FOIAWEAR — THE CULPER RING / Cipher & Typography Tee

FOIAWEAR / ARCHIVE SERIES 035 — THE CULPER RING

When the first two years of the Revolutionary War produced no major intelligence breakthroughs, General George Washington turned to Benjamin Tallmadge and made him his intelligence chief. Tallmadge recruited trusted friends from his hometown on Long Island. None of them had spied before, but they had known each other a long time and shared a circle of trust. They became the Culper Ring — a farmer, a businessman, a bar owner, a mariner, a housewife and a handful of others, working in the heart of New York City where the British Army was garrisoned.

Their intelligence on British military strategy, order of battle and morale let Washington rebalance the odds against a far stronger enemy, and their reporting on troop logistics by land and sea allowed France's fleet to move without risk of ambush.

What made the Ring remarkable was its tradecraft, improvised in an age without modern communications. They used the need-to-know principle, code, dead drops, cover and aliases — and true names were never used in Culper correspondence, in case a letter fell into the wrong hands. Washington supplied spy gadgets and distributed vials of invisible ink and reagent, used to mask and unmask sensitive correspondence. One surviving letter from Samuel Culper (Abraham Woodhull), passed to Washington in July 1780, detailed British commanders, troop numbers and order of battle — and survives both as written and transcribed with the Ring's codes revealed.

The Ring ran for five years; its final communications were recorded in 1783, the year the war ended. Tallmadge lived until 1835, dying at 82 in Litchfield, Connecticut.

The artwork is a stylised typographic treatment of cipher material — a field of abstract glyph blocks, Morse-style dot-and-dash bands and a cipher disc. The glyphs and letter groups in the artwork are decorative and are not the Culper Ring's historical code. It is not a photograph, technical drawing or a facsimile of any document.

Offered in twelve garment colours: the artwork carries light typography on dark garments (Black, Navy, Graphite, Pepper, Espresso, Sapphire) and dark typography on light garments (Moss, Chambray, Mustard, Butter, Light Green, White).

The QR code on the front opens the CIA's story on the Culper Ring's intelligence contributions, one of the sources for the above: https://www.cia.gov/stories/story/three-key-intelligence-contributions-of-the-little-known-culper-ring/

Garment: Comfort Colors 1717 garment-dyed t-shirt. Heavyweight 6.1 oz/yd² (206.8 g/m²), 100% ring-spun US cotton, pre-shrunk, relaxed fit, double-needle stitched with no side seams and a sewn-in label. Sizes S–4XL. Printed on the front at 300 DPI; plain back. The main artwork prints at 10 × 10 in and the QR at 1.8 × 1.8 in.

Care: machine wash cold, inside out, with like colours. Tumble dry low. Do not iron directly on the printed area.

FOIAWEAR is an independent brand and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to the Central Intelligence Agency, the United States government, or any other government or agency.