Appearing on Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot channel 125, Fox & Friends co-host Brian Kilmeade discussed his book about the spy ring that helped win the Revolutionary War, which host and Breitbart News Executive Chairman Stephen K. Bannon predicted would be the “sleeper hit” of the Christmas season.
Kilmeade said he started working on the book, George Washington’s Secret Six: The Spy Ring That Saved the American Revolution, in 1989 when he found out there were six everyday people who risked their lives for the fledgling country–and they were from his home town of Long Island, New York. He said he had never heard about these heroic citizen spies while he was attending school and wanted to ensure their stories were told to future generations.
In a book that has already been heralded as thrilling and accessible, Kilmeade said once he started learning about these characters, he “couldn’t be more fascinated.”
One of the agents in the book communicated with invisible ink. Another owned a dry goods shop in Manhattan. One was a publisher of a royalist newspaper who ended up being a double agent to help the Americans. There was a mysterious “upper class” woman who was referred to as “355.” Kilmeade said intelligence picked up when she came aboard and she was close to the man who “who would have combined with Benedict Arnold to give away West Point,” and getting information about that was one of the ring’s “great accomplishments.”
There was a farmer, who was the first to come aboard in addition to someone Kilmeade called a “real stud” who did not use a pseudonym and used a whale boat and a cannon to weave and blast his way through the British Navy for four years to deliver communications. Benjamin Tallmadge organized the group.
These heroes lived and died anonymous lives and “didn’t want any acclaim,” according to Kilmeade.
But they left clues as to what they did, and George Washington wrote about them in coded ways.
“It was right there in front of us,” Kilmeade said.
Kilmeade said as he was working on this project and approaching it like “journalists and investigators” for over two decades, other historians were getting closer to putting together the pieces, which made him accelerate to the finish line because Kilmeade had been on the trail before anyone else.
Though Kilmeade acknowledged that those born in the United States now have “hit the lotto” and cannot possibly understand the sacrifices that the colonists made, there is a “direct line between” the country’s everyday heroes today, especially those in the military, who carry on the country’s traditions and values of the citizen spies whose stories Kilmeade passionately tells.
While discussing his significant work that will contribute new insights into the history of the Revolutionary War, Kilmeade lamented that had he learned about these spies as a kid, the story “would have stuck with him forever.” Because of Kilmeade, future generations of Americans who read George Washington’s Secret Six: The Spy Ring That Saved the American Revolution will not be deprived of one of the more significant, compelling, and fascinating pieces of the country’s history.
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