserted intelligence personnel, supported by code clerks, into the relief teams that the U.S. Food Administration, headed by future president Herbert Hoover, was deploying to a destitute and starving Europe soon after the armistice.
Once the worst of all wars erupted in September 1939, the United States was just about ready for the final steps needed to create a highly refined profession of “intelligence,” Stout writes. Men, as nearly all of them were, would no longer think of themselves as staff officers, lawyers, or diplomats, but rather as part of a new calling. They embraced the ideas and practices of an American way of intelligence—agile, pioneering, and collaborative, when done right.
Of course, Pearl Harbor was the worst intelligence failure in U.S. history, rivaled only by that of 9/11. The fear of being attacked again “out of the blue” shadowed the Cold War decades. From 1947 onward, the entire world had to be watched, and everything anticipated, even during an ostensible time of peace. Ever since, highly trained intelligence professionals with a rich variety of finely-honed skills would spend their entire careers anticipating what might be lurking around the world’s dark corners. That was the takeaway from World War I to the new corps of U.S. intelligence. ###
World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence, by Mark Stout. University Press of Kansas, 2023. 388 pages.
Espionage is supposed to be the world's second oldest profession, which means it has been around for a few years. The basic functions haven't changed much but technology has. Electricity, the telephone, aviation and so forth have produced new targets--electronic transmissions and ways of intercepting them, for example. The lists are long and getting longer.
Mr. Stout writes about these, and I do not doubt the accuracy of his account, but were the roots of today's U.S. intelligence structure really founded in events from Word War I. It's a stretch because there was not only no continuity, there was no organization. When WWI ended, so did our intelligence activities. The same happened when subsequent crises required some form of intelligence response. And none of the entities formed to any other entities formed. The U.S, had no intelligence program worthy of the name when Pearl Harbor (comment continued above)
You and he, apparently, unfortunately miss the history in two crucial instances. Pearl Harbor may have been one of FDR's greatest successes, since he did everything he could to make it happen, which included an awareness of its precise timing. For that, see Day of Deceit by Robert Stinnett, researched to within an inch of its life. The second misunderstanding: 9/11. Roll your eyes all you want, but until you have an answer to the following question and an innocent explanation for that answer, you are...sadly misinformed: In the Context of 9/11, what do the following numbers represent:
2753. 21905? Glad to be of help at 292929@msn.com