there is a british officer, who was wounded very badly at the battle of rinsed and. he was not expected to live. asked for permission to have a british officer, out of new brunswick to take his last will and testament. they insisted it had to be done at night. but putnam did is an all the empty houses, he put candles to make them look like they were occupied. he then had his 50 soldiers march past the house where the last will and testament was being taken. sometimes, one or two at a time, sometimes six at a time, sometimes a dozen, sometimes all 50. when the british officer goes back to brunswick, he reports that putnam is at princeton with 4000 soldiers. [laughter] instead of the 50 that he really had. fake reports for spies.

washington like to make up fake reports and send them into british headquarters headquarters here in new york. he did so well that after the battle of brandywine in pennsylvania, the british army captured an original american report but were absolutely convinced it was faith. because they were getting so many fake reports they refuse to believe it. now, another one is what washington's deception was that he needed to-- to move the american army and the french army from north jersey and basically westchester and putnam counties counties passed the british, across the delaware river and eventually down to your down to hook up with lafayette down there and cornwallis. washington uses what is called the deception battle plan.

the deception battle plan is also used in world war ii for the landing at normandy. it is also used endeavored storm by general schwarzkopf to do an end around of the republican guard. they use washington's plan. the first thing you need is a clear objective in the clear objective was he needed to steal a march across new jersey himself without being attacked by the british who were located in new york and staten island. you have to know the enemies assumptions. and, the washington originally was planning to attack new york with the french. the british in new york believe that and so what do you have to do is, once you know what the enemy believes, you then have to reinforce their believe that that is what you are going to do. so, the next thing would be method selection. the options they used, one of

the things that he did was since they were using the french army in the french army, the bulk of their diet is bread, he had brick ovens being built and they were built in chatham new jersey. issued orders for the preparation of building ovens at the highlands, right near sandy hook, and he also was issuing orders for supplies to be brought to the french ovens at the highlands. once the wrenched troops arrived but since the french troops were never going there he could write as many orders as he wants because none of these contracts would ever take place. the other thing that he did is he had troops assigned to go to -- and they went down by the water's edge. he wanted the british to observe them collecting bricks. you had a two gun artillery unit, which spent their time sitting there watching a two

canon hessian unit that was the cross on staten island, and these two units spent the entire war just observing each other. so he knew that this unit was going to be there, so he sent them down there and they did so well and eating obnoxious and making noise and collecting the brakes as the ovens and chatham were being built, is that they were actually fired upon. how did we get there? what winds up happening is washington is able to steal the march but what he does is he has 30 boats put on carriages that

are brought to springfield, new jersey for the anticipated attack on staten island. there would be no other reason to bring the boats they are because they weren't going to virginia. so he has gone and convinced the british that there is going to be an attack on staten island. and then, the eventual result is the fact that his army and the french army are able to move across new jersey without being attacked and as i am sure most of you are aware, make it down to virginia and cornwallis surrenders at yorktown. that gives you pretty much of a run through on the spycraft that was used during the american revolution. there are many more codes and ciphers that are in the book, and at this point, i would like to open it up to some questions.

hopefully i will have some answers. we have won back their. wait for the mic please. >> could you comment on nathan hale? >> nathan hale was absolutely a very poor spy. i don't know if you are familiar with what has been found out. british general, the scottish general by the name of grant, his papers were found images become recently available. in there he identifies that robert rogers actually got hail to tell him that he was a spy and what the mission was, and hale should have kept his mouth shut. what he told rogers who was also an american spy and because he

outed himself, he winds up giving himself hung. next question. >> can you comment on washington getting his troops out of brooklyn into manhattan and the cliché where they built up the fires and it seemed like army was still there? >> he also use that after, down in trenton where he had the fires built to deceive the british, that they were still in position, but at the battle of her quinn, he uses they leverage marble meant to get the troops across the east river back to

manhattan and by the fact that the british were convinced that come morning, that they would have a victory over an american army that was ensconced on long island. and yeah, it was another one of his deceptions. as i said, for somebody who never told the truth, he certainly stretch stretches an awful lot. we have one there. >> could you comment hercules mulligan and perhaps his relationship to alexander hamilton? >> when hamilton first comes to new york, he actually winds up living with mulligan at one point at the beginning and that is how they get to know each other. mull again, there is one book on mull again that was published years ago, and it identifies

that mulligan had been using a black servant, probably a slave, to carry the messages over to new jersey to hamilton, who would have been at moorestown at the time. that is really all that we no, exactly how the system worked. this is one of the problems in working with researching spies, which i have been doing for the last 18 years, is that it is like playing 500 chess matches at one time. pieces advance very slightly when you find another clue and in the case of mulligan, we know he was sending messages. we know how we got the messages. it appears that he was operating for most of the war. he, being a closer-- clothier the british officers would go to

him to get their new uniforms or their fancy attire and naturally while they are there waiting and being fitted, he would entice them into talking and extract information that way. >> could you speak to rivington and the involvement of the newspaper in lower manhattan? >> one of the things that rivington, he appears to switch sides about 1781. in appendix, in the book, i go into the correspondence that appears to exist between rivington and turn island. the american goes over to long island and picked up the british naval signals. there is a series in rivington's

newspaper that seems to imply that he is requesting someone to come over and pick up the intelligence by means of ads that appear in the newspaper, and i give you the chronology that i appear to have found. and it is very interesting that the name used is the name of a person who wrote a book on codes and ciphers. so some of the references that are used would have been references, if you go back to the period, would have been understood by somebody who is was in the military line, and he also, the last ad that i mentioned, he has indicated that he is having a problem with paper for his newspaper. his paper mill is on long island, which happens to be where he turns over the codes.

and he also says he is going to be there, and the kids a specific time period. when he is going to be there and be available. so if you follow this, we don't have an exact proof but it is the closest thing that i could ever find of any documents in any way that might indicate how the connection was made. that took a lot of hunting and reading a lot of pages to find that one. >> i think they can hear me, but can you go back to that one code that you had for benedict arnold? were those the designs for west point? >> the letter? the letter is where he offered west point for 20,000 pounds. >> i thought the one where the

major was hung in upstate new york? >> no. no. the letters that andre was carrying, if i remember correctly, are currently the property of the state of new york. that letter came from the generator henry clinton papers were-- it was the offer to turn over west point. the british then would have to have accepted the offer. then you get to the point where they then have to agree to meet, which all that follows after, and then you get andre going up after that. [inaudible] or go. >> no, they were just drawings. there would be no reason to put it in code because it was face to face. one of the problems that you have is that spies coming out of

new york, they would come either across to basically jersey city area and then across the marsh lands over into newer. there actually exists a map that has the spy route marked on it through the marches. it came out of the british had porter papers. which i found absolutely interesting that they actually mark did, and the other route was they would go over to staten island and then go over to elizabeth, which, if you go over the gospel of's bridge now it is such a short area and the channel had been widened since the 18th century. one of the spies tell us how he used to do it, is you take a rowboat. he would row across to the other side and then sink the boat below the water line, go do to

his business, come back, a one-person rowboat, raise the boat and row across to the other side and sink it again. the spy was james moody. he operated mostly from staten island downed across to the wood ridge creek and he would hide his rowboat in the woodbridge creek. between parts amboy and seaboard. >> are any of the cipher still used today by the government and if not, what other sorts of technology had taken over hiding secrets and things like that. >> computers. actually you can use your computer and code messages far superior to what we use used in the american revolution. computers today design the codes

and where he talked about a one letter shift, that is one transaction. they would then take the one letter shift, which actually would use different combinations, and then make multiple shifts, and if you get into breeding about the japanese purple codes, you will see that they go into multiple layers of transcriptions, and the only way to decode the stuff is using a computer. and you really need to be a mathematician today to be doing codes and ciphers at that level. one of the things they didn't mention that we actually used here in new york that was used at one broadway was a thing called the language of flowers. there was a young girl who was the putnam's headquarters and up in the top of one broadway was a widows watch. she would go up there and observed the american troops and

then come down and draw paintings. she would draw paintings of flowers. the last real book written on the subject was about 1835, but by using flowers, you could give a description as to how many troops were there, whether they were going to be just amassed on the border, whether they were going to attack. there was one individual who claims that in abe k. of flowers he could put the equivalent of eight pages of text. so, there are other systems i didn't go into. i just touched on some of them. speak could you list a few of the documented female spies? >> okay. there is ann bates, a british spy. she was going into the american

camps and then coming back and reporting. there is a miss jennie. we know she is a friend seamstress that the british sent up into the french camp. she is suspected. the french arrest her. she is sent over and interrogated by one of washington's command. she is sent back to north castle and she is then had her head shaved and forced to write out of camp camp backwards on a course and told if she ever comes back again, she will be hung, and by the way you hang spies. you normally don't shoot them. only a gentleman is shot in the 18th century. a spy is not a gentleman so i spies not shot which is why andre was hung. be asked to be shot which indicated he was a gentleman and if he was a gentleman they couldn't be a spy and they shouldn't be executing him so they had to hang him.

they could not shoot him. it was 18th century etiquette. >> general washington had many aides decamp including alexander hamilton. was one of these aides decamp in charge of the spy decoding? >> you had different case agents running spies. you had tom ridge who was running spies on long island. you had dayton who was running spies out of elizabeth. a lot more is made of the cult burrs mainly because they are so well thought minute and they are so well documented because they operated over a long distance. when spies out grade at a close distance, depositions are taken rather than original documents maintained, and their reports tend to be summarized.

so what happens is that those reports from the spies who are nearby tend to be summarized in general's reports because it is word-of-mouth. you are not doing that much in codes and ciphers for nearby spies. is only spies who are coming from a distance. in the case of talmadge, his spies were in new york coming back through setauket up to connecticut, where he would then do the decoding based on his code book which is one of the appendix of my book. there are other copies around. and he would then send the transcribed message. some of the original messages went on when he was out of position. so it tends to be whoever is the case agent is the one who is going to be doing the decoding, not necessarily the age of camps. they may be collecting the

information, taking down the orders from washington, sending them out but they are really not running the operation. they are more like the secretary. >> so, back in the days voc was the name for the spies and how much was a typical payday? >> i'm sorry? >> how much money where the spies pay for their activities? >> they were paid based upon what the perceived danger was, so it all depends on what the assignment is. the one thing you can be certain is that spies got paid. if you were doing research and you see somebody claiming to be a spy admitted not get paid, they were actually a scout. you always paid you your spies dumb matter which side you were on because when you did not pay

them, than the other side is going to pay them and they are going to be working for the other side. spies tend to get paid even before the generals get their money. also, the term spy in 18th century has different meanings besides what we think of. we think of spies, we think of the james bond types by going incognito behind enemy lines. in the 18th century the term spy also meant scowled on the frontier. it was used interchangeably. they would refer to my spies, but when you go find out what they were doing, they were just doing recognizance. they never went jan enemy lines. also on the frontier you would see terms like indian spy, eagles by, any time it has a modifier, be very careful because usually what it means is somebody was given the job to go up on top of a mountain top and

count the number of people and which direction they were going. they are not doing anything more than taking a traffic code. we have got one back there. >> to you have any specifics on the chemistry that was used in some of the hidden messages that is more sophisticated than the vinegar or lemon juice, and what they actually than have something else on the page that they could wash off? >> one of the formulas used is both cloth, which is not chemically available today. the americans, their original supply came from sir james j. in london, who claims to have invented it, although it was, the formula was known by the british for 100 years before, so he probably made them take a

liberal license in claiming he invented it or tweaked it a bit. the americans later on setup-- john chase, that is his brother, sets up a laboratory up around new york to manufacture the agent and reagent that are used. so, once the laboratory is actually established, the americans have a plentiful supply. the ogle powder at the time was available through any medical supply, so anyplace that there was surgery, they would have had it. >> this will be our last question. >> in her research and your book, how many of these individual spies have you come

across and i assume these are the ones that have serviced? i am curious how many have surfaced and how many do you suspect were never discovered. >> many were never discovered mainly because they operated one time. what i found, when i started doing this 18 years ago, there may be was 40 spies that were pretty much around as to the number that were there. if you are doing it over the last 18 years, my computer data place identifies between three and 400 people that actually went behind enemy lines duke looked intelligence. many would go for one trip, get cold feet and decide that said or go into one trip and that ends at. some actually continue on for the majority of the war. so there are all different scenarios.

the first book i wrote, the rebellion of the ranks, there are 30 spies there and many of those were never identified before, and i have a series of other books that are coming out that i'm working out that will identify spies by state. [applause] thank you. >> john nagy is the author of mutinies of the american revolution and rebellion in the ranks. he's a scholar in residence at st. francis university and loretto pennsylvanian founding member of the american revolution roundtable of philadelphia. for more information visit fraunces tavern museum in new york. >> this week in john dean as a guest on booktv's in depth, the former white house counsel to president nixon and author of 10 books including an updated

edition of line ambition.

>> in her book, "enlightened sexism," susan douglas compares images of women in the u.s. culture from the 1980s to the age of reality tv. nicole's books in ann arbor michigan host this 50 minute event.

>> i wanted to begin i just talking somewhat informally about wyatt wrote this book and then i'm going to do a brief reading from the introduction. in 1994, i published a book called where the girls are, and it did very well. he was about the mixed messages that they be dumb girls and women got from the mass media and their own love-hate relationship with popular culture. as a result, i did get a lot of speaking engagements at colleges and universities, but pop culture, as we all no, has it pretty short shelf life and especially after the turn-of-the-century and certainly by the middle of the past decade, people were starting to ask me what i am about buffy. or xena, not to mention the bachelor. or all the makeover shows and more recent shows like desperate housewives or mad