Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy - Eamon Javers [21]
To this day, selling private intelligence services to the government in wartime can be a profitable enterprise. An entire industry has evolved around it, and many of these enterprises have headquarters outside Washington, D.C., where the other “Beltway bandits” set up shop selling services to the feds. Among the intelligence contractors of today are well-known names such as Booz Allen Hamilton, with 19,000 employees and more than $4 billion in annual revenue, which depends on consulting work for the U.S. intelligence community. At the other end of the scale is the relatively small corporation Abraxas, which, the Los Angeles Times revealed in 2006, creates fake identities and dummy companies for undercover CIA employees around the world. Some of today’s intelligence contractors have gotten into trouble. The CEO of an obscure contractor, MZM, was found in 2005 to have paid more than $1 million in illegal bribes to a powerful congressman in exchange for classified contracts. And the role of the security contractor Blackwater drew attention during congressional hearings in 2007 on the conduct of the firm’s employees in Iraq, who had been accused of murdering innocent civilians.
But first there was Pinkerton.
AFTER LINCOLN WAS elected president of the United States in November 1860, planning began for his triumphal journey from Illinois to the capital. Cities all along the rail route offered the president-elect the chance to speak to large, adoring crowds. But the route was scheduled to go south from Philadelphia to Baltimore, Maryland—an area with thousands of people, known as copperheads, who sympathized with the South. At that moment, it wasn’t clear whether Maryland would end up in the Union or as a Confederate state. Debate raged in the state capital at Annapolis. Lincoln would have to traverse this dicey geography on his way farther south to Washington, D.C. Samuel Morse Felton, the president of the Pennsylvania Central Railroad, was in charge of organizing the logistics of the trip, including arranging for special presidential trains and setting schedules. He called on Allan Pinkerton, saying he’d heard that Maryland’s secessionists were planning violent reprisals if the state voted to stay in the Union.
Pinkerton put together a plan to protect the president-elect. James Mackay has laid out the detailed preparations in his book Allan Pinkerton: The First Private Eye. The Pennsylvania Railroad organized rail workers and drilled them as a kind of a railway militia. Concerned that copperheads would try to burn train bridges, the workers covered the bridges with coats of fresh paint and fireproof materials. Felton sent men to infiltrate the Maryland militia, to figure out which units might stay loyal and which tilted toward the Confederacy.
Meanwhile, Pinkerton sent in a top team of detectives, including Timothy Webster, Hattie Lawton, and Pinkerton’s own assistant, Harry Davies. Pinkerton trawled the bars of Baltimore using an undercover alias—“J. H. Hutcheson” of Charleston, South Carolina—looking to identify copperheads and their supporters. At the same time, Davies befriended one transplanted southerner during nights of carousing at Anne Travise’s house of prostitution in Baltimore. The man bragged to Davies that he was plotting with a recent immigrant to assassinate President-Elect Lincoln as his train rolled through town. Webster enlisted undercover in the Confederate militia, and heard that it, too, was planning an assassination.
This was enough to convince the team that Lincoln would be in real danger as he passed through Baltimore. Eventually, Pinkerton and his team ferreted out the details of the plot—a small band of men would strike at the Calvert Street train depot. Lincoln heard similar rumors of a plot against him from law enforcement agents as well, and weighed whether to travel to Baltimore as planned or skip the city on his way from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to Washington, D.C. As Lincoln’s train left Harrisburg,