Ever since the first navies of ancient times, they were met around the world with spies who were duty bound to study these fleets, their movements, and locations. These assets, known as human intelligence, or HUMINT, often blend into to local ports, beaches, and harbors under a clandestine cover. This cover can be as a photographer, shipping clerk, stevedore, barkeeper, or any such other trade that would not fall under suspicion. In the early 20th century, there were few US citizens traveling around Central America and they were usually diplomats, businesspersons, or scholars. It was a group of these scholars, anthropologists and archeologists mainly, who gave the best service to the US Navy’s Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) in looking for rumored German U-Boat bases in Central America during World War 1.
Who was Sylvanus Griswold Morley?
Morley was a little known anthropologist and scholar of the early twentieth century. He was born in 1883 in Chester Pennsylvania. Starting as an engineering student he went on to Harvard where he studied pre-Columbian early American archaeology, specifically that of the Mayans. From 1907 onward, he spent a great deal of time in Central and South America doing research and conducting exploration and excavation of ancient ruins. He was also Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) Agent No. 53 during the same time. A new book by Charles Harris and Louis Sadler, The Archaeologist was a Spy: Sylvanus G. Morley and the Office of Naval Intelligence, covers this part of Morley's life in detail.
A look at The Archaeologist was a Spy
Sadler and Harris delve full-speed into the strange world of ONI operations south of the Rio Grande just before World War 1. They detail Morley and his archeological background and his patriotism in coming forward to offer his services. Morley, and his cast of supporting characters including a cartoonist, other scientists, and lawyer, is fully explained in their travels around Banana Country in Belize, Guatemala, the Yucatan, and others. Despite the seemingly best efforts of Washington to derail their mission (Morley was listed on the Naval List as an officer and they often found correspondence waiting for them with US Navy return addresses), they successfully scouted every port, harbor, and river mouth from Panama to Brownsville Texas looking for the Kaisers secret submarine bases.
The work is handsomely illustrated with 22 figures, extensively noted, and indexed. Some 60-odd pages are dedicated to a series of four fascinating and insightful appendices which detail Morley’s own reports on the rivers, bays, and lagoons of the Mosquito Coast and the Yucatan, and of the ONI’s list of secret agents and code numbers. At 464-pages, this hardcover is dry reading for the casual reader. If you are looking for a spy chase thriller with gee-whiz gadgets, beautiful blondes, and lurking U-Boats, this is not it, despite the flashy cover. However, for those interested in the amazingly slap-sticky-- yet shockingly effective-- methods of the early US Intelligence Community, or in US-Mexico-Central American political intrigues during World War I, then this book should be at the top of your list.
About the authors
Sadler and Harris are both emeritus history professors at New Mexico State University, Las Cruces. Together they have written two other books about US involvement south of the border during the first two decades of the 20th Century, The Texas Rangers and the Mexico Revolution, and The Secret War in El Paso: Mexican Revolutionary Intrigue 1906-1920. These two men are quite possibly the most knowledgeable scholars alive about this time and place in history and the murky undercurrents that swirled far from the light of the surface.
Join the Conversation