Diversity in MI - Fort Huachuca - U.S. Army

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Women in Military IntelligenceFrom the time of the intrepid RevolutionaryWar spy Lydia Darragh, to Lt. Gen.Claudia Kennedy, Assistant Chief of Staff forIntelligence at the Pentagon in 1997 and thefirst female MI officer to achieve the rank ofgeneral, women have played a key role in theintelligence art. They have been assigned tointelligence duties since 1943 when theWomen’s Army Corps was established. Whenthe WACs were disestablished in 1976, womenbecame an undifferentiated part of the Army.MI was the first to begin recruiting women andgiving them operational training. The NationalSecurity Agency enlisted its first female in1971. By 1973 women were being assigned toMI’s remote operational sites. In 1978 the MIBranch had 415 female officers assigned, morethan 10 percent of their total, a milestone therest of the Army would not reach for 10 moreyears. In 1984 the Intelligence School atHuachuca conducted a study on the role offemale soldiers in MI. The study’s goal was to“maximize the role of women while at the sametime assuring career opportunities and assignmentvariety for both males and females.” In1988, the MI Corps was recommending openingsome 400 positions in tactical, forwarddeployedCEWI units to women. This resultedin the opening to women of hundreds of newpositions in tactical, forward-deployed MIunits.Here are some of the women that have firmlyestablished themselves in the pantheon ofAmerican military intelligence. Lydia Darragh,an Irish girl from Dublin who married a Philadelphiaschool teacher, would have to beconsidered the first woman to have contributedto the cause of U.S. Army intelligence. Accordingto Darragh family history, it wasduring the Revolutionary War that she used herunusual vantage point, her home across thestreet from the headquarters of the Britishcommander Sir William Howe, to observeheightened activity or overhear careless talk bythe British soldiery. Howe appropriated somerooms in the Darragh house for his conferenceroom and personal use, giving Darragh someunusual opportunities to eavesdrop. On at leastone occasion when her normal reportingchannels were not available, she personallytraveled through the enemy lines to deliver herreport to General George Washington. On otheroccasions she used her 14-year-old son as acourier.The Civil War saw a number of women workingdiligently and sometimes seductively forboth sides. Notable for their espionage amongthe southern belles were Belle Boyd and RoseGreenhow. Boyd gave good information toGeneral Stonewall Jackson and earned histhanks after the battle at Front Royal, Virginia,when he wrote to her citing “the immenseservice that you have rendered your countrytoday.” Greenhow was a Washington, D.C.,socialite at whose parties the highly placedstrategists gathered. The first Confederatevictory of the war at Manassas was in part madepossible by the coded message she sent toGeneral Beauregard reporting the movement ofGeneral McDowell’s army. Greenhow wasnabbed by Allen Pinkerton, the detective turnedUnion counterintelligence chief, and jailed.Boyd, too, was discovered and sentenced fortreason.The Union had its own roster of femaleagents and among them no one was moresuccessful than Elizabeth Van Lew. Despitebeing born in Richmond in 1818, her sympathieslie in the north where she was educated.Her father was originally from Long Island andher mother from Philadelphia. It was in thatlatter city, where her maternal grandfather wasmayor, that she received her education. Shereturned to Richmond after college a determinedabolitionist and a ready agent of northernpolitics. When her father died, she freed thefamily’s nine retainers and purchased theirrelatives so that she could free them as well. Asearly as 1859 she was sending reports toWashington about southern dispositions. Herring was known as the Richmond Undergroundand it had another important partner, SamuelRuth, a superintendant of the Richmond,Fredericksburg and Potomac Railroad, animportant job for an intelligencer as the Confed-
erates were dependent upon the railroad todeploy and concentrate their forces. We getonly shadowy glimpses of Van Lew’s operationsbecause she asked for and got all therecords pertaining to the Richmond Undergroundfrom the War Department after the war.Her destruction of the records concerning herspying activities was intended to protect membersof her network from recriminations followingthe fighting, but it leaves little for the pagesof history. But the documentation that hassurvived shows Van Lew warning Maj. Gen.Benjamin Butler that northern prisoners of warhad been removed from the capitol and thatnumber of troops defending Richmond hadbeen decreased. Her organization retrieved thebody of Union Col. Ulric Dahlgren from anunmarked grave and restored it to his family inthe north. As General Ulysses S. Grant steppedup the pressure on Confederate forces in thefinal months of the war, Van Lew’s intelligencecame to have a critical significance. Brig. Gen.George H. Sharpe, Grant’s chief intelligenceofficer, said after the war, “The greater portion[of our intelligence of 1864-64] in its collectionand good measure its transmission, we owed tothe intelligence and devotion of Miss VanLew.” [Corson, William R., The Armies ofIgnorance: The Rise of the American IntelligenceEmpire, Dial Press, New York, 1977, p.573.]A former slave, Harriet Tubman was an abolitionistwho is best known for her heroic efforts smuggling runawayslaves northward on what came to be known as the undergroundrailroad. When the Civil War started, her intricateknowledge of the terrain would be an asset to the Unionforces. She was a spy and scout for the U.S. Army in SouthCarolina. She organized a network of recently freed blackslaves into her own intelligence service and she was thus ableto provide federal commanders with tactical information onConfederate activities. On at least one occasion she personallyguided a Union raiding party up the Combahee River, usingher knowledge of the terrain to avoid detection by Confederatetroops.Pauline Cushman was a 30-year old actress in 1863when she was recruited by General William Rosencrans andhis chief of Army police William Truesdail to travel behindenemy lines to gather information on rebel forces. She wascaptured with maps and stolen documents in her possession.She escaped, was recaptured and sentenced to be hung atShelbysville. She was left behind, however, in the Confederateretreat. Future president James Garfield made heracquaintance in Nashville and informed President Lincoln ofher exploits. For her service, Lincoln granted her a commissionas a major and she toured theaters wearing her uniformand reciting her adventures to appreciative audiences. She andher third husband, Jeremiah Fryer ran a hotel and livery stablein Casa Grande, Arizona, in 1879 and later moved toFlorence. She returned to San Francisco in 1890 and diedthere three years later.The plethora of female spies during the Civil Warmay simply be due to their aptitude for the work and acommitment to the cause. An officer who did a good deal ofthinking about the art of espionage in the years following thewar, Arthur L. Wagner, taught at Leavenworth’s Infantry andCavalry School, and wrote a book on intelligence. Hethought that, “Women are often the best of spies.” but hewarned, “their means of gaining information is generally indirect proportion to their lack of character, and accordinglyproportionate to their lack of credibility.” Two of the moreincredible personal histories follow.Mary E. Bowser was a slave who lived and workedon the John Van Lew plantation outside Richmond, Virginia.Along with the other family slaves, she was freed in 1851when John Van Lew died and his daughter and inheritor,Elizabeth, granted them their freedom. After receiving aneducation in Philadelphia, Bowser returned to Richmond tobecome part of the intelligence organization run by ElizabethVan Lew. The story goes that Mary Bowser was planted inthe home of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy,as a servant. There she was in a good position tooverhear and report on private conversations. The informationshe passed along to Van Lew was said to be of inestimableworth to General Grant and the Union cause. A singleparagraph in a 1912 book on the Civil War is the onlymention of Bowser’s role. To date, no documentated sourcesverify Bowser’s role in the Van Lew ring and it has beencalled a historical invention by historian Eric C. Fishel.Sarah Emma Edmonds was a secret agent for theUnion. Disguised as a man named Frank Thompson, thisCanadian-born women enlisted as a private for service in theCivil War. First serving as a nurse, she volunteered as a spyfor McClellan, according to her bestselling book, Nurse andSpy in the Union Army, completing at least eleven successfuland daring missions into the heart of the Confederacy. Onsome occasions, skin dyed and bewigged, she adopted thedisguise of a Negro laborer. Most historians consider herstory incredulous and find little to corroborate her selfglorifyingchronicle of her transexual and biracial adventures.Nevertheless, she was inducted into the MI Hall of Fame.Contributions of a more substantial nature byAmerican women to the cause of military intelligence wouldcontinue throughout the 20th century, especially in the area ofthe new science of cryptology. Genevieve Hitt was the wifeof Parker Hitt, the U.S. Army’s pioneer in cryptology. Shestudied along with her husband to master the work of codebreaking,and during World War I, she operated the coderoom at Fort Sam Houston in San Antonio, Texas. By thetime of World War II, Elizabeth Friedman, the wife ofcryptology giant William F. Friedman, picked up the mantleof female code-breaking. Along with her husband, she hadtaught cryptology to U.S. Army officers during the last war.She colloborated with her husband on solving difficult codes
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Diversity in MI - Fort Huachuca - U.S. Army

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