Elyse Graham, a professor in the English department at Stony Brook University, is interested in hidden histories. In her latest book, “Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II,” she explores an untold corner of the Second World War. When the war began, the Unite States found itself in need of an intelligence agency, and created the Office of Strategic Services, which would become the basis for today’s CIA. In an effort to fill its ranks, the agency turned to academia, recruiting literature professors, librarians and historians to perform undercover operations and investigative work. In “Book and Dagger,” Graham tells the story of the academics who pioneered modern spycraft and helped turn the tide of the war. The book came out Tuesday, and Graham speaks at Porter Square Books on Oct. 6. We interviewed Graham on Friday; her words have been edited for length and clarity.
How did you first find out about the professors, librarians and historians the OSS recruited during World War II?
I’ve been writing about the history of universities for a long time. In the 1950s and ’60s, many of the young undergraduates who were getting recruited to the CIA were coming from literature and history departments, and I became curious why that was. When I looked into it, I found that it was because their professors had been spies during World War II, so they still had CIA connections. Some of their colleagues from that time had joined the CIA and never gone back to their universities. It was an unexpected way to think about the type of people who might go into spycraft, and I decided it would be a fun story to explore.
The central characters are Joseph Curtiss, the literature professor; Sherman Kent, the history professor; and Adele Kibre, the archivist. How did you decide on these three?
They were all connected prior to the war. Adele made her money by traveling around Europe and taking photographs, documenting archives that people in the United States wanted to look at. One of her clients was the Yale library, and Joseph Curtis and Sherman Kent were professors at Yale. The three of them were actually in a little friend group of sorts. So they all had this existing connection, which I liked, and they each represented very different things about spycraft.
Joseph was very much a Yale type of person – he grew up in Connecticut, went to Yale for undergrad, earned his doctorate there and stayed on as a professor – so he is representative of these tweed-wearing professors who were thrown into a completely foreign world and were expected to master the art of cloak-and-dagger operations, and found themselves to be very good at that job. Then there’s Sherman, who went and worked on research and analysis in Washington, and eventually rose to become the head of research and analysis for all of Africa and Europe. He represents the way that these professors had to learn how to communicate with the military and war planners to make a case for a new kind of intelligence. He turned out to be a perfect person for the job because he was a very brash, smart-mouthed character; he never felt quite at home in the classroom, but he seemed to be very comfortable in the midst of battle, so to speak. And Adele was also very successful at her job. She was actually the OSS’ most successful document sender: She sent home unbelievable amounts of material that she had whisked right under the noses of people who sympathized with the Germans.
How did Kibre’s role as a woman come into play in her work?
The entry of women into warfare as intelligence agents was still very much in dispute at the beginning of the war. People weren’t sure women would be able to do the job, but some of the people who were in charge of intelligence recruiting during the war believed that women, in fact, were actually the perfect people to do this job. There was the fact that women were accustomed to getting things done without relying on anyone to help them, and there was also the fact that they were more easily overlooked by others, because they didn’t make themselves the center of attention or want to show off how much they knew. Men would sometimes try to impress women by showing off the secrets they knew, and that was a real liability in terms of intelligence. By the end of the war, there was no question that women were excellent at spycraft.
Had using academic thinkers to gather intelligence been used before?
Research and analysis, the branch of the OSS that these people worked for, was an entirely new thing in the world. It demonstrated a new kind of thinking about intelligence, by which, in Sherman’s words, 90 percent of what you might wish to know about another country in the context of warfare is available in public sources. It’s just that nobody reads those sources – things like telephone books, railroad directories, novels, guidebooks, even documents belonging to reinsurance companies, which are companies that insure insurance companies. If you can imagine going through the archives and finding bits of treasure among the most boring material imaginable, that was the job of these R&A agents. They were sometimes locked in the Library of Congress until an important operation was done, pulling all-nighters and working so hard that they didn’t have time to change their clothes. Their work turned out to be tremendously successful, and it became the basis of how the CIA, when it was created after the war, went about its work. Sherman, who had headed intelligence analysis for Europe and Africa for the OSS, became the theorist and architect of intelligence analysis in the CIA. It was a new idea, but it was a great idea, and it very much helped us to win the war.
Do you think there’s a lesson in here about the power of libraries and the humanities, two institutions that are increasingly being attacked?
Absolutely I think this is a story that holds important lessons for the present day. We’re in a time when libraries are under threat, when people are questioning the value of the humanities, and this is a story that reminds us of all the good that comes with libraries. They’re not just places that store information, although that can be incredibly valuable too! They’re also places that raise intelligent, thoughtful readers. And those intelligent, thoughtful readers of huge masses of information are able to come up with the important ideas that can help us to maintain peace and, at times, plan war. Libraries are also essential for national security, which is evident in this book. At the beginning of the war, they didn’t have maps of the places that they were fighting in, and a group of ingenious academics found ways to get that knowledge out of telephone books and such. The importance of libraries was noted – one of the first actions the government took after the war was to institute a huge program to build up American libraries and make sure we would never be short of the information that we needed again. Unfortunately, 80 years later, we seem to have forgotten that lesson.
Elyse Graham reads from “Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II” at 3 p.m. Oct. 6 at Porter Square Books, 25 White St., Porter Square, Cambridge. Free. Information is here.
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