This tour contains three types of stops: HONOR stops mark the gravesites of specific individuals. REMEMBER stops commemorate events, ideas, or groups of people. EXPLORE stops invite you to discover what this history means to you.
Introduction
Arlington National Cemetery is the final resting place of many individuals who shaped the United States’ modern intelligence programs — both military and civilian. For most of U.S. history, intelligence operations existed only during wartime. During the American Revolution, General George Washington directed a network of secret agents and reconnaissance scouts whose intelligence he used to plan and conduct military operations. During the Civil War, the U.S. Army created the Bureau of Military Information (BMI), which collected and analyzed data from an array of sources — cavalry reconnaissance, Signal Corps observation posts, newspapers, and intercepted communications — to inform the U.S. Army’s strategy. In the 1880s, both the Army and the Navy created separate peacetime intelligence operations to scout and collect intelligence on foreign militaries. However, these organizations were small, and their reach was limited.
Major Herbert Yardley
Ran the United States’ first cryptology agency during World War I. After World War I, he established the Black Chamber, a permanent, peacetime cipher bureau. Exposed American cryptology secrets in a 1931 book titled The American Black Chamber.
Major General William J. Donovan
Donovan is considered the “father of America’s centralized intelligence.” He received the Medal of Honor for heroism during WWI. During WWII, he lead the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the precursor to the CIA.
The U.S. Intelligence Community
The U.S. intelligence community has grown significantly since World War II. Today, it includes 18 organizations — two independent national agencies, ten military organizations, and six offices within other federal departments and agencies. These are permanent, peacetime operations that work both separately and together to collect and analyze intelligence to support U.S. foreign policy and national security. President Ronald Reagan established the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) by executive order in 1981. The order outlined the goals and priorities for each intelligence organization and stated that“[t]imely and accurate information about the activities, capabilities, plans, and intentions of foreign powers, organizations, and persons and their agents, is essential to the national security of the United States.”
Major Joseph E. Maxfield
Maxfield was head of a balloon detachment deployed to Cuba during the Spanish-American War, and he performed aerial reconnaissance. He managed the laying of telegraph lines in Cuba and the Philippines, which facilitated Army communications.
Captain Francis Gary Powers
Powers flew the U-2 spy plane to perform reconnaissance over the Soviet Union during the Cold War. He was shot down and captured by the Soviet Union in 1960, an incident that heated up tensions between the US and USSR.
Major Stephanie Rader
Rader was one of the first women to join the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps. She worked as an OSS operative in Poland just after WWII, gathering intelligence about Soviet activities and Polish attitudes toward the US and USSR.
Elizebeth Smith Friedman
Friedman has been called “America’s first female cryptanalyst.” During World War II, she led the civilian team that broke codes generated by the German enigma machine.
Lt. Col. William Friedman
During WWI, Friedman led the U.S. government’s only codebreaking unit. During WWII, he served as chief cryptologist for the Army Signal Intelligence Service, a precursor to the NSA.
Cryptology
Elizebeth Smith Friedman and her husband William Friedman pioneered the field of cryptology in the first half of the 20th century. They developed techniques of codebreaking that are still used today.
Captain Forrest R. Biard
Biard served as senior linguist for Station Hypo, a small Navy intelligence unit tasked with decrypting Japanese messages during WWII. Biard's work was critical to American success at the Battle of Midway and in New Guinea.
Jennifer Matthews & Elizabeth Hanson
On December 30, 2009, a suicide bomber attacked a military base in Khost, Afghanistan. The attack killed 12 CIA agents and contractors. Two of the agents killed in the attack were Jennifer Matthews and Elizabeth Hanson. Matthews’ and Hanson’s careers highlight important CIA/civilian contributions to national and military intelligence.
Private James W. Pryde
Pryde worked at the NSA as a telemetry analyst, and much of his work remains highly classified. He served as director of the Defense Special Missile and Astronautics (now Aerospace) Center, NSA representative to the Department of Defense, and assistant deputy director of administration at the NSA.
Conclusion
You've reached the end of the Military Intelligence Walking Tour. We hope you enjoyed your time exploring the cemetery. You can explore additional content through the Arlington National Cemetery Education Program website, or find more tours through Arlington National Cemetery's STQRY.
