Thomas Paine and the CIA's 1976 Lesson on Leaks

By Harlan Pryce ·

A Bicentennial publication uses a 1775 firing to warn against disclosure, framing modern covert action as a revolutionary tradition while congressional investigators circled the Agency.

Thomas Paine learned the hard way that the appetite for revolutionary fervor does not extend to the disclosure of operational secrets. The English-born philosopher who authored Common Sense to frame the argument for American independence found himself stripped of his standing and purged from the inner circle when he could not keep his mouth shut. His fall was not a tragedy of politics, but a failure of tradecraft, and it cost him his place in the room where the actual machinery of independence was being built.

I am working from the archive's curated description of a 1976 CIA pamphlet titled “Intelligence in the War of Independence” rather than the original pages. The document is a piece of historical curation, a Bicentennial offering that attempts to bridge the gap between the 18th-century woods of the colonies and the 20th-century corridors of Langley. It is a document that cares less about the Revolution than it does about the legitimacy of the Agency.

The Washington Shield

The Agency opens its historical defense with a quote from George Washington. The record notes that Washington observed, “The necessity of procuring good Intelligence is apparent & need not be further urged -- All that remains for me to add is, that you keep the whole matter as secret as possible.”

By leading with the Father of His Country, the Agency is not merely citing a source; it is invoking a shield. The public record establishes Washington as the commander of the Continental Army and the first president of the United States, a man whose survival—and the survival of the cause—depended on a network of spies and clandestine couriers. The connection here is a deliberate alignment. The CIA links its own operational necessity to Washington's personal insistence on silence, effectively arguing that the Agency's mandate is not a product of the Cold War, but a foundational requirement of the American state.

If this file is shaped the way it looks, the desk's reading is that the Agency was attempting to establish intelligence gathering as an inherent prerogative of the Executive. By anchoring the narrative to Washington, the pamphlet suggests that the need for secrecy transcends the whims of the current legislature. It frames the clandestine service not as a modern deviation from democratic norms, but as the very tool that enabled those norms to exist. To question the Agency's secrecy, in this reading, is to question the judgment of the man who led the Continental Army to victory.

Document imagery from nsarchive.gwu.edu From the files: nsarchive.gwu.edu

The Cautionary Tale of Thomas Paine

The document does not stop with the praise of Washington; it moves quickly to the punishment of the indiscreet. The record emphasizes the "need for utmost secrecy," citing the specific instance where Thomas Paine was discharged from the Committee of Secret Correspondence for “divulging information.”

The Committee of Secret Correspondence was the body formed by the Second Continental Congress in 1775 to secure French aid and diplomatic alliances before it was renamed the Committee of Foreign Affairs in 1777. It was the first formal intelligence organ of the American government, and it functioned as a tight circle of trust. When Paine—a man of immense intellect but zero discretion—leaked sensitive information, the Committee did not offer a reprimand; they severed him.

The connection drawn by the Agency is stark. By highlighting Paine's discharge, the CIA transforms a Founding Father into a cautionary tale. The pamphlet uses Paine’s failure to maintain secrecy as a historical precedent to justify the Agency's own internal discipline and its hostility toward leakers. It is a precise piece of framing: the act of leaking is not presented as a whistleblowing effort or a pursuit of transparency, but as a personal failure of character and a betrayal of the national interest.

The pattern suggests that the Agency was attempting to pathologize the act of leaking. By casting Paine as the archetype of the failed operative, the document diverts attention from the systemic lack of oversight within the intelligence apparatus and refocuses it on the individual's failure of discretion. In the Agency's view, the problem is never the operation; the problem is the man who cannot keep the secret.

The Vocabulary of Normalization

The most revealing part of the record is the list of "controversial acts" the Agency attributes to the revolutionaries. The pamphlet claims that the founders engaged in "political action, covert action, foreign intelligence, counterintelligence, wartime special operations, deception operations, and propaganda."

This is a calculated exercise in retrospective taxonomy. The public record shows that while the revolutionaries certainly spied and lied, they did not use the professionalized terminology of the 1970s. "Covert action" and "counterintelligence" are terms of art from the 20th-century intelligence community, not the 18th-century colonial assembly. The Agency is projecting its own modern organizational chart onto the past.

The connection is clear: the CIA is attempting to normalize its current capabilities by rebranding them as "traditional." By labeling the activities of the 1770s with the vocabulary of the 1970s, the Agency argues that its current operations are merely the evolved form of an American tradition. It is a way of saying that if Washington used "deception operations," then the Agency's modern use of them is not a violation of American values, but an adherence to them.

The Bicentennial Defense

The timing of this publication is the key that unlocks the entire document. 1976 was not just the Bicentennial; it was the era of the Church Committee, the Senate investigation that stripped the veil off the Agency's domestic spying and assassination plots. The Agency was under siege, its reputation in tatters, facing a Congress that had suddenly decided it wanted to see the books.

The desk's reading is that this pamphlet was a defensive rebranding effort. It was designed to provide the CIA with historical legitimacy at a moment when it was being framed as a rogue entity. By wrapping itself in the flag and the image of George Washington, the Agency was attempting to move the conversation. It wanted the public and the politicians to believe that covert action is a foundational American tradition, not a modern deviation.

The still-withheld pages of the Agency's internal communications from that era would likely show a desperate need to counteract the narrative of the Church Committee. The pamphlet is the public face of that effort—a polished, historical justification for the existence of a secret state. It argues that the price of independence is a permanent, secret capability, and that those who seek to expose that capability are not patriots, but the next Thomas Paine: useful for a time, but ultimately unfit for the room.

Who paid for this framing? The American public, who were led to believe that the Agency's secrecy was an inheritance from the Founders rather than a choice made by bureaucrats in the 1940s. The Agency succeeded in creating a lineage of legitimacy that allows it to claim that any legislative scrutiny is an affront to the spirit of 1776. The pattern is consistent: when the Agency is caught in a lie, it does not apologize; it finds a dead man from the 18th century to vouch for its methods.

Sources

  1. Central Intelligence Agency, “Intelligence in the War of Independence,” A Bicentennial Publication of the Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, D.C., 1976 — National Security Archive (GWU)
  2. Document PDF (Central Intelligence Agency, “Intelligence in the War of Independence,” A Bicentennial Publication of the Central Intelligence Agency, Washington, D.C., 1976)
  3. Background: Committee of Secret Correspondence — Wikipedia