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Two hundred and fifty years after the Declaration of Independence, we speak of the founders with a reverence that can flatten them into marble—preordained, wise, and magnificent. But George Washington is a far more interesting figure than the monument allows. He was, by most accounts, a mediocre battlefield general. He lost more engagements than he won. He was outmaneuvered at Long Island and badly beaten at Brandywine, and lost Philadelphia in the aftermath. As president, of course, he was transformative, setting precedents for executive restraint and the peaceful transfer of power that still define the office.
But neither the flawed general nor the great president is the Washington I find most admirable on this anniversary. The Washington who most deserves our attention is the one history has most neglected: the spymaster. And without that Washington, there is no nation to celebrate.
This Founders & Fellows essay is part of a series in which Hoover scholars explore the people, ideas, and debates that brought America to life.
Winning the Revolutionary War seems inevitable now, but it was nearly impossible then. Washington’s Continental Army was undertrained, undersupplied, and perpetually on the edge of dissolution. Scraped together from the colonies, this ragtag band of patriots faced a seasoned British Army with Hessian auxiliaries and the most powerful navy in the world. On any conventional military ledger, the American cause was a longshot at best.
Washington’s great insight, arrived at partly through the pain of his own battlefield failures, was that he could never win by outfighting the British. But he could win by out-knowing them. Information, he understood earlier and more systematically than most commanders of his era, was a weapon. And wielding it required building something that had never existed in the American colonies: a professional intelligence network.
The contrast between Washington the battlefield commander and Washington the intelligence architect is striking. As a general, he could be reactive and slow. As a spymaster, he was methodical, patient, clever, and relentlessly proactive.
He directed his intelligence chief, Major Benjamin Tallmadge, to recruit agents behind British lines and establish communication chains using cover identities and coded messages. His operations included developing new spy technology—invisible ink, a two-chemical “sympathetic stain” developed by the physician and chemist James Jay—to protect intelligence that might be intercepted. Washington ran double agents, feeding false information to British commanders while extracting their secrets. And he developed verification in intelligence analysis, running multiple independent sources against one another before acting on any single report, because he knew that raw intelligence was unreliable and that self-interest shapes what informants say.
The now-famous Culper spy ring, which operated inside occupied New York for five years, was pivotal to tracking British troop movements and unmasking Benedict Arnold’s treachery. It was less a romantic adventure than a disciplined bureaucratic achievement.
Nearly two centuries before our modern “top secret” classification system, Washington developed procedures including code numbers to protect identities (his own was 711) and compartmentalized knowledge so that the exposure of one agent could not unravel the rest. Washington himself did not know the true names of many of his own spies—and it worked. We now know the core members: Benjamin Tallmadge, Abraham Woodhull, Robert Townsend, Caleb Brewster, Austin Roe, and Anna Strong. But Townsend’s identity as the ring’s chief Manhattan source wasn’t revealed until 1930, through handwriting analysis on letters found in his family home decades after his death. Others, including a mysterious figure known only as “John Cork,” as well as couriers and informants who passed through the network, remain unidentified to this day. No complete full roster is known to have survived, and historians have found no evidence to believe that one ever existed. That was the point.
Washington’s victory at Yorktown was the decisive final battle of the war, and it hinged on a masterpiece of intelligence deception. To trap Lord Charles Cornwallis there, Washington needed to find a way to keep British General Henry Clinton and his reinforcements frozen in New York. So, Washington devised an elaborate scheme to make it appear that American forces were threatening New York while they were secretly marching in the opposite direction.
He planted false dispatches. He had a known British spy interrogated about landing beaches on Staten Island, knowing the disinformation would travel straight back to Clinton. He staged troop movements toward Manhattan. And in perhaps the most delicious detail in the entire history of American espionage, he ordered the construction of a large field bakery—a sixty-five-foot shed housing massive French bread ovens—in Chatham, New Jersey, intended to be visible to British observers. Clinton’s intelligence network duly reported the ovens. No army builds that kind of semi-permanent baking infrastructure unless it plans to stay. Clinton concluded an attack on New York was imminent and stayed put.
Washington later wrote that he had made “a deceptive provision of Ovens, Forage, and Boats” to misguide Clinton, and that he had kept even his own senior officers in the dark about their true destination so the secret could not leak.
Cornwallis, abandoned and surrounded at Yorktown, surrendered his forces in October 1781. French bread, or rather the elaborate pretense of it, may have done as much to secure American independence as any battle ever fought.
There is something revealing, too, in how Washington ran his networks. He was meticulous about protecting his agents, people who risked the gallows. He funded operations quietly, through accounts that left minimal paper trails, and maintained operational security at a time when loose talk was endemic. The same discipline that made him such a consequential president—the studied self-control, the awareness that how he acted would set precedents for those who came after—was present in his intelligence work a decade earlier. The man who presided over the Constitutional Convention with such careful authority was the man who had spent years quietly directing handlers, assets, and dead drops across occupied New York.
The other founders were extraordinary in more visible ways. Hamilton’s financial architecture gave the new republic its economic foundation. Madison’s constitutional engineering established an enduring governing framework. They operated largely in the light of history: arguing in pamphlets, debating in assemblies, writing letters that survived. But much of Washington’s achievements came in the shadows, in secret dealings that, by design, are mostly lost to history.
What fragments survive reveal that Washington was a singular genius who saw, and seized, his greatest asymmetric advantage against a far more powerful foe: intelligence gathered by ordinary people who were surrounded by an occupying army and risked everything for the cause.
George Washington is the father of our nation, a victorious general, and our first president. But the title that best explains why we are celebrating 250 years of American independence is spymaster in chief.
Amy Zegart is the Morris Arnold and Nona Jean Cox Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and leads Hoover’s Technology Policy Accelerator and Robert and Marion Oster National Security Affairs Fellows Program. The author of Spies Lies, & Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence (Princeton University Press, 2022), she is also an associate director and senior fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI; a senior fellow at the Freeman Spogli Institute; and professor of political science, by courtesy, at Stanford University.