50 TOP SECRET DOCUMENTS THAT CHANGED HISTORY
National Geographic, $26, 320 pages
REVIEWED BY JAMES SRODES
Once, while I was in the British National Archives in Kew, I waded through a coded report from English spies embedded deep within Benjamin Franklin’s embassy in Paris as he tried to inveigle the French into helping our Revolutionary struggle. The code was baby-easy, numbers were assigned to individuals (Franklin was 72, King George III was 47 and concepts such as independence (101) and the plain text soon made each clear.
The report was a fascinating insight into the daily workings of Franklin’s large household and his cadre of privateers like John Paul Jones. Details like wine consumed, mistresses in residence, and, importantly, Franklin’s determination to achieve independence as a precondition for peace were faithfully set down. Then I hit pay dirt. As I turned the last page I found a dismissive note in pencil signed by no less than King George himself, “This proves what I have believed all along, Dr. Franklin is flooding us with information for the purposes of deceiving us.”
My “Ha!” jerked the other researchers in the reading room around and brought a docent hurrying over to abjure me to be more reticent under pain of expulsion. The moment remains one of the thrills of my life in the stacks of various libraries.
So I know what Peter Earnest means in his forward to this splendid book about the 50 most important secret documents when he says that breaking into coded messages is akin to “(T)he archeologist coming unexpectedly upon ancient ruins…”
Mr. Earnest should know. During 36 years as a senior Central Intelligence Agency case officer and executive, he had charge at one time or another over the document hoards of the old World War II Office of Strategic Services and the agency’s probe of John F. Kennedy’s assassination. He now runs the International Spy Museum, one of our town’s top tourist attractions, and this book will be another of the museum’s source books.
The book both provides illustrations of and annotations to 50 once-secret documents that can be said to have changed history in fundamental ways. It is well worth space on your crowded intelligence shelves on a number of counts.
Author Thomas B. Allen is co-author of “The Spy Book,” the essential intel encyclopedia, and one of our area’s true dispassionate experts on the topic. The book actually lets you look at the documents, and the annotations put them in clear context. So it is a resource for your own readings but, more, Mr. Allen’s accessible writing style makes it an attractive gift and introduction to young readers and to others dipping for the first time into the dark waters of spies and how they change our lives.
History can be changed any number of ways by secret documents and Mr. Allen organizes the books along topic lines such as war, traitors, counterintelligence, and more topically today, the secret state.
Sometimes a single document can save one nation and damage another. In 1587 Anthony Standen, a spy for Sir Francis Walsingham, spymaster for Queen Elizabeth I, managed to get a letter through from Spain that confirmed the building of a vast naval armada to support an invasion of England. Standen also showed that invasion was still some months off so the British had the time to move expeditiously to bolster their own naval defenses. The near-total destruction of the Armada in 1588 ended the anti-Protestant crusade of King Philip II of Spain and was the true foundation of British naval supremacy four centuries.
Other secret documents merely forestall the inevitable from happening as soon as it might have, but that delay can have profound and often tragic consequences. Among the more interesting illustrations is a page from the code book used by Washington society darling and Confederate spy Rose Greenhow when she relayed critical Union troop movements across the Potomac to Rebel forces. Her dispatches are credited with being key to the total rout of Union forces at the opening Battle of Bull Run and with other tactical successes. And while the Confederacy probably had little chance of ultimate victory the prolongation cost us more American lives than all our other wars combined.
Some classified papers are interesting footnotes to history. Included in the book is the telegram that Assistant Navy Secretary Theodore Roosevelt (his boss was out of town) sent to Adm. George Dewey to set the U.S. Asiatic Fleet on a war footing, thereby giving him a head start in the still undeclared Spanish-American War. Roosevelt benefited from that bit of audacity too, as history records.
Mr. Allen makes the point that the provenance of these documents often is more important than the source. Early in 1917, British code breakers had a problem: how to make public a telegram they had deciphered from German Foreign Minister Arthur Zimmerman to the Mexican government promising them they could reclaim, “the lost territory” of Texas, New Mexico and Arizona, if they would side with the Kaiser in the impending war with the United States.
The trouble was the British had obtained the telegraph by spying on American telegraph traffic; also they did not want the Germans to know their ciphers had been penetrated. By using clever rerouting and leaking, the inflammatory message was made public by American journalists and became “eloquent evidence” for President Woodrow Wilson that Germany meant to draw the U.S. into the war. A month later, it was.
Many of the documents on display in this book have a more immediate bite. One such is the letter in 2000 that purportedly arranged the sale of uranium to Iraq from Niger. That questionable piece of paper was the center of the ill-starred Scooter Libby perjury trial over whether sanctions were taken against that pair of questionable civil servants Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson whose consciences, it seems, trumped their oaths.
Traitors galore are on display too from Benedict Arnold to yesterday’s turncoat spies for the Soviets Robert Hanssen of the FBI and Aldrich H. Ames of the CIA.
The last declassified document in the book is one to ponder for its implications. It is the President’s Daily Briefing received by George W. Bush on Aug. 8, 2001, just 36 days before the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. The title of the PDB is, “Bin Ladin Determined to Strike in U.S.” In the politicized uproar that followed those attacks, this PDB was judged “old reporting” and Mr. Bush took no action after reading it.
Judge for yourself and enjoy the rest of the book.
— Among James Srodes’ recent books is “Allen Dulles, Master of Spies.”
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