Most Secret and Confidential: Intelligence in the Age of Nelson

Got a terribly important message for London? How does a 3 month lag time sound?

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More reflection is needed on how [the] intelligence dimension fits into the other ideas of military leadership: A refreshingly new perspective This is a superlative work on an aspect of naval history as yet largely ignored. An unparalleled look at the secret world behind Royal Navy operations during the Age of Sail.

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A lively book for the general reader which will deepen understanding of the ways in which naval officers had to think at a time when it might take weeks, or months, for orders to reach them from the Admiralty. The book is the first to address its subject directly, and It reads well, and although its subject matter will appeal to a professional audience, any adult reader will have little difficulty understanding it.

Most Secret and Confidential , which is not afraid to use references to the well-researched treatments of such fictionally famous admirals as Hornblower and Aubrey, would make useful reading for anyone interested in sea power in the age of sail, the wars of the French Revolution and Napoleon, and the history of intelligence.

Most Secret and Confidential is a fascinating and rewarding account that would be useful to military officers of all ranks and services. This book is a must read for every intelligence officer or any other member of the military The book is beautifully produced with appropriate illustrations This operation was part of the Post Office, and remained so until modern times. Signals intercept and codebreaking operations of particular use to the commander at sea tended to be rather less subtle and included periodic raiding parties to go ashore and capture codebooks during attacks on shore-side fortifications and semaphore stations.

Possession of these books allowed British ships or personnel placed ashore to read the signals being relayed by the semaphore stations, which frequently included operational tasking to French fleet units.

Obtaining recognition codes from ships captured or sunk and providing these to ships of the squadron was particularly useful in allowing British fleet units to employ the ruse de guerre of masquerading as French ships in order to attack unsuspecting prey. This was a particularly useful ploy in an era when the Royal Navy operated a number of warships captured from the French and, it should be noted, a few captured from the Americans as well , which could easily pass themselves off as French ships if they possessed the proper recognition signals.

In the era of sailing ships and goose quill pens, there was little prospect for the Admiralty to provide timely intelligence support to deployed fleet units.

Thus Nelson and his contemporary commanders were obliged to devise collection means of their own. The common complaint of Nelson and his contemporaries was that there never were enough frigates to collect intelligence or enough dispatch vessels to disseminate it—a two-century-old example of the timelessness of the problem of assigning scarce intelligence assets and being able to disseminate effectively the product once it has been collected.

The commanders themselves directed the intelligence collection and dissemination in support of Nelson or other ship, squadron, or fleet-level commanders. A squadron commander would likely be limited to a single clerk. Nelson had a finely developed appreciation of the importance of intelligence and a particular knack for its collection. He was a superb intelligence officer in his own right, but he would never have thought of himself as one.

Intelligence, to him, was an essential element in his ability to fight the fleet, and its collection and inclusion in his decisionmaking were as much a part of his command style as logistics, planning, and fighting tactics.

His contemporaries who were successful at sea treated intelligence similarly. The author, himself a Naval Reserve Intelligence Officer, makes this point well in the final chapter of his book: Reading Most Secret and Confidential will give the reader a good appreciation for the historical justification for this observation.

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