Department of the Navy described it in detail to President Lincoln in the Secretary's annual report. While this information was Smalls' greatest intelligence contribution to the Union, he subsequently provided another gift to the Navy. On the night of May 12, 1862, he, family members, and other black American crewmen of the Planter, a cargo steamer turned into an armed coastal patrol ship, sailed out of Charleston harbor after the captain and two mates had gone home. In the dark, Smalls pretended to be the captain and, from his previous experiences, was able to provide all the correct countersigns to challenges from the various harbor fortifications. Upon reaching ships forming the Union blockade, he surrendered the Planter to them. Later that month he and his fellow crewmen received payment as a reward from the US government for half the appraised value of the ship as a reward. When Pinkerton left his position as chief of intelligence for the Army of the Potomac in November 1862, he took all his intelligence files on the Confederacy with him. (Because he had been a private contractor, the files belonged to him). This left Union forces without centralized Confederate order-of-battle information, and the one remaining intelligence officer in the Army of the Potomac had to travel to the War Department in Washington to re-create this information from records of previous battles. Charlie Wright When Gen. Joseph Hooker took command of the Army of the Potomac on 27 January 1863, he immediately saw the need for an effective centralized intelligence system. On 11 February, Col. George H. Sharpe, an attorney and an officer of New York state volunteers, accepted the post of head of the Army's intelligence service. Under Sharpe, with direction from Hooker, the Bureau of Military Information (BMI) was created. Its sole focus was collection of intelligence on the enemy; it had no counterintelligence responsibilities. It soon developed into the first "all-source intelligence" organization in US history. Sharpe obtained, collated, analyzed, and provided reports based on scouting, spying behind enemy lines, interrogations, cavalry reconnaissance, balloon observation, Signal Corps observation, flag signal and telegraph intercepts, captured Confederate documents and mail, southern newspapers, and intelligence reporting from subordinate military units. This structured approach, which ended with the Confederate surrender, was not re-institutionalized until 1947, when the CIA was created. Sharpe's BMI was well established when Charlie Wright, a young black man, arrived at Union lines