Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II
Elyse Graham
Ecco Books
Copyright 2024 by the author

You could, if you want, blame Secretary of State Henry Stimson. In 1929, he’s alleged to have stuck his nose in the air and said “Gentlemen don’t read each other’s mail”, and then shut down most of the United States’ foreign intelligence apparatus. So we were caught flat-footed when the Japanese attacked twelve years later.

Now it was up to William Donovan, the newly appointed head of the OSS, to put together his agency from scratch. The “Research and Development” side would be easy – just get a bunch of technical people to design and build all the secret devices of spycraft. But for the “Research and Analysis” department, which would collect and study the mountains of data needed by the US Military, you needed people with highly specialized training.

So that’s why a Yale English professor found himself at a “secure location”, learning how to silently kill someone with a knife, and how to deal with being interrogated by the enemy. Oh, by the way, you’d only need to hold up under capture and interrogation for 48 hours. Not because by that time they’d be done with you, or that you could expect to be rescued by then, but because that’s how long it should take for your contacts to forget they ever knew you and “vanish”….

I really thought this book was going to be a dull, academic slog. No photo section, but a lot of endnotes. And no “review blurbs” on the back cover. But Graham has done the research, digging through memoirs, letters, and declassified materials to make this not only interesting, but even a little exciting.

The thread running through all her accounts of the archivists and historians and other researchers who aided the Allied cause in their own special way, is that you can never know which skills will be useful in a time of crisis.

You’ll want a language professor from Smith College to befriend the secretaries at the Spanish Embassy, so that when you contrive to have a job open up there, all those ladies will recommend their new best friend for the job…. An archivist skilled in photographing documents to go to Stockholm and take microfilm pictures of obscure technical journals to send back to engineers back in the US…. Economists who can point out production bottlenecks and crucial factories that the Resistance can target…. Anthropologists who can write handbooks for shipwrecked sailors or downed airmen who find themselves in strange lands…. Historians to pore over old ship’s logs for information on reefs, shoals, and other navigational hazards…. You’ll want someone who can recognize the importance of trade publications with names like The Universal Directory of Railway Officials and The Railway Yearbook 1936, librarians who can get their hands on copies, and others who can wade through those massive tomes to report to you that the Nazis simply don’t have the rolling stock to make effective use of the Soviet rail network during Operation Barbarossa….

This is the sort of intelligence gathering that cannot be automated. As Yale professor Sherman Kent (who is one of those special agents Graham writes about) wrote after the war, human experts – either scholars or career intelligence agents – have the benefit of knowing their own limitations. Kent would return to the world of spies; he’d sign up with the CIA in 1950, where he persuaded them to start an in-house academic journal: Studies in Intelligence. The CIA would soon start amassing its own library of documents related to espionage, including centuries old texts and letters on the matter.

Graham ends the book with a plea for more support of the humanities. STEM fields are all the rage these days, but we should not neglect the people who can see the biggest picture. You never know when you’ll need someone who actually enjoys digging through archives and reading obscure periodicals….

Oh, and don’t cripple federal agencies on a stupid whim…….