When CIA employees walk into their headquarters in suburban Virginia, they are now greeted by a young Black woman. She’s holding a lantern and armed with a pistol in her belt, looking fearless.
The woman is Harriet Tubman, a hero of the Underground Railroad, portrayed in a striking bronze statue recently unveiled at the Central Intelligence Agency in Langley.
The idea for the statue came from CIA officers who studied Tubman in a leadership class, including her time spying for the Union Army during the Civil War.
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“This is very meaningful,” said Cobbs, who wrote a historical novel about Tubman’s role gathering intelligence for the Union Army, "The Tubman Command."
“She was a kick-ass spy operating in extremely difficult circumstances with extremely high stakes,” said Cobbs, a professor at Texas A&M University.
Although school children are familiar with Tubman’s work helping rescue slaves and bring them to freedom in the North, when she was dubbed “Moses,” her time as a Union Army nurse and spy is often overlooked, Cobbs said.
In June 1863, Tubman played a crucial role in the planning and execution of a daring raid into Confederate territory in South Carolina, leading a team of eight scouts who gathered intelligence on enemy positions on the Combahee river.
Through her intelligence gathering, she learned that some Confederate gun emplacements had been removed and that defensive positions were lightly manned, according to Cobbs.
Tubman then took part in the raid, leading Union gunboats to strategic points near the shore where fleeing slaves were waiting.
The operation came off without a hitch and with no Union Army losses. More than 750 slaves were liberated, a pontoon bridge destroyed and troops disembarked to torch valuable Confederate property, including plantations, fields, mills, warehouses and mansions.
Newspaper accounts in the North hailed the raid and credited an unnamed Black woman as the mastermind of the effort, a “she Moses.” Her role in the operation made her the first American woman to command an armed military raid, and last year, Tubman was accepted into the U.S. Army Military Intelligence Corps Hall.
After the war, Tubman had financial struggles and was denied repeated requests for a Union Army pension, which was awarded to Black soldiers who took part in the same raid. After 30 years, she was granted a pension for her work as a nurse, not as a soldier and an intelligence officer.