WORLD WAR I

United States

A - J

Aston, George G. [Sir] Secret Service. London: Faber & Faber, 1930. New York: Cosmopolitan, 1930.

According to Constantinides, this is "a collection of stories of secret service, partly derived from personal experience.... Credit must be given ... for [Aston's] recognition of the importance of security and counterintelligence and for his provision of many examples of their vital role in the success or failure of military operations."

Barton, George. Celebrated Spies and Famous Mysteries of the Great War. Boston: Page, 1919. [Petersen]

Beach, Jim. "Origins of the Special Intelligence Relationship? Anglo-American Intelligence Co-operation on the Western Front, 1917-18." Intelligence and National Security 22, no. 2 (Apr. 2007): 229-249.

The author suggests that the World War I "interaction between the intelligence staffs of the British and American Expeditionary Forces was a significant precursor to the emergence of the later relationship."

Bigelow, Michael E. "The First Steps: Battalion S2s in World War I." Military Intelligence 18. no. 1 (Jan.-Mar. 1992): 26-31.

Bisher, Jamie. "Conjecture on the de Cramm Affairs." Intelligencer 16, no. 1 (Spring 2008): 55-57

This is a neat little piece of historical investigation, described by the author thusly: "Evidence suggests that Matilda de Cramm, intimate friend and French tutor of U.S. Ambassador to Russia David R. Francis during the Bolshevik Revolution, was a German or Austro-Hungarian agent, as was her estranged husband, Dr. Ludwig de Cramm."

Bisher, Jamie. "Hunt for Superweapons, Circa 1918." The Submarine Review, Jul. 2004.

Author's note: Discusses U.S. intelligence's hunt for German submarine bases in Latin America and the book by Charles Harris and Louis Sadler, The Archaeologist Was a Spy.

Blankenhorn, Heber. Adventures in Propaganda: Letters from an Intelligence Officer in France. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1919. [Petersen]

Bruntz, George G. Allied Propaganda and the Collapse of the German Empire in 1918. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1938. [Petersen]

Coulter, C.S. "Intelligence Service in the World War." Infantry Journal 20 (Apr. 1922): 376-383. [Petersen]

Cryptologia. Editors. "From the Archives: The Achievements of the Cipher Bureau (MI-8) during the First World War. Documents by Major Herbert O. Yardley Prepared Under the Direction of the Chief Signal Officer, 25 May 1945, SPSIS-1. Signal Security Agency. Washington, DC." 8, no. 1 (1984): 62-74. [Petersen]

Doerries, Reinhard R. Imperial Challenge: Ambassador Count Bernstorff and German-American Relations, 1908-1917. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1989.

Boghardt, Studies 51.1 (Mar. 2007), 17/fn.1, refers to this as a "superb study."

Egerton, George. "Diplomacy, Scandal, and Military Intelligence: The Craufurd-Stuart Affair and Anglo-American Relations, 1918-20." Intelligence and National Security 2, no. 4 (Oct. 1987): 110-134.

The author argues that this diplomatic incident played "a major role in the seminal events which transpired in Anglo-American relations and Washington politics in 1919."

[Egolf, Richard]. Radio Intelligence on the Mexican Border, World War I: A Personal View. Ft. George G. Meade, MD: National Security Agency, Center for Cryptologic History, [n.d.].

"The Radio Intelligence Service (R.I.S.) was created during World War I by the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Branch for the sole purpose of supporting strategic intelligence through radio intercept. This was the first unit of its kind and its success helped to lay the foundation for the use of radio intercept by the U.S. military. The R.I.S. served mainly on the U.S./Mexican border, monitoring the threat of a Mexican-German alliance. Mr. Richard Egolf was one of the young men recruited for the R.I.S. in 1918. He served in McAllen, Texas, with Radio Tractor Units 33 and 34. In 1976, Mr. EgoIf was interviewed by members of the NSA History Department about his experiences in this earliest of signals intelligence organizations."

Ellis, Mark. "'Closing Rank' and 'Seeking Honors': W.E.B. DuBois in World War I." Journal of American History (Jun. 1992): 96-124.

http://carlisle-www.army.mil/usamhi/RefBibs/intell/1900-39.htm: "Close analysis of his 'accomodation' editorial & his candidacy for a commission" in the Military Intelligence Division (MID).

Finnegan, John P. "U.S. Army Counterintelligence in CONUS: The World War I Experience." Military Intelligence 14, No. 1 (Jan. 1988): 19-21.

Fox, John F., Jr. "Early Days of the Intelligence Community: Bureaucratic Wrangling over Counterintelligence, 1917–18." Studies in Intelligence 49, no. 1 (2005), 9-17.

"As the United States prepared to send troops to fight in France in 1917,... foreign agents had been acting largely with impunity on domestic soil for three years.  Treasury Secretary William Gibbs McAdoo made what might appear to be a reasonable proposal: centralize all intelligence responsibility, especially counterintelligence, in a Bureau of Intelligence to be run by the Department of State or the Treasury Department.... [H]is proposal exacerbated a bureaucratic battle underway between the Treasury Department and the Department of Justice over how counterintelligence ... should be handled on the homefront. When the dust settled following the armistice of 1918, Justice's Bureau of Investigation -- the predecessor to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) -- came out on top as the agency in charge of domestic counterintelligence, a responsibility that has not been changed since that time."

Friedman, William F. "Use of Codes and Ciphers in the World War and Lessons to be Learned Therefrom." Signal Corps Bulletin, Jul.-Sep. 1938, 35-48. [http://carlisle-www.army.mil/ usamhi/RefBibs/intell/ crypto.htm]

Gilbert, James L. "U.S. Army COMSEC in World War I." Military Intelligence 14, no. 1 (Jan. 1988): 22-25.

Harris, Charles H., and Louis R. Sadler. The Archaeologist Was a Spy:  Sylvannus G. Morley and the Office of Naval Intelligence. Albuquerque, NM:  University of New Mexico Press, 2003. 

Peake, Studies 47.3, notes that Sylvannus Morley "was a 33-year-old Harvard-trained archaeologist studying the Mayan civilization in Mexico and Central America" when in 1917 he proposed "to the Office of Naval Intelligence that he and a group of colleagues serve as agents in Central America." They were "to provide data on German, and later Japanese, efforts to establish submarine bases in the region.... The authors deal in some detail with ONI organizational problems, agent communications, relationships with American firms in the area, and the problems of maintaining cover when suspected of being spies." This work "gives long overdue recognition to some able agents and expands the public record on ONI World War I operations.  It is well documented with copies of Morley reports and primary source citations."

For Brooks, NIPQ 19.3, the authors have clearly documented Morley's work with ONI, providing "almost day-to-day accounts of his exploits." Beyond that, however, they "have made an even greater contribution to the history of ONI by obtaining the declassification of ONI records of the World War I era which document the far-flung nature of ONI agent operations."

See also, Jamie Bisher, "Hunt for Superweapons, Circa 1918," The Submarine Review, Jul. 2004.

Hinrichs, Ernest H. Listening In: Intercepting German Trench Communications in World War I. Shippensburg, PA: White Mane, 1996.

Kruh, Cryptologia 21.4, identifies this as a "first-hand account of the author's experience as a World War I listening station intercept operator at the front lines.... Hinrichs also gives a detailed account of an early deception operation during the second phase of Meuse-Argonne offensive."

Johnson, Thomas M. Our Secret War: True American Spy Stories, 1917-1919. Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill, 1929.

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