The American Spy
With fluency in several languages, the U.S. Army assigns Spencer Fleming to intelligence following graduation from the West Point military academy in 1915. His first assignment, the Mexican border campaign to destroy Pancho Villa in 1916, follows with assignment to General Pershing’s staff of the AEF in France as America enters WWI in 1917.
During his service in Mexico and France, he came to the attention of influential senior officers for his intelligence work from the front lines earning several citations for valor. Subsequent diplomatic assignments following WWI provided the perfect background for eventual assignment as military attaché to Germany in 1933.
Essentially diplomats, military attachés gather only available information of military value from the host country. To acquire secret information requires espionage penetration by foreign intelligence operatives.
Prior to the onset of WWII, the United States did not have a foreign intelligence service. Having risen to power in Germany, Adolf Hitler’s provocative pronouncements threaten German territorial expansion through military means. The result, another great multinational European war. Discovering opportunities to go beyond the narrow confines of gathering military information of interest only to the War Department, Fleming enters the dangerous world of espionage to discover Nazi secrets useful to U.S. policymakers.