Tell them, tell them about Tom Paine, America’s first intelligence failure. The urgent voice whispered in my ear in the dawn. I realized it was Oliver Wiswell, hero of Kenneth Roberts’s novel about the loyalists in the American Revolution. Oliver is one of my favorite fictional characters. I’ve often imagined him still fuming over the victory the despised rebels won in their war for independence.

“Huh?” I growled.

It’s all there. All in that travesty of the truth, “Common Sense.” That abominable son of an English corset maker sold Americans a pack of lies. I don’t mean his dreadful calumnies of His Majesty, George III. I mean the third section of his vicious screed. The part that no one ever reads.

I soon had a copy of “Common Sense” before my bleary eyes. I began reading the triumphant prose of Section III, “OF THE PRESENT ABILITY OF AMERICA.” Paine was telling rebels that defeating the British was going to be easy. “The [American] Continent hath, at this time, the largest number of armed and disciplined men of any power under Heaven.”

The American land force was “already sufficient” and it would be a simple matter to build a navy. It would cost money, but that was not a worry. We could afford to spend several million pounds sterling to put an American fleet on the high seas. “Debts we have none.” While Great Britain was reeling under a debt of L140,000,000. The interest alone came to L4,000,000.

America could build a navy as big as Britain’s for a mere L3,500,000 – a twentieth part of England’s debt. Whereupon Tom appended a chart of how much it cost to build various sized warships, and how many Britain had of each type in 1757 – the peak year of England’s global power. It came to exactly L3,500,000. Impressive!

Paine went on to argue that no country on the globe was better suited to build a navy. Tar, timber, iron, and cordage were American products. Moreover, the ships could easily be converted into merchant vessels, so the navy would be worth more than it cost when the war ended. As for manning the fleet, that too was easy. You did not need more than 20 veteran sailors in a 200-man crew.

If we tired of building enough ships to match the British one-to-one, that was not a worry. We would not have to fight the whole English fleet. Her ships were scattered all over globe, protecting colonies in India, the West Indies, Africa. Even if we built a fleet that was only a twentieth the size of England’s, we would still outgun her. Moreover, not a tenth part of the current English navy was fit for service. The ships were rotting in dockyards. The admiralty carried on the rolls the name of a ship even though only a plank of it was left.

Tom guaranteed America’s navy would outnumber England’s two-to-one in our home waters. The king’s minions had to sail 4,000 miles to attack us and sail back the same deadly distance to refit and recruit!

What was the conclusion? Defeating these royalists was virtually guaranteed. They were almost bankrupt. They would never be able to raise any men to expand their army, even if they could afford the cost. “It is a matter of observation,” Tom maintained, “that the more a country is peopled, the smaller their armies are.”

Another factor was Britain’s “increase in commerce,” which “diminishes the spirit, both of patriotism and military defense.” How else could anyone explain the way the city of London, “notwithstanding its numbers, submits to continued insults [from the king] with the patience of a coward?”

England, to sum it up, would simply not put up much of a fight. “The more men have to lose, the less willing they are to venture. The rich in general are slaves to fear.”

“Common Sense” sold 100,000 copies – the equivalent of a 15-million copy sale today. Buoyed by this intelligence estimate from an Englishman, no less, just off a recent boat from the mother country, America went blithely to war with Great Britain in 1775. Five years later, it was the Americans, not the British, who were bankrupt, their paper money worthless. The British fleet, that nullity which supposedly could not possibly operate in strength off the American coast, had clamped a blockade on the 13 rebellious colonies that reduced their economy to a shambles. The American fleet consisted of a few stray warships, which spent most of their time hiding in remote bays or far up rivers.

The American army, instead of recruiting an awesome host from the “largest number of armed and disciplined men in the world,” was a pathetic invalid, barely numbering a third of the soldiers the British had in America. As early as 1778, Washington advised Congress there was no longer any hope of more volunteers and recommended a draft. There is no doubt that as an intelligence expert, Tom Paine was on a par with Humpty Dumpty. But we won the war.

How? By persuading the French to become our allies and pour millions of dollars into our empty pockets to keep us in the contest. And send an army and a fleet to tip the balance in America’s favor. At the climactic victory of Yorktown, in 1781, there were approximately 29,000 French soldiers and sailors – and about 9,000 Americans.

That’s your version, Oliver. But there’s another version. We won by admitting Tom Paine was wrong and staying in the game – George Washington’s favorite phrase. Washington sums up this side of the story. The tens of thousands of hours he spent with the army, the thousands of letters he wrote, his unwavering determination to see “so good a cause” triumph. Eight exhausting years of struggle in which he and his officers became “a band of brothers.” That’s what overcame Tom Paine’s lousy intelligence.

Mr. Fleming’s latest book is “George Washington’s Secret War: The Hidden History of Valley Forge” (Smithsonian Books).