Intelligence and Military Operations

Michael Handel, Michael Handel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135179410
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'armée et de la marine

Traditionally the military community held the intelligence profession in low esteem, spying was seen as dirty work and information was all to often ignored if it conflicted with a commander's own view. Handel examines the ways in which this situation has improved and argues that co-operation between the intelligence adviser and the military decision maker is vital.

Part One

The US Civil War

The Role of Intelligence in the Chancellorsville Campaign, April-May, 1863

Jay Luvaas

After the bloody failure to storm Confederate positions at Fredericksburg on 13 December 1862, the Union Army of the Potomac returned to its old camps on the north side of the Rappahannock. It had lost nearly 13,000 men, most of them in vain assaults against enemy defenses at Marye’s Heights, and with shattered morale and fading confidence in its commander, the army was ‘all played out’. Six weeks later Major General Ambrose E. Burnside tried to retrieve the situation, but the entire country was an ‘ocean of mud’ and he was soon forced to abandon what became known officially – and derisively – as the ‘Mud March’. On 25 January Burnside was relieved.

He was replaced by Major General Joseph Hooker, an experienced corps commander with a well-deserved reputation as an aggressive combat leader. In the weeks that followed, Hooker made many far-reaching changes. He abolished the ‘Grand Divisions’, each comprising two corps, that Burnside had introduced, and he created corps badges to be worn by officers and men to indicate the corps and division to which they belonged. He established the corps as a unit for the organization of his artillery, although he stripped his chief of artillery of all tactical functions and reduced him to his original purely administrative usefulness. He consolidated all of his cavalry into one corps, commanded by Major General George P. Stoneman, and he substituted pack-mules for army wagons on an extensive scale. Hooker also reorganized the Inspector-General’s department to provide inspectors for his combat arms as well as for each brigade, and he improved the soldiers’ fare while at the same time doing what he could to see that tobacco was regularly issued, that an occasional issue of whisky was made on return from extra duty, and that clothing was inspected and provided. More to the point, Hooker overhauled his intelligence service.¹

In his official Report of the Chancellorsville campaign, the Confederate Commander, General Robert E. Lee, attributed his success at Chancellorsville ‘to the skillful and efficient management of the artillery’ and to the initiative and skill of his chief subordinates. Had it not been for the need to maintain secrecy, however, Lee surely would have given highest credit to his intelligence service, for as one of his division commanders later noted, ‘every day Lee had information of Hooker’s movements’. In contrast Hooker found himself frequently groping in the dark, unable to penetrate the designs of his enemy, sort out contradictory information, or even to get an accurate assessment of enemy numbers. In studying the Chancellorsville campaign, therefore, it is especially appropriate to look at the way in which each commander acquired and made use of intelligence, for, as the foremost authority on the campaign has observed, ‘one of the most important qualifications of a commander is the ability to sift truth from conficting rumors and reports, and deduce therefrom the dispositions, movement, and intentions of the enemy’.²

The man responsible for acquiring military information for the Army of the Potomac had been Allan Pinkerton, who had come from Chicago in the wake of the fiasco at Bull Run in July 1861, accompanied by his entire detective force. Used initially to tighten security, Pinkerton arrested a number of people suspected of sending information secretly to Richmond, but soon his skilled operatives ‘were traveling between Richmond and Washington’, bringing ‘valuable information’ about enemy plans. ‘Major Allan’ as Pinkerton was then known, was in almost daily contact with the President, the Secretary of War, the provost-marshal general and the general in charge of the Union armies. He served as Major General G.B. McClellan’s chief of intelligence in both the Peninsular and the Maryland campaigns. When McClellan was relieved from command a month after the battle of Antietam, Pinkerton became indignant at his treatment and refused to continue longer at Washington.³

According to one authority, the successful secret service agent must be ‘keen-witted, observant, resourceful, and possessing a small degree of fear, yet realizing the danger and consequences of detection’.

His work … lay, in general, along three lines. In the first place all suspected persons must be found, their sentiments investigated and ascertained. The members of the secret service obtained access to houses, clubs, and places of resort, sometimes in the guise of guests, sometimes as domestics … As the well-known and time-honored shadow detectives, they tracked footsteps and noted every action. Agents … gained membership in hostile secret societies and reported their meetings, by which means many plans of the Southern leaders were ascertained. The most dangerous service was naturally that of entering the Confederate ranks for information as to the nature and strength of defenses and numbers of troops. Constant vigilance was maintained for the detection of Confederate spies, the interception of mail-carriers, and the discovery of contraband goods. All spies, ‘contrabands’, deserters, refugees, and prisoners of war found in or brought into Federal territory were subjected to a searching examination and reports upon their testimony forwarded to the various authorities.⁴

When Hooker took over the Army of the Potomac, he could find no document of any kind at headquarters that contained information about the Confederate forces in his immediate front. ‘There was no means, no organization, and no apparent effort, to obtain such information.⁵ He immediately established an organization for that purpose, and soon he was able to acquire ‘correct and proper’ information of the strength and movements of the enemy. On 30 March he named Colonel G. H. Sharpe of the 120th New York Volunteers his new deputy provost-marshal-general, in which capacity he was placed in charge of the separate and special Bureau of Military Information. Sharpe remained at the head of this bureau for the rest of the war and supervised the secret service work in the East.⁶

Amid these organizational changes Hooker planned his campaign. His directive specified only that he assume the offensive without any unnecessary delay and that his operations should not uncover Washington. He thought first of crossing the river some distance to the south, where he could turn the Confederate right flank and possibly interpose his army between the Confederate forces under General Robert E. Lee and Richmond, but the rugged terrain, the expanding width of the river in that direction, and the ability of Lee’s men to extend their breastworks as rapidly as his own troops could construct practicable roads caused him to set aside this plan in favor of a movement against the other flank. He would send his cavalry corps upstream to cross the rivers, then strike southward, with the primary object of cutting Confederate communications between Fredericksburg and Richmond. Then he would move three infantry corps 30 miles upstream to cross the Rappahannock at Kelly’s Ford, with orders to descend the river and take Confederate fortifications at the United States and Banks’ Fords in reverse. This would enable him to send two additional corps across the United States Ford to reinforce the marching column, and together they would move directly against the rear of Lee’s lines at Fredericksburg. Lee would then either have to come out in the open to fight or retreat in the direction of Richmond. Hooker left two corps under Major General John Sedgwick to demonstrate against the Confederates at Fredericksburg, with orders to pursue the enemy ‘with the utmost vigor’ if he seemed to be falling back in the direction of Richmond.

The general tenor of the statements received make it appear that Jackson’s corps is left to guard the passage of the river. Ransom’s division, of Longstreet’s corps, is one mentioned as gone to Tennessee or South Carolina. Pickett’s division is one gone to Charlestown.⁸

This disparity in the assessment of the size as well as the destination of enemy detachments and also in the time required for the news to filter back to headquarters was typical of most of the strategic intelligence that reached Lee and Hooker in the weeks ahead. With the departure of Longstreet, Lee had barely 60,000 men to guard the river line – his enemy could muster nearly 134,000.

A week after Longstreet’s departure, Stonewall Jackson summoned his topographical engineer and gave him secret orders to prepare a map of the Shenandoah Valley ‘extended to Harrisburg, Pa., and then on to Philadelphia – wishing the preparation to be kept a profound secret’.⁹ On 9 April, Lee suggested to James A. Seddon, Secretary of War, that the enemy had probably decided to confine the operations of the Army of the Potomac and of forces south of the James to the defensive while reinforcing Union armies in the west: the recent transfer of Burnside’s IX Corps to Kentucky raised this as a distinct possibility. ‘Should General Hooker’s army assume the defensive,’ Lee suggested, ‘the readiest method of relieving the pressure upon General Johnston and General Beauregard would be for this army to cross into Maryland.’ For that he would require more provisions and suitable transportation. He would also need a pontoon bridge, and two days later he requested the Engineer Bureau to send a pontoon bridge train to Orange Court House, where it could be added to his army once he could seize the initiative and invade Pennsylvania.¹⁰ The immediate problem, however, was to prevent Hooker from maneuvering him out of his lines and driving him back to the defense of Richmond.

‘If I am able to determine the enemy’s disposition while at the same time I conceal my own, then I can concentrate and he must divide’. These words are provided by Sun Tzu, but Lee made the thought his own.

* * *

The two armies went about gathering intelligence in much the same way. During the preparation for active operations, the chief source of information was probably a loose network of spies and scouts. The terms were often used interchangeably, but in the parlance of the day ‘spies’ were individuals located permanently within enemy lines or territory who were actively involved in collecting information valuable to their military leaders. Here the Confederacy had a natural advantage in that the border states, particularly Maryland, contained many southern sympathizers, and even in the North there were many who denied the right of the Federal Government to invade the south. This advantage was greater still in the occupied portion of the Confederacy, where nearly every inhabitant was a potential spy willing to provide military information to those fighting for southern independence. As the war went on, the use and number of Union spies were greatly increased, ‘ and in the last year the system reached a high degree of efficiency’, with spies constantly at work in all the Confederate armies and in all the cities of the South. Only the names of a few ‘have been rescued from obscurity’.¹²

To the Civil War soldier, however, most of what were loosely termed ‘spies’ would be considered ‘scouts’. Scouts were organized under a chief who directed their movements, and their duties were to serve as couriers between the network of spies and their own military leaders. Because their duties involved bearing dispatches, locating enemy units, and acquiring precise information about the terrain that would facilitate the march of the army, it was inevitable that scouts would often function as spies. Scouts became ‘the real eyes and ears of the army’ as they probed forward as far as the enemy picket line and then used their trained powers of observation to find out what was happening on the other side. In the Confederate armies these men came primarily from the cavalry, while initially the Union commanders depended more upon civilian spies, detectives and deserters for information. After Sharpe became head of Hooker’s Bureau of Military Information, he turned increasingly to scouts drafted from the army, although at the time of Chancellorsville Lee’s intelligence system still enjoyed a decided edge. The Official Records contain few references to reports from Union scouts until Hooker’s army was actually on the move, whereas Lee frequently received vital information from this source, as revealed in the following letter from Lee to President Jefferson Davis a month before the battle.

All the reports from our scouts on the Potomac indicate that General Hooker’s army has not been diminished, and is prepared to cross the Rappahannock as soon as the weather permits. Various days have been specified for him to advance, but that has been prevented by the occurrence of storms. The 17th ultimo was one of the days stated, and on the 22nd three days rations had been cooked and placed in the haversacks of the men.¹³

Two days later Lee heard from a scout he had sent into Maryland to watch the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad. This man confirmed what Lee had already heard from other reports, that Burnside’s IX Corps was indeed being shipped west on the railroad. The scout had counted five divisions.

They were all infantry, transportation for the whole f...