New Books in Military History · Marshall Poe

Mark Stout, "World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence" (UP of Kansas, 2023)

·1 hr 12 min·4 clips

John Gade called the Danish Military Intelligence Service “the truest friends a fellow could ever wish for.”

1. New Books Network hosts Mark Stout to discuss World War I and the Foundations of American Intelligence, published by University Press of Kansas in 2023. 2. Stout is a former State Department Bureau of Intelligence and Research officer, CIA analyst, IDA researcher, and intelligence historian, which makes his book’s argument professionally grounded. 3. The episode asks why World War I, rather than World War II or 1947, should be treated as the origin point for modern American intelligence. 4. Stout says the story begins in the late 1870s, when U.S. military reformers looked at German and French intelligence offices and wanted similar institutions. 5. He identifies the Office of Naval Intelligence, created in 1883, and War Department intelligence, created in 1885, as the first enduring U.S. intelligence agencies. 6. Those early offices focused more on collecting and compiling material than on later-style analysis, but they also managed military and naval attaches overseas. 7. Stout says Arthur L. Wagner, a West Point graduate and infantry officer, became a foundational intellectual figure at Fort Leavenworth in 1886. 8. Wagner wrote Organization and Tactics in 1894 and Service of Security and Information in 1893, which Stout calls an early American intelligence manual. 9. He says Wagner discussed peacetime intelligence, open source materials, signals intelligence, espionage, counterespionage, deception, prisoners, deserters, and balloon photography. 10. Stout presents Wagner’s work as a basis for Army intelligence thinking that remained in print until 1910 and circulated widely in the Army and National Guard. 11. The book then moves through the Spanish-American War, the Philippine-American War, and the shift toward card files, duplicate records, and district-level intelligence reporting. 12. Stout argues that these systems helped produce a shared intelligence picture across U.S. commands in the Philippines. 13. He describes the 1916 punitive expedition after Pancho Villa’s raid on Columbus, New Mexico, as a testing ground for intelligence practices later used in France. 14. In that campaign, Pershing’s staff used Japanese and Chinese sources, and Stout recounts an attempt by Japanese spies to poison Villa’s coffee with $50,000 in gold behind it. 15. He says Attorney General Thomas Gregory was troubled by the rumor, Secretary of War Newton Baker ordered an investigation, and Pershing denied knowledge of it. 16. Stout treats that episode as an early example of American covert action and plausible deniability. 17. Pershing’s experience with cavalry, reconnaissance, aviation, and code breaking in Mexico shaped his later confidence in intelligence during World War I. 18. The episode’s tone is interview-driven and historically detailed, with Stout answering long questions in a measured, analytical style. 19. Listeners interested in U.S. military history, intelligence history, and early twentieth-century warfare will get the most from it. 20. Listeners wanting a short general overview without military or intelligence detail may skip it.

As heard by us

A careful look at how World War I turned improvisation into an intelligence profession.

Mark Stout follows how World War I gave American intelligence a working shape, using the book to show how institutions, habits, and improvised methods came together.

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Why you'd press play

You want the wartime foundations of American intelligence before the Cold War hardened them.

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