http://www.frontpagemag.com/2014/paul-schnee/george-washingtons-spies-how-they-saved-the-american-revolution/print/
“Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail” declared Henry L. Stimson when, as Secretary of State in 1929, he promptly closed the cryptanalysis department of the United States.
Had George Washington been inhibited by such diplomatic niceties, it is likely he would have lost the revolutionary war. This possibility was described by Brian Kilmeade, who cohosts Fox News Channel’s morning show Fox & Friends, when he spoke about his new book “George Washington’s Secret Six-The Spy Ring that Saved the American Revolution” at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Wednesday Morning Club at the Beverly Hills Hotel on January 16th.
During a riveting presentation, Kilmeade described the activities of Washington’s group of disparate patriots who frequently risked certain death over many years in order to secure victory against Great Britain, the world’s only real superpower at the time. Almost nothing was known of them or their activities until a horde of letters was discovered in 1929 and handed over to Long Island’s premier historian, Morton Pennypacker, for study and analysis.
The letters revealed the identities of the Culper Spy Ring. It included Robert Townsend, a Quaker merchant and reporter; Austin Roe, a tavern keeper; Caleb Brewster, a longshoreman who ferried messages between Connecticut and New York; Abraham Woodhull, a Long Island bachelor with business and family reasons for traveling to Manhattan; James Rivington, the owner of a swanky coffeehouse and print shop where high-ranking British Officers congregated to gossip about secret plans and operations; and Agent 355, a woman whose identity is still unknown but who used her charm to coax information out of British officers.