The two puzzles of “George Washington's Secret Six”

After early fumbles, compelling story of Revolutionary War spy ring emerges


Brian Kilmeade & Don Yaeger

Sentinel; 235 pages; $27.95

At the heart of “George Washington’s Secret Six” are two mysteries.

Fox News co-host Brian Kilmeade and veteran author Don Yaeger successfully unravel the first: Who were Washington’s undercover agents in New York, and how did they gather critical intelligence behind British lines?

The second puzzle, though, goes unsolved: Why does this book veer from cartoonish scenes to insightful passages? The early chapters are particularly clumsy, littered with cardboard characters, stilted dialogue and anachronistic prose.

We are introduced to hissable villains — when the British hanged Nathan Hale, the “message sent to all New Yorkers was clear: ‘You spy, you die’ ” — and lovable Yankees, cheering Washington’s ragtag army:

“ ‘Enjoy this bacon,’ urged the local butchers, heaving slabs of salted meat onto the supply wagons.

“ ‘Fresh milk!’ announced the housewives who scrambled out of their cottages wielding their buckets and dippers.”

If that doesn’t ring true, there’s a reason: Kilmeade and Yaeger confess that “much of the dialogue in this book is fictional.” That helps explain, if not excuse, scenes of square-jawed colonial heroes delivering wooden speeches worthy of an 18th-century melodrama.

Yet there’s a compelling yarn at the center of “Secret Six,” one that the co-authors eventually get around to weaving with skill. After the death of Hale, a dedicated yet unlucky spy, an aide to Washington assembled a group of patriotic civilians to track British moves in enemy-occupied New York City. Known as the Culper Ring, they were a varied lot: a Quaker merchant, a publican, a longshoreman, a businessman, a printer and a woman with society connections.

Earlier scholars have identified the first five; the woman is known to history only as Agent 355. Her fate is unknown, but her observations in parlors and ballrooms helped the spy ring score their greatest coup: uncovering Benedict Arnold’s treasonous plot to deliver the American fortress at West Point to the British.

During the long years of British occupation — captured in August 1776, Manhattan was not liberated until November 1783 — the Culper Ring pioneered several espionage techniques to track the enemy. They used invisible ink, codes, code names and cover stories.

James Rivington, for instance, was best known in Manhattan as the Loyalist printer of pro-British publications and proprietor of a coffeehouse frequented by redcoat officers. When the war ended, Washington made a point of visiting the printer — probably to shield him from retribution by his more openly patriotic neighbors.

Because it relied on secrecy, the Culper Ring was overlooked by generations of historians. Since Morton Pennypacker broke this story in 1929, several authors have revisited the tale. Kilmeade and Yaeger are the latest and most creative.

The Culper Ring’s reports to Washington were often incomplete; they only passed along what they knew. “Washington’s Secret Six” would have been a stronger book if the authors had followed the Culper Ring’s example.

Peter Rowe is a U-T San Diego staff writer whose true identity remains a closely guarded secret.


