#notes/europe #notes/north-america

Book and Dagger : How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II

by Elyse Graham

Summary

The untold story of the academics who became OSS spies, invented modern spycraft, and helped turn the tide of the war At the start of WWII, the U.S. found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today’s CIA, was quickly formed—and, in an effort to fill its ranks with experts, the OSS turned to academia for recruits. Suddenly, literature professors, librarians, and historians were training to perform undercover operations and investigative work—and these surprising spies would go on to profoundly shape both the course of the war and our cultural institutions with their efforts. In Book and Dagger, Elyse Graham draws on personal histories, letters, and declassified OSS files to tell the story of a small but connected group of humanities scholars turned spies. Among them are Joseph Curtiss, a literature professor who hunted down German spies and turned them into double agents; Sherman Kent, a smart-mouthed history professor who rose to become the head of analysis for all of Europe and Africa; and Adele Kibre, an archivist who was sent to Stockholm to secretly acquire documents for the OSS. These unforgettable characters would ultimately help lay the foundations of modern intelligence and transform American higher education when they returned after the war. Thrillingly paced and rigorously researched, Book and Dagger is an inspiring and gripping true story about a group of academics who helped beat the Nazis—a tale that reveals the indelible power of the humanities to change the world.

Review

It felt oddly timely to read this, especially towards the learning about the impacts this knowledge initiative in the OSS had on kickstarting America's intelligence strategies, given recent (early 2025) goings on.

I bought it because I'm interested in knowledge management. It would have been really cool to see the actual flow of knowledge throughout the war, if that was the thread that brought you through the narrative of the war. You could have taken any one of these stories and written a whole book about information analysis or picked a few to provide an intimate walkthrough of the many ways information can be manipulated. Instead, it was more like a summary of examples across the war, but I still appreciated that. I learned a lot of stuff that I had never been taught before, not even peripherally.

I guess a book like this is a bit limited to resourcing because perhaps women didn't write enough about their experiences in the war. I wish any one of those lady librarians wrote a memoir as descriptive as the men's. I would have loved more detail on their adventures too, but I guess we have what we have available to us, which is tons of shit about a racist anthropologist.

Despite that it gets 4/5 stars for being interesting and fun to read, if not a little disjointed at times, with an overarching goal to promote the usefulness of knowledge and humanities.

Quotes

It was a mission that required his knowledge (and love) of books, just as a fighter pilot’s mission requires a knowledge of planes. And the OSS recruited hundreds of others like him: mild-mannered professors and oddball archivists and restless librarians. Because America had no standing intelligence agency at the start of the war and needed to build up an instant bank of expertise on every subject in the library, the OSS simply raided the library for recruits. (Page 7)

In 1933, Hitler gave the order to burn books. In 1941, he gave the order to burn people. (Page 11)

Donovan’s new intelligence service understood what Hitler never did: the power of power from below. (Page 12)

in the Library of Congress, OSS veterans helped to catalogue the OSS records; this was a good service to history, but they often catalogued the names of men and not the names of women. In memoirs that men wrote about the war years, the names of women are, likewise, often absent—they’re “a shapely analyst,” say, or “a woman from Harvard.” I’m grateful to have a way to fill in the stories of figures who, despite their importance, don’t receive their due space in the archives. (Page 16)

earning cash by taking photographs of rare texts for scholars back home in the States, who did not have, in those days before the internet, any other way of seeing such texts besides visiting the archives themselves. (One of her clients was the Yale Library.) (Page 22)

“Skull science,” the practice of taking measurements from skulls in order to argue for the inferiority of whole ethnic groups, was discredited by Darwin’s time in the nineteenth century—smarter people don’t have bigger skulls—but it became vogue in the early twentieth century precisely because people who wanted to commit horrific acts against other ethnic groups thought skull science gave them a veneer of scientific objectivity. (Page 26)

After the war, the discipline of anthropology would undertake a serious examination of its complicity in the Holocaust and other crimes against humanity (Page 26)

Gentlemen may not read other people’s letters, but scholars do. They’re good at it. (Page 33)

Cover is so important that if carrying out a subversive mission would harm your cover, you must protect the cover and ditch the mission. (Page 55)

This is the kind of information relayed in the lectures at Allied intelligence training camps, including Area B. So much of being a successful spy comes down not to fighting daggers or cool gadgets or ingenious stunts, but to classroom skills like paying attention, pattern-finding, puzzle-solving, and memorization. It’s the kind of job a professor can excel at. (Page 57)

The paradox of spycraft is that, even though a spy’s work encompasses all manner of moral issues, the real moral issue comes before any of that, during training. Because that’s when you make the big decision that leads to all the rest: whether to become a spy at all, knowing full well that you may have to deceive and even kill people. And that’s a choice you must make alone: the first, and hardest, lesson in the solitude of spycraft. (Page 63)

Cumper was an army engineer who knew, as all army engineers do, that the world has two kinds of engineering journals: civil engineering journals, which explain how to build bridges, and military engineering journals, which explain how to blow up those same bridges. (Page 64)

If she wants to know something specific, but doesn’t want people to notice her asking questions, she should simply make incorrect statements while in the company of experts. Her companions will correct her, especially if they’re men (Page 67)

Do unto others as they would do unto you,” he advised in a training manual, “but do it first." (Page 75)

Espionage and astrology have a few key points in common. An overwhelming drive to control what will happen by gaining total foreknowledge. A fascination with personalities, and a belief that one can learn enough about someone’s personality to predict their actions better than they themselves can. A conviction that one’s profession relies on using methods that only initiates must know to uncover information that only initiates should know. Like espionage, early modern astrology was a field that concerned itself greatly with ciphers (Page 87)

What Geertz said about the information marketplace of the bazaar is also true of the information marketplace of spycraft: “Strictly, a bazaar trader or artisan does not have a reputation, good or bad. He has reputations, dozens of them.” (Page 93)

The purpose of revoking papers was to give the police and the Gestapo a justification for doing as they liked with their victims: arresting them, shooting them, sending them to prisons or concentration camps. (Page 114)

Is there a safe place on the sidelines of a conflict like this one? Can a newspaper stand aside and observe both the tolerant and the intolerant without condemning either group—and refrain, thereby, from helping either group? (Page 120)

The Nazis demanded that the press in Sweden normalize—treat as credible and give equal time to—Nazism. That strategy extended to newspapers, but also libraries, bookstores, and universities. These efforts worked to legitimize ideas that were once abhorrent. (Page 120)

D-day, which, though we now associate the term with the landing at Normandy, was a term that applied to any mission’s start date (Page 160)

the humanities researchers who were recruited more than pulled their weight. Much of their work followed a premise that professors know all too well: the answers might be right in front of you, but you won’t see them unless you do the reading. And another premise: nothing in the archives is unimportant (Page 168)

So how do you keep secrets if you can’t keep secrets? A time-honored method is to flood the enemy with bad intelligence. Drown information with disinformation (Page 173)

Authoritarian regimes, in the words of Robert Hutchings, a scholar of public affairs and the former chair of the U.S. National Intelligence Council, are prey to “intellectual pathologies” that drastically narrow what they’re capable of thinking: intense conformity, resistance to contrary information, the overestimation of insiders, and the stereotyping of outsiders. Authoritarianism is a catastrophic intellectual handicap (Page 120)

A paradox of spycraft is that gathering good intelligence necessitates working alone, but making good on that intelligence necessitates working together. And the knowledge that’s necessary to coordinate that teamwork is dangerous to grant to any one person. (Page 222)

America, when it honored its best values, welcomed them. It’s the American way: welcoming strangers, seizing the practical gains of diversity, finding common cause between aristocrats and thieves. (Page 244)

The hero in a crisis is the man who makes his decisions most known and felt. (Page 253)

Donovan also praised the “hyphenated Americans” who did so much for the war effort: “An unusual circumstance that helped us was the melting-pot nature of the American population. No other nation has in its population so many diverse national strains as are found in ours. During the war, some thought the unassimilated admixture would prove a weakness that our enemies would penetrate and exploit. Instead, the vast pool of linguistic skills and special racial and regional knowledge became one of our prime assets. No matter what region was involved, we were always able to muster for intelligence work either American citizens or friendly aliens versed in its language, politics, history, and customs.” (Page 257)

security can’t hide a truly large operation: “With rare exceptions, even the tightest security measures guard against disclosure only to the most naïve, preoccupied, witless, incompetent, or unlucky enemy.” If secrets won’t protect a large operation, what will? Whaley’s answer is deception: the active spreading of falsehoods. The French call this act intoxication, a word that suggests how falsehoods can impair or disable. The word also suggests how falsehoods can have a kind of allure, like drinks at a party. “The ultimate goal of stratagem,” Whaley says, referring to military deception, “is to make the enemy quite certain, very decisive, and wrong.” (Page 266)

William Burke and William Hare famously did in the 1820s when—seeking forensically “clean” cadavers they could sell to medical schools, which used the cadavers for anatomy lessons—they killed and sold sixteen victims. (Page 275)

Every night at 7:00 p.m., the BBC aired a special program for France, spoken en français so that French people could understand it. The French authorities forbade anyone to listen, under threat of punishments that went up to twelve months of hard labor; but plenty of civilians took the risk of listening anyway, with the lights off and their windows shut tight to keep the sound of tinny voices from making its way to the street. (The broadcast always began with the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony: da-da-da-dum, or dot-dot-dot-dash, which is Morse code for the letter V. V for victory.) (Page 282)

Paintings are mortal. But they’re also memory, an image of a particular time and place from a particular point of view, which is why we value them so highly, and why Hitler wanted to destroy many of them. Without the museum of the past, without men and women of other times and places lending us their minds, our comprehension of the world is nothing more, as H. L. Mencken said, than a small flashlight beam in a large and murky room. (Page 327)

For anyone with the most basic moral equipment, trading friendly commonalities with a Nazi will be a deeply unpleasant experience. (Page 329)

the scholars knew when to follow principles, not orders. In the process, they enacted the hope that the future of art—and of the world—would be different from the past. (Page 339)

Even with our best efforts, our knowledge of the past will always be frustratingly limited. Most of the people who have ever lived were illiterate. Most of our knowledge about the past comes from writing. You can do the math yourself. (Page 365)

Books

Books remind us of the brutal follies of tyrants, big and small. They teach us that knowledge is an ongoing process, not a fixed set of givens. (Page 9)

a book is—to quote the poet John Milton—a human spirit treasured up for a life beyond life. If the Nazis were to succeed in utterly wiping a people from the Earth, they would have to destroy their books as well. (Page 10)

The event was reportedly a bit of a farce, since books don’t actually burn very well; the fires took an embarrassingly long time to get going and, afterward, books were retrieved from the piles barely charred. But people around the world recognized the threat for what it was, and they protested vehemently against the conflagration. (Page 10)

"You can burn my books and the books of the best minds in Europe, but the ideas in them have seeped through a million channels and will continue to quicken other minds.” (Page 10)

a new field arose in both literature and history departments called book history, the study of the material history of texts. It is a discipline saturated with mourning—with a moral urgency to recover lost worlds from the documents those worlds left behind. (Page 359)

Knowledge

Raw intelligence has little value without experts who can make meaning of the intelligence. (Page 33)

SIS even refused to share most of its institutional knowledge with the SOE, convinced that SOE agents would get captured and give everything away. No matter. The SOE would start with the traditions it could—and would build its own institutional knowledge from there. (Page 61)

In the 1970s, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz would use bazaars as a model for understanding environments filled with unreliable information: “To start with a dictum: in the bazaar, information is poor, scarce, maldistributed, inefficiently communicated, and intensely valued.” (Page 81)

the goal of counterintelligence is to use the enemy’s intelligence services to your advantage, which means you should let those services keep running. The task isn’t to cut off information, but rather to control it (Page 96)

Journalists, for instance, often use the phrase “too good to check” to refer to stories that nobody wants to fact-check because they’re so fun to believe that people actively fight for them over the truth (Page 287)

A human expert’s knowledge is valuable partly because the expert knows the limits of that knowledge. Decades later, Kent wrote to a friend that no new technologies would put that thesis out of date—not computers or microdot messages or clandestine listening devices: “The heart of the book is as solid as ever; the game still swings on the educated, thoughtful man, not on gadgetry.” (Page 349)

Stories

the thing about stories is that you don’t always get to choose the one you’re in. (Page 18)

Technology

John von Neumann, the Hungarian mathematician who came to the United States from Berlin, pioneered digital computing—work that arose from his military ordnance projects during the war. Historically, modern computers should have been invented in Berlin. Instead, they were invented in Princeton and Pennsylvania. (And Cambridge, in the United Kingdom.) If not for Germany’s path of destruction, today we would spell the word computer with a K. (Page 358)

Notes while reading

I ended up texting people a lot while reading this instead of keeping my own notes but I have some quotes to share. It was quite an adventure while also being adequately nerdy to satiate the desire for how knowledge plays a part in all of it.

• I want to read more about journalists in early wars
• And ghost wars
• and the history of camouflage
• How much foreign art has America stolen since 1949?