Exclusive interview with Alexander Rose, author of ‘Washington’s Spies’
Rating: Three Stars
by Gabrielle Pantera
Washington’s Spies is the basis for the AMC TV mini-series Turn. “Barry Josephson, the producer, contacted me from out of the blue about three years ago,” says Washington’s Spies author Alex Rose.
“Barry Josephson and Craig Silverstein invited me along to watch the pilot being filmed down in Virginia, which was very exciting. I spent two weeks down there, seeing how the sausage gets made. It was quite fascinating, especially for a writer more accustomed to working alone in an archive.”
Washington’s Spies is a factual book not a historical novel. Washington used a handful of rebels acting as spies although spycraft hadn’t yet been refined and these early American spies made many mistakes, some fatal. The British spies were no better. Major John Andre, when captured by the Americans, revealed the fact that Washington’s star general Benedict Arnold was a traitor.
In the summer of 1778 General George Washington needed to know where the British would strike next. Washington’s goal was to find out as much as he could about what General Henry Clinton was doing and stop him. He enlisted a group of loyal Americans who later become known at the Culper Ring comprising, among others, a Quaker torn between family loyalty and political principle, a sailor who was a thrill junkie, a party boy, an Ivy League-educated cavalryman who was a friend of Nathan Hale, and a peaceful farmer who wanted nothing more than to retire, but couldn’t. The spies operated in British-occupied New York.
An academic book, Washington’s Spies is not a novel and Rose doesn’t give dialog, but does use lots of quotes from correspondence. It explores the relationship between Washington and his spies. Rose talks about the technical aspects of Culpers’ spycraft including using invisible ink and cryptography and the footnotes make for fascinating reading of anecdotal details. At the end of the book Rose traces the people’s lives and their deaths after the war.
Rose says choosing the Culper Ring was an accident. “I was reading a biography of Benedict Arnold and I became interested in the wider espionage angle during the Revolution. It turned out much, against my expectations, that hardly anything had been written on the subject. So then it was a matter of finding the right story to hang it on, which is where the Culper Ring came in.”
Rose spent a great deal of time poring through the Culper Ring correspondence and trying to read their handwriting. He also read a large number of contemporary newspapers and the Culper letters. “All the Culper letters are lodged in the George Washington Papers at the Library of Congress,” says Rose. “Anyone can go see them, or at least consult them online.”
For this season, Rose has been serving as a consultant on the AMC series. “I go over the scripts and make suggestions,” says Rowe, “but it’s up to the writers what to do from there. As for the look of the show, that’s nothing to do with me; that’s the work of the brilliant costume, props, construction, and special-effects people. They’re the ones who brought the series to life.”
Rose, who is a born-and-bred New Yorker, has written two other books. The first, American Rifle: A Biography, is a look at the iconic American firearm, and the other is yet to be named but will be released this fall.
Washington’s Spies: The Story of America’s First Spy Ring by Alexander Rose. Paperback, 384 pages. Publisher: Bantam; Reprint edition (May 1, 2007). Language: English, ISBN-13: 978-0553383294 $17.00
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