Book and Dagger

Book and Dagger, Elyse Graham. Ecco Books (ISBN: 9780063280847) 2025.

Summary: The contribution of scholars and librarians to undercover and intelligence operations during World War II.

James Bond they were not. They were Ivy League academics. Among them were literature professors, historians, librarians, and archivists. But they played a critical role for a nation desperately in need of an intelligence service.

When Pearl Harbor was attacked and the United States found itself in a global conflict, government leaders recognized our profound lack of good intelligence. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was formed, the predecessor to today’s CIA. One of the decisions they made was that academics were people good at ferreting out information. They knew how to spend time in archives and make sense out of disparate and sometimes apparently insignificant sources like a phone book or a newspaper ad or even trash. As researchers, their vocation also allowed them to go undercover to find that information.

Elyse Graham focuses her story around three of these academics. Joseph Curtiss was a literature professor who was able to recruit a network of German double agents in Turkey. Adele Kibre was a single archivist who went to Stockholm to acquire critical information about German plans, using charm when needed to dupe those who didn’t think a woman librarian could be a spy. Meanwhile, Sherman Kent, a historian, pioneered and led research and analysis efforts, sifting through mountains of information to create actionable intelligence.

Graham describes the training agents underwent. The goal was to survive capture for 48 hours. However, this wasn’t the time until rescue, but rather the time for other agents to evacuate to safety. Of course, there was the cyanide capsule. Along the way, Graham describes a number of operations, including a raid on a Norwegian heavy water plant. She also describes all the intelligence disinformation efforts surrounding D-Day. Consequently, a number of German resources were elsewhere.

Here is an example of what academics could accomplish. A group from Yale went to the library and from publicly available information reconstructed over 90 percent of the U.S. military’s order of battle and strategic plans. All of this was supposed to be classified. Other analysts studied returning bombers to recommend where to put extra shielding from anti-aircraft fire. They noticed that engines didn’t suffer a lot of hits. Counter-intuitively, that’s where they recommended shielding. Bombers with engine hits didn’t return.

My one criticism of the book is that the author included so many stories that didn’t involve Curtiss, Kibre, and Kent, that one lost the thread of the narrative of their experiences. Not that the stories weren’t interesting. It’s just that after a while, it felt like one story after another that proved the author’s thesis rather than developing the narrative.

However, the thesis itself is worth noting. The scholars turned spies were so successful because of the disciplines they developed as scholars. Graham lists these:

“How to sift through paper evidence like newspapers, leaflets, and novels. How to gather clues from unlikely sources like advertisements and society columns. How to read a lot in just a little time. How to look at a pile of cracked and curling pages and see a treasure hunt. How to evaluate claims. How to tell stories. How to come up with audacious methods of solving problems using unlikely data: figuring out military secrets, say, by tracking ball bearings, or railroad rates, or the serial numbers of tank components. How to make arguments that aren’t merely summaries of what has been said, but that say something new. How to understand another country–because the past, too, is another country–on its own terms” (p. 297).

Graham doesn’t pass up the current relevance of this lesson from history. Scholars, especially from the humanities, are routinely disparaged. Yet doesn’t this story demonstrate that there is a kind of intelligence that we ignore at our peril? Thankfully, there were leaders during World War II who recognized the importance of such intelligence and people who had cultivated the intellectual discipline it required.