The Spy in the Committee of Public Safety
Throughout the Terror in 1793-94, writes Vera Watson, the British Government were being supplied with detailed reports on French Cabinet meetings. Who was the Spy among the thirteen members of the Committee of Public Safety?
On September 14th, 1793, Francis Drake, newly appointed Minister Plenipotentiary to the Republic of Genoa,1 sent to Lord Grenville, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, two extracts from the proceedings of the Committee of Public Safety with the comment that a similar bulletin would be dispatched by every post.
This statement meant that the British Government, throughout the Terror, was being supplied with the minutes of French cabinet meetings, for at that period the Committee of Public Safety was the Government of France.2
Drake was reticent about the means he had employed to achieve this astonishing feat of espionage and about the authorship of these bulletins. But he begged Lord Grenville to conceal them, as any indiscretion might lead to the detection of their writer.3 On November 9th, however, when forwarding another in the series, he remarked: “Your Lordship may rely on the authenticity of it, as it was drawn up by a person who is employed as a secretary to that committee [of Public Safety], and who conceals his real principles under the cloak of the most extravagant Jacobinism.”
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