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Putting the "SIG" in SIGINT: The dawn of electronic communications

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During the 1800s, military commanders relied on cavalry, scouts, and reconnaissance parties for most of their tactical intelligence. Prior to Samuel F.B. Morse's invention of the electric telegraph in 1844, the military communicated with visual signals. The U.S. Army Signal Corps, formed in 1860, was responsible for these signals. In the 10 years after the invention of the telegraph its use would quickly spread across the U.S. with over 23,000 miles of telegraph wire going up prior to the start of the Civil War. Although the Signal Corps made use of this new technology it wasn't until 1867 that the electric telegraph, in addition to visual signaling, became a Signal Corps responsibility.

During the Civil War (1861-1865) neither the Union or the confederacy had a formal, high-level military intelligence service, although both engaged extensively in clandestine activities. A few of these actions were intercepting and decoding telegrams and intercepting mail. In June of 1861 the first electronic transmission of intelligence information occurred. Using a telegraph instrument aboard a captive balloon during the Battle of Fair Oaks, a Union observer reported his aerial observations of Confederate troop movements. This marked the first use of telegraphy from an airborne platform and the first air-to-ground communications of the Civil War. With the use of the telegraph the U.S. Army had for the first time an electronic Command, Control and Communications (C3) system. And, for the first time, telegraph lines were tapped and messages intercepted. Captain Anson Stager, head of the Military Telegraph Service, established in 1861, developed a cryptosystem to provide an elementary safeguard against wiretapping.

During the 1870s important advances in the communications field occurred. The Signal Corps constructed, maintained and operated some 4,000 miles of telegraph lines along our country's western frontier. Marconi invented the wireless telegraph, the forerunner of the radio. Alexander Graham Bell patented the telephone and Thomas Alva Edison invented the mimeograph machine. The 1880s saw the establishment of the first formal, permanent intelligence organizations. In 1882 the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) was formed. The Army's first modern intelligence organization was formed in 1885 when President Cleveland asked Adjutant General R.C. Drum a piece of routine information. Embarrassed that he didn't have the information, Drum established the Military Information Division (MID) (Chart 1) of the Adjutant Generals Office as a permanent peacetime intelligence organization to "gather and file information concerning the military organizations of foreign countries in which, for one reason or another, the United States might become interested." The MID collected and filed material on geography and foreign forces and gave instructions to attaches.

During the last decade of the 1800s the Signal Corps role in the Spanish American War of 1898 and the subsequent Philippine Insurrection was on a larger scale than it had been in the Civil War. In addition to visual signaling the Corps supplied telephone and telegraph wire lines and cable communications, fostered the use of telephones in combat and employed combat photography. The military recognized the potential of intercepted communications signals as a source of intelligence and records show that during the Spanish American War a U.S. military officer recruited a source in the Western Union telegraph office in Havana to intercept communications between Madrid and Spanish commanders in Cuba. The MID published and distributed maps and intelligence pamphlets on Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines.

The first real tactical and operational field intelligence organization was developed during the Philippine War of 1899-1902. In 1898 an Insurgent Records office was created in the Manila headquarters of the Expeditionary Force in the Philippines to sift through and translate boxes of captured documents. The importance and scope of the office grew and so did the staff, finally becoming the Military Information Division of the Adjutant General's Office, Headquarters, Division of the Philippines, on 13 December 1900. In an effort to combat guerrillas, the Army had divided its units into small garrisons around the Philippines. In each garrison an officer was assigned to coordinate information on the terrain and enemy. Most of their information came from spies, deserters, prisoners, or captured documents - HUMINT sources.

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