The Secret War for the Union: The Untold Story of Military Intelligence in the Civil War

Most histories of the Civil War have largely ignored the issue of military intelligence. At the end of the war, most of the intelligence records disappeared, remaining hidden for over a century. This is the first book to examine the impact of intelligence on the Civil War, providing a new perspective on this period in history.

The former chief intelligence reporter for the National Security Agency brings his professional expertise to bear in this detailed analysis, which makes a notable contribution to Civil War literature as the first major study to present the war's campaigns from an intelligence perspective. Focusing on intelligence work in the eastern theater, 1861-1863, Fishel plays down the role of individual agents like James Longstreet's famous "scout," Henry Harrison, concentrating instead on the increasingly sophisticated development of intelligence systems by both sides. Fishel treats intelligence as a continuum, one that in the Civil War included cavalry reconnaissance and the systematic interrogation of prisoners and deserters, as well as the use of local sympathizers to observe and report on enemy forces. Above all, he shows, intelligence required record-keeping?the compilation and cross-checking of fragments of information furnished by a broad variety of sources. Here, the bureaucratized Union army had an advantage over its more casual Confederate counterpart. But if the South was inferior in the collection and interpretation of intelligence, it possessed in Lee a commander gifted in applying the information he did possess. The result, as Fishel shows in this expertly written, organized and researched work, was a rough balance of forces in the intelligence war, a balance that contributed to the bloody, head-down fighting as both sides sought to gain on the battlefield an advantage unobtainable in the war's more subtle areas.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

A detailed study based on the previously forgotten files of the army's Civil Warera Bureau of Military Information, buried in a storage room until 1959 when they were found by the author in Washington's National Archives. Fishel, a career intelligence officer at the National Security Agency, dispels the many romantic legends of superior spying by the Confederates as mostly fiction; he concludes that the North, after a poor start, became more adept than the South. He carefully describes the spying that helped shape the campaigns of the Army of the Potomac from Bull Run in 1861 through the Peninsula, Chancellorsville, Fredericksburg, Antietam, Gettysburg, and on to Grant's great 1864 Virginia campaign. Fishel finds much fault with George McClellan, commander of the Army of the Potomac in 1862, and his adviser, the famous detective Allan Pinkerton, hinting at a conspiracy to inflate the estimates of the numbers of enemy soldiers to justify McClellan's inaction and his pleas for more troops. Civil War intelligence is depicted here as a constant cat- and-mouse search for the enemy. Information was obtained by the Bureau, beginning in 1863, in a variety of ways: from cavalry scouts, balloons, telescopes, and spies, somewhat superseding Pinkerton's method of interrogating prisoners, deserters, runaway slaves, and civilian refugees, who were sometimes Confederate ``plants.'' Robert E. Lee and Stonewall Jackson, Fishel says, were masters at fooling the enemy, deftly using misinformation, feints, sudden disappearances, and surprise attacks. The North's greatest intelligence feat, according to the author, was tracking Lee's 150- mile march into Pennsylvania and taking the high ground at Gettysburg, negating the widespread opinion that the two armies met there by chance. Fishel's prodigious, breakthrough research provides a treasure trove for historians to ponder and constitutes a real addition to Civil War history. The dense prose, however, makes one long for the graceful style of a Catton, a Foote, or a McPherson. (24 maps) -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

At the start of the Civil War, neither the Union nor the Confederate armies had any formal military intelligence-gathering activities. Fishel, an intelligence officer for over 30 years at the National Security Agency, studies the different ways that the Army of Virginia and the Army of the Potomac looked for information about each other before every battle. He begins with the first Battle at Bull Run and takes the reader through the Battle of Gettysburg. The South depended almost entirely on cavalry, while the North utilized spies, aerial observation, captured soldiers, the Pinkerton Group, and Union sympathizers living in the South. The author takes each battle in succession and describes the military information available to each army, how it was obtained, how it was utilized, and how it affected the outcome of the battle. In the epilog he summarizes the remainder of the battles fought in Virginia but not in the same detail as the earlier battles. Very detailed and well written, this book gives an excellent overview of the use of military intelligence in the Civil War. Recommended for all Civil War collections.
-?W. Walter Wicker, Louisiana Tech Univ., Ruston
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Fishel has filled what must be one of the few remaining niches for original, significant Civil War scholarship. His achievement rectifies what historian Stephen Sears describes in the foreword as a "sad array" of titles about the intelligence aspects of the war, sad because they rely on adventure-story memoirs of spies and detectives rather than on the only thing that matters about intelligence: what commanders decided to do with it. Fishel delves into the myriad sources of information about the enemy that a general would, or should, collect and interpret. His story principally covers the annals of the Army of the Potomac from First Bull Run to Gettysburg. As buffs have memorized, not just bad but imaginary intelligence of huge Confederate numbers induced McClellan's caution, and Fishel analyzes how the general and detective Pinkerton inflated estimates. From those ad hoc and error-prone beginnings, the spy service became more systematic under Hooker, punctuated by one agent's intrepid reconnaissance behind Lee's lines, on the strength of which Hooker initiated the Chancellorsville campaign. Though a careful assembly of minutiae, Fishel's account never sinks beneath the mass of facts; his insistence on appraising how intelligence caused action or idling will surely capture the legions of buffs--and dent complacent beliefs that the Civil War's military campaigns hold no room for new interpretations. An impressive landmark. Gilbert Taylor