Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II - Elyse Graham
Published in 2024 by Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins, New York, NY
400 pages
ISBN: 9780063280847
ISBN-10: 0063280841
LCCN: 2024013142
LCC: D810.S7 G68 2024
When we think of the stereotypical spy, our mind typically resorts to a sophisticated, charismatic individual who employs a wide array of high-tech gadgets and irresistible charm to accomplish their covert missions. Fueled by the endless number of spy novels that began to surge in popularity after the First World War and continued in its cultural influence in the Cold War due to film franchises such as James Bond, this fanciful stereotype has fastened itself into the popular imagination, shaping how we commonly think of the art of spycraft and espionage.
While plenty of books, films, and shows focus on the highly skilled secret agents and the ultra-dangerous missions they undertake to gain intelligence, far less attention is given to the multitudes of men and women who work behind desks conducting intelligence analysis. Far from the glitz and glamor depicted in spy novels, the day-to-day realities of espionage are much more routine and seemingly mundane, as analysts sift through seemingly endless amounts of information to get a one-up on the enemy.
During the Second World War, the US government turned its attention toward the world of academia to fill the ranks of its newly formed intelligence operation. In her 2024 book, Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, Elyse Graham (historian and professor at Stony Brook University) sheds light on the under-examined and often unappreciated role of academics and librarians who, due to their training in the humanities, served as the ideal candidates for analyzing complex data and deciphering between truth and deception during the Second World War. These bookish individuals -- while vastly underappreciated and largely unnoticed in their operations -- served as covert spies for the OSS, helped to turn the tide of the war in favor of the Allies, and invented the art of spycraft as we know it today.
Overview:
Delving into historical documents, biographies, and declassified agency files, Graham recenters the role that scholars, librarians, artists, and bookworms from across disciplines in the humanities played in serving as intelligence analysts during the Second World War. These figures were not professional spies but scholars and experts in their academic fields, making them perfect candidates for interpreting complex data. Graham argues that these analysts were ideal for the art of spycraft, as an education in the humanities trains an individual to examine a wide array of documents, make informed decisions even amongst inadequate data, and find connections that others might easily overlook or outright miss.
Rather than bold, daring individuals who easily draw attention to themselves, Graham emphasizes the best spies are unremarkable as they pass by unnoticed. This unassuming posture allows them to gain information, interpret complex data, and deceive through inconspicuous means. Throughout each chapter, Graham recounts the various covert operations and intelligence-gathering missions that these individuals across the globe conducted to turn the tide of the war in the Allies’ favor.
Deeper Dive:
At the outset of the Second World War, the United States found itself severely lacking in a robust intelligence agency, especially when compared to other Western nations’ intelligence services, such as Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service (MI6). As such, President Franklin Roosevelt tasked Wall Street lawyer and WWI veteran William Donovan with quickly constructing such an organization. In June 1942, Donovan (with a great deal of help from British intelligence officer Dick Ellis) founded the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), America’s first large-scale intelligence agency and a precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
Donovan knew he needed to build up this newly-minted agency quickly, and so he scoured for recruits in a wide variety of fields and occupations. One of the branches of the OSS that Graham highlights in Book and Dagger is the Research and Analysis (R&A) division. Donovan needed a wide array of scholarly experts in the ranks of the R&A branch, and so he naturally turned to the world of academia for fresh recruits.
Donovan understood that intelligence analysis was well-suited for those with formal education in the social sciences and humanities. Not only were they well-suited to thrive amid the monotony and boredom that others might find intolerable, but humanities scholars and librarians were adept at finding connections between seemingly disparate data sets. As such, the R&A branch scoured libraries for copies of maps that revealed critical intel on train routes, absorbed information and disinformation from newspapers and magazines, and devoured endless seemingly mundane records such as telephone directories, architectural blueprints, postcards, travel guides, and other reference materials to find any information that might serve as a critical asset in the fight against the Axis powers.
During the beginning phases of the War, the O.S.S. recognized that American universities and libraries lacked many of the critical resources needed to gather comprehensive intelligence. To cover these gaps, the agency sent several professors, librarians, and bookworms abroad to serve as spies and to gather vital documents to be utilized in the war effort. Graham focuses the bulk of her attention on three primary individuals: 1) archivist Adele Kibre, who was sent to Stockholm to photograph and acquire critical German documents to send back to the OSS, 2) mild-mannered Yale literature professor Joseph Curtiss, who was thrown headfirst into Istanbul to acquire important books, but was subsequently tasked with rooting out German spies and turning them into double agents, and 3) foul-mouthed history professor Sherman Kent, who was in charge of the R&A division focused on Europe and Africa.
The O.S.S. was in dire need of intelligence, so these figures provided them with tens of thousands of documents from the enemy, including maps, atlases, newspapers, resistance literature, propaganda, scientific journals, and technical documents on topics such as rubber production, transportation, aeronautics, petroleum production and usage, finance and banking, shipbuilding, mining facilities, etc. Out of these documents, these intelligence analysts calculated and answered hyper-specific questions regarding the infrastructure and tactics of the Axis powers. Through their efforts, critical intelligence was gained which turned out to be crucial to winning battles and striking at the heart of the Nazi regime.
Each of these individuals also trained in the art of espionage and assassination, as they learned crucial combat techniques alongside practical survival skills. Most important was their ability to maintain their cover story and fly under the radar as they operated in broad daylight. Some were heroic in their efforts, which have often gone unnoticed and overlooked, while others, such as the racist Harvard-educated anthropologist Carleton Coon, imagined himself in the stereotypical role of a secret agent, which often undercut his ability to serve effectively in the O.S.S. Regardless, each of these figures indubitably shaped the character of modern intelligence analysis and spycraft, as the operations and structure of the O.S.S. served as the foundation for the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A.).
Commendations:
Several dimensions of Book and Dagger are well worth praising. First and foremost, Graham has poured an immense amount of research into this work, resulting in a robust and accessible account of academics whose covert efforts as a part of the OSS have largely gone unnoticed in the larger history of the Second World War. It was fascinating to read the various accounts of everyday citizens being tapped by the U.S. government to serve as spies during the war against fascism. Graham takes personal letters and declassified historical documents to construct a thrilling narrative account of espionage conducted by these academics and librarians. Her writing style is largely informal and imminently accessible, making this a quick and breezy read.
As a fellow scholar in the humanities, I also appreciated Graham’s unwavering appreciation for the humanities and their intrinsic value, even beyond their immediate use value in the ever-shrinking job market. Graham firmly believes in the power of narrative and small acts of resistance to effect more wide-ranging change. By highlighting the diligent and often unappreciated effort of so many workers behind the scenes in intelligence analysis, Graham offers a necessary corrective to the over-romanticized images of spycraft that have dominated our imaginative landscapes.
Furthermore, I also deeply appreciated Graham’s implicit argument regarding the critical importance of libraries. As a book conservation and preservation specialist with a graduate degree in the humanities, I’ve witnessed how these institutions are currently threatened by the increasing privatization of universities and far-right activists’ efforts to ban books and defund public libraries. Graham illustrates how, at the outset of the war, America’s libraries were woefully underfunded and lacking in essential collections. Libraries serve not only as community centers that promote access to education and training programs; they also are repositories of information. While many books and documents might seem to be simply gathering dust on a day-to-day basis, they might become incredibly valuable resources in another context. Any document, no matter how mundane or seemingly unimportant, could hold a small detail that could make the difference between victory and defeat.
After the war, the U.S. government recognized how important these resources were to intelligence operations, and worked to expand their collections and workforce. Many top intelligence agents worked within libraries, serving as the head of the American Library Association (ALA) and building robust cataloging systems and databases that are still widely utilized today. Despite the trend toward prioritizing digitization and online collections over physical collections within libraries, these virtual resources are vulnerable, such as efforts to hack the digital infrastructure which can leave resources wholly inaccessible or over-relying on the publisher’s copyright agreements over digital items, which can be revoked and instantly pulled from collections with a new contract. As such, physical collections are vital now more than ever, especially in an environment of increased censorship and the rise of AI.
Graham’s account illustrates how vital these resources are to not only our collective knowledge but also to issues of national security and the resistance against authoritarianism. Book and Dagger draws our attention to the small acts of resistance and espionage that served to undermine the Nazi regime, and as such, it serves as a powerful reminder of how power can be utilized from below to effect substantive change. Graham’s insistence of the importance of libraries and archives as repositories of our collective history shines through in this work, and highlights the necessity of these institutions in our contemporary context.
Finally, I also deeply appreciated Graham’s contemplation regarding the various ethical and moral quandaries that these individuals were confronted with during their covert operations. For example, if you knew that your efforts to rig explosives to a ship would greatly hamper the enemy’s ability to create a massive weapon, would you allow dozens of civilians to board that ship, knowing that they would most likely perish? What if your friend or family member boarded that ship, completely oblivious to its predestined ill fate? Would you follow orders and keep quiet, secure in the belief that the mission is for a greater purpose? Or would you try to warn them, thus risking word getting out and the Nazis uncovering your mission?
To take another example: What if you are in charge of recovering art from the war? Would you send valuable pieces back to pay for the war effort, or would you be tempted to keep especially valuable ones for yourself? What if the art was created by a Nazi? Should you simply burn the artwork or guard it with your life to keep it as a piece of history? These are real scenarios that Graham presents throughout the book, and they illustrate the real moral decisions that spies on the ground had to make in the course of their missions.
Critique:
On the other hand, Book and Dagger suffers from a few shortcomings. First and foremost, the narrative pacing could be more balanced throughout the book. While her narrative largely focuses on three primary individuals -- Adele Kimbre, Joseph Curtis, and Sherman Kent -- the chapters are not organized chronologically, but more thematically, which can be rather disorienting at times. Some chapters directly cover the work of these three individuals, while others are one-off stories of spy operations and covert missions, such as the sabotage of the Vemork hydroelectric power plant in Norway, which provided heavy water for the Nazi effort to construct a nuclear weapon or the efforts and dilemmas of the Art Looting Investigation Unit as they recovered Nazi art. These one-off chapters were interesting in their own right, but they felt quite out of place within the book's overall structure. While the book is constructed around vignettes of various spy efforts such as these, it needs a stronger cohesive argument to tie everything together, which weakens the work's overall impact.
Furthermore, while I agree that the hiring of scholars and academics to serve as spies for the U.S. government was a striking event during WWII, Graham occasionally overreaches in her argument, as she claims that the utilization of civilians as spies is a recent phenomenon. Though she makes a passing nod toward other spy operations in U.S. history, she largely ignores the long history of civilians being conscripted to serve in espionage operations. Even in American history, civilians were employed as spies against enemies (both foreign and domestic), such as the Culper Spy Ring during the American Revolutionary War. While Graham’s focus is narrowly on academics serving in intelligence agencies, she elides this longer, more complex historical context of espionage in American history.
Likewise, while the book’s episodic structure makes it a quick and accessible read, it can also lack some depth and leave several stones unturned. For example, there is not much exploration regarding the continued influence of the intelligence community and its deep connections with the Ivy League, especially in its more ambitious hyper-surveillance ambitions in the post-war era. While Graham brings up several individual moral dilemmas in the book, she does not contemplate the larger ethics at play of having civilian scholars and librarians serve as spies, and how it can be used for immoral purposes.
While the Second World War was perhaps the last undoubtedly justified war in which America was involved, as Graham notes, these figures laid the foundation of the C.I.A., whose operations across the globe have served to further America’s invisible empire and secure hegemony through military strength. Without a critical eye on the longer-term legacy of these individuals, much of the book can end up coming off as a “rah-rah America” narrative. Instead of soberly assessing how these scholars and librarians were effectively used for their talents and then discarded when no longer valuable, Graham’s account is content to simply marvel that librarians were included in these machinations at all. This lack of critical analysis and longer context prevents the work from being relevant to today’s current state of globalized capitalism and digital surveillance.
Finally, there is the issue of Graham’s historiography and the responsibility of the historian to reconstruct the historical narrative. Most notably, Graham admits that several gaps exist in the historical record regarding specific meetings and conversations. This is expected in any historical account, let alone one that focuses on covert operations. Yet, instead of letting the gaps exist as they are, Graham attempts to fill in these blank spaces with speculative dialogue and events. While she admits her approach at the outset, these paragraphs of imagined dialogue, internal monologues, and tangential speculation as to what might have happened are by far the weakest points of the book. Unfortunately, her reconstructed fictional dialogue is highly contrived and a bit hokey and falls into the trap of non-fiction writers (myself included) being ill-equipped to write fiction. While entertaining at points, these fictional sections felt more like unnecessary padding to fill space and did not add much to the overall narrative. While these are heavily present in the first few chapters, they fortunately become less frequent in later sections.
Conclusion:
Overall, Book and Dagger is a riveting and informative account that illuminates the various espionage activities that scholars and librarians engaged in during the Second World War. While some of Graham’s imagined dialogue can be a bit out of place and distracting, it does not tarnish what is otherwise a robust and gripping historical non-fiction work. Graham skillfully balances rich research with accessible narrative prose, making this work suitable for anyone interested in the various facets of World War Two spycraft. As such, Graham’s work is an imminently accessible and valuable addition to the already rich scholarship of WWII espionage.