This one came to me as a gift. If I had known it was published before Spies, Patriots, and Traitors, I would have read and reviewed it first.

Review: George Washington’s Secret Six: The Spy Ring That Saved the American Revolution, Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger, 2013.

This is a popular history – no footnotes but a brief bibliography and index – and it’s tightly focused on the Culper Spy Ring operating in British occupied New York City. It covers much the same territory as Chapter Nine, “American Intelligence Activities Reach Maturity” of Kenneth A. Daigler’s Spies, Patriots, and Traitors. It even relies on the same histories of the Culper Spy Ring as Daigler: John Edwin Bakeless’s Turncoats, Traitors, and Heroes (1998), John A. Nagy’s Invisible Ink: Spycraft in the American Revolution (2010), and Morton Pennypacker’s General Washington’s Spies (1939).

That focus allows a couple of things missing from Daigler’s account: an in-depth profile of the six spies (well, five actually because the identity of No. 355, as she was known to Washington, is not definitively known), a greater sense of what it was like to live in occupied New York, and quotes from the correspondence of the spy ring.

Kilmeade and Yaeger, to make the story more vivid, provide dialogue at certain points based on written documents. Continue reading →