March 10, 2025 • 54 mins
Did you know that some of the most effective American spies during World War II were librarians and archivists and history professors? Some were locked in the basement of the Library of Congress, analyzing documents. Those documents were being gathered by academics sneaking around Europe, under the noses of the Nazis. Author Elyse Graham tells me the story at the center of her book, Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II.
Support this podcast by shopping our latest sponsor deals and promotions at this link: https://bit.ly/4gF2K18
See more information on my books: katewinklerdawson.com
Follow me on social: @tenfoldmore (Twitter) / @wickedwordspod (Facebook) / @tenfoldmorewicked (Instagram)
2025 All Rights Reserved
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
She was very good at her job, and she refused
to tell her superiors her methods, even though they sent
her letters begging, like, just tell me how you're doing this,
(00:21):
tell me how you're finding this, and she never told them.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:51):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. Did you know that some
of the most effective American spies during World War II
(01:11):
were librarians and archivists and history professors. Some were locked
in the basement of the Library of Congress analyzing documents.
Those documents were being gathered by academics sneaking around Europe
under the Noses of the Nazis. Author Elise Graham tells
me the story at the center of her book, Book
and Dagger, how scholars and librarians became the unlikely spies of.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
World War II.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
When you are at at dinner party, are meeting new
people and they say, we're an author. What kind of
book was this? What do you say, Because it's certainly
not a quick summary. It's what are the themes and
what makes the book important you think and relevant to
an audience.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Now, so what would you say the book is about? Say,
this is a history of the OSS, which we as
a precursor to the CIA, which came together very quickly
in the wake of Pearl Harbor. At this time, the
United States didn't have a standing intelligence agency, and so
William Donovan, who was the head of the OSS, had
to pull together a working spy agency very quickly. And
(02:17):
an intelligence agency, as the name might suggest, requires a
lot of intelligence, a lot of information people who understand
how to find facts and collect them and turn them
into something that's usable strategically or tactically. In short, he
needed to become an instant expert on every subject to
the library, and the best way for him to do that,
(02:38):
it turned out, was to simply raid the library for recruits.
So he pulled all of these librarians out of their
libraries and professors out of their classrooms, and they became
the spies who worked during World War Two. And the
innovations that they brought to the field of spycraft were
so profound that they laid down the basis for modern intelligence.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
I've not done a book on spies. I had researched
pretty heavily a book on female spies during the Civil War,
and they were the most unlikely. Of course, we always
say that the most unlikely people who you would never suspect,
And you know, these were women that were transporting secrets
in their boots as they're riding across the country. And
I've always wondered what the background of a spy is,
(03:20):
So what is it now? Do you know what a
typical background for a CIA agent would be?
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Is it law enforcement or what is it? You know,
I don't know what the typical background for a CIA
agent would be today, although rumor has it that the
CIA still does recruiting at the annual American Library Association conference.
I think you were right when you said that when
we hear about a spy, we always wind up saying, Oh,
that's the last person that I would expect, because that's
(03:45):
exactly who's demanded of a spy. In the movies, you know,
spies are these ripped hunks who are always carrying around
lots of gadgets and wearing tuxedos. But in real life
a gadget or a weapon would blow somebody's cover. A
tuxedo or having everybody in the western HEMMI sphear know
your drink order would make you a really ineffective spy.
These spies, librarians and professors were chosen precisely because they
(04:07):
would be overlooked. They were the world's least glamorous people
for the world's most glamorous profession, and somehow they made
it work really well. Now, what makes a good spy?
Back then, if you think about the sort of person
who succeeded in the OSS after being pulled out of
their library, Carol, we might think of somebody like adel Kiber.
She got her PhD at the University of Chicago. She
(04:30):
was studying classics so she could speak different languages and
work in the archives. Back then, women couldn't become professors
very easily, so she got a job sort of self employed,
going from archive to archive across Europe taking pictures of
rare texts to send back home to professors in the States.
There are still people who will do that for you
(04:50):
at various archives. They'll take pictures of the material and
send them to you for a fee. They could usually
make about seventy dollars an hour. It's a pretty good job.
But she became along the way O Way really really
good at getting, you know, documents that were hard to get.
Once she went to the Vatican Archives, where in order
to look at anything you need permission from a church official.
She asked to find this one hard to find document.
(05:12):
The attendant said, well, no, you can't get that. You
would need permission from a cardinal to get that. And
she said, then send me to the nearest cardinal. And
he was appalled. But then she took out a card,
an introduction card that you might stand up to someone,
and it said adel Kaiber, Hollywood, California, because she had
grown up in Los Angeles, and she sent up that
card of introduction to his eminence and he immediately sent
(05:35):
the attendant back down with the message, oh you're from Hollywood, Come, come,
let's talk. She went up there and she amused the
cardinal with an hour and a half of conversation about Hollywood.
I don't know everything that was in the conversation, but
I do know that he asked her whether it was
true that Los Angeles, like the Vatican, is surrounded by
a high wall. And I don't know her answer, but
I like to think she said something like yes, that's
(05:56):
why it's so hard to break into the film industry.
But my point is afterward she got permission to see
the text. You know, a lot of the time we're
working in the archives, it's not as simple as just
looking up something in the library catalog. You need to
work people, or you need to be aware of ways
to get at an item that aren't as simple as
(06:17):
just walking through the door and asking for it. And
she was extremely good at that, which was why after
World War Two started, someone who had previously employed her
in this job, who is now working for the OSS
called her up and said, have I got a job
for you? And she jumped at the chance. It was
like she had been waiting all of her life to
do this. And it says she had, or at least
(06:39):
she had been training all of her life to do this.
She was learning how to be a spy without knowing it.
She became the most productive document acquisitions expert working for
the OSS. She sent home mountains of material, a lot
of it, stuff that she really should not have gotten
access to, underground newspapers, books that the Germans had designated
(06:59):
SEQ books and pulled from circulation, German periodicals that only
went to people on vetted subscriber lists. We don't know
her methods, but we know that she got all of
this incredible stuff and she sent it back to the
United States, and you know, it wound up in all
sorts of places. It wound up in Washington helping people
(07:19):
to make strategic wartime plans. It wound up in the
library at a little place in Los Alamos.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
So for Adele, just to simplify from my own mind, here,
she is looking for documents that are either housed in
Germany or documents that are German based documents but they're
held other places.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Is that right? Yeah, she was working as an undercover
agent in Stockholm. Stockholm was neutral, but it wasn't impartial.
That is, Stockholm had an agreement with the warring countries
that it could remain neutral only if no spies operated
in Stockholm, so it was very important for her to
remain undercover. Besides which, the Swedish police had trained with
the Gestappos, so if she had been captured, she would
(08:06):
have been open to possibly Gestoppo style beatings and interrogations.
You know, all kinds of things like that. She got
and secretly sent home on microfilm, All kinds of documents
that she really shouldn't have gotten. Access to. Railway schedules,
German newspapers, atlases, maps, technical journals, German newsletters that were
on a restricted list and only went to certain vetted subscribers,
(08:28):
underground resistance literature, privately printed books, books that have been
printed by underground presses, books that the German government had
designated secret books and pulled from circulation. She got current newspapers,
back copies dating to nineteen forty, industry directories, trade magazines,
railway schedules, publications on aeronautics and banking, and bibliography and
(08:49):
metallurgy and mining, basically scientific publications of every description, and
a lot of this was much more useful from an
espionage perspective than you would think when you first heard
what it was like, take one of those industry directories.
What would be the value of getting a Berlin industry
directory for nineteen forty two. Well, one of its uses
(09:10):
would be to find out the addresses of factories that
produced ball bearings. And if you're asking what's the point
of getting factories that produce ball bearings getting their addresses,
the answer is that ball bearings were used to manufacture
fighter planes and tanks and gun carriages and all the
other moving parts of Hitler's war machine. If you bomb
a factory that produces fighter planes, you've just bombed a
(09:31):
factory that produces fighter planes. But if you bomb a
factory that produces ball bearings, you've potentially disabled all of
the factories that produce ball bearings and that produced tanks
and that produce things like that. There's a huge subplot
of World War two that just consists of trying to
get control of ball bearings. But what I'm trying to
say is Kuyber was acquiring, at the request of the OSS,
(09:51):
all of these documents, all of these books that not
only were hard to get, but also the value of
which wasn't immediately obvious. And the reason she was being
asked for them was because of professors back home in
the States who were working, for instance, in the basement
of the Library of Congress, who were using their knowledge
(10:11):
as humanists or social sciences, as economists and so forth
to say, hey, hang on a second, I think that
if we bomb the ball bearing factories, we can have
a much bigger effect than if we simply bomb the
airplane factories. Well, that was going to be my next question.
How did she know what to even look for? Did
the OSS give her guidance? But it sounds like the
people in America were giving her guidance who had background
(10:33):
in this sort of thing. Yes, they sent her requests,
although she also found items on her own that she
sent over. So she made friends with the Norwegian underground,
for example, and she would send photographs in secret publications
from them.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
When we talk about the personal life of these folks,
and we're starting with Adele, did she have a husband
or kids or you know, family that I'm just wondering
if she if she was able to tell anybody what
she's doing.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
So she didn't have a husband, she didn't have kids.
Seems to value her freedom, which maybe we can understand.
But also when other women who did have a husband, kids,
so forth, came home from the war and they had
been working in espionage, they were very very good at
not telling their families what they had been up to.
You know, they would have cover stories. There was one
woman who much later wrote a memoir. She had been
(11:19):
working at the spy training school near London. It was
called Beauley, and she told her family that she was
working for the Ministry of Agriculture and Fish, and they
believed that for many, many decades after she went home.
One of the people in the Soe, the British equivalent
of the OSS, who did recruiting, actually preferred to recruit
(11:42):
women because he thought that women are capable of a
kind of He used the phrase lonely courage that he
thought men were less capable of, because men have wives,
they have secretaries, they have a friend at the pub
that that they want to gossip to, whereas women are
kind of accustomed to having their labor be invisible yea,
you know, sort of unthanked, and they can when necessary
(12:04):
turn that into a strength.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Well, I thought you were going to say that he
would insinuate that women are more duplicitous than men, a
little sneakier.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Maybe we're sneakier. I would definitely say that academics are
sneakier than other people. They're very accustomed to subterfuge, to
gathering gossip, to that sort of thing. I think that
it's not much of a stretch to say that a
lot of these guys found themselves very much at home
in the world of spycraft after they were sent to
the training camps and taught how to kill people with
folded newspapers.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
I will say, you cannot pin this comment on me,
but I have spoken to many male investigators who say
how many times the male criminal has been fouled by
his interest in sex. Yes, that's a whole other level
of influence that women can have over men. So yes,
I absolutely I think that's in the Civil War time
(12:54):
another reason why both sides Union and the Confederates were
able to utilize women. So Adela doesn't have a family
or she doesn't feel pressure to disclose anything, and she's
able to kind of move along on her own. Tell
me your source for her. Did she write letters or
was it a book or what happened? So she was
exchanging letters constantly with her superiors, and also there were
(13:17):
lists of texts that she was sending home for record keeping.
A war produces a tremendous amount of documentation, so it
was possible to find in the archives, in the National
Archives in Maryland a tremendous amount of paperwork describing her adventures.
I will mention parenthetically that getting at her papers the
(13:38):
National Archives in Maryland is more difficult because the Finding
Aid Forss documents was put together by OSS veterans after
the war, and even though they did a good service
to history, but they forgot to record the names of
women along with the names of men in a lot
of cases. So the documents are there, but you will
not find her name in the find Aid. You have
(14:01):
to kind of know that it's there and get the
help of librarians to get you to it. I know
the irony is not lost on you that you were
writing about a woman whose job was to dig up
every piece of information she could and now you are
struggling to find documentation on this woman whose job was to,
you know, find all of this information.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
So was she your most not interesting character?
Speaker 2 (14:22):
But is Adele the one that you connected with the
most or is there someone else that we're going to
talk about that you felt even kind of closer to.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
I really appreciated Adele, and for me she represented partly,
you know, it was a serious war, It was it
important war. It was also the case that for Adele
and women like her, and my grandmother, who worked in
intelligence was one of them, the war was an opportunity
to have more power and more freedom than would have
been available under any other circumstances at that time.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Yeah, I mean we often hear about when menly for war,
you know, the women are at home and they're acquiring
new skills and you know, arning new things. And of
course we know about the baseball leagues, you know that
started popping up, and then when they come back, it's
hard to realize that things will go back to normal.
I know that this is for a spy story. Some
of your information would have been limited. Do we have
(15:13):
any idea how many female spies were out there?
Speaker 1 (15:16):
You thought it was just maybe more women than men.
So the OSS itself was thirty five percent women. I
couldn't say off of the top of my head how
many of them were active undercover agents. But it was
the case that undercover agents were often preferred to be
women because if you had someone who was in occupied France,
let's say, if they were a man, then they might
(15:38):
get swept up by one of the raids that the
Germans sometimes performed, where they would take all of kind
of all of the men who are on the streets
and you know, get them over to Germany to work
in the factories or something like that. They wouldn't do
that to the women. Or these were often kind of
cities of widows. The men had all been taken away
to work in the factories or to fight or that
sort of thing, and the people holding the fort were women.
(16:02):
So who would notice another woman walking around, especially one
who had say a basket on her bicycle that you know,
had vegetables poking out of it, even though it was
actually carrying a radio that sort of thing. Yeah, women
had sort of a better cover given the circumstances during
World War Two a lot of the time.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Now you know, now we have the Internet, she could
scan stuff in and send it and it could be encrypted,
and you know, there's I think ways to safely send documents.
But this would have been snail mail, right, How would
she have gotten these documents back? To the United States
or wherever they were going safely. I know she's in Sweden,
but still there must have been some kind of monitoring
from the Germans about stuff like this.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
All sorts of different methods, a big one with something
called the diplomatic pouch. That is, it was possible for
embassies to safely send documents or microfilm back home, and
that was sort of a privilege that everybody gave everybody
else's embassies. That isn't to say that embassies were completely
safe this whole mission during World War Two in I
(17:02):
think Washington, where the OSS secretly broke into the Spanish
embassy and took photographs of the documents inside of its
safes using the help of some criminals. Back home in
the States, they found a guy in New York who
was sort of kept out of jail because he always
helped the FBI to break into whatever safe the FBI
needed to break into. But that's a whole other story. Yeah,
(17:23):
diplomatic pouch was a big one, but people used all
sorts of sneaky methods to get documents across borders. During
the war, there was a case where documents were secretly
being ferried out of an occupied country in a Nazi plane,
and they kept the papers sort of in the plane's breaks,
(17:45):
so the Nazis would actually fly it over the border. Wow.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Did you get a sense from any of the letters
from Adele to her supervisors or whoever that she was
in danger at any point she scared or felt like
she was going to get caught at some point.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
I'm sure that she must have felt that way. I mean,
the place where she worked, which was the American legation,
was being observed. It was right next door to the
German legation to begin with, but also there were people
wearing plain clothes constantly standing on the other side of
the road and taking pictures of the building. I mean,
it was very obviously being surveilled, which makes it all
(18:26):
the more remarkable that she managed not to come under
suspicion of being a spy. She did have what was
known as cutaways, which is people who would meet someone
on her behalf so that she never met the other person,
or boys who would pick up deliveries at bookstores, that
sort of thing. But I get the sense that she
was actually very good at controlling her fear and getting
(18:50):
things done. You know, like one of those I don't
know lady detectives in a BBC show who goes into
the village and, you know, figures out that the vicar
murdered everyone and sets things right and then adjusts her
hat and gets on the train to the next village.
She really does give me that give you that impression.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Little Jessica Fletcher from Murder She wrote vous.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Exactly, Yes, I'm getting Jessica Fletcher vibes. Okay, cozy mysteries. Okay.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
So do we get the sense that the Germans did
the exact same thing that we did, or other countries
that our allies did.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
No, Actually, the United States was inventing something new when
it recruited all of those professors and librarians to the OSS.
The professors and librarians they worked in a branch of
the OSS called Research and Analysis, also known as the
Chairborn Division. Now there was another branch of the OSS
called Research and Development, and those guys were it was
(19:42):
a well known kind of branch in any spy agency.
It was the people who made bombs, who made you know, poisons,
that sort of thing, spy gear, weapons, That was a
well known type of branch in a spy agency. But
research and analysis, bringing in humanists, bringing in social science, right,
getting them to do their thing in the service of spycraft.
(20:04):
That was something new, and it wound up being so
successful that it changed the course of espionage. I mean,
we've been talking about ways of secretly, you know, bringing
messages from one place to another. I know that during
World War Two there was also a group of women
who would carry secret message. They would dress like nuns
and carry secret messages in their rosaries. But the great
innovation of research and analysis was something that Sherman Kent.
(20:27):
Another character in the book says, which is that ninety
percent of what a spy agency needs to know they
can get from public sources. They don't need to consult
secret sources at all. It's just that And this is
the big secret of life. Nobody does the reading. So
if you do the reading, every professor knows this. They
go into class. The students haven't done the reading. They
could tell who has. If you do the reading, you're
(20:48):
already ahead of everybody else. So there was one instance
during World War two. This is a story that William
donnovan liked to tell, and it's apparently true. There was
a woman, a countess, American by birth, very lucky by marriage,
and she was traveling by train from you know, an
occupied country to an unoccupied one. The gestoppo pull everybody
(21:09):
off of the train to search them to make sure
that they're not spies, and the Countess when she went
to the restroom in the train, she had taken a
newspaper and sort of you know, pulled off the pages
and set them down on the seat so that, you know,
in order to keep her dignified bottom from being contaminated.
But that means that when the gestappo were searching everybody,
(21:29):
she had, unbeknownst to her newsprint on her bottom. And
so the Germans got very excited because they thought that
they had discovered this new way, you know, for Allied
spies to transmit information. And she was finally able to
prove to them that it was just newsprint from a newspaper.
They were very upset and put her back on the train.
And Donovan would always finish the story by saying they
(21:51):
were so excited about the newsprint on her bottom that
they forgot to check the lining of her purse, which
was filled with documents for the oss. But the actual
punchline to the story is the newspaper itself. The professors
who were working in the basement of the Library of
Congress figured out all kinds of ways to read newspapers
from occupied Europe, newspapers from neutral countries, things like that
(22:13):
to get information on troop movements. They were able to
figure out whether the Germans were amassing troops somewhere or
whether they were planning to make a strike somewhere, using
things like you know, frothy little mentions of military men
in town in the society pages. They were able to
use tables of railroad rates and study the changes in
(22:36):
railroad rates in order to find out where the Germans
were moving. Various kinds of materials, which is to say,
you know, they actually they read the newspaper, They read
industry directories, they read novels, they looked at you know,
they looked at all kinds of things that you would
normally not consider to be texts that would have any
relevance for espionage, and they found them to have incredible
(23:00):
value in planning the war effort.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Now, was there a way to connect Adele to some
event that helped us in the war, like you know,
from the Civil war times, I read about a woman
who was able to sneak out a message that essentially
gave the Union a heads up of when the Confederacy
was going to attack. It gave them like a two day,
(23:24):
you know, warning, which was invaluable. They were able to
directly connect it to the woman. Is there a way
to do that with Adele or was it just sort
of all of this context that helped overall that she
was sending.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
I can give you a pretty good one. The Germans
wanted the neutral countries like Sweden to believe that it
would be a terrible thing if the Americans won the war.
They very badly wanted Swedes, for instance, to believe that
Americans were ruffians who had no concept of culture, that
if they won, they would tear down the libraries and
concert halls of Europe, And so they sent all of
these cultural ambassadors to Sweden. They believed in soft power,
(23:58):
which is an important thing to be able to flex
professors and little round glasses to give lectures, and conductors
to wave their batons over performances of the magic flute.
But they also made sure that their scientific and technical
journals flowed into Stockholm's libraries and universities without interruption. Now,
German technical journals, German scientific journals, these were not getting
(24:20):
to the United States, right. You do not send your
scientific work to a country that you're warring with, particularly
if both you and they are racing to get the
proper recipe for an atomic bomb. The things that Adele
sent home included tons and tons and tons of German
scientific periodicals, particularly German scientific periodicals in the fields of
(24:44):
sort of engineering and metallurgy and atomic physics, which are
the fields that are necessary for building an atomic bomb.
Many of the journals and articles that she sent home
found their way into the library at a little place
New Mexico called Los Alamos. That seems to be to
be a very valuable contribution and something that not many
(25:07):
people would have been able to do.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Personality wise, what kind of person do you think Adele was?
Obviously she was very bold, and she was aware of
what the consequences would be. Actually, before you get to
her personality, what would the consequences have been if she
had been caught, you know, smuggling out something or accessing
something she shouldn't have.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Is this a death penalty? Thing depends on who caught
her to be perfectly honest. I mean there were German
spies operating in Stockholm as well. You know, the Swedish
police might have simply interrogated her very harshly Gestapo style.
One hopes that they wouldn't have passed her along to
the Gestapo, But the Swedish police were aligned with the
Gestapo and had trained with the Gestapo, so that's not certain.
(25:48):
The best outcome that she would have had would have
been to be confined in a kind of camp in Sweden,
along with sort of air force personnel who had downed
in Sweden. They were kept in the country and not
sent home to their respective militaries. That would have been
the gentlest possible outcome for her, But a lot of
spies died in terrible ways during World War Two. They
(26:12):
were poisoned, they were brought to German camps and had
the most terrible possible fates. It was not a safe
occupation by any means.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Were these camps in Sweden where you're talking about, you know,
air force pilots or whoever going down and being kept
there where she might have gone, I'm sure not humane,
more humane than obviously the German concentration camps. What were
those like, do you have any idea, I mean, was
it like being in solitary confinement in the United States
or what would it be like.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
I think it would be along the lines of a
sort of Japanese and tournament camp in the United States.
So nothing close to what the Germans had come up with,
but also not happy lodgings.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Okay, personality wise, what's the sense that you got from
her you reading her letters or did she talk about
anything personal?
Speaker 1 (26:57):
So Eugene Power, who's the guy who wound up working
for the OSS giving her the call? Right? She was
at the University of Chicago at the time. Maybe he
found her in the University of Chicago library where you
could call a scholar who was working. He said that
she jumped at the chance to be a spy. He
said that she had enjoyed reading spy stories when he
(27:18):
knew her before the war, that she always seemed to
him to be a fem fatale sort. I hate that price. Look,
I took that to be in a non sexual way
and just as a kind of dangerous woman. A dangerous woman. Yes,
I think the best word for her is resourceful. I mean,
she had a job hopping from archive to archive across Europe,
(27:38):
finding rare texts and taking photographs of them for scholars
who didn't want to make the trip and might not
be able to get those items. She was very good
at using what was available to her to get access
to texts. And also I think that she knew that
she was the sort of woman who appealed to men
who think, one that they're attracted to smart women and
(28:02):
two that they're smarter than the women they're attracted to,
which is a dangerous combination in a man. Yeah. I
think that she had been waiting by the phone, you know,
so to speak, waiting for something, anything, and when she
got that call, she jumped at the assignment. As he said,
I think it was grand for her that she was
going to be a terrible danger at any moment. She
(28:23):
was very good at her job, and she refused to
tell her superiors her methods, even though they sent her
letters begging like just tell me how you're doing this,
tell me how you're finding this, and she never told them.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
As we wrap up Adele's story, where does her career end?
Does it end with the end of World War two?
And she goes back to Chicago and goes back to
work or what happens to her.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
The end of World War Two. She doesn't get married.
She goes back to the life that she loved, which
is traveling around and now free Europe taking photographs of
rare texts wow, acting as a bibliographic detective. She goes
back to the life that she loved.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
And she just lives to a ripe old age and
becomes obscure in history because she was a spy.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
And that's what happens with spies. That's about right now.
The guy who probably helps to train her in England,
if she did her training in England, which I think
she did. Selwyn Jepson. He wrote detective stories after the
war about female detectives who had trained to be spies
during the war. You know, I think there's a lot
(29:25):
of the personalities of the women that he trained in
his detective stories. I highly recommend reading them as just
a document of how the women he interacted with sort
of thought through problems and reasoned morally with things, which
is much more in the way that a villain who
is doing good would reason through things than you know,
(29:46):
some shrinking violet damsel to be rescued.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
Tell me about one of your other main characters Sherman Kent,
so the description I think is hilarious. A smart mouth
history professor who rose to become the head of analysis
all of Europe and Africa, smartmouthed I like that already.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
I like Sherman. I think Sherman Kent was kind of
a knife too sharp for his sheath. He was a
history professor at Yale. He could have been a good
drill sergeant, but he wound up in an Ivy League
school and maybe he was a little restless there. Right,
He would throw chalk past the heads of his students
if they weren't paying attention, which they don't let us
(30:23):
do anymore. He gets recruited by the OSS at the
start of the war. He's sent to a spy training school.
The book has a lot of information about the things
you learn in spy training schools, and he learns how
to throw knives, among other things, and he's delighted with this,
and he learns how to throw daggers better than a
Sicilian is the phrase that follows him around for the
rest of his life. He also learned how to fold
(30:45):
a newspaper to make it into a deadly weapon, which
later in life he would stop mid conversation and show
people how to do this. You know, just a man
who had knives as comfort objects. That's who Sherman Kent was.
Now Sherman Kent stayed in Washington rather than going abroad.
He became one of the leaders of research and analysis.
This group of librarians and professors who are working, as
(31:08):
I said, in the basement of the Library of Congress,
among other places, and reading all of these novels, and
reading these newspapers and reading these industry directories and coming
up with intelligence guidance for the war effort. I mean,
like real strategic analysis to tell the war's leaders what
they should do next, where they should strike, what conditions
the military will find if it goes ashore in some
(31:30):
town in North Africa, etc. Et cetera, et cetera. Calculating
the amount of armor that needs to be put on
the sides of planes to make sure that they come
back safely, but don't weigh too much, that sort of thing.
All of that is within RNA's purview. Sherman Kent comes
up with as saying that ninety percent of what an
intelligence agency needs to know it can get from public sources,
(31:53):
not secret sources, which I think remains true to this day.
He becomes the head of intelligence analysis all of Europe
and Africa. But more than that, like I said, RNA,
the Chairborn Division was something new in the world of intelligence.
It wasn't normal for military types to be listening to
tweety professors who were telling them what to do. Part
of Sherman Kent's job was to speak on behalf of
(32:16):
those tweety professors to the military, to speak to generals
in their own language. And this is something that Sherman
Kent could do better than anybody else, because among his
other attributes, he was a man of superb and outrageous
profanity who was prepared to go sort of toe to
toe in terms of inventiveness of speech with any general
(32:37):
that he might talk to. All of the insights of
the professors would have been nothing if Sherman Kent hadn't
been there to talk on their behalf, and he did.
That's amazing, you know.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
I think about one of my books, American Sherlock, which
was about a forensic scientist who could not figure out
how to talk to juries who oftentimes you know, had
very little, no education, and he for a very long time,
tried to use three syllable words and was very scientific,
and he kept losing cases because people didn't understand what
he was talking about. Sherman reminds me of maybe the
(33:07):
interpreter that Oscar Heinrich needed to really simplify it, and
finally Heinrich got it. But Sherman, it sounds like it
was just tailor made to be the person to disseminate
this information. And that was my question is maybe this
sounds silly, but did all of the military leaders take
this seriously? I mean, did they really make big decisions,
(33:27):
life changing decisions based on what these geeks in the
basement of the Library of Congress were really saying. Did
they ever question their logic that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Yeah, there was. It took time for them to come
around to it. But the you know, the outcomes of
the research of ur and A turned out to be undeniable.
So RNA's first sort of big test was the invasion
of North Africa. You know, their insights, their data, their
strategic guidance was used to plan the invasion, which went
(33:58):
way way better than the best projects of anybody who
was helping with that. And so you know, they passed
that test. Now, it was a big test, and it
had all of the elements of kind of a test
in school in the sense that they were you know,
you had people who were doing the reading. You had
all night study sessions where these you know, sort of
binders of material were being put together by people who
(34:19):
I'll say it again, they were locked in the basement
of the Library of Congress, not allowed out until they
had successfully invaded North Africa because the military was afraid
that they might give away some detail of the invasion
if they were allowed to go home. I don't know
if you've been in the basement of the Library of Congress,
but nope, it's this huge labyrinth. It's this extraordinary place.
(34:41):
I think there might be people from World War two
still wandering around in there, you know, they just haven't
found their way to the doors back out. But anyway,
so there were all night study sessions and then there
was the final exam and they aced this thing. Right.
That was really the turning points not just for the war,
but a turning point for R and A as well,
because they had proven how effective they were. After that,
(35:04):
they were taken much more seriously by the military.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
If I understand sort of the way that this works,
and I barely do. It is that the Shermans of
the world were requesting documents from the Adeles of the world.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Is that the simplified way this goes. That's about right, yes.
And Sherman was doing some detective work of his own
back in Washington, like he knew the kind of information
that they would need in order to do strategic planning,
and the question was where am I going to get
that information? Not always from Adele. There was one instance where,
you know, the smallest things could make a difference. They
(35:39):
needed to know something about railroads in North Africa. They
needed to know about railroads in North Africa in the
most detailed possible way. And the best way for me
to explain why this sort of thing should be important
is to point out that during the Normandy invasion, the
Germans could very easily have come over to the Normandy
coast and wiped out the Allies and what was already
(36:02):
a very difficult landing. And one of the reasons that
they didn't was because, in the hours after the Normandy
invasion had started, a code phrase went out over French
radio and French members of the resistance civilians went out
and over the next few hours destroyed more than nine
hundred sections of railroad personally so that the German reinforcements
(36:24):
couldn't derive. Knowing where railroad sidings are what you can
do in order to damage them permanently or temporarily, where
the different railroads lead, you know, in order to stop
a division from coming from this direction or another direction.
That can be really important in wartime or if you're
making a landing. Knowing which railroads you need to destroy
in order to prevent German reinforcements from finding you or
(36:47):
protect so that you can go to another city. This
is all very important, but especially in the era before
the Internet. Knowing in really good detail about every railroad
siding in North Africa, you can understand how that would
be difficult. It happened that Sherman Kent's a friend of
his told him that a Moroccan railway engineer was visiting
him and would he like to come and talk to him.
(37:08):
So Kent, you know, he got dressed up in his
tweed and his bow tie, and you know he came over,
puffing his pipe and said, oh, I'm beguale professor, I'm
kind of interested in North Africa for non intelligence reasons.
Can I ask you a few questions about the railroad
sidings in Morocco just to clarify, just to clarify if
it's not intelligence.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
At all, Yes, it's not spycraft at all, I promise, okay.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
And as Kent said at his memoir, instead of dropping
dead at the mention of so sensitive a subject, the
guy actually gave not only gave him all the information
that he needed, but Kent became so bold as to
bring out like this questionnaire that he had put in
his bag, and the guy just filled out, you know,
kind of this comprehensive information on Moroccan railroads. And Kent
(37:48):
immediately immediately went to his office it was about ten
PM by then, and called a general and said, I
have this information about Moroccan railroads. And the general said,
I expect for you to get that information desk before sunrise.
So no sleep for Sherman Ken that night. But that
was how vital the information turned out to be. So
there were people who were kind of or you had
(38:09):
members of R and A who were kind of taking
measurements at railway stations around Washington in the middle of
the winter because they were trying to figure something out
about the way that the metal would expand or contract
in the Russian winter. I bore you with all of
this stuff, but nothing is insignificant in the end, no
detail is unimportant. You're not just dropping these bombs on
top of people. There are so many other ways to
(38:30):
win a war, and better ways. I mean, look, bombing
is one thing, but the real you know, the real
coup is if you can get people on the ground
to do sabotage. Because if you bomb a factory, you've
just damaged the roof. Most of the time. You want
to damage the machines, and furthermore, you want to damage
the most important machines, and furthermore, you want to damage
them in a specific way that makes them hard to repair.
(38:52):
So the real trick was getting people who were factory
workers in Norway to carry pocketfuls of sand into factories
and destroy them in a very specific way that was
laid out by engineers working for the Allies, and in
a way that they had plausible deniability. I didn't do
that to the machine. It works, just got gunked up.
(39:13):
Don't know what to do, mister, mister Haraguy in charge.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
Now you mentioned a memoir, and that was going to
be a question, how do we know so much about
Sherman because we know Adele didn't have a memoir, she
had letters and stuff. So was this a braggert on
the page? Essentially? Was this a vanity project for him?
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Well, he did write a memoir. It didn't get published,
although the unpublished memoirs are in his papers at the
Yale University Library, and it's a thrilling read. Okay. He
wound up going into the CIA after the war, and
he became actually a very important person in the history
of what we call sort of intelligence studies. He set
it up as something like an academic subject, the same
(39:52):
way that art history is a subject or the history
of the book. He really wanted to make the CIA
to make sure that its methods, the comprehensiveness, the objectivity
of methods of academic analysis. He set up the CIA's
in house journal, Studies in Intelligence. All of which is
to say that when you are at academic and you
(40:13):
reach the end of your career, you have what's known
as fest shrifts written about you. People write papers in praise,
you know, in praise of you or in your honor,
and put them together in a book that's not really
done anymore. I'm just trying to describe the flavor of
the time. I was wondering if you and I were
going to be up for that. I guess not. You're
not going to be in fest shrifts now, But that
(40:34):
used to be a thing, and you would, you would
write a memoir, you know, And he wrote a memoir.
It is, as I said, very interesting reading. But he
was such a character that lots of people wrote about him,
you know, his eternal quid of chewing tobacco, his red suspenders,
his outrageous language, his facility with throwing knives. I mean,
(40:54):
he really was kind of a one of a kind
character who fit absolutely perfectly into the of the OSS
during the war and helped to guide the CIA in
the decades afterward.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
And like Adele, I'm assuming lived a ripe old age
and was not poisoned by cyanide and his coffee at
some point.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
That's right, he wasn't poisoned by cyanide. He lived to
a ripe old age. You know. He was one of
the editors I think of studies at Intelligence, and he
loves to gore the subpar work of people who sent
in bad articles. He tried to go back to He
tried to go back to Yale after the war, and
I think that it just bored him. You know, he
had just been helping to run a war. He had
been helping to run a spy you know agency, he
(41:31):
had been a spy master. And then he goes back
to Yale and the kids still aren't doing the reading,
but they're not even in positions of enough authority to
make the fact that they're ignorant interesting. So he turns
around and goes to the CIA. But he does one
thing after the war that was kind of a mistake
that's interesting, which is he wanted to prove what he'd
always been saying, which is that ninety percent of what
(41:52):
an intelligence agency needs to know it can get from
public sources, not secret sources, as long as you do
what nobody else does and do the reading. So he
got a group of history professors at Yale to spend
the summer in Yale's library reading through public documents like
newspapers and coming up with the answers to all of
these US military secrets. And they succeeded, and they put
(42:12):
together a report and they gave it to the OSS
and it somehow got into the hands of Congress and
then into the hands of the President, and everybody was
very upset because they thought that it proved the Yale professors.
He told the Yale professors to pretend they were working
for Russia. So when they put together this report, it
looked like they were putting it together for Russia. Oh gosh, yeah, exactly.
That wasn't You're right, that is underline not smart. So
(42:35):
you know, so, oh, Yale professors are working for the Russians,
and you know, there was a big scandal, and everybody
got in a lot of trouble, and a CIA operative
showed up at the Yale Library and tried to confiscate
the library's entire contents.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
Was this the Red Scare like McCarthy era? I hope not,
for his sake. That's not when this happened.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
I think it was a little before then. But they
tried to confiscate the library's entire contents. He was persuaded
to only take the papers of the historians involved, but
Kent did prove that he was right.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
The historians did succeed, So well, there you go. He's
luck he didn't get thrown in jail or worse. Yeah, okay,
do we want to tell me a little bit about
Joseph Curtis, you know, just like the short notes on him,
because I know he was a significant character for you.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Also, Joseph Curtis a Yale professor. Again, look, Yale is
a very sneaky and secretive place, and it produces a
lot of spies. Apparently, I can't change that. That's just
a historical fact. So he was studying early modern literature
at Yale. He was a professor. He'd gone to Yale undergrad,
then Yale for grad school, then become a professor there.
Very much a hot house flower, you know what I mean.
(43:38):
He had a very safe, very cozy, little life of letters.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
I've never heard that analogy before. A hot house flower.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
A hothouse flower. He had grown up in a greenhouse,
you know, he had always been protected and oh got it.
And then he was pulled out of that world, trained
as a spy and thrown into wartime Istanbul where he
was given the job of tracking down German spies and
turning them into double agents. So it was very much
a sink or swim situation for him, and remarkably he
(44:05):
turned out to be good at his job. He turned
out to be so good at his job that he
had a non trivial effect on the outcome of the
Norman dy invasion. And he was a literature professor right well.
So one of the conceits of the book is something
that that advisors do tell to PhD students, which is,
your dissertation is an autobiography. There's something about what you
(44:25):
choose as the subject for your dissertation that says something
about you, or it's a question that you're trying to
figure out the answer to a as a person, because
it has something to do with your own nature, your
own character. Joseph Curtis wrote his dissertation about astrologers in
the early modern period, and his conceit, and I think
he was correct, is that astrologers were really detectives. That
(44:48):
was the role that they performed in society. They found
out the answers to questions, they found missing objects. People
came in and said, you know, is my wife plotting
to kill me? You know? Or am I going to
become a widow anytime soon? Those are not suspicious questions
at all. If somebody had blackmail information about someone else,
you'd go to the astrologer to kind of get the
(45:09):
black mail documents back. So he was talking about, you know,
the life of a bibliographic detective, of a kind of
scholar who solved mysteries but also was in touch with
something like real magic. Not that he thought that astrologers
were working with real magic, but they surrounded themselves with
the symbols of magic. They had brazen heads that were
said to talk to you know, to give oracular advice,
(45:32):
and they wore velvet caps and you know capes, and
you know, we're said to summon angels or devils. You know,
I think this was kind of the perfect life of
a scholar to have this kind of drama together with
all of your books. And he got to live that life.
He went to wartime Istanbul. He worked in what was
(45:54):
called Double Cross, which was the counter espionage section of
the OSS. He was tracking down German spies, turning them
into double agents. He was involved look in Sweden. Sweden
could stay neutral because it had made an agreement with
the warring countries that no spies would operate in Sweden.
(46:14):
That's why Kaiber had to operate undercover. But Istanbul was
neutral because Turkey had made a deal with the warring
countries that it could remain neutral if everybody's spies operated
in Turkey openly. There were seventeen different intelligence agencies operating
in Istanbul. Everybody in that world was presumed to be
a spy. You had hundreds of people working as professional whisperers.
(46:37):
There's a section on whispering in the book, which is
a very specific way that you spread rumors. Right, you
have to be trained to do it. You were not
allowed to spread rumors or whisper unless you had been
trained to do it, and the rules for whispering are
in the book. But in this world he was so
successful as kind of one of the leading figures in
(46:58):
the oss branch, nobody suspected him of being a spy,
despite the fact that everybody was presumed to be a spy.
He had a cover story as a professor. He was
also supposedly a book collector, just innocently collecting books for
Yale's library, but in fact he was doing something totally different.
And even though his students would you know, the student
at the university that he taught classes at, would make
(47:20):
jokes about which of their professors had put another body
in the Bosphorus this week. You know that they said, oh,
all of our professors are spies too. They not only
didn't think he was a spy, but they didn't remember
him afterward. There was a CIA head once who said
a spy is the sort of person who can't get
a waiter's attention in a restaurant. And that was Joseph Curtis.
You know, he was just unmemorable, even though he had
(47:42):
very secretly, you know, a very adventurous heart. You know,
I find serial killers to be the same way.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Every serial killer I've ever written about is sort of
like kind of disappears into the wallpaper, is the way
they're described, that sort of a seemingly innocuous, you know,
anonymous person who you would never suspect of anything.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Maybe that's the success ones. Maybe the ones who don't
disappear into the wallpaper are caught after just one murder
and they don't get to be a serial killer. Yeah, yeah,
it could be.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
How does one turn a German spy into a double agent?
That can't be easy. He must have been very persuasive
or what. There are all kinds of methods that you
could use. I don't have any of them to hand.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
Half of the trouble is tracking them down, and then
you figure out whether you want to turn them into
a double agent, whether it would be better to convince
them to defect, because defections can have an effect on morale.
It's a very dangerous and very necessary area of spycraft.
But the real trick with double cross is this, to
the extent possible, you do not want to destroy the
(48:40):
enemy's intelligence service. You want to keep the enemy's intelligence
service and their intelligence networks in place and get them
all working for you. So you convince them that you
guys are going to win and that you will give
them a break after you win. You convince them that
they're going to get a little bit more money, you know,
if they work for you.
Speaker 2 (49:02):
Timing is probably very important too. I mean, the closer
you get to the end of the war and it
looks like the Germans are not going to do well,
it's probably easier to convince people to switch sides.
Speaker 1 (49:10):
Oh. Absolutely, people were positively, you know, jumping at the
chance to not be seen to be a Nazi toward
the end of the war. And people were so ashamed
after the war in Germany of what they had done
that there was a huge, huge wave of suicides by
Germans at the end of the war, just all kinds
of suicide. It was tragic because parents would do it
(49:31):
to their children, they would have families died together. So,
you know, the Nazis wound up being their own victims. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
Kind of to wrap this up, when we go back
to the geeky academics, and I say that freely because
I am one of those, and so are you, why
do you think they didn't get their due? Why aren't
there just one thousands of books written about them, like
the books of you know, the spies that worked all
the way back. I mean, there's a wonderful book Alexander
Rose wrote about Washington spies. You know, we know all
(50:03):
TV series, we know things that have happened. Is it
because they are locked away in the Library of Congress
and they don't have like exploding bombs in their back pockets?
Speaker 1 (50:12):
Or you know, why don't we know more about these people?
I think that one of the elements is this that
we're accustomed to a kind of spy story that has,
you know, a guy wearing a tuxedo looks amazing Henry
Cavill type running across rooftops with a gun in one hand.
And that's not really how most spycraft takes place. Now
(50:34):
for you and me, there's a real romance to the
world of books, right. We understand that scholars love gossips.
They love to read old letters for a reason because
the old letters are full of secrets. We love stabbing
each other in the back, we love subterfuge. I don't
do that just for the record listeners, but we can
understand very easily how the things that these professors and
librarians did could fit very easily into the world of spycraft.
(50:58):
But that might not, you know, but you need to
sort of love books first and understand that librarians are
real information workers and how easily that fits into the
world of intelligence to be able to spin up, maybe
in your head, a kind of plot that fits with
the real life plots that these guys were living out.
One way that I've thought about how the librarians and
(51:18):
professors fit into the war is this, when a crisis comes,
then you fall back on your training. What you have
is what you bring to the war. So the English
had these spy training schools that were incredibly posh. They
were these country manners and at housemasters and servants and
that sort of thing. Because they were English, that's what
they knew, so that's what they fell back on. The
Americans trained their spies in these muddy camps with tents
(51:41):
in national parks where they were teaching people how to
do quick draws like cowboys because they were Americans, so
of course they trained like cowboys. The Norwegians were out
there on skis. The French resistance robed liquor stores, drank
the wine and then turned the empty wine bottles into
moloktov cocktails. Because they're French. They fought as the French
do now. The librarians, when the war came, also fell
back on their training, and it turned out to be
(52:03):
unexpectedly exactly what modern intelligence needed. These guys have been
training to be spies to work in intelligence for all
of their lives, and they never knew. Then the war came.
They were recruited into spycraft and it was like, my god,
I can swim, like I can do this. I've been
practicing my whole life. That's incredible. It would be great
to see more more spy stories about that element. Partly
(52:24):
because I'm a great lover of dark academia and love
to see it wherever I can. But also because this
is a story that teaches us that libraries themselves are important,
you know, not just as centers of education, not just
as centers of community, but as places that train the
very readers who become valuable intelligence agents later on, and
as centers that are essential to national security. The value
(52:47):
of the humanities, the value of the social sciences, that's
something that is back under debate, and it's a shame
that it is because the humanities teach us, among other things,
to work with data that has a lot of holes
in it, data that is ambiguous, and that's kind of
the data that you have to work with, for example,
in a wartime situation. Wars aren't controlled experiments. That's why
(53:08):
the humanists turned out to be so good at wartime analysis.
They were used to working with the kinds of data
that you find yourself dealing with in warfare.
Speaker 2 (53:26):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and Don't Forget There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(53:51):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Tooga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgariff, and
Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold more Wicked,
and on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod
This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
She was very good at her job, and she refused
to tell her superiors her methods, even though they sent
her letters begging, like, just tell me how you're doing this,
(00:21):
tell me how you're finding this, and she never told them.
Speaker 2 (00:28):
I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
research for my many audio and book projects has taken
me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
(00:51):
and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
unpublished details behind their stories. Did you know that some
of the most effective American spies during World War II
(01:11):
were librarians and archivists and history professors. Some were locked
in the basement of the Library of Congress analyzing documents.
Those documents were being gathered by academics sneaking around Europe
under the Noses of the Nazis. Author Elise Graham tells
me the story at the center of her book, Book
and Dagger, how scholars and librarians became the unlikely spies of.
Speaker 1 (01:36):
World War II.
Speaker 2 (01:39):
When you are at at dinner party, are meeting new
people and they say, we're an author. What kind of
book was this? What do you say, Because it's certainly
not a quick summary. It's what are the themes and
what makes the book important you think and relevant to
an audience.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
Now, so what would you say the book is about? Say,
this is a history of the OSS, which we as
a precursor to the CIA, which came together very quickly
in the wake of Pearl Harbor. At this time, the
United States didn't have a standing intelligence agency, and so
William Donovan, who was the head of the OSS, had
to pull together a working spy agency very quickly. And
(02:17):
an intelligence agency, as the name might suggest, requires a
lot of intelligence, a lot of information people who understand
how to find facts and collect them and turn them
into something that's usable strategically or tactically. In short, he
needed to become an instant expert on every subject to
the library, and the best way for him to do that,
(02:38):
it turned out, was to simply raid the library for recruits.
So he pulled all of these librarians out of their
libraries and professors out of their classrooms, and they became
the spies who worked during World War Two. And the
innovations that they brought to the field of spycraft were
so profound that they laid down the basis for modern intelligence.
Speaker 2 (02:58):
I've not done a book on spies. I had researched
pretty heavily a book on female spies during the Civil War,
and they were the most unlikely. Of course, we always
say that the most unlikely people who you would never suspect,
And you know, these were women that were transporting secrets
in their boots as they're riding across the country. And
I've always wondered what the background of a spy is,
(03:20):
So what is it now? Do you know what a
typical background for a CIA agent would be?
Speaker 1 (03:25):
Is it law enforcement or what is it? You know,
I don't know what the typical background for a CIA
agent would be today, although rumor has it that the
CIA still does recruiting at the annual American Library Association conference.
I think you were right when you said that when
we hear about a spy, we always wind up saying, Oh,
that's the last person that I would expect, because that's
(03:45):
exactly who's demanded of a spy. In the movies, you know,
spies are these ripped hunks who are always carrying around
lots of gadgets and wearing tuxedos. But in real life
a gadget or a weapon would blow somebody's cover. A
tuxedo or having everybody in the western HEMMI sphear know
your drink order would make you a really ineffective spy.
These spies, librarians and professors were chosen precisely because they
(04:07):
would be overlooked. They were the world's least glamorous people
for the world's most glamorous profession, and somehow they made
it work really well. Now, what makes a good spy?
Back then, if you think about the sort of person
who succeeded in the OSS after being pulled out of
their library, Carol, we might think of somebody like adel Kiber.
She got her PhD at the University of Chicago. She
(04:30):
was studying classics so she could speak different languages and
work in the archives. Back then, women couldn't become professors
very easily, so she got a job sort of self employed,
going from archive to archive across Europe taking pictures of
rare texts to send back home to professors in the States.
There are still people who will do that for you
(04:50):
at various archives. They'll take pictures of the material and
send them to you for a fee. They could usually
make about seventy dollars an hour. It's a pretty good job.
But she became along the way O Way really really
good at getting, you know, documents that were hard to get.
Once she went to the Vatican Archives, where in order
to look at anything you need permission from a church official.
She asked to find this one hard to find document.
(05:12):
The attendant said, well, no, you can't get that. You
would need permission from a cardinal to get that. And
she said, then send me to the nearest cardinal. And
he was appalled. But then she took out a card,
an introduction card that you might stand up to someone,
and it said adel Kaiber, Hollywood, California, because she had
grown up in Los Angeles, and she sent up that
card of introduction to his eminence and he immediately sent
(05:35):
the attendant back down with the message, oh you're from Hollywood, Come, come,
let's talk. She went up there and she amused the
cardinal with an hour and a half of conversation about Hollywood.
I don't know everything that was in the conversation, but
I do know that he asked her whether it was
true that Los Angeles, like the Vatican, is surrounded by
a high wall. And I don't know her answer, but
I like to think she said something like yes, that's
(05:56):
why it's so hard to break into the film industry.
But my point is afterward she got permission to see
the text. You know, a lot of the time we're
working in the archives, it's not as simple as just
looking up something in the library catalog. You need to
work people, or you need to be aware of ways
to get at an item that aren't as simple as
(06:17):
just walking through the door and asking for it. And
she was extremely good at that, which was why after
World War Two started, someone who had previously employed her
in this job, who is now working for the OSS
called her up and said, have I got a job
for you? And she jumped at the chance. It was
like she had been waiting all of her life to
do this. And it says she had, or at least
(06:39):
she had been training all of her life to do this.
She was learning how to be a spy without knowing it.
She became the most productive document acquisitions expert working for
the OSS. She sent home mountains of material, a lot
of it, stuff that she really should not have gotten
access to, underground newspapers, books that the Germans had designated
(06:59):
SEQ books and pulled from circulation, German periodicals that only
went to people on vetted subscriber lists. We don't know
her methods, but we know that she got all of
this incredible stuff and she sent it back to the
United States, and you know, it wound up in all
sorts of places. It wound up in Washington helping people
(07:19):
to make strategic wartime plans. It wound up in the
library at a little place in Los Alamos.
Speaker 2 (07:29):
So for Adele, just to simplify from my own mind, here,
she is looking for documents that are either housed in
Germany or documents that are German based documents but they're
held other places.
Speaker 1 (07:44):
Is that right? Yeah, she was working as an undercover
agent in Stockholm. Stockholm was neutral, but it wasn't impartial.
That is, Stockholm had an agreement with the warring countries
that it could remain neutral only if no spies operated
in Stockholm, so it was very important for her to
remain undercover. Besides which, the Swedish police had trained with
the Gestappos, so if she had been captured, she would
(08:06):
have been open to possibly Gestoppo style beatings and interrogations.
You know, all kinds of things like that. She got
and secretly sent home on microfilm, All kinds of documents
that she really shouldn't have gotten. Access to. Railway schedules,
German newspapers, atlases, maps, technical journals, German newsletters that were
on a restricted list and only went to certain vetted subscribers,
(08:28):
underground resistance literature, privately printed books, books that have been
printed by underground presses, books that the German government had
designated secret books and pulled from circulation. She got current newspapers,
back copies dating to nineteen forty, industry directories, trade magazines,
railway schedules, publications on aeronautics and banking, and bibliography and
(08:49):
metallurgy and mining, basically scientific publications of every description, and
a lot of this was much more useful from an
espionage perspective than you would think when you first heard
what it was like, take one of those industry directories.
What would be the value of getting a Berlin industry
directory for nineteen forty two. Well, one of its uses
(09:10):
would be to find out the addresses of factories that
produced ball bearings. And if you're asking what's the point
of getting factories that produce ball bearings getting their addresses,
the answer is that ball bearings were used to manufacture
fighter planes and tanks and gun carriages and all the
other moving parts of Hitler's war machine. If you bomb
a factory that produces fighter planes, you've just bombed a
(09:31):
factory that produces fighter planes. But if you bomb a
factory that produces ball bearings, you've potentially disabled all of
the factories that produce ball bearings and that produced tanks
and that produce things like that. There's a huge subplot
of World War two that just consists of trying to
get control of ball bearings. But what I'm trying to
say is Kuyber was acquiring, at the request of the OSS,
(09:51):
all of these documents, all of these books that not
only were hard to get, but also the value of
which wasn't immediately obvious. And the reason she was being
asked for them was because of professors back home in
the States who were working, for instance, in the basement
of the Library of Congress, who were using their knowledge
(10:11):
as humanists or social sciences, as economists and so forth
to say, hey, hang on a second, I think that
if we bomb the ball bearing factories, we can have
a much bigger effect than if we simply bomb the
airplane factories. Well, that was going to be my next question.
How did she know what to even look for? Did
the OSS give her guidance? But it sounds like the
people in America were giving her guidance who had background
(10:33):
in this sort of thing. Yes, they sent her requests,
although she also found items on her own that she
sent over. So she made friends with the Norwegian underground,
for example, and she would send photographs in secret publications
from them.
Speaker 2 (10:46):
When we talk about the personal life of these folks,
and we're starting with Adele, did she have a husband
or kids or you know, family that I'm just wondering
if she if she was able to tell anybody what
she's doing.
Speaker 1 (10:57):
So she didn't have a husband, she didn't have kids.
Seems to value her freedom, which maybe we can understand.
But also when other women who did have a husband, kids,
so forth, came home from the war and they had
been working in espionage, they were very very good at
not telling their families what they had been up to.
You know, they would have cover stories. There was one
woman who much later wrote a memoir. She had been
(11:19):
working at the spy training school near London. It was
called Beauley, and she told her family that she was
working for the Ministry of Agriculture and Fish, and they
believed that for many, many decades after she went home.
One of the people in the Soe, the British equivalent
of the OSS, who did recruiting, actually preferred to recruit
(11:42):
women because he thought that women are capable of a
kind of He used the phrase lonely courage that he
thought men were less capable of, because men have wives,
they have secretaries, they have a friend at the pub
that that they want to gossip to, whereas women are
kind of accustomed to having their labor be invisible yea,
you know, sort of unthanked, and they can when necessary
(12:04):
turn that into a strength.
Speaker 2 (12:06):
Well, I thought you were going to say that he
would insinuate that women are more duplicitous than men, a
little sneakier.
Speaker 1 (12:11):
Maybe we're sneakier. I would definitely say that academics are
sneakier than other people. They're very accustomed to subterfuge, to
gathering gossip, to that sort of thing. I think that
it's not much of a stretch to say that a
lot of these guys found themselves very much at home
in the world of spycraft after they were sent to
the training camps and taught how to kill people with
folded newspapers.
Speaker 2 (12:32):
I will say, you cannot pin this comment on me,
but I have spoken to many male investigators who say
how many times the male criminal has been fouled by
his interest in sex. Yes, that's a whole other level
of influence that women can have over men. So yes,
I absolutely I think that's in the Civil War time
(12:54):
another reason why both sides Union and the Confederates were
able to utilize women. So Adela doesn't have a family
or she doesn't feel pressure to disclose anything, and she's
able to kind of move along on her own. Tell
me your source for her. Did she write letters or
was it a book or what happened? So she was
exchanging letters constantly with her superiors, and also there were
(13:17):
lists of texts that she was sending home for record keeping.
A war produces a tremendous amount of documentation, so it
was possible to find in the archives, in the National
Archives in Maryland a tremendous amount of paperwork describing her adventures.
I will mention parenthetically that getting at her papers the
(13:38):
National Archives in Maryland is more difficult because the Finding
Aid Forss documents was put together by OSS veterans after
the war, and even though they did a good service
to history, but they forgot to record the names of
women along with the names of men in a lot
of cases. So the documents are there, but you will
not find her name in the find Aid. You have
(14:01):
to kind of know that it's there and get the
help of librarians to get you to it. I know
the irony is not lost on you that you were
writing about a woman whose job was to dig up
every piece of information she could and now you are
struggling to find documentation on this woman whose job was to,
you know, find all of this information.
Speaker 1 (14:18):
So was she your most not interesting character?
Speaker 2 (14:22):
But is Adele the one that you connected with the
most or is there someone else that we're going to
talk about that you felt even kind of closer to.
Speaker 1 (14:29):
I really appreciated Adele, and for me she represented partly,
you know, it was a serious war, It was it
important war. It was also the case that for Adele
and women like her, and my grandmother, who worked in
intelligence was one of them, the war was an opportunity
to have more power and more freedom than would have
been available under any other circumstances at that time.
Speaker 2 (14:51):
Yeah, I mean we often hear about when menly for war,
you know, the women are at home and they're acquiring
new skills and you know, arning new things. And of
course we know about the baseball leagues, you know that
started popping up, and then when they come back, it's
hard to realize that things will go back to normal.
I know that this is for a spy story. Some
of your information would have been limited. Do we have
(15:13):
any idea how many female spies were out there?
Speaker 1 (15:16):
You thought it was just maybe more women than men.
So the OSS itself was thirty five percent women. I
couldn't say off of the top of my head how
many of them were active undercover agents. But it was
the case that undercover agents were often preferred to be
women because if you had someone who was in occupied France,
let's say, if they were a man, then they might
(15:38):
get swept up by one of the raids that the
Germans sometimes performed, where they would take all of kind
of all of the men who are on the streets
and you know, get them over to Germany to work
in the factories or something like that. They wouldn't do
that to the women. Or these were often kind of
cities of widows. The men had all been taken away
to work in the factories or to fight or that
sort of thing, and the people holding the fort were women.
(16:02):
So who would notice another woman walking around, especially one
who had say a basket on her bicycle that you know,
had vegetables poking out of it, even though it was
actually carrying a radio that sort of thing. Yeah, women
had sort of a better cover given the circumstances during
World War Two a lot of the time.
Speaker 2 (16:21):
Now you know, now we have the Internet, she could
scan stuff in and send it and it could be encrypted,
and you know, there's I think ways to safely send documents.
But this would have been snail mail, right, How would
she have gotten these documents back? To the United States
or wherever they were going safely. I know she's in Sweden,
but still there must have been some kind of monitoring
from the Germans about stuff like this.
Speaker 1 (16:42):
All sorts of different methods, a big one with something
called the diplomatic pouch. That is, it was possible for
embassies to safely send documents or microfilm back home, and
that was sort of a privilege that everybody gave everybody
else's embassies. That isn't to say that embassies were completely
safe this whole mission during World War Two in I
(17:02):
think Washington, where the OSS secretly broke into the Spanish
embassy and took photographs of the documents inside of its
safes using the help of some criminals. Back home in
the States, they found a guy in New York who
was sort of kept out of jail because he always
helped the FBI to break into whatever safe the FBI
needed to break into. But that's a whole other story. Yeah,
(17:23):
diplomatic pouch was a big one, but people used all
sorts of sneaky methods to get documents across borders. During
the war, there was a case where documents were secretly
being ferried out of an occupied country in a Nazi plane,
and they kept the papers sort of in the plane's breaks,
(17:45):
so the Nazis would actually fly it over the border. Wow.
Necessity is the mother of invention.
Speaker 2 (17:52):
Did you get a sense from any of the letters
from Adele to her supervisors or whoever that she was
in danger at any point she scared or felt like
she was going to get caught at some point.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
I'm sure that she must have felt that way. I mean,
the place where she worked, which was the American legation,
was being observed. It was right next door to the
German legation to begin with, but also there were people
wearing plain clothes constantly standing on the other side of
the road and taking pictures of the building. I mean,
it was very obviously being surveilled, which makes it all
(18:26):
the more remarkable that she managed not to come under
suspicion of being a spy. She did have what was
known as cutaways, which is people who would meet someone
on her behalf so that she never met the other person,
or boys who would pick up deliveries at bookstores, that
sort of thing. But I get the sense that she
was actually very good at controlling her fear and getting
(18:50):
things done. You know, like one of those I don't
know lady detectives in a BBC show who goes into
the village and, you know, figures out that the vicar
murdered everyone and sets things right and then adjusts her
hat and gets on the train to the next village.
She really does give me that give you that impression.
Speaker 2 (19:08):
Little Jessica Fletcher from Murder She wrote vous.
Speaker 1 (19:10):
Exactly, Yes, I'm getting Jessica Fletcher vibes. Okay, cozy mysteries. Okay.
Speaker 2 (19:15):
So do we get the sense that the Germans did
the exact same thing that we did, or other countries
that our allies did.
Speaker 1 (19:22):
No, Actually, the United States was inventing something new when
it recruited all of those professors and librarians to the OSS.
The professors and librarians they worked in a branch of
the OSS called Research and Analysis, also known as the
Chairborn Division. Now there was another branch of the OSS
called Research and Development, and those guys were it was
(19:42):
a well known kind of branch in any spy agency.
It was the people who made bombs, who made you know, poisons,
that sort of thing, spy gear, weapons, That was a
well known type of branch in a spy agency. But
research and analysis, bringing in humanists, bringing in social science, right,
getting them to do their thing in the service of spycraft.
(20:04):
That was something new, and it wound up being so
successful that it changed the course of espionage. I mean,
we've been talking about ways of secretly, you know, bringing
messages from one place to another. I know that during
World War Two there was also a group of women
who would carry secret message. They would dress like nuns
and carry secret messages in their rosaries. But the great
innovation of research and analysis was something that Sherman Kent.
(20:27):
Another character in the book says, which is that ninety
percent of what a spy agency needs to know they
can get from public sources. They don't need to consult
secret sources at all. It's just that And this is
the big secret of life. Nobody does the reading. So
if you do the reading, every professor knows this. They
go into class. The students haven't done the reading. They
could tell who has. If you do the reading, you're
(20:48):
already ahead of everybody else. So there was one instance
during World War two. This is a story that William
donnovan liked to tell, and it's apparently true. There was
a woman, a countess, American by birth, very lucky by marriage,
and she was traveling by train from you know, an
occupied country to an unoccupied one. The gestoppo pull everybody
(21:09):
off of the train to search them to make sure
that they're not spies, and the Countess when she went
to the restroom in the train, she had taken a
newspaper and sort of you know, pulled off the pages
and set them down on the seat so that, you know,
in order to keep her dignified bottom from being contaminated.
But that means that when the gestappo were searching everybody,
(21:29):
she had, unbeknownst to her newsprint on her bottom. And
so the Germans got very excited because they thought that
they had discovered this new way, you know, for Allied
spies to transmit information. And she was finally able to
prove to them that it was just newsprint from a newspaper.
They were very upset and put her back on the train.
And Donovan would always finish the story by saying they
(21:51):
were so excited about the newsprint on her bottom that
they forgot to check the lining of her purse, which
was filled with documents for the oss. But the actual
punchline to the story is the newspaper itself. The professors
who were working in the basement of the Library of
Congress figured out all kinds of ways to read newspapers
from occupied Europe, newspapers from neutral countries, things like that
(22:13):
to get information on troop movements. They were able to
figure out whether the Germans were amassing troops somewhere or
whether they were planning to make a strike somewhere, using
things like you know, frothy little mentions of military men
in town in the society pages. They were able to
use tables of railroad rates and study the changes in
(22:36):
railroad rates in order to find out where the Germans
were moving. Various kinds of materials, which is to say,
you know, they actually they read the newspaper, They read
industry directories, they read novels, they looked at you know,
they looked at all kinds of things that you would
normally not consider to be texts that would have any
relevance for espionage, and they found them to have incredible
(23:00):
value in planning the war effort.
Speaker 2 (23:03):
Now, was there a way to connect Adele to some
event that helped us in the war, like you know,
from the Civil war times, I read about a woman
who was able to sneak out a message that essentially
gave the Union a heads up of when the Confederacy
was going to attack. It gave them like a two day,
(23:24):
you know, warning, which was invaluable. They were able to
directly connect it to the woman. Is there a way
to do that with Adele or was it just sort
of all of this context that helped overall that she
was sending.
Speaker 1 (23:35):
I can give you a pretty good one. The Germans
wanted the neutral countries like Sweden to believe that it
would be a terrible thing if the Americans won the war.
They very badly wanted Swedes, for instance, to believe that
Americans were ruffians who had no concept of culture, that
if they won, they would tear down the libraries and
concert halls of Europe, And so they sent all of
these cultural ambassadors to Sweden. They believed in soft power,
(23:58):
which is an important thing to be able to flex
professors and little round glasses to give lectures, and conductors
to wave their batons over performances of the magic flute.
But they also made sure that their scientific and technical
journals flowed into Stockholm's libraries and universities without interruption. Now,
German technical journals, German scientific journals, these were not getting
(24:20):
to the United States, right. You do not send your
scientific work to a country that you're warring with, particularly
if both you and they are racing to get the
proper recipe for an atomic bomb. The things that Adele
sent home included tons and tons and tons of German
scientific periodicals, particularly German scientific periodicals in the fields of
(24:44):
sort of engineering and metallurgy and atomic physics, which are
the fields that are necessary for building an atomic bomb.
Many of the journals and articles that she sent home
found their way into the library at a little place
New Mexico called Los Alamos. That seems to be to
be a very valuable contribution and something that not many
(25:07):
people would have been able to do.
Speaker 2 (25:08):
Personality wise, what kind of person do you think Adele was?
Obviously she was very bold, and she was aware of
what the consequences would be. Actually, before you get to
her personality, what would the consequences have been if she
had been caught, you know, smuggling out something or accessing
something she shouldn't have.
Speaker 1 (25:26):
Is this a death penalty? Thing depends on who caught
her to be perfectly honest. I mean there were German
spies operating in Stockholm as well. You know, the Swedish
police might have simply interrogated her very harshly Gestapo style.
One hopes that they wouldn't have passed her along to
the Gestapo, But the Swedish police were aligned with the
Gestapo and had trained with the Gestapo, so that's not certain.
(25:48):
The best outcome that she would have had would have
been to be confined in a kind of camp in Sweden,
along with sort of air force personnel who had downed
in Sweden. They were kept in the country and not
sent home to their respective militaries. That would have been
the gentlest possible outcome for her, But a lot of
spies died in terrible ways during World War Two. They
(26:12):
were poisoned, they were brought to German camps and had
the most terrible possible fates. It was not a safe
occupation by any means.
Speaker 2 (26:21):
Were these camps in Sweden where you're talking about, you know,
air force pilots or whoever going down and being kept
there where she might have gone, I'm sure not humane,
more humane than obviously the German concentration camps. What were
those like, do you have any idea, I mean, was
it like being in solitary confinement in the United States
or what would it be like.
Speaker 1 (26:41):
I think it would be along the lines of a
sort of Japanese and tournament camp in the United States.
So nothing close to what the Germans had come up with,
but also not happy lodgings.
Speaker 2 (26:50):
Okay, personality wise, what's the sense that you got from
her you reading her letters or did she talk about
anything personal?
Speaker 1 (26:57):
So Eugene Power, who's the guy who wound up working
for the OSS giving her the call? Right? She was
at the University of Chicago at the time. Maybe he
found her in the University of Chicago library where you
could call a scholar who was working. He said that
she jumped at the chance to be a spy. He
said that she had enjoyed reading spy stories when he
(27:18):
knew her before the war, that she always seemed to
him to be a fem fatale sort. I hate that price. Look,
I took that to be in a non sexual way
and just as a kind of dangerous woman. A dangerous woman. Yes,
I think the best word for her is resourceful. I mean,
she had a job hopping from archive to archive across Europe,
(27:38):
finding rare texts and taking photographs of them for scholars
who didn't want to make the trip and might not
be able to get those items. She was very good
at using what was available to her to get access
to texts. And also I think that she knew that
she was the sort of woman who appealed to men
who think, one that they're attracted to smart women and
(28:02):
two that they're smarter than the women they're attracted to,
which is a dangerous combination in a man. Yeah. I
think that she had been waiting by the phone, you know,
so to speak, waiting for something, anything, and when she
got that call, she jumped at the assignment. As he said,
I think it was grand for her that she was
going to be a terrible danger at any moment. She
(28:23):
was very good at her job, and she refused to
tell her superiors her methods, even though they sent her
letters begging like just tell me how you're doing this,
tell me how you're finding this, and she never told them.
Speaker 2 (28:34):
As we wrap up Adele's story, where does her career end?
Does it end with the end of World War two?
And she goes back to Chicago and goes back to
work or what happens to her.
Speaker 1 (28:44):
The end of World War Two. She doesn't get married.
She goes back to the life that she loved, which
is traveling around and now free Europe taking photographs of
rare texts wow, acting as a bibliographic detective. She goes
back to the life that she loved.
Speaker 2 (28:58):
And she just lives to a ripe old age and
becomes obscure in history because she was a spy.
Speaker 1 (29:03):
And that's what happens with spies. That's about right now.
The guy who probably helps to train her in England,
if she did her training in England, which I think
she did. Selwyn Jepson. He wrote detective stories after the
war about female detectives who had trained to be spies
during the war. You know, I think there's a lot
(29:25):
of the personalities of the women that he trained in
his detective stories. I highly recommend reading them as just
a document of how the women he interacted with sort
of thought through problems and reasoned morally with things, which
is much more in the way that a villain who
is doing good would reason through things than you know,
(29:46):
some shrinking violet damsel to be rescued.
Speaker 2 (29:50):
Tell me about one of your other main characters Sherman Kent,
so the description I think is hilarious. A smart mouth
history professor who rose to become the head of analysis
all of Europe and Africa, smartmouthed I like that already.
Speaker 1 (30:03):
I like Sherman. I think Sherman Kent was kind of
a knife too sharp for his sheath. He was a
history professor at Yale. He could have been a good
drill sergeant, but he wound up in an Ivy League
school and maybe he was a little restless there. Right,
He would throw chalk past the heads of his students
if they weren't paying attention, which they don't let us
(30:23):
do anymore. He gets recruited by the OSS at the
start of the war. He's sent to a spy training school.
The book has a lot of information about the things
you learn in spy training schools, and he learns how
to throw knives, among other things, and he's delighted with this,
and he learns how to throw daggers better than a
Sicilian is the phrase that follows him around for the
rest of his life. He also learned how to fold
(30:45):
a newspaper to make it into a deadly weapon, which
later in life he would stop mid conversation and show
people how to do this. You know, just a man
who had knives as comfort objects. That's who Sherman Kent was.
Now Sherman Kent stayed in Washington rather than going abroad.
He became one of the leaders of research and analysis.
This group of librarians and professors who are working, as
(31:08):
I said, in the basement of the Library of Congress,
among other places, and reading all of these novels, and
reading these newspapers and reading these industry directories and coming
up with intelligence guidance for the war effort. I mean,
like real strategic analysis to tell the war's leaders what
they should do next, where they should strike, what conditions
the military will find if it goes ashore in some
(31:30):
town in North Africa, etc. Et cetera, et cetera. Calculating
the amount of armor that needs to be put on
the sides of planes to make sure that they come
back safely, but don't weigh too much, that sort of thing.
All of that is within RNA's purview. Sherman Kent comes
up with as saying that ninety percent of what an
intelligence agency needs to know it can get from public sources,
(31:53):
not secret sources, which I think remains true to this day.
He becomes the head of intelligence analysis all of Europe
and Africa. But more than that, like I said, RNA,
the Chairborn Division was something new in the world of intelligence.
It wasn't normal for military types to be listening to
tweety professors who were telling them what to do. Part
of Sherman Kent's job was to speak on behalf of
(32:16):
those tweety professors to the military, to speak to generals
in their own language. And this is something that Sherman
Kent could do better than anybody else, because among his
other attributes, he was a man of superb and outrageous
profanity who was prepared to go sort of toe to
toe in terms of inventiveness of speech with any general
(32:37):
that he might talk to. All of the insights of
the professors would have been nothing if Sherman Kent hadn't
been there to talk on their behalf, and he did.
That's amazing, you know.
Speaker 2 (32:46):
I think about one of my books, American Sherlock, which
was about a forensic scientist who could not figure out
how to talk to juries who oftentimes you know, had
very little, no education, and he for a very long time,
tried to use three syllable words and was very scientific,
and he kept losing cases because people didn't understand what
he was talking about. Sherman reminds me of maybe the
(33:07):
interpreter that Oscar Heinrich needed to really simplify it, and
finally Heinrich got it. But Sherman, it sounds like it
was just tailor made to be the person to disseminate
this information. And that was my question is maybe this
sounds silly, but did all of the military leaders take
this seriously? I mean, did they really make big decisions,
(33:27):
life changing decisions based on what these geeks in the
basement of the Library of Congress were really saying. Did
they ever question their logic that kind of thing.
Speaker 1 (33:36):
Yeah, there was. It took time for them to come
around to it. But the you know, the outcomes of
the research of ur and A turned out to be undeniable.
So RNA's first sort of big test was the invasion
of North Africa. You know, their insights, their data, their
strategic guidance was used to plan the invasion, which went
(33:58):
way way better than the best projects of anybody who
was helping with that. And so you know, they passed
that test. Now, it was a big test, and it
had all of the elements of kind of a test
in school in the sense that they were you know,
you had people who were doing the reading. You had
all night study sessions where these you know, sort of
binders of material were being put together by people who
(34:19):
I'll say it again, they were locked in the basement
of the Library of Congress, not allowed out until they
had successfully invaded North Africa because the military was afraid
that they might give away some detail of the invasion
if they were allowed to go home. I don't know
if you've been in the basement of the Library of Congress,
but nope, it's this huge labyrinth. It's this extraordinary place.
(34:41):
I think there might be people from World War two
still wandering around in there, you know, they just haven't
found their way to the doors back out. But anyway,
so there were all night study sessions and then there
was the final exam and they aced this thing. Right.
That was really the turning points not just for the war,
but a turning point for R and A as well,
because they had proven how effective they were. After that,
(35:04):
they were taken much more seriously by the military.
Speaker 2 (35:07):
If I understand sort of the way that this works,
and I barely do. It is that the Shermans of
the world were requesting documents from the Adeles of the world.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Is that the simplified way this goes. That's about right, yes.
And Sherman was doing some detective work of his own
back in Washington, like he knew the kind of information
that they would need in order to do strategic planning,
and the question was where am I going to get
that information? Not always from Adele. There was one instance where,
you know, the smallest things could make a difference. They
(35:39):
needed to know something about railroads in North Africa. They
needed to know about railroads in North Africa in the
most detailed possible way. And the best way for me
to explain why this sort of thing should be important
is to point out that during the Normandy invasion, the
Germans could very easily have come over to the Normandy
coast and wiped out the Allies and what was already
(36:02):
a very difficult landing. And one of the reasons that
they didn't was because, in the hours after the Normandy
invasion had started, a code phrase went out over French
radio and French members of the resistance civilians went out
and over the next few hours destroyed more than nine
hundred sections of railroad personally so that the German reinforcements
(36:24):
couldn't derive. Knowing where railroad sidings are what you can
do in order to damage them permanently or temporarily, where
the different railroads lead, you know, in order to stop
a division from coming from this direction or another direction.
That can be really important in wartime or if you're
making a landing. Knowing which railroads you need to destroy
in order to prevent German reinforcements from finding you or
(36:47):
protect so that you can go to another city. This
is all very important, but especially in the era before
the Internet. Knowing in really good detail about every railroad
siding in North Africa, you can understand how that would
be difficult. It happened that Sherman Kent's a friend of
his told him that a Moroccan railway engineer was visiting
him and would he like to come and talk to him.
(37:08):
So Kent, you know, he got dressed up in his
tweed and his bow tie, and you know he came over,
puffing his pipe and said, oh, I'm beguale professor, I'm
kind of interested in North Africa for non intelligence reasons.
Can I ask you a few questions about the railroad
sidings in Morocco just to clarify, just to clarify if
it's not intelligence.
Speaker 2 (37:25):
At all, Yes, it's not spycraft at all, I promise, okay.
Speaker 1 (37:28):
And as Kent said at his memoir, instead of dropping
dead at the mention of so sensitive a subject, the
guy actually gave not only gave him all the information
that he needed, but Kent became so bold as to
bring out like this questionnaire that he had put in
his bag, and the guy just filled out, you know,
kind of this comprehensive information on Moroccan railroads. And Kent
(37:48):
immediately immediately went to his office it was about ten
PM by then, and called a general and said, I
have this information about Moroccan railroads. And the general said,
I expect for you to get that information desk before sunrise.
So no sleep for Sherman Ken that night. But that
was how vital the information turned out to be. So
there were people who were kind of or you had
(38:09):
members of R and A who were kind of taking
measurements at railway stations around Washington in the middle of
the winter because they were trying to figure something out
about the way that the metal would expand or contract
in the Russian winter. I bore you with all of
this stuff, but nothing is insignificant in the end, no
detail is unimportant. You're not just dropping these bombs on
top of people. There are so many other ways to
(38:30):
win a war, and better ways. I mean, look, bombing
is one thing, but the real you know, the real
coup is if you can get people on the ground
to do sabotage. Because if you bomb a factory, you've
just damaged the roof. Most of the time. You want
to damage the machines, and furthermore, you want to damage
the most important machines, and furthermore, you want to damage
them in a specific way that makes them hard to repair.
(38:52):
So the real trick was getting people who were factory
workers in Norway to carry pocketfuls of sand into factories
and destroy them in a very specific way that was
laid out by engineers working for the Allies, and in
a way that they had plausible deniability. I didn't do
that to the machine. It works, just got gunked up.
(39:13):
Don't know what to do, mister, mister Haraguy in charge.
Speaker 2 (39:17):
Now you mentioned a memoir, and that was going to
be a question, how do we know so much about
Sherman because we know Adele didn't have a memoir, she
had letters and stuff. So was this a braggert on
the page? Essentially? Was this a vanity project for him?
Speaker 1 (39:29):
Well, he did write a memoir. It didn't get published,
although the unpublished memoirs are in his papers at the
Yale University Library, and it's a thrilling read. Okay. He
wound up going into the CIA after the war, and
he became actually a very important person in the history
of what we call sort of intelligence studies. He set
it up as something like an academic subject, the same
(39:52):
way that art history is a subject or the history
of the book. He really wanted to make the CIA
to make sure that its methods, the comprehensiveness, the objectivity
of methods of academic analysis. He set up the CIA's
in house journal, Studies in Intelligence. All of which is
to say that when you are at academic and you
(40:13):
reach the end of your career, you have what's known
as fest shrifts written about you. People write papers in praise,
you know, in praise of you or in your honor,
and put them together in a book that's not really
done anymore. I'm just trying to describe the flavor of
the time. I was wondering if you and I were
going to be up for that. I guess not. You're
not going to be in fest shrifts now, But that
(40:34):
used to be a thing, and you would, you would
write a memoir, you know, And he wrote a memoir.
It is, as I said, very interesting reading. But he
was such a character that lots of people wrote about him,
you know, his eternal quid of chewing tobacco, his red suspenders,
his outrageous language, his facility with throwing knives. I mean,
(40:54):
he really was kind of a one of a kind
character who fit absolutely perfectly into the of the OSS
during the war and helped to guide the CIA in
the decades afterward.
Speaker 2 (41:04):
And like Adele, I'm assuming lived a ripe old age
and was not poisoned by cyanide and his coffee at
some point.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
That's right, he wasn't poisoned by cyanide. He lived to
a ripe old age. You know. He was one of
the editors I think of studies at Intelligence, and he
loves to gore the subpar work of people who sent
in bad articles. He tried to go back to He
tried to go back to Yale after the war, and
I think that it just bored him. You know, he
had just been helping to run a war. He had
been helping to run a spy you know agency, he
(41:31):
had been a spy master. And then he goes back
to Yale and the kids still aren't doing the reading,
but they're not even in positions of enough authority to
make the fact that they're ignorant interesting. So he turns
around and goes to the CIA. But he does one
thing after the war that was kind of a mistake
that's interesting, which is he wanted to prove what he'd
always been saying, which is that ninety percent of what
(41:52):
an intelligence agency needs to know it can get from
public sources, not secret sources, as long as you do
what nobody else does and do the reading. So he
got a group of history professors at Yale to spend
the summer in Yale's library reading through public documents like
newspapers and coming up with the answers to all of
these US military secrets. And they succeeded, and they put
(42:12):
together a report and they gave it to the OSS
and it somehow got into the hands of Congress and
then into the hands of the President, and everybody was
very upset because they thought that it proved the Yale professors.
He told the Yale professors to pretend they were working
for Russia. So when they put together this report, it
looked like they were putting it together for Russia. Oh gosh, yeah, exactly.
That wasn't You're right, that is underline not smart. So
(42:35):
you know, so, oh, Yale professors are working for the Russians,
and you know, there was a big scandal, and everybody
got in a lot of trouble, and a CIA operative
showed up at the Yale Library and tried to confiscate
the library's entire contents.
Speaker 2 (42:49):
Was this the Red Scare like McCarthy era? I hope not,
for his sake. That's not when this happened.
Speaker 1 (42:53):
I think it was a little before then. But they
tried to confiscate the library's entire contents. He was persuaded
to only take the papers of the historians involved, but
Kent did prove that he was right.
Speaker 2 (43:03):
The historians did succeed, So well, there you go. He's
luck he didn't get thrown in jail or worse. Yeah, okay,
do we want to tell me a little bit about
Joseph Curtis, you know, just like the short notes on him,
because I know he was a significant character for you.
Speaker 1 (43:17):
Also, Joseph Curtis a Yale professor. Again, look, Yale is
a very sneaky and secretive place, and it produces a
lot of spies. Apparently, I can't change that. That's just
a historical fact. So he was studying early modern literature
at Yale. He was a professor. He'd gone to Yale undergrad,
then Yale for grad school, then become a professor there.
Very much a hot house flower, you know what I mean.
(43:38):
He had a very safe, very cozy, little life of letters.
Speaker 2 (43:41):
I've never heard that analogy before. A hot house flower.
Speaker 1 (43:44):
A hothouse flower. He had grown up in a greenhouse,
you know, he had always been protected and oh got it.
And then he was pulled out of that world, trained
as a spy and thrown into wartime Istanbul where he
was given the job of tracking down German spies and
turning them into double agents. So it was very much
a sink or swim situation for him, and remarkably he
(44:05):
turned out to be good at his job. He turned
out to be so good at his job that he
had a non trivial effect on the outcome of the
Norman dy invasion. And he was a literature professor right well.
So one of the conceits of the book is something
that that advisors do tell to PhD students, which is,
your dissertation is an autobiography. There's something about what you
(44:25):
choose as the subject for your dissertation that says something
about you, or it's a question that you're trying to
figure out the answer to a as a person, because
it has something to do with your own nature, your
own character. Joseph Curtis wrote his dissertation about astrologers in
the early modern period, and his conceit, and I think
he was correct, is that astrologers were really detectives. That
(44:48):
was the role that they performed in society. They found
out the answers to questions, they found missing objects. People
came in and said, you know, is my wife plotting
to kill me? You know? Or am I going to
become a widow anytime soon? Those are not suspicious questions
at all. If somebody had blackmail information about someone else,
you'd go to the astrologer to kind of get the
(45:09):
black mail documents back. So he was talking about, you know,
the life of a bibliographic detective, of a kind of
scholar who solved mysteries but also was in touch with
something like real magic. Not that he thought that astrologers
were working with real magic, but they surrounded themselves with
the symbols of magic. They had brazen heads that were
said to talk to you know, to give oracular advice,
(45:32):
and they wore velvet caps and you know capes, and
you know, we're said to summon angels or devils. You know,
I think this was kind of the perfect life of
a scholar to have this kind of drama together with
all of your books. And he got to live that life.
He went to wartime Istanbul. He worked in what was
(45:54):
called Double Cross, which was the counter espionage section of
the OSS. He was tracking down German spies, turning them
into double agents. He was involved look in Sweden. Sweden
could stay neutral because it had made an agreement with
the warring countries that no spies would operate in Sweden.
(46:14):
That's why Kaiber had to operate undercover. But Istanbul was
neutral because Turkey had made a deal with the warring
countries that it could remain neutral if everybody's spies operated
in Turkey openly. There were seventeen different intelligence agencies operating
in Istanbul. Everybody in that world was presumed to be
a spy. You had hundreds of people working as professional whisperers.
(46:37):
There's a section on whispering in the book, which is
a very specific way that you spread rumors. Right, you
have to be trained to do it. You were not
allowed to spread rumors or whisper unless you had been
trained to do it, and the rules for whispering are
in the book. But in this world he was so
successful as kind of one of the leading figures in
(46:58):
the oss branch, nobody suspected him of being a spy,
despite the fact that everybody was presumed to be a spy.
He had a cover story as a professor. He was
also supposedly a book collector, just innocently collecting books for
Yale's library, but in fact he was doing something totally different.
And even though his students would you know, the student
at the university that he taught classes at, would make
(47:20):
jokes about which of their professors had put another body
in the Bosphorus this week. You know that they said, oh,
all of our professors are spies too. They not only
didn't think he was a spy, but they didn't remember
him afterward. There was a CIA head once who said
a spy is the sort of person who can't get
a waiter's attention in a restaurant. And that was Joseph Curtis.
You know, he was just unmemorable, even though he had
(47:42):
very secretly, you know, a very adventurous heart. You know,
I find serial killers to be the same way.
Speaker 2 (47:46):
Every serial killer I've ever written about is sort of
like kind of disappears into the wallpaper, is the way
they're described, that sort of a seemingly innocuous, you know,
anonymous person who you would never suspect of anything.
Speaker 1 (47:58):
Maybe that's the success ones. Maybe the ones who don't
disappear into the wallpaper are caught after just one murder
and they don't get to be a serial killer. Yeah, yeah,
it could be.
Speaker 2 (48:07):
How does one turn a German spy into a double agent?
That can't be easy. He must have been very persuasive
or what. There are all kinds of methods that you
could use. I don't have any of them to hand.
Speaker 1 (48:20):
Half of the trouble is tracking them down, and then
you figure out whether you want to turn them into
a double agent, whether it would be better to convince
them to defect, because defections can have an effect on morale.
It's a very dangerous and very necessary area of spycraft.
But the real trick with double cross is this, to
the extent possible, you do not want to destroy the
(48:40):
enemy's intelligence service. You want to keep the enemy's intelligence
service and their intelligence networks in place and get them
all working for you. So you convince them that you
guys are going to win and that you will give
them a break after you win. You convince them that
they're going to get a little bit more money, you know,
if they work for you.
Speaker 2 (49:02):
Timing is probably very important too. I mean, the closer
you get to the end of the war and it
looks like the Germans are not going to do well,
it's probably easier to convince people to switch sides.
Speaker 1 (49:10):
Oh. Absolutely, people were positively, you know, jumping at the
chance to not be seen to be a Nazi toward
the end of the war. And people were so ashamed
after the war in Germany of what they had done
that there was a huge, huge wave of suicides by
Germans at the end of the war, just all kinds
of suicide. It was tragic because parents would do it
(49:31):
to their children, they would have families died together. So,
you know, the Nazis wound up being their own victims. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (49:39):
Kind of to wrap this up, when we go back
to the geeky academics, and I say that freely because
I am one of those, and so are you, why
do you think they didn't get their due? Why aren't
there just one thousands of books written about them, like
the books of you know, the spies that worked all
the way back. I mean, there's a wonderful book Alexander
Rose wrote about Washington spies. You know, we know all
(50:03):
TV series, we know things that have happened. Is it
because they are locked away in the Library of Congress
and they don't have like exploding bombs in their back pockets?
Speaker 1 (50:12):
Or you know, why don't we know more about these people?
I think that one of the elements is this that
we're accustomed to a kind of spy story that has,
you know, a guy wearing a tuxedo looks amazing Henry
Cavill type running across rooftops with a gun in one hand.
And that's not really how most spycraft takes place. Now
(50:34):
for you and me, there's a real romance to the
world of books, right. We understand that scholars love gossips.
They love to read old letters for a reason because
the old letters are full of secrets. We love stabbing
each other in the back, we love subterfuge. I don't
do that just for the record listeners, but we can
understand very easily how the things that these professors and
librarians did could fit very easily into the world of spycraft.
(50:58):
But that might not, you know, but you need to
sort of love books first and understand that librarians are
real information workers and how easily that fits into the
world of intelligence to be able to spin up, maybe
in your head, a kind of plot that fits with
the real life plots that these guys were living out.
One way that I've thought about how the librarians and
(51:18):
professors fit into the war is this, when a crisis comes,
then you fall back on your training. What you have
is what you bring to the war. So the English
had these spy training schools that were incredibly posh. They
were these country manners and at housemasters and servants and
that sort of thing. Because they were English, that's what
they knew, so that's what they fell back on. The
Americans trained their spies in these muddy camps with tents
(51:41):
in national parks where they were teaching people how to
do quick draws like cowboys because they were Americans, so
of course they trained like cowboys. The Norwegians were out
there on skis. The French resistance robed liquor stores, drank
the wine and then turned the empty wine bottles into
moloktov cocktails. Because they're French. They fought as the French
do now. The librarians, when the war came, also fell
back on their training, and it turned out to be
(52:03):
unexpectedly exactly what modern intelligence needed. These guys have been
training to be spies to work in intelligence for all
of their lives, and they never knew. Then the war came.
They were recruited into spycraft and it was like, my god,
I can swim, like I can do this. I've been
practicing my whole life. That's incredible. It would be great
to see more more spy stories about that element. Partly
(52:24):
because I'm a great lover of dark academia and love
to see it wherever I can. But also because this
is a story that teaches us that libraries themselves are important,
you know, not just as centers of education, not just
as centers of community, but as places that train the
very readers who become valuable intelligence agents later on, and
as centers that are essential to national security. The value
(52:47):
of the humanities, the value of the social sciences, that's
something that is back under debate, and it's a shame
that it is because the humanities teach us, among other things,
to work with data that has a lot of holes
in it, data that is ambiguous, and that's kind of
the data that you have to work with, for example,
in a wartime situation. Wars aren't controlled experiments. That's why
(53:08):
the humanists turned out to be so good at wartime analysis.
They were used to working with the kinds of data
that you find yourself dealing with in warfare.
Speaker 2 (53:26):
If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and Don't Forget There are
twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast Tenfold More
Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
(53:51):
Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Nick Tooga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgariff, and
Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold more Wicked,
and on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod
Host
Kate Winkler Dawson
Popular Podcasts
Stuff You Should Know
If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!