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Welcome to the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates'interview series on radio and podcast. The show covering all things health, wellness, culture, and more. The show for all of us who aren't old, we're better. Each week, we'll interview superstars, experts, and ordinary people doing extraordinary things, all related to this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Now, here's your host, the award-winning Paul Vogelzang.
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Welcome to the Not Old Better Show's Smithsonian Associates interview series.
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I'm Paul Vogelzang,
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and I am so glad you're joining us today. At the height of World War II, the United States faced one of its greatest challenges, the urgent need for intelligence to help win the war against Nazi Germany. But who would answer the call?
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Soldiers and generals were obvious choices,
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but what if I told you that some of the most effective spies weren't military men or women? at all. What if some of the heroes behind Enemy Lines were actually scholars, librarians, and literature professors? Well, that's the subject of our interview today, and we're going to be talking with author and historian, Dr. Elise Graham. It sounds like something right out of a spy novel, but it's true. Today, we have a fascinating and thought-provoking episode that will take you deep into how one of the most unexpected stories of World War II. Our guest, as I say, is historian, Smithsonian associate, Dr. Elise Graham, here to share insights from her remarkable new book, Book and Dagger, How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II. Dr. Graham's research uncovers how the U.S. Office of Strategic Services, known as OSS, the precursor to CIA, turned to academia. Recruiting some of the sharpest minds from American universities to carry out top secret operations. We're going to talk about all of these subjects today, and especially these bookworms who went undercover decoding enemy communications, hunting spies, gathering intelligence that helped change the course of the war. Fascinating, fascinating subject. You're going to enjoy hearing from Smithsonian Associate Dr. Elise Graham. We're going to learn more about Joseph Curtis, a literature... professor who tracked down German agents, and Adele Khyber, an archivist who smuggled valuable documents out of neutral Sweden while the world watched in suspense. This story is not just a testament to the power of knowledge, but a reminder of how intellectual curiosity and a love of books can make a real difference in the world, even in times of war, especially perhaps in times of war. So, what can we learn from these brilliant, unexpected spies? How did their work shape modern intelligence? and even American higher education? And why is this story so relevant today as libraries and humanities departments face increasing pressure? Well,
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our guest, Smithsonian Associate Dr.
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Elise Graham will answer these questions and more as we explore the incredible story of how these bookworms helped beat the Nazis.
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Please join us when I introduce our guest,
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Dr.
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Elise Graham. Dr. Elise Graham, welcome to the program.
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It's a pleasure.
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It's nice to talk to you. I'm excited to get into your new book, Book and Dagger. Congratulations on this work. It is just a wonderful story and we're going to have lots of great things to talk about. I know our audience is going to be very excited. Our audience, of course, is Smithsonian Associates and driven by your upcoming presentation. Why don't we start there and maybe just tell us briefly what you're going to tell our audience and how you'll engage everybody using Zoom. We're all on. Zoom these days. And I think that's a nice way to begin. If you're going to have some photographs that you're going to share during your presentation, just give us just a little bit of a brief about what you'll tell us.
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I've got a slide deck. I've got music. I even have some props. This is a history of the OSS, which is a precursor to the CIA. It came together very quickly in the wake of Pearl Harbor. And lacking a standing intelligence agency, the United States found itself in need of experts. on every subject in the library. So they raided the library for recruits. They pulled professors and librarians into the world of intelligence, trained them as spies, set them behind enemy lines. And it turned out that these very unlikely spies were exactly what modern intelligence needed. They wound up basically inventing modern spycraft.
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Yeah, and they did so being themselves, being academics, being, as you say, studious individuals who perfected this. this art, this craft of analysis in a very specific manner. Among others, you talk about Joseph Curtis and Sherman Kent and then Adele Kiber. Why those three? What was it about them that just stood out? Well,
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partly they were outstanding individuals themselves. So Adele Kiber was the most successful document hunter. in the OSS. And she brought, as you said, to bear in her spycraft skills that she had learned before the war. She worked as a kind of professional archive hunter, getting documents for scholars in the United States from different places in Europe. She understood that in order to work the archives, you often have to work people. She understood how to find pieces of information that nobody would have thought that you could get hold of, that she shouldn't have been able to get hold of in wartime Europe, but darn it, she got hold of it. She worked. for the Yale Library, among other places. And Joseph Curtis and Sherman Kent happened to be friends at Yale. They were in a little friendship group. Kent went on to become the head of intelligence analysis, this sort of new form of intelligence that he helped to invent. He became the head of intelligence analysis for all of Europe and Africa. He was marvelously suited to his job. When he was a professor, he was kind of out of place. He maybe should have been a drill surgeon. He was brilliant, but... He was a fighter. He used to take pieces of chalk and fire them past the heads of his students to keep them awake. They don't let us do that anymore. He became sort of a point person who talked to the military and sold them on the brilliant ideas that these Tweedy professors came up with in their, you know, locked in the basement of the Library of Congress. All of the innovations of the professors and librarians who became intelligence agents wouldn't have... come to anything if the military hadn't been persuaded to make use of those insights, those tactical and strategic bits of intelligence. And Kent was perfectly suited to do that. He could speak to the military in their own language. Joseph Curtis, an example of the kind of unlikely person who wound up flourishing as a spy. Curtis was very much a hothouse flower. He went to Yale as an undergraduate, was a Yale graduate student. then became a professor at Yale. They do that at that school. It seemed like he was always going to live a very comfortable life in his little den, kind of dreaming about adventure in other places, but not actually going there. And then he was yanked out of his comfortable life. The head of his department came to him one day and said, listen, tomorrow you have to go to the Yale club in New York City. You have to wear a purple tie. You'll see a man who's smoking a cigarette. He'll put it out. He has a message for you. That's how he got recruited. And one of the reasons that recruiting, among other things, was so much like a spy novel is that there was no standing intelligence tradition in the United States. And one thing that all of these new spymasters had in common is they'd read spy novels. So they'd seen the movies, they'd read the novels. So a lot of the time they were like, well, you have to go to the Baltimore train station. You'll see a man with a red carnation. That was what they had to work off of. Anyway, Curtis wound up being sent to wartime Istanbul. which was the spy capital of the world. There were 17 intelligence agencies operating openly in Istanbul, and he wound up having the job of finding enemy intelligence agents and turning them into double agents. It was the most unlikely thing you could possibly imagine for someone who had written his dissertation at Yale about early modern astronomy and literature. He wound up doing such a good job that he had a non-trivial impact on the success of the Normandy invasion. All of which is to say that these guys sort of fortuitously are connected to each other. It's like a small connected group, but they were also outstanding in their separate fields. They really show you the range of what these guys were asked to do as spies and exactly why it is that on the one hand, these are the people you at least expect to be spies. But on the other hand, why they had training. that helped them to do exactly what the war needed them to do.
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Was it a sense of patriotism? Was it all about God and country? What drew them to this? And I suppose, did they all go willingly to Istanbul?
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They went to wherever they were told to go. I'm sure that a sense of patriotism had a lot to do with it. I'm also sure from reading memoirs, from knowing a few people who worked in intelligence during World War II, that in a few cases, for instance, for women, it did provide a life of greater freedom. than they could have had under any other circumstance. I've talked to one or two women who worked in intelligence. The war was a war that had to be fought, and it had to be won precisely by people who hated war, as one veteran has said. But it was a freeing circumstance also for some people who were sent out and given responsibilities that they could never have had otherwise. In Sherman Kemp's case, for instance, he was so much better suited to being a spymaster than being a professor that... after he went back to Yale, he looked around and said, no, this isn't the place for me and went right back to being a spy, you know? Sometimes it takes a little bit of wandering around before the man meets the metier.
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Yeah,
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yeah. Takes a little while to find our calling. I certainly feel the same. But I think being drawn to spycraft, there's a romantic side of it, I think, too. I noticed on your website that you list yourself as a part-time archive spy. Does this interest you, too? I mean, might you head off and help us out in our international need?
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I'm not sure that you'll see me doing cloak and dagger stuff anytime soon, but I knew going into this the extent to which finding information can overlap with the skills that you need to be a good intelligence agent. And the CIA recognizes this too. Word on the street is that the CIA does recruiting at the annual American Library Association conference. I was at that conference recently and the CIA was there. As I said, in order to work the archives, you sometimes have to work people. And furthermore, libraries are not just a place to keep information. They're not just a place to get information. They're also a place to hide information. There are all sorts of ways that stuff that is technically in a library isn't listed on the catalog or isn't available for people to know about, unless you know the right people or unless you know about the history of the institution, unless you understand the right strings to pull. This is totally separate, but there was a fellow in the 18th century who was writing a biography of Shakespeare. You don't need to know all of the details, but he assumed something about playwrights in Shakespeare's time that turned out not to be true. He found out it wasn't true because he found a playwright's diary in a library just before his book was about to be published. So he didn't change the book. He just didn't return the book to the library. I think it was sent back after he was dead. There's a university I won't name in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where the English department goes to the library and reshelves a certain book that's about them so that nobody in the university can find that book. A library is supposed to be a place where everything is eminently findable. And yet it is also a place where things go missing and have to be found by a bibliographic detective. This is the sort of thing that people like Joseph Curtis and Adele Kuyber were masters of. And it's exactly the sort of thing that modern intelligence needed. Sherman Kent said that 90% of what an intelligence agency might need to know can be found not even in secret sources, but in sources that are already out there. It's just that you have to know how to do the reading. You have to know how to find information about the location of a secret factory in a society page from a local newspaper, or you have to know how to read a phone book from Casablanca. in such a way that you can provide tactical intelligence to people who are going to try to invade a foreign shore. When the Allied forces wanted to invade North Africa, they didn't know what they would see when they got there. So one of the victories that these libraries helped them to achieve was giving them eyes on the ground in the days before Google Maps. They read phone books and said, okay, this is the street address of the Red Cross. This is the street address of where you're going to need to capture the wireless. These are the railroad tracks that you're going to need to demolish so that German reinforcements don't come in. They not only got this from things like phone books, industry directories. They also got this kind of information from 18th century whaling maps. They really read 13 ways to Sunday, the most unlikely of documents, and pulled out of it tactical and strategic intelligence that was crucial for winning the war.
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And so interesting how that's shaped. what we know of as espionage today. I mean, really, some of these same techniques now modernized, perhaps through technology, are being used in a very similar kind of manner. Talk to us a little bit about how that influenced what we have today.
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The CIA is still very aware of the value of open source intelligence. Of course, often you'll see bits and pieces on social media. Somebody will post an Instagram picture that has this. an image in a corner that's of intelligence value. The poster didn't know about it, but people who know the right things to look for can make use of that. As I said, the CIA still recruits librarians. And also a lot of the lessons that spies learned in this book to learn how to be good spies are lessons that spies still learn today. In movies, spies are like these ripped hunks who are carrying lots of gadgets, but in real life, Spies are chosen precisely because they're the kind of people who will be overlooked. And the lesson that they learned about how, for instance, to pump somebody for information, most informants don't know their informants. How do you question someone without tipping them off that they're being questioned? Well, you don't ask questions. You just say something wrong in a confident voice and the other person will correct you. They'll explain why you're wrong, especially if you're a woman and they're a man. Men love explaining things to women. And I mean that as no offense. That's just a thing that happens to be true. There was something during World War II that spies were taught to do called whispering. You had to, whispering was spreading misinformation. You had to be specially trained to be a whisperer. You were not allowed to spread misinformation unless you were a trained whisperer. The person in charge of the whisperers was called the master whisperer, which I kind of love. Anyway, if you read the directions on how to do whispering properly, and the book has a list of the most important ones, it's kind of exactly how Twitter works. Which is to say that we live, yeah, we live in an era where the challenge as it was kind of during World War II is finding out true information from a mass of misinformation, much of it deliberate. And those are lessons that readers can use just as easily as people who are professional spies.
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Hi, it's Paul. Do you love entertaining, informative, eclectic, insightful programs about culture, health, science, life, and everything Smithsonian? As part of our Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast, we're introducing you to the new Smithsonian Associates streaming series. Smithsonian, a nonprofit organization, is excited to present this new aspect of their 55 years as the world's largest museum-based educational program. Join us from the comfort of your home as we periodically interview Smithsonian Associate guest speakers. Our audience here on radio and podcast can explore our website for more information links. and details at notold-better.com. Thanks, everybody.
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Our guest today is Smithsonian Associate Dr. Elise Graham. Dr. Graham has written the new book called Book and Dagger. I love that title, Dr. Graham, but How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II. Let's talk a little bit more about Adele Khyber because I thought she was fascinating. Just as you alluded to... there was some upward mobility, there was some freedom, there were some opportunities that she might not have experienced, yet she was still doubted because of gender, and she prevailed. That's just an amazing story. And maybe you just tell a little bit more about her to us.
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The value that women could bring to spycraft wasn't certain at the beginning of World War II. There was a fellow who did recruiting for the British intelligence agencies named Selwyn Jepson, who was very confident that women would make excellent spies, partly because they were overlooked. Partly because they would be able to move around behind enemy lines much more easily than men could, because in occupied countries, men were rounded up and sent to fight for the Germans, for instance, or they were sent to work in factories for the Germans. So it would be much more common to see women walking around on the street. So a woman would pass more easily as a courier or something like that. But also he thought, and this is just something that he thought. That women were accustomed to getting things done by themselves because they didn't have a woman to help them, a wife, a secretary, something like that. He said that they had a kind of cool and lonely bravery that made them very effective spies. And I think that women like Kiber absolutely showed his intuition to be true. She was marvelous at her job. She was very good at working her sources. We have letters that she wrote to people. She seems to have taken on different personas according to what she thought would be most appealing to the person she was talking to. She seems to have persuaded bookstores, for instance, that were on the side of the Germans. She was in Stockholm, that she herself was on the side of the Germans. She often told people that she was collecting books for the Library of Congress, but she got hold of documents that she absolutely should not have gotten hold of as an American working in wartime Stockholm, which was... neutral but not impartial and was tilted towards the German side, at least as far as the police and so on were concerned. The Stockholm police had trained with the Gestapo. She was also an American. She grew up in Los Angeles. She was the daughter of Hollywood set designers. And something that Americans brought to the war that they were very good at was a little bit of that Hollywood magic, a little bit of that art of illusion. Before the war, she spent some time doing research in the Vatican archives. She once asked for a document that an attendant told her she would absolutely not be allowed to have. A certain cardinal was the only person who could give permission to have that document and it certainly wouldn't go to her. So she got out her calling card and had it sent up to the cardinal. And it just said, Adele Kiber, Hollywood, California. And he sent for her and he said, oh my goodness, you're from Hollywood. You have to tell me all about movies and things like that. He asked her whether it was true that Hollywood, like the Vatican, is surrounded by a high wall. I don't know what she answered. I like to think it was something like, yes, that's why it's so hard to break into the movie industry. She understood how to use what was available to charm people, to persuade people that she was on their side. She understood people, which is kind of rare for scholars, but made her a very effective bibliographic detective.
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That's wonderful. Dr. Elise Graham, Smithsonian Associates, our guest today, we'll have links so that our audience can find out more about Dr. Graham, her wonderful new book, Book and Dagger. We will have links also for Dr. Graham's other work and specifically her upcoming presentation at Smithsonian Associates. Let's talk for a second about post-war activity for these spies. How did the espionage work kind of influence their post-war work and Did some of them remain spies? I mean, you referred to that just a few minutes ago, but how many of them stuck with just pure academic life?
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It's an interesting question and a complicated one. So after the war, some people like Sherman Kent realized that they were much better suited to the world of espionage than they were to the world of academia. Although those two worlds aren't necessarily so different from one another. There's secrets and backstabbing and intrigue. in academia, as well as in the cloak and dagger world. A lot of the scholars who went back to universities still kept in touch with the CIA. In fact, I first became interested in this story when I started wondering why so many students from literature and history departments in the 1950s and 1960s wound up training the CIA. The answer is that their professors had worked for the OSS. They had been spies, and they maintained their connections to the CIA afterward. The CIA had a term for the pipeline that ran straight from humanities departments to intelligence. They called it the P-source, short for professor's source. The CIA influenced a lot about academia and higher education after the war. There was this huge push to give American libraries the strongest collections possible. There was a strong belief after the war that libraries weren't just centers of community and education, but something that's integral to national security. Something that I still think is true, even though libraries are in a bit of trouble today in terms of funding and other things. I think that that's a mistake and a bit of historical forgetfulness that's ill considered. The CIA invented the modern MFA program, which has been written about by other people, but they were very interested in the idea that they could take writers, intellectuals from other countries. put them in the Midwest, teach them how to become writers that had American values, and then send them back to their own countries. Area studies, the idea that you would specialize in the study of Latin America, or you would specialize in the study of the Eastern Bloc countries or something like that, was and is considered to be a pipeline to intelligence work valued and supported in universities, partly for that reason. In short, There was and is something of military-industrial-academic complex that was established after World War II. It's no longer true that if you walk through a history department or a literature department, just about everybody that you meet has been a spy. However, it is true that the fields that they themselves trained in, almost all of them were touched after World War II in a way that… had a lot to do with the wartime experience of needing to know about a particular thing, or the wartime experience of a certain kind of loss. There was a new field that came about called book history that I think is partly a response to the loss of millions of people, vast amounts of books that were burned or otherwise destroyed, wanting to try and recreate a world that had been lost. And the field of book history, which this book partly makes use of, took a lot of its moral urgency, I think, from the memories of the war.
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I know that the OSS was new to World War II. Were there any precedents to the use of humanities, histories, history professors, academicians prior to World War II in collecting espionage or collecting any information or resources?
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Professors had been used before and were used, for instance, by the British during World War II to break cones. If you know quite a lot about how language works, then you could be a pretty effective cryptographer. And a lot of scholars worked in Britain at Bletchley Park and such. And there's a certain type of branch, one of them was in the OSS, called something like research and development. And these are the chemists, these are the engineers, these are the people who build shoes that are also radios or... interesting kinds of bombs. That was an established type of the use of professors in intelligence agencies. What was new about what the Americans did was to build a branch that wasn't research and development, the engineers, the scientists, but research and analysis. This was the humanists. This was people who had been trained in literature, people who had been trained in history, people who had been trained in bibliography, in philology, in economics, social science, in psychology. And they brought their skills to bear in reading the most unlikely documents and answering what might seem the silliest possible questions. However, the answers to those questions, how many pellets do you put in an anti-aircraft shell? What are the optimal places to reinforce the armor on a plane? A lot of stuff that has to do with ball bearings. To put it very briefly, if you bomb a factory that makes aircraft, then you have bombed just a factory that makes aircraft. If you bomb a factory that makes tanks, then you've bombed a factory that makes tanks. If you bomb a factory that makes ball bearings, then the Germans can't make aircraft or tanks because both of those things need ball bearings. So there was a lot of work having to do with... right? Developing methods of sabotage for destroying the ball bearing machines, trying to get control of ball bearings. It's a whole subplot of World War II. But this is something that the economists came up with because economists are very good at finding sneaky and unconventional ways to look at a subject. This is the kind of Freakonomics aspect of World War II. Anyway, that was new. And that was what proved to be what we would call the basis of modern intelligence today. intelligence analysis, which was invented by the OSS, by these humanities professors, by people like Sherman Kent. That was what the United States gave to the world of modern intelligence.
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Dr. Elise Graham, Smithsonian Associates, been our guest. Dr. Graham is author of the wonderful new book, Book and Dagger. Congratulations on this excellent book, Dr. Graham. We're looking forward to seeing you at Smithsonian Associates. It's been so much fun talking to you. I can't talk to you for a lot longer. We're going to wrap it up today, but I will say as your dupe. more work on this subject or more work on history and academicians. I know our audience is going to be interested. And so I'll selfishly invite you back now. Please do come back and see us at some point. But thank you for your time.
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Thank you. I look forward to the presentation. I'm sure it'll be a lot of fun.
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My thanks to Dr. Elise Graham and her generous time today.
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My thanks, of course,
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always to the Smithsonian team for their hard work in keeping our show going. My thanks to Sam Henniger and his team working as executive producer and doing all the big stuff behind the scenes.
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Thanks to everybody out there.
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Please be well, be safe, and let's talk about better. The Not Old Better Show.
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Thanks, everybody.
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We will see you next week for another edition of the Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast.
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Thanks for joining us this week on the Not Old Better Show, Smithsonian Associates interview series on radio and podcast. To find out more about all of today's stories or to view our extensive back catalog of previous shows, simply visit notold-better.com. Join us again next time as we deep dive into some of the most fascinating real-life stories from across the world, all focused on this wonderful experience of getting better, not just older. Let's talk about better. The Not Old Better Show.
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Hi, one final thing. Please check out our website for this episode and all episodes at notold.com. nashbetter.com or subscribe to the podcast on Apple Podcasts. And be sure to check out your local radio stations to find out more about The Not Old Better Show on podcast and radio. You can find us all over social media. Our Twitter feed is Not Old Better and we're on Instagram at Not Old Better too. The Not Old Better Show is a production of NOBS Studios. I'm Paul Vogelsang and I hope you'll join me again next time to talk about better. The Not Old Better Show. Thanks, everybody. We'll see you next week.
