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CHAPTER 3  NINETEENTHCENTURY INTELLIGENCE

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NEW TECHNOLOGY,

NEW INTELLIGENCE

The rapid pace of technological progress that followed from the

Industrial Revolution transformed the world. This was especially

the case in the field of communications, in which technological

advances changed the nature of spying.

AGE OF THE RAILWAY

The first passenger rail system was developed in Britain

in the 1820s, and railways quickly spread around the globe.

The steam train enabled secret agents to travel virtually

unnoticed to wherever they were needed in a matter of

hours, or, at most, a couple of days. Spies also found it

advantageous to catalog the movements of trains, especially

during wartime. Armies now traveled to the battlefield by

train, and astute observers—perhaps camouflaged as a lady

painter near the railroad—could work out the numbers of

soldiers being transported to the front and where that likely

destination would be.

One byproduct of this transport revolution was the

emergence of the foreign correspondent—a journalist

sent to report from hot spots around the world, most usually

wars or other violent struggles. Like the spy, the foreign

correspondent was looking for information, and it was not

long before spies were using the cover of journalism to go

about their covert activities.

INVENTION OF THE TELEGRAPH

The other great breakthrough in communications was the

electric telegraph, the first practical examples of which

developed on both sides of the Atlantic in the 1830s.

Left: During the

American Civil War

(1861–1865),

President Abraham

Lincoln traveled the

country in his own

presidential car. The

railroads had been

taken over for the

war effort.

The system invented by Samuel Morse in

the United States became the standard

that others followed, and during the 1840s

thousands of miles of telegraph lines were

laid across America and Europe. During the

Crimean War (1854–1856) undersea cables

were laid in the Black Sea to provide a direct

link between London and the British Army

in the Crimea. A message could be sent in a

few hours rather than the three weeks of normal

postal correspondence.

By the time of the outbreak of the American Civil War

in 1861, a network of rail and telegraph lines spanned

the country, enabling commanders a control over their

forces otherwise impossible. But the telegraph had one

fundamental weakness—the lines could be tapped by

outsiders and its messages read.

President Lincoln was so enamored of the information

provided by the telegraph that a special telegraph office

was installed in the White House, complete with a team of

cryptographers to break coded messages. One of the major

successes of the cryptographers came from their listening in

to private correspondence between a source working for the

Confederate states and another in New York. The decoded