Nearly a hundred years before the main character in Sam Greenlee's seminal black-radical tome 'The Spook Who Sat By The Door' used what he learned as a CIA agent to undermine the U.S. government, African-American slaves and freedmen spied on the South during the Civil War to undermine the Confederacy.


They played the role of the illiterate, shuffling and bumbling Negro, often pretending to be completely ignorant of the war raging around them, all the while parsing through important documents left un-minded or eavesdropping on talk of weapons procurement, troop location and movements.

"The chief source of information to the enemy is through our Negroes," said Gen. Robert E. Lee, commander of the Confederate Army in May 1863, according to a story on NPR.com this morning.

The story recounts tales of these unsung Civil War heroes, some of whom were operatives sent by the Union Army, who risked life and limb to play, and play masterfully, a "high-stakes game of cat-and-mouse with Confederate spy-catchers and slave masters who could kill them on the spot," according to the article.

There was John Scobell, who worked as a deckhand on a rebel sympathizer's steamboat, who kept his eyes and ears open as the rebels moved troops and supplies up and down river. They thought nothing of talking openly about their plans and strategy in front of Scobell, who they thought of as nothing more than a slave. But in fact he was a spy sent by the Union Army.

Then there's Mary Elizabeth Bowser, a former slave in Virginia who was freed and sent to school. When she returned to Richmond, Elizabeth Van Lew, a member of the family that once owned her, was running a sophisticated spy ring. Van Lew then got Bowser a housekeeper job in the Confederate White House. While working there she managed to steal top-secret information, all as Confederate President Jefferson Davis slept and worked right under the very same roof.

And of course there is the godmother of all black super-spies, Harriet Tubman. Tubman's clandestine missions deep into the South are the stuff of legend. Not only was Tubman smuggling slaves to freedom via the Underground Railroad, she was gathering intelligence for the Union.

These black spies are even lauded by today's CIA. According to the CIA website:

Union officers got so many valuable pieces of intelligence from slaves that the reports were put in a special category: "Black Dispatches." Runaway slaves, many of them conscripted to work on Confederate fortifications, gave the Union Army a continually flowing stream of intelligence.

At the onset of the Civil War, Allan Pinkerton was head of the Union Intelligence Service. He actively recruited black spies and detailed as much in his autobiography. In it he described a number of successful missions, a couple by John Scobell. He described the spy as a "cool-headed, vigilant detective" who skillfully and easily tricked those around him by taking on "the character of the light-hearted, happy darkey."

According to the author of the NPR story, there are scant references to the contributions of these spies in historical records, mainly because Union spymasters destroyed documents to shield them from Confederate soldiers and sympathizers during the war and vengeful whites afterward.

"These kinds of spies and operatives come up over and over again many of them unnamed and rarely do they receive glory," Hari Jones, curator of the African American Civil War Museum in Washington, told NPR.