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secrecy, kept his operations so secret that we may never have the full history of them.
    To be sure, two of his intelligence officers, Boudinot and Tallmadge, later wrote their memoirs, but they were exceedingly discreet. Even forty years after the war was over, when John Jay told James Fenimore Cooper the true story of a Revolutionary spy, which the latter then used in his novel The Spy , Jay refused to divulge the real name of the man. Much of what we know today about intelligence in both the Revolutionary and Civil Wars was only turned up many generations after these wars were over.
    Intelligence costs money, and agents have to be paid. Since it is the government’s money which is being disbursed, even the most informal and swashbuckling general will usually put in some kind of chit for expenses incurred in the collection of information. Washington kept scrupulous records of money spent for the purchase of information. He generally advanced the money out of his own personal funds and then included the payment in the bill for all his expenses which he sent the Continental Congress. Since he itemized his expenses, we can see from his financial accountings that he spent around $17,000 on secret intelligence during the years of the Revolutionary War, a lot of money in those days. Walsingham, in England, two hundred years earlier, also kept such records, and it is from them that we have gleaned many of the details about his intelligence activities.
    But the official accountings are not the only indicators that the pecuniary side of intelligence contributes to history. A singular attribute of intelligence work under war conditions is the delay between the completion of an agent’s work and his being paid for it. He may be installed behind the enemy lines and may not get home until the war is over. Or the military unit that employed him may have moved hastily from the scene in victory or retreat, leaving him high and dry and without his reward. Thus it may happen that not until years later, and sometimes only when the former agent or his heirs have fallen on hard times, is a claim made against the government to collect payment for past services rendered. Secret intelligence being what it is, there may be no living witnesses and absolutely no record to support the claim. In any case, such instances have often brought to light intelligence operations of some moment in our own history that otherwise might have remained entirely unknown.
    In December, 1852, a certain Daniel Bryan went before a justice of the peace in Tioga County, New York, and made a deposition concerning his father, Alexander Bryan, who had died in 1825. Daniel Bryan stated that General Gates in the year 1777, just before the Battle of Saratoga, had told his father that he wished him “to go into Burgoyne’s Army as a spy as he wanted at that critical moment correct information as to the heft of the artillery of the enemy, the strength and number of his artillery and if possible information as to the contemplated movements of the enemy.” Bryan then “went into Burgoyne’s Army where he purchased a piece of cloth for a trowsers when he went stumbling about to find a tailor and thus he soon learned the strength of the artillery and the number of the Army as near as he could estimate the same and notwithstanding that the future movements of the Enemy were kept a secret, he learned that the next day the Enemy intended to take possession of Bemis heights.”
    The deposition goes on to tell how Alexander Bryan got away from Burgoyne’s Army and reached the American lines and General Gates in time to deliver his information, with the result that Gates was on Bemis Heights the next morning “ready to receive Burgoyne’s Army.” As we know, the latter was soundly trounced, an action which was followed ten days later by the surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga. According to the deposition, Bryan was never rewarded. His sick child died during the night he was away and