George Washington's Conspiracy Tactics

During the Revolutionary war General George Washington would use Spies, and surveillance to scout and maneuver the continental army around the British forces as well as pay people off and mislead the British to gain the advantage. There are many instances where Washington’s use of the espionage tactics helped them gain the upper hand. After the war Washington would become obviously become president where he would later ask congress to fund Intelligence Operations. Eventually in the following in July of 1790 congress funded the “Secret Service” which gave about 40,000 for the purposes Washington asked for. By 1793 the fund would reach 1 million, or more than 10% of the United States budget.
Then after that Washington left it seems that the executive …show more content…
On the eve of the First World War, by contrast, the intelligence system of the United States was more backward than that of any major power”(Andrews pg.28) However, this quote is followed by “Most Americans, however, preferred it that way…” followed by saying “Americans had believed that their country was guided by uniquely high ethical principals. They regarded peacetime espionage, if they thought all, as corrupt outgrowths of Old World diplomacy, alien to the open and upright American way.”(Andrews pg.28) basically saying that the peacetime intelligence was not an ethical way to carry out gathering information from other countries. After the World Wars and the Cold Wars you see where the changes were made. In 1914 Wilson was originally not one for the people who were for using the intelligence ideals, however by the end of it he realized that the importance of intelligence, which was extremely important. So much of the disconnect came from the simple fact that we did not like peacetime espionage, we did not look at is as an ethical form of information gathering as stated earlier. So finally the first World War ends and World War Two begins. The attack that brought America into the Second World War that was Pear Harbor. Pearl Harbor is considered one of the biggest intelligence blunders ever in United States history, besides that of 9/11 both with very similar characteristics. First of all there was information pointing out what was going to happen, however we did not believe them because it was not the obvious choice. Also there were signals that it was coming however we did not do a good job sharing the information therefor we did have a gap we could not fill that would later aid the attack by the