author
Henry Bascom Smith
d. 1916
A Union veteran and former secret-service officer, he wrote vivid Civil War recollections that read like firsthand spy stories. His best-known book looks back on covert work in Maryland and around Washington with an eye for drama and detail.
1 Audiobook
Between the Lines: Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After
by Henry Bascom Smith
About the author
Remembered today for Between the Lines: Secret Service Stories Told Fifty Years After (published in 1911), he presented himself in that book as a brevet major who had served as assistant provost marshal and chief of the secret service under Major General Lew Wallace during the American Civil War.
The book is less a formal history than a lively memoir, filled with anecdotes about intelligence work, military policing, and wartime intrigue. That firsthand angle is what makes his writing stand out: it offers listeners a personal view of how espionage and counter-espionage were remembered half a century after the war.
Reliable biographical details beyond the book and his death year are hard to confirm from the sources I found, so it is safest to describe him mainly through the work he left behind. Even so, his account remains an engaging window into the shadowy side of the Civil War.