Spies Who Helped Win Our Independence
George Washington’s Secret Six: The Spies Who Saved America, by Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger, New York: Sentinel, 2014, 236 pages, softcover. To order the book, see page 1.
Six spies who were enlisted in the “Culper” spy ring as desired by George Washington — a Quaker merchant, a tavern keeper, a longshoreman, a Long Island bachelor, a coffeehouse owner, and a mysterious woman — may have saved the infant United States’ war for independence from the mighty British Empire.
And Washington did not even know all their names, the operation was such a well-kept secret. In fact, one of the six — the woman known simply as Agent 355 — is still not known, while another member of the ring’s identity was not discovered until 1929. Benjamin Tallmadge formed what was known as the Culper Ring, and it included a man who ran both a coffeehouse and a loyalist newspaper (James Rivington). Rivington’s intelligence, gathered in interviews with British officers, was critical to the winning of the Battle of Yorktown.
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