ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1997, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, January 7, 1997 TAG: 9701070047
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C-4 EDITION: NEW RIVER VALLEY
DATELINE: ARLINGTON
SOURCE: ANNE GEARAN ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER
UNION SPIES HAVE NOTHING to be ashamed of, a Civil War author asserts in his new book.
The Northern victory in the Civil War owed nothing to its spies, who bumbled or swooned in the face of crafty Southern sympathizers. Or so the conventional tale of the war has been written for more than a century.
But a Virginia author claims the Union fielded better spies and gathered better information about the enemy than scholars have yet acknowledged. Better, even, than the much-admired Confederates.
``The explanation for why the world believes the Confederates had the advantage is founded on myth,'' author Edwin C. Fishel said in an interview in his Arlington home.
His book, ``The Secret War for the Union,'' was published recently by Houghton Mifflin. The book chronicles Union spying in Virginia, Pennsylvania and Maryland during 1861-1863.
He concludes the North did a better job of deciphering enemy signals, scouting movements, interrogating prisoners and other intelligence operations. The Confederates performed better only in cavalry reconnaissance, Fishel writes.
``I think that's probably a conclusion most people would not anticipate,'' said Gary Gallagher, a Civil War historian at Pennsylvania State University who agrees with Fishel.
``Historians have generally concluded that the side fighting on its home ground would have better information about the enemy,'' Gallagher said.
Even with heavy scholarly and popular interest in the Civil War, intelligence remains a largely unexamined facet, Fishel and Gallagher said.
Scholars were hobbled by the loss of nearly all Confederate intelligence records and the scattered state of surviving Northern records.
Fishel's research casts a different light on several of the Civil War's most important battles, among them Gettysburg, Antietam and Chancellorsville.
The book calls Union Gen. Joseph Hooker's 55-mile unchallenged march to the rear of Lee's army at Chancellorsville a previously unexplained intelligence coup.
Knowing the Confederates had cracked their flag code, Union signalmen sent a hoax message that lured Lee's cavalry out of position, Fishel writes.
``The intelligence background of any war, when it is revealed, changes history's understanding of what happened,'' said Fishel, himself a veteran of 30 years as an analyst with the National Security Agency and related agencies.
Union Gen. George B. McClellan relied heavily on his intelligence deputy, the security pioneer Allan Pinkerton, Fishel said. But Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee refused to assign any staff officer to full-time intelligence work.
Lee also distrusted information from spies, Fishel said. And Lee never mastered the Union tactic, championed by Pinkerton, of thoroughly interrogating deserters and refugees.
Much of the popular view of the North as inept in intelligence matters was fed by breathless contemporary accounts. Readers in both North and South ate up the stories of valiant Confederate sympathizers risking death to spy behind enemy lines and of Southern beauties wooing Union officers for the secrets they carried.
``After the war, for 20 years, there was a series of memoirs by spies or people who claimed to have been spies,'' Fishel said. ``Few of these people ever did anything at all. These books were really trashy.''
The lurid tales were retold even by people who knew better, and thus became hard to dislodge, Fishel said.
``I complain about this a lot, but it actually put me in business,'' Fishel said.
Belle Boyd is probably the best-known example of a self-professed spy who exaggerated her exploits. Boyd went on a speaking tour after the war, promoting herself as a key supplier of information she gleaned from Union officers.
``She was her own best publicist, although most of it was lies,'' Gallagher said.
LENGTH: Medium: 77 linesby CNB