Guerrillas Near Washington DC

[Pete]

In a message above in this thread I cited the book Come Retribution: The Confederate Secret Service and the Assassination of Lincoln. One of the authors of the book, retired NSA man David W. Gaddy, was in the news the other day for breaking a previously undecrypted Confederate signal message from 1863 that had quietly reposed in the collection of the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond since the 1890s. The message was to Gen. Pemberton in Vicksburg and stated that there would be no relief for the Confederate garrison there. The AP story begins as follows, and the link is available by clicking here:

RICHMOND, Va. (AP) — A glass vial stopped with a cork during the Civil War has been opened, revealing a coded message to the desperate Confederate commander in Vicksburg on the day the Mississippi city fell to Union forces 147 years ago.

The dispatch offered no hope to doomed Lt. Gen. John C. Pemberton: Reinforcements are not on the way.

The encrypted, 6-line message was dated July 4, 1863, the date of Pemberton's surrender to Union forces led by Ulysses S. Grant, ending the Siege of Vicksburg in what historians say was a turning point midway into the Civil War.

The message is from a Confederate commander on the west side of the Mississippi River across from Pemberton.

"He's saying, 'I can't help you. I have no troops, I have no supplies, I have no way to get over there,' " Museum of the Confederacy collections manager Catherine M. Wright said of the author of the dispiriting message. "It was just another punctuation mark to just how desperate and dire everything was."

Dave is an acquaintance of mine. During Vietnam as a DoD civilian he ran a signal interception station in the Khe Sahn vicinity for a few months. His book Come Retribution explores the way John Wilkes Booth's conspiracy used known Confederate safe houses, rat lines, signal ciphers, and military support for the assassination of Lincoln. Although no smoking gun connecting Booth to the Confederate government is provided, the coincidences are far too many for the theory to be dismissed out of hand.