Espionage

Review: Book and Dagger

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Cover image of "Book and Dagger" by Elyse Graham

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.

Review: Marco Polo, If You Can

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Cover image of "Marco Polo, If You Can" by William F. Buckley, Jr.

Marco Polo, If You Can

Marco Polo, If You Can (Blackford Oakes, Number 4), William F. Buckley, Jr. Mysterious Press/Open Road (ISBN: 9781504018524) 2015 (first published in 1981).

Summary: Blackford Oakes awaits a death sentence in the Lubyanka as a spy, part of a plot to expose a Soviet mole.

The trial was pro forma. Oakes U-2 flamed out over Soviet territory, allowing his capture. Known as a spy, he’s sentenced to death. And appeals for reprieves or lighter sentences have failed. Uncharacteristically, Oakes is down to prayers.

Most of the book concerns how Oakes, out of the spy business for three years, has ended up in the Lubyanka. The problem is that there is a mole high in the U.S. government in the Eisenhower administration, leaking the contents of sensitive meetings. Who it is, how it is being done, and the network that gets that information to the Soviets occupies much of the book.

Initially, the CIA brings Oakes back to help expose the network. The high stakes of this operation strike home when Oakes loses of friend to save his life.

Back in the States, the investigation homes in on the source, a woman Oakes had once been intimate with. Likewise, they figure out how it is being done, despite close monitoring. A Xerox machine plays a leading role. But things take a twist because the CIA knows about the leak. They mix misinformation with credible information including a project dubbed “Marco Polo.” Instead of the Soviets embarrassing the Americans, the Americans want to do the embarrassing.

But first, the Americans must embarrass themselves. And that’s where Oakes flight comes in, paralleling the real life Gary Powers incident. But the Soviets shot down Powers, whereas Oakes stages his flameout. His landing in Soviet territory is deliberate. But you will have to read to understand why, and whether the plan works prior to Oakes execution.

Buckley’s Oakes evokes the cold war machinations of Le Carre and the sexuality of Ian Fleming’s James Bond without the flare of either author. The plot is diverting but not thrilling. The sex is ho-hum. Of greatest interest are the portrayals of Allen Dulles and J. Edgar Hoover. And we care enough about Oakes to hope he will escape with his life. There are others in this series, particularly Stained Glass and Saving the Queen that I would rate more highly. But if you like the series or just want some pleasant Cold War era diversion, give this a read.

Review: Passenger to Frankfurt

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Passenger to Frankfurt, Agatha Christie. William Morrow Paperbacks (ISBN: 9780062094452), 2012 (Originally published in 1970).

Summary: Sir Stafford Nye helps a woman in the Frankfurt airport by giving her his cloak, passport, and boarding ticket to England and finds himself caught up in a global plot.

Sir Stafford Nye is a middle aged diplomat on his way home from Malaya when approached by a woman claiming that the re-routing of her flight jeopardizes her life, and asks that Nye help her by giving her his cloak, passport and boarding ticket. To make it all seem plausible, she says she will drug his beer while he leaves behind the cloak with passport and boarding ticket to step away for a moment. When he returns, they are gone, he drinks his beer and is eventually wakened, holding the stuffed Panda he had purchased for his niece, Sybil. Panda will return!

He treats it as a strange embarrassment until a colleague in security tells him he saved Mary Ann, an important agent who is variously known as Daphne Theodofanous and Countess Renata Zerkowski. When his passport is returned, he places a “personal” and ends up meeting her at the opera Siegfried, where she leaves a program with an important clue. Before he knows it, he is involved with her in an espionage plot designed to thwart the rise of a fascist organization sowing mayhem in the world led by a child purportedly sired by Hitler, but masterminded by an obese Bavarian countess.

Throughout, Nye tries to understand what is his part. He also learns rule number one in espionage–trust no one. Indeed, a traitor has infiltrated the intelligence organization directing “Mary Ann’s” efforts. At times, we wonder if Mary Ann is to be trusted.

Indeed, it was puzzling to me what role Nye plays beyond his initial unusual act of trust, other than his connection to his Aunt Mathilda who actually seems to have more to do with the denouement than Nye.

It’s an odd story, implausible at a number of points. The redeeming element is the mysterious Mary Ann. This was written when Christie had turned eighty and was the last of her spy stories. Perhaps the other element of the story is Christie’s prescient appreciation of the compelling attraction of fascism. Few would have credited this in 1970, when the horrors of fascism were still fresh. That aspect of this work is, sadly, far more plausible fifty years later.

Review: The Captain and the Enemy

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The Captain and the Enemy, Graham Greene. New York: Open Road Media, 2018 (orginally published in 1988).

Summary: A boarding school boy is taken to live with a poor woman in a London flat by a confidence man called “The Captain,” who sporadically visits, provides money and seems to care for the woman, Liza, who become’s “Jim’s” mother. Only years later does he understand more about this mysterious figure, and the various relations in his life.

There is much in the setup to this story that stretches plausibility. Victor Baxter, a boarding school student whose distant father is known as “The Devil” is taken out of school one day by a distinguished figure of military bearing, only known as the Captain. That things are not on the up and up becomes clear when, first The Captain asks the boy to lend him what little money he has, and then takes him for an extravagant meal at a hotel, charges it to his room, and then leaves without paying for anything. They are driven to a poorer part of London, to a basement flat, where a poor young woman, Liza lives. The Captain instructs Victor that he is to call her mother and that he will be Jim, and will not be going back to school. He tells Victor/Jim and Liza that he won the boy in a game of backgammon from his father.

The Captain shows up sporadically, always giving Liza assistance, though the source of the money is obscure. Newspaper reports of jewelry thefts mention a figure like The Captain in description, and there are times when he must make himself scarce and times they are not to answer the door to anything but his signal. When he is present, The Captain gives history and geography lessons that suggest wartime escapes and flights. It’s evident that he cares for Liza, that there is some deep bond. “Jim’s” role as he becomes older is to look out for Liza in The Captain’s absence–more prolonged now that he is in Panama. His letters promise wealth around the corner, but again, don’t mention where this will come from.

“The Devil” also shows up and doesn’t challenge the arrangement. It turns out that Liza had been a mistress of his, became pregnant, and a botched abortion resulted in her inability to have children. Through The Captain, one child of the Devil replaces another one lost. The Captain comes off as the noble trickster or confidence man, using deceit to accomplish his idea of the good.

As Jim grows up, he starts working for a newspaper, eventually moving out but staying in touch with Liza. The Captain, now going by Smith, sends money for them to come to Panama. Before she is able, Liza is struck by a car, on an errand Jim once ran. Jim decides to come to Panama, but conceals the truth of Liza’s death. He is met by Quigley, an acquaintance, but not a trusted friend of Smith, who seems very interested in knowing from Jim what the Captain is doing. Jim learns that it has to do with Smith’s plane, which he uses to haul “cargo” for various customers. Remember, this is in the late 1970’s. Jimmy Carter has signed a treaty to turn over the canal to Panama. There are various revolutionary and counter-revolutionary movements. Arms are needed, drugs are sold to pay for them. The latter part of the book have to do with the Captain’s efforts, supported by the Panamania government who set a guard on his lodgings, and Mr. Quigley’s real work behind the mask of a financial journalist.

The culmination of the story reveals more of this shadowy figure’s true character, his love for Liza, and Jim’s own relationship with The Captain/Smith. Personally, while I wanted to see how the story would resolve, I felt Greene stretched plausibility and the story didn’t work for me. How schools, family, and social structures let this happen, even after an aunt found out what was going on stretched credulity. I felt this was not up to the level of his great novels of the 1940’s and 1950’s although having the whiff of espionage, of characters who live in the shadows, and yet who love and long for purposeful lives. This one, written toward the end of his life in 1988 (he died in 1991), is for fans who want to read all of his works. I would not base my opinion of Greene on this work but rather ones like Brighton Rock, The Power and the Glory, The Heart of the Matter, The End of the Affair, The Quiet American, and Our Man in Havana, all written before 1960.

Review: The Ministry of Fear

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The Ministry of Fear, Graham Greene. New York: Open Road Media, 2018 (first published in 1943).

Summary: Just released from a psychiatric hospital for the mercy killing of his wife, Arthur Rowe inadvertently gets caught up in a twisty espionage plot.

It is 1943, the middle of World War 2 in London, with nightly bombing raids and no one knowing if they will live to the next morning. Arthur Rowe lives quietly in a flat, reading and re-reading The Old Curiosity Shop. He’s been exempted from the war effort because he was recently released from a psychiatric facility where he had served a sentence of the mercy killing of his wife.

Inadvertently, he is caught up in an espionage affair, surviving poisoning, escaping another murder charge only to survive a bomb blast when a case, supposedly of books that he is carrying to a hotel rendezvous explodes. He loses his memory, narrowly escapes a sinister psychiatrist, and joins the effort to hunt down the espionage mastermind, the brother of a woman he has fallen in love with, Anna Hilfe. I’ve seen plenty of plot movement and narrow escapes in other Greene novels, but nothing like the madcap adventures of this novel, reminiscent more of G. K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday than anything else I’ve read by Greene.

It begins at a charity fete where Rowe visits a fortune teller who mistakes him for one of the conspirators, that enables him to win a cake in which a role of microfilm has been hidden. He is poisoned, but survives, when he will not give up the cake. After working with a detective, he visits the fortune teller again, and when the lights go out, a man is murdered with a knife carried by Rowe. Knowing he could be charged with murder, he flees, ends up carrying a case of what he thinks are books to a hotel for a man he met at a book seller.

The case explodes, he survives but with the loss of his memory, recovering in a bucolic country psychiatric facility (again!) headed by a soothing but sinister doctor up to no good. He’s visited by Anna Hilfe, who works at the charity that ran the fete, who he’d met earlier and encountered just before the suitcase bomb exploded. He comes to love her, even though he does not remember the prior connection, nor the ways her brother Willi is involved in the espionage plot, ways that become clearer as memory returns and he joins the effort to uncover the ring and retrieve a crucial microfilm.

“The Ministry of Fear” formally is an espionage ring, but becomes more in Greene’s plot. It is the dull reality of the nightly existence of Londeners. For Rowe, it is the fear of being found guilty of a murder he didn’t commit while struggling to justify the one he did. Fear and distrust taints love as both Rowe and Anna know things of the other and of themselves that they dare not reveal. With the catastrophic losses of war and the gray world of espionage, one senses people anxiously clinging to illusions of normalcy in a world gone wrong, and living off balance as a result. It may well be Greene’s snapshot of his times–and a parable for our own.

Review: Dragon’s Teeth

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Dragon’s Teeth (The Lanny Budd Novels #3), Upton Sinclair. New York: Open Road Media, 2016 (originally published 1942).

Summary: As Irma’s fortune wanes, Lanny uses his art dealings both for income and to secure release of the Robins, who are swept up in the anti-Semitism of pre-war Nazi Germany.]

This is the third of eleven books Upton Sinclair wrote around young, well-connected Lanny Budd, set in the years between the two wars and World War 2. In my review of book #2, I noted a Matthew Arnold quote about “Wandering between two worlds, one dead,/The other powerless to be born.” and hoping the wandering would end with this book. If anything, Lanny and Irma’s wanderings around Europe seem more pronounced with yacht trips and migrations from Bienvenu on the Riviera to Paris, Berlin, and Munich.

If there is a plot line, it revolves around the Robin family, a Jewish financier and his sons, Hansi and Freddi and their spouses. Hansi and Freddi were swept up into Lanny’s “pink” socialism, while Johannes had cultivated a business relationship with Lanny’s father, a gun manufacturer. Johannes thinks his affluence protects him and his family. It turned out otherwise. Lanny negotiates the family’s freedom with Hermann Goring, at the cost of the Robin fortune. But Freddi is left behind, and eventually reported in Dachau. Much of the story revolves Lanny’s efforts to get him out of Germany.

Under his trade as an art dealer, he goes in and out of Germany, holding shows of his step father, Marcel Detaze’s paintings. He mutes his socialism and cultivates ties with Goebbels, Goring, and even Hitler, who he meets twice. Throughout, the question is really who is using who, but a significant part of the narrative is an expose’ of the growing persecution of the Jews, the “disappearings,” and the ambitions of the Fuhrer.

Lanny and Irma make a glamour couple with her fortune and his looks, though that fortune is “declining” due to the crash of the market. In this book, one senses increasing tension between the daughter of capitalists and the socialist Lanny. Each indulge to a point the wishes of others, but Lanny’s efforts to rescue his Jewish, socialist friends at the risk of his life clearly strains the relationship as Irma sees more clearly who she married, and Lanny wrestles with the circuits around Europe, seeing and being seen. Irma wants to host a salon. Lanny wants to find some greater purpose, preferably resisting the rising Nazi threat, whose measure he has accurately taken.

This book won a Pulitzer in 1943. I personally wonder what this says about other published works of that year. Most of the action and excitement happens in the last 100 pages of a 600 page book. The rest is hundreds of pages of wanderings around Europe whose main purpose is to show Western society’s last flurry’s as Nazism arose–the dissolution of the French government against the backdrop of a German society buying order and prosperity at the cost of the suppression of the Jews and the rise of tyranny. I do think Sinclair could have cut at least 200 pages out of this book without harm either to the plot or Sinclair’s polemic purposes.

Reviews of previous books in the series:

World’s End

Between Two Worlds