It arranged the purchase of military stores through intermediaries to conceal the fact that Congress was the true purchaser. The committee also sent missions to seize British supplies in the southern colonies. It gathered intelligence about secret Loyalist ammunition stores and arranged to seize them. The Secret Committee employed agents overseas, often in cooperation with the Committee of Secret Correspondence. The Committee kept its transactions secret and destroyed many of its records to ensure the confidentiality of its work.
The committee also took over and administered on a uniform basis the secret contracts for arms and gunpowder previously negotiated by certain members of Congress without the formal sanction of that body. The committee was not, however, a true intelligence agency, since the Committee of Secret Correspondence with which it often worked was mainly concerned with obtaining military supplies in secret and distributing them, and selling gunpowder to privateers chartered by the Congress. The Second Continental Congress created a Secret Committee on September 18, 1775. Congress created a Secret Committee for domestic intelligence, a Committee of Secret Correspondence for foreign intelligence, and a committee on spies, for tracking spies within the Patriot movement.īritish espionage efforts were overseen by the British Army and focused primarily on gathering military intelligence to support military operations.Īmerican organizations involved in espionage Secret Committee In addition, both sides conducted political action, covert action, counterintelligence, deception, and propaganda operations as part of their overall strategies.Īmerican intelligence was monitored and sanctioned by the Continental Congress to provide military intelligence to the Continental Army to aid them in fighting the British during the American Revolutionary War. During the American Revolutionary War, the Continental Army and British Army conducted espionage operations against one another to collect military intelligence to inform military operations.
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