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Central Intelligence Agency
The Work of a Nation. The Center of Intelligence

CSI

Nathan Hale's Mission

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 APPROVED FOR RELEASE 1994
 CIA HISTORICAL REVIEW PROGRAM
 2 JULY 96
      
      
     

UNCLASSIFIED

       
The ironies of success and failure      
       
   

NATHAN HALE'S MISSION

   
   

Streeter Bass

   
       
 "How beautiful is death when earned by virtue. 
  . . . What pity it is  
 That we can die but once to serve our country."  
 

Joseph Addison, Cato

 
       
One of the ironies of the world of clandestine activity lies in the fact that almost all of its popular heroes are the ones who were caught. Ironic, perhaps, but obvious-inasmuch as, if you aren't caught, chances are no one will ever hear of you. For every 10,000 Americans to whom Nathan Hale and John Andr6 are familiar names from grammar school on, there is hardly one who has ever heard of Abraham Woodhull or Robert Townsend or Edward Bancroft.
       
In the 20th century the concept of the spy, while still retaining a hefty amount of its traditional pejorative content, has acquired a certain glamor which it didn't have in the 18th and 19th--enough, in fact, to encourage an appalling amount of amateur and semi-professional activity performed in sufficiently inappropriate contexts and with sufficient clumsiness to ensure a plethora of embarrassing failures. By the criterion of failure mentioned above, we ought thus to have, at the present time, a bagful of heroes. That we don't is confirmatory of the basic dictum of ends justifying means-whether you wind up a hero or a villain in espionage (providing, of course, you get caught) depends largely on public agreement regarding the desirability of the ends. If, by popular agreement, the ends to be served by the spy's mission are "patriotic," he is a hero; if they aren't, he isn't.
       
By the Fourth of July, 1776, the colonies had been at war with the Mother Country for more than a year. Until then, things hadn't gone too badly. The Redcoats had been ignominiously chased back from Concord and shut up in Boston. The pyrrhic victory of Bunker Hill had gained them precisely nothing. Howe-by neglecting to occupy -Dorchester Heights-had committed the first of a series of blunders which went far toward assuring the eventual success of the Revolution and had betaken himself to Halifax to re-fit and await further orders.
       
To Washington in Cambridge, commanding an army which proudly referred to itself as "Continental," it seemed clear that when the British returned it wouldn't be to Boston. By now it would be patently obvious to King and Cabinet that they were going to have to put down rebellion in all thirteen colonies; it was no longer to be simply a question of reducing one obstreperous New England town. Plainly the British would attempt to establish a beachhead and a base of operations from which they could undertake to invest the entire eastern seaboard.
       
There was little doubt in Washington's mind where this attempt would be made. New York had a harbor which could shelter the entire Royal Navy. It was the key to the Hudson-Champlain highway to (and from) Canada which,
 
UNCLASSIFIED

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Posted: May 08, 2007 08:41 AM
Last Updated: May 08, 2007 08:41 AM
Last Reviewed: May 08, 2007 08:41 AM