Interpreting national security and intelligence in geographic exploration: Explorers and geographers in America's early republic

Abstract

‘Intelligence’ connotes the collection of information in furtherance of policy and strategic security objectives. Intelligence practitioners tend to look primarily to the histories of battlefield reconnaissance and court intrigue for their profession's discursive precedents. For the Western state, the mastery of territory has also been an important security objective since the Age of Exploration. Specifically, in the American case, territorial expansion and the subduing of new territory long lay at the heart of America's viability as a state. Thus, the intelligence field ought also to recognize geographical exploration as deeply implicated in Western national security discourse and as sharing an epistemological similarity with intelligence gathering. Both intelligence gathering and geographical exploration rely upon ‘Humint’, that is, informants penetrating distant and hidden places and reporting on the features found therein. America's early Republic period offers key examples of this fundamental similarity.

Notes

1 An example of this is in Christopher Andrew, For the President's Eyes Only: Secret Intelligence and the American Presidency from Washington to Bush (London: HarperCollins 1995) pp.6–29, in which the author claims to account for all American intelligence from the Revolution up until America's entry into World War I. That the history of intelligence is completely synonymous with the history of military intelligence is the theme running throughout all the chapters of a post-Cold War volume of essays on intelligence history, Keith Neilson and B.J.C. McKercher (eds.) Go Spy the Land: Military Intelligence in History (Westport, CT: Praeger 1992).

2 See especially Allen Dulles, The Craft of Intelligence (Boulder: Westview 1963) pp.9–28; and William R. Polk, Neighbors and Strangers: The Fundamentals of Foreign Affairs (Chicago and London: University of Chicago 1997) pp.175–99. Sun-Tzu's The Art of War was translated into English in 1910 by Lionel Giles. Numerous published editions of the work exist, and it is also available in full text online.

3 Among the many who employ this evocative description are Roy Godson, ‘Intelligence: An American View’ in K.G. Robertson (ed.) British and American Approaches to Intelligence (London: MacMillan 1987) pp.3–36; Norman Polmar and Thomas B. Allen, The Encyclopedia of Espionage (NY: Gramercy 1997) p.ix. Polk (Neighbors and Strangers, p.175) also cites this common sobriquet, but he disputes that one could more accurately characterize merchant-trade as the second-oldest profession, and he notes that merchant ‘cover’ has been favored by spies from ancient times.

4 An array of definitions spanning legislative documents as well as the writings of former Intelligence Community figures includes the following: ‘National Security Act of 1947’, in Compilation of Intelligence Laws and Related Laws and Executive Orders of Interest to the National Intelligence Community (Washington: Government Printing Office 1998) pp.3–45; Dulles (note 2) p.9; Godson (note 3); and John Bruce Lockhart, ‘Intelligence: A British View’ in Robertson (note 3) pp.37–52.

5 The role of the credible eyewitness in constructing geographic knowledge during the zenith of global exploration in the Renaissance and the Enlightenment periods has been increasingly analyzed by historical geographers and historians of science more generally. See Steven Shapin, A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century England (Chicago: University of Chicago 1994), especially ‘Epistemological Decorum’, pp.193–242, in which he addresses visual observation and direct witness as reliable testimony to truth; Daniel Carey, ‘Compiling Nature's History: Travellers and Travel Narratives in the Early Royal Society’, Annals of Science 54 (1997) pp.269–92; Dorinda Outram, ‘On Being Perseus: New Knowledge, Dislocation, and Enlightenment Exploration’ in David J. Livingstone and Charles Withers (eds.) Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press 1999) pp.281–94, especially p.283; Charles Withers, ‘Reporting, Mapping, Trusting: Making Geographical Knowledge in the Late Seventeenth Century’, Isis 90 (1999) pp.497–521; and Michael Heffernan, ‘“A Dream as Frail as Those of Ancient Time”: The In-credible Geographies of Timbuctoo’, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 19 (2001) pp.203–25, especially p.203.

6 See Clifford Beal, ‘Chronic Underfunding of US HUMINT Plays Role in Intelligence Failure’, Jane's Defence Weekly, 11 September 2001, <http://www.janes.com/security/international_security/news/jdw/jdw010911_1_n.shtml>; Saxby Chambliss ‘We Have Not Correctly Framed the Debate on Intelligence Reform’, Parameters (2005) pp.5–13; and Laurence Commission on the Intelligence Capabilities of the United States Regarding Weapons of Mass Destruction, Report to the President (Washington, DC, 31 March 2005).

7 On the geographical ramifications of the rise of the territorial state, see John Agnew, ‘The Territorial Trap: The Geographical Assumptions of International Relations Theory’, Review of International Political Economy 1/1 (1994) pp.53–80. The ‘trap’ of the territorial state is a threefold set of rationales: first, that the state's territory is the container for a ‘nation’; second, that everything within the territory is ‘domestic’ and everything external is ‘international’; and, third, that the state authority legitimately ‘represents’ whatever lies within the boundaries of the territory.

8 Of course, tactical intelligence that is focused upon battlespace necessities remains an important part of today's overall ‘intelligence apparatus’. And such intelligence relies quite explicitly on geographic information and technologies. But conducting intelligence operations on a foundation of geographic technologies is one thing; acknowledging the field of geography as one source of the intelligence profession's guiding epistemology is quite another. It is to pervasive scarcity of the latter in today's intelligence field that I direct this essay.

9 Jerry Weinberger (ed.) Francis Bacon's New Atlantis and the Great Instauration (Arlington Heights, IL: H. Davidson 1989) p.87. Relatedly, see John Michael Archer, ‘Surveillance and Enlightenment in Bacon's New Atlantis’, Assays 6 (1991) pp.111–27. Archer argues that Bacon's New Atlantis reinforced the assumption that direct observation of distant lands and peoples could produce knowledge that would lead to a variety of social improvements.

10 It is worth noting that Thomas Jefferson, under whom American ‘Humint’ began in earnest with the Lewis and Clark Expedition, regarded Frances Bacon as one among ‘my trinity of the three greatest men the world has ever produced’, along with John Locke and Isaac Newton. Quoted in Charles A. Miller, Jefferson and Nature: An Interpretation (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins 1988) p.3.

11 See John Melish, A Military and Topographical Atlas of the United States, Including British Possessions and Florida (Philadelphia: G. Palmer 1813).

12 Ibid. p.4.

13 Ibid. p.5.

14 John Melish, Geographical Intelligence (Philadelphia: Melish 1818).

15 Ibid. p.3.

16 Ibid. p.4.

17 Letter from George Rogers Clark to Thomas Jefferson, 12 December 1802; reprinted in Donald Jackson (ed.), Letters of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, with Related Documents, 1783–1854, Volume 1 (Urbana: University of Illinois 1978) pp.7–8.

18 Letter from Carlos Martinez de Yrujo to Pedro Cevallaos, 21 December 1802 and Spanish decree 19 February 1803; reprinted in ibid. pp.4–6.

19 See Stephen F. Knott, ‘Thomas Jefferson's Clandestine Foreign Policy’, International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence 4/3 (1990) pp.325–55, especially pp.330–3; and Stephen E. Ambrose, Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson, and the Opening of the American West (NY: Simon and Schuster 1996) p.71. It seems that the geographer Jedidiah Morse was susceptible to the rumors of foreign penetration and subversion of the young Republic, especially by France; and throughout the 1790s he not only was wildly suspicious of Jefferson of himself serving as an agent of France, but he also published a sermon wherein he warned of the ‘present danger’ of European infiltration of the new Republic to erode its moral fabric and especially to attack what Morse saw as its religious foundation. See Robert Lawson-Peebles, Landscape and Written Expression in Revolutionary America: The World Turned Upside Down (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1988) pp.69–70. This bizarre episode in Morse's career is also mentioned in John Rennie Short, ‘A New Mode of Thinking: Creating a National Geography in the Early Republic’ in Surveying the Record: North American Scientific Exploration to 1930 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society 1999) pp.19–50, see especially pp.38–9.

20 Outram (note 5) p.281.

21 David Livingstone, The Geographical Tradition: Episodes in the History of a Contested Enterprise (Oxford: Blackwell 1992) pp.52–101; and Withers (note 5).

22 The official name of the expedition, also referred to in account titles as the ‘Expedition of Captains Lewis and Clark’, offers a subtle reminder that it was a military venture, a corps of officers and enlisted men, in which goals of military and geopolitical reconnaissance were combined with aspirations for scientific ‘discovery’.

23 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Lost World of Thomas Jefferson (Chicago/London: University of Chicago Press 1948 [1993 edition]) pp.9–26.

24 Peale's museum displayed natural specimens collected by explorers and naturalists from Europe and North America alike. Its original location within Independence Hall implied a connection between the new American republic and New World nature itself, and suggested that patriotism could be expressed through attention to American natural history.

25 John Logan Allen, Lewis and Clark and the Image of the American Northwest (New York: Dover 1975) p.65; Albert Furtwangler, Acts of Discovery: Visions of America in the Lewis and Clark Journals (Urbana, IL/Chicago: University of Illinois Press 1993) p.79; and Ambrose (note 19) p.69.

26 Joseph W. Ernst, With Compass and Chain: Federal Land Surveyors of the Old Northwest (New York: Arno 1979).

27 Peter S. Onuf, ‘Liberty, Development, and Union: Visions of the West in the 1780s’, William and Mary Quarterly 43/2 (1986) pp.179–213, at p.179.

28 Allen (note 25) p.64.

29 Quoted in Boorstin (note 23) p.24.

30 Lewis's mentoring and training by Jefferson is well documented. Furtwangler (note 25) pp.75–84, provides an insightful summary. Additionally, James P. Ronda, Lewis and Clark Among the Indians (Lincoln, NE/London: University of Nebraska 1984) pp.1–8, discusses these and other aspects of Lewis's preparation, emphasizing his preparations relative to native groups that the Expedition might encounter.

31 Many of these instructions appear or are discussed in letters contained in Jackson (note 17), especially Jefferson to Benjamin Smith Barton (p.16), Jefferson to Benjamin Rush (p.18), Jefferson to Robert Patterson (p.21), Andrew Ellicott to Jefferson (p.23), Robert Patterson to Jefferson (p.28), Albert Gallatin to Jefferson (p.32), Benjamin Rush's Rules of Health (p.54), and Jefferson to Lewis 30 April 1803 and 16 May 1803 (pp.44 and 49).

32 Outram (note 5) pp.282–3. Outram's discussion points to the journals of Cook and Humboldt as demonstrative of the Enlightenment's emphasis upon the written travel narrative, but overlooks the additional and contemporaneous example of Lewis and Clark.

33 Arlen J. Large, ‘Lewis and Clark Under Cover (Secrecy involving the Expedition – a cipher-text letter)’, We Proceeded On 15/3 (1989) pp.12–21, at p.13.

34 Knott (note 19) clearly evaluates Lewis and Clark's accomplishments in the context of clandestine state strategic policies in Jefferson's Administration.

35 Allen (note 25) pp.354–5 notes Lewis's disappointment when he failed to prove this.

36 Ronda (note 30) pp.10–11.

37 Native American historians maintain that Native American attitudes towards Sacagawea remain ambivalent today, due to impressions that she was a ‘defector’, in the sense of spying to the detriment of her own people. See Irving W. Anderson, ‘Myths Cloud True Role of “Sacagawea” in White Conquest of the West’, We Proceeded On 19/4 (1993) pp.28–9.

38 Lewis to Jefferson, 28 December 1803, in Jackson (note 17). See also Ronda (note 30) p.11.

39 These and other relevant documents may be accessed through the Federation of American Scientists Intelligence Resource Program, at <http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/dcid.htm>.

40 Large (note 33) and Jackson (ed.) (note 17) both quote this final letter from Jefferson to Lewis.

41 I have found allusions in the literature on explorers such as Stephen Long, William Dunbar, and Benjamin Bonneville, as well as on ‘mountain men’ in general. See Mrs. Dunbar Rowland (ed.) Life, Letters, and Papers of William Dunbar, of Elgin, Morayshire, Scotland, and Natchez, Mississippi: Pioneer Scientist of the United States (Jackson, MS: Mississippi Historical Society 1930); William H. Goetzmann, ‘The Mountain Man as Jacksonian Man’, American Quarterly 15/3 (1963) pp.402–15; Lucile M. Kane (ed.) The Northern Expeditions of Stephen H. Long: The Journals of 1817 and 1823 with Related Documents (Minneapolis, MN: Minnesota Historical Society 1978); and Roger L. Nichols and Patrick L. Halley, Stephen Long and American Frontier Exploration (Newark, NJ: University of Delaware 1980). In addition, the use of native Americans as intelligence agents is implied in G. Malcolm Lewis's work on Amerindian contributions to Euro-American mapmaking: G. Malcolm Lewis, ‘Misinterpretation of Amerindian Information as a Source of Error on Euro-American Maps’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers 77/4 (1987) pp.542–63.

42 Pike's own journals relate the extent to which he regarded his mission as supporting US Government strategic goals. For a recent edition see Stephen H. Hart and Archer B. Hulbert (eds.) The Southwestern Journals of Zebulon Pike, 1806–1807 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico 2005).

43 Edgeley W. Todd (ed.) The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A., in the Rocky Mountains and the Far West: Digested from His Journal by Washington Irving (Norman, OK/London: University of Oklahoma Press 1986) Appendix A, pp.380–1.