WEBVTT - Elyse Graham: Book and Dagger 0:00:00.440 --> 0:00:05.039 This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised. 0:00:12.760 --> 0:00:16.079 She was very good at her job, and she refused 0:00:16.120 --> 0:00:18.800 to tell her superiors her methods, even though they sent 0:00:18.920 --> 0:00:21.480 her letters begging, like, just tell me how you're doing this, 0:00:21.520 --> 0:00:28.479 tell me how you're finding this, and she never told them. 0:00:28.760 --> 0:00:32.639 I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor 0:00:32.680 --> 0:00:35.400 in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the 0:00:35.440 --> 0:00:39.280 podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career, 0:00:39.560 --> 0:00:43.280 research for my many audio and book projects has taken 0:00:43.360 --> 0:00:46.600 me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down 0:00:46.640 --> 0:00:51.320 with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers, 0:00:51.400 --> 0:00:55.800 and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true 0:00:55.800 --> 0:00:59.560 crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both 0:00:59.640 --> 0:01:02.520 good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the 0:01:02.680 --> 0:01:07.759 unpublished details behind their stories. Did you know that some 0:01:07.840 --> 0:01:11.280 of the most effective American spies during World War II 0:01:11.760 --> 0:01:16.440 were librarians and archivists and history professors. Some were locked 0:01:16.480 --> 0:01:20.320 in the basement of the Library of Congress analyzing documents. 0:01:20.480 --> 0:01:24.760 Those documents were being gathered by academics sneaking around Europe 0:01:24.959 --> 0:01:28.720 under the Noses of the Nazis. Author Elise Graham tells 0:01:28.760 --> 0:01:31.360 me the story at the center of her book, Book 0:01:31.480 --> 0:01:36.319 and Dagger, how scholars and librarians became the unlikely spies of. 0:01:36.319 --> 0:01:37.080 World War II. 0:01:39.760 --> 0:01:42.520 When you are at at dinner party, are meeting new 0:01:42.520 --> 0:01:44.840 people and they say, we're an author. What kind of 0:01:44.840 --> 0:01:47.480 book was this? What do you say, Because it's certainly 0:01:47.520 --> 0:01:50.240 not a quick summary. It's what are the themes and 0:01:50.400 --> 0:01:53.560 what makes the book important you think and relevant to 0:01:53.880 --> 0:01:54.480 an audience. 0:01:54.520 --> 0:01:57.600 Now, so what would you say the book is about? Say, 0:01:57.800 --> 0:02:00.160 this is a history of the OSS, which we as 0:02:00.160 --> 0:02:03.200 a precursor to the CIA, which came together very quickly 0:02:03.240 --> 0:02:05.960 in the wake of Pearl Harbor. At this time, the 0:02:06.400 --> 0:02:10.040 United States didn't have a standing intelligence agency, and so 0:02:10.360 --> 0:02:13.320 William Donovan, who was the head of the OSS, had 0:02:13.360 --> 0:02:17.560 to pull together a working spy agency very quickly. And 0:02:17.800 --> 0:02:22.000 an intelligence agency, as the name might suggest, requires a 0:02:22.000 --> 0:02:25.200 lot of intelligence, a lot of information people who understand 0:02:25.240 --> 0:02:28.959 how to find facts and collect them and turn them 0:02:28.960 --> 0:02:32.920 into something that's usable strategically or tactically. In short, he 0:02:33.280 --> 0:02:36.400 needed to become an instant expert on every subject to 0:02:36.440 --> 0:02:38.840 the library, and the best way for him to do that, 0:02:38.960 --> 0:02:41.680 it turned out, was to simply raid the library for recruits. 0:02:42.080 --> 0:02:44.560 So he pulled all of these librarians out of their 0:02:44.560 --> 0:02:47.680 libraries and professors out of their classrooms, and they became 0:02:48.160 --> 0:02:51.560 the spies who worked during World War Two. And the 0:02:51.600 --> 0:02:54.200 innovations that they brought to the field of spycraft were 0:02:54.240 --> 0:02:57.640 so profound that they laid down the basis for modern intelligence. 0:02:58.040 --> 0:03:00.840 I've not done a book on spies. I had researched 0:03:00.960 --> 0:03:04.400 pretty heavily a book on female spies during the Civil War, 0:03:04.760 --> 0:03:07.160 and they were the most unlikely. Of course, we always 0:03:07.160 --> 0:03:10.440 say that the most unlikely people who you would never suspect, 0:03:10.440 --> 0:03:13.560 And you know, these were women that were transporting secrets 0:03:13.560 --> 0:03:16.800 in their boots as they're riding across the country. And 0:03:16.880 --> 0:03:19.880 I've always wondered what the background of a spy is, 0:03:20.520 --> 0:03:22.640 So what is it now? Do you know what a 0:03:22.720 --> 0:03:25.000 typical background for a CIA agent would be? 0:03:25.200 --> 0:03:27.880 Is it law enforcement or what is it? You know, 0:03:28.040 --> 0:03:30.560 I don't know what the typical background for a CIA 0:03:30.680 --> 0:03:33.480 agent would be today, although rumor has it that the 0:03:33.520 --> 0:03:38.000 CIA still does recruiting at the annual American Library Association conference. 0:03:38.640 --> 0:03:40.440 I think you were right when you said that when 0:03:40.440 --> 0:03:42.880 we hear about a spy, we always wind up saying, Oh, 0:03:42.960 --> 0:03:45.680 that's the last person that I would expect, because that's 0:03:45.720 --> 0:03:48.880 exactly who's demanded of a spy. In the movies, you know, 0:03:48.960 --> 0:03:51.520 spies are these ripped hunks who are always carrying around 0:03:51.560 --> 0:03:54.760 lots of gadgets and wearing tuxedos. But in real life 0:03:55.160 --> 0:03:57.840 a gadget or a weapon would blow somebody's cover. A 0:03:57.920 --> 0:04:00.440 tuxedo or having everybody in the western HEMMI sphear know 0:04:00.520 --> 0:04:03.200 your drink order would make you a really ineffective spy. 0:04:03.800 --> 0:04:07.520 These spies, librarians and professors were chosen precisely because they 0:04:07.560 --> 0:04:11.000 would be overlooked. They were the world's least glamorous people 0:04:11.000 --> 0:04:14.280 for the world's most glamorous profession, and somehow they made 0:04:14.320 --> 0:04:16.640 it work really well. Now, what makes a good spy? 0:04:17.120 --> 0:04:19.400 Back then, if you think about the sort of person 0:04:19.400 --> 0:04:22.520 who succeeded in the OSS after being pulled out of 0:04:22.560 --> 0:04:26.520 their library, Carol, we might think of somebody like adel Kiber. 0:04:26.880 --> 0:04:30.360 She got her PhD at the University of Chicago. She 0:04:30.480 --> 0:04:33.200 was studying classics so she could speak different languages and 0:04:33.240 --> 0:04:37.120 work in the archives. Back then, women couldn't become professors 0:04:37.200 --> 0:04:40.640 very easily, so she got a job sort of self employed, 0:04:40.680 --> 0:04:44.240 going from archive to archive across Europe taking pictures of 0:04:44.520 --> 0:04:48.080 rare texts to send back home to professors in the States. 0:04:48.480 --> 0:04:50.600 There are still people who will do that for you 0:04:50.640 --> 0:04:53.240 at various archives. They'll take pictures of the material and 0:04:53.279 --> 0:04:55.560 send them to you for a fee. They could usually 0:04:55.600 --> 0:04:58.000 make about seventy dollars an hour. It's a pretty good job. 0:04:58.160 --> 0:05:01.200 But she became along the way O Way really really 0:05:01.240 --> 0:05:04.479 good at getting, you know, documents that were hard to get. 0:05:04.839 --> 0:05:07.320 Once she went to the Vatican Archives, where in order 0:05:07.360 --> 0:05:10.000 to look at anything you need permission from a church official. 0:05:10.120 --> 0:05:12.320 She asked to find this one hard to find document. 0:05:12.760 --> 0:05:14.919 The attendant said, well, no, you can't get that. You 0:05:14.920 --> 0:05:17.320 would need permission from a cardinal to get that. And 0:05:17.360 --> 0:05:19.800 she said, then send me to the nearest cardinal. And 0:05:19.880 --> 0:05:23.000 he was appalled. But then she took out a card, 0:05:23.040 --> 0:05:25.719 an introduction card that you might stand up to someone, 0:05:25.960 --> 0:05:29.760 and it said adel Kaiber, Hollywood, California, because she had 0:05:29.760 --> 0:05:32.159 grown up in Los Angeles, and she sent up that 0:05:32.279 --> 0:05:35.080 card of introduction to his eminence and he immediately sent 0:05:35.120 --> 0:05:38.920 the attendant back down with the message, oh you're from Hollywood, Come, come, 0:05:39.040 --> 0:05:41.760 let's talk. She went up there and she amused the 0:05:41.760 --> 0:05:45.080 cardinal with an hour and a half of conversation about Hollywood. 0:05:45.279 --> 0:05:47.240 I don't know everything that was in the conversation, but 0:05:47.279 --> 0:05:49.479 I do know that he asked her whether it was 0:05:49.520 --> 0:05:52.680 true that Los Angeles, like the Vatican, is surrounded by 0:05:52.680 --> 0:05:54.880 a high wall. And I don't know her answer, but 0:05:54.920 --> 0:05:56.760 I like to think she said something like yes, that's 0:05:56.760 --> 0:05:58.800 why it's so hard to break into the film industry. 0:05:59.240 --> 0:06:02.560 But my point is afterward she got permission to see 0:06:02.600 --> 0:06:04.760 the text. You know, a lot of the time we're 0:06:04.800 --> 0:06:08.200 working in the archives, it's not as simple as just 0:06:08.360 --> 0:06:11.359 looking up something in the library catalog. You need to 0:06:11.520 --> 0:06:14.480 work people, or you need to be aware of ways 0:06:14.480 --> 0:06:17.520 to get at an item that aren't as simple as 0:06:17.680 --> 0:06:19.880 just walking through the door and asking for it. And 0:06:19.960 --> 0:06:22.280 she was extremely good at that, which was why after 0:06:22.360 --> 0:06:26.080 World War Two started, someone who had previously employed her 0:06:26.760 --> 0:06:29.200 in this job, who is now working for the OSS 0:06:29.360 --> 0:06:31.920 called her up and said, have I got a job 0:06:31.960 --> 0:06:35.479 for you? And she jumped at the chance. It was 0:06:35.520 --> 0:06:37.159 like she had been waiting all of her life to 0:06:37.240 --> 0:06:39.280 do this. And it says she had, or at least 0:06:39.320 --> 0:06:41.280 she had been training all of her life to do this. 0:06:41.440 --> 0:06:43.560 She was learning how to be a spy without knowing it. 0:06:44.240 --> 0:06:49.400 She became the most productive document acquisitions expert working for 0:06:49.480 --> 0:06:53.320 the OSS. She sent home mountains of material, a lot 0:06:53.360 --> 0:06:55.719 of it, stuff that she really should not have gotten 0:06:55.760 --> 0:06:59.600 access to, underground newspapers, books that the Germans had designated 0:06:59.640 --> 0:07:04.280 SEQ books and pulled from circulation, German periodicals that only 0:07:04.320 --> 0:07:07.800 went to people on vetted subscriber lists. We don't know 0:07:08.360 --> 0:07:10.840 her methods, but we know that she got all of 0:07:10.880 --> 0:07:13.560 this incredible stuff and she sent it back to the 0:07:13.640 --> 0:07:16.880 United States, and you know, it wound up in all 0:07:16.920 --> 0:07:19.720 sorts of places. It wound up in Washington helping people 0:07:19.800 --> 0:07:23.360 to make strategic wartime plans. It wound up in the 0:07:23.520 --> 0:07:26.480 library at a little place in Los Alamos. 0:07:29.840 --> 0:07:34.680 So for Adele, just to simplify from my own mind, here, 0:07:34.960 --> 0:07:38.560 she is looking for documents that are either housed in 0:07:38.680 --> 0:07:43.200 Germany or documents that are German based documents but they're 0:07:43.280 --> 0:07:44.280 held other places. 0:07:44.360 --> 0:07:47.080 Is that right? Yeah, she was working as an undercover 0:07:47.160 --> 0:07:51.680 agent in Stockholm. Stockholm was neutral, but it wasn't impartial. 0:07:51.920 --> 0:07:55.160 That is, Stockholm had an agreement with the warring countries 0:07:55.160 --> 0:07:58.080 that it could remain neutral only if no spies operated 0:07:58.080 --> 0:08:00.280 in Stockholm, so it was very important for her to 0:08:00.320 --> 0:08:03.920 remain undercover. Besides which, the Swedish police had trained with 0:08:04.000 --> 0:08:06.800 the Gestappos, so if she had been captured, she would 0:08:06.840 --> 0:08:10.840 have been open to possibly Gestoppo style beatings and interrogations. 0:08:11.280 --> 0:08:13.720 You know, all kinds of things like that. She got 0:08:13.920 --> 0:08:17.680 and secretly sent home on microfilm, All kinds of documents 0:08:17.680 --> 0:08:21.200 that she really shouldn't have gotten. Access to. Railway schedules, 0:08:21.240 --> 0:08:25.760 German newspapers, atlases, maps, technical journals, German newsletters that were 0:08:25.760 --> 0:08:28.560 on a restricted list and only went to certain vetted subscribers, 0:08:28.840 --> 0:08:32.440 underground resistance literature, privately printed books, books that have been 0:08:32.440 --> 0:08:35.600 printed by underground presses, books that the German government had 0:08:35.600 --> 0:08:39.760 designated secret books and pulled from circulation. She got current newspapers, 0:08:39.800 --> 0:08:44.040 back copies dating to nineteen forty, industry directories, trade magazines, 0:08:44.120 --> 0:08:48.679 railway schedules, publications on aeronautics and banking, and bibliography and 0:08:49.040 --> 0:08:54.400 metallurgy and mining, basically scientific publications of every description, and 0:08:54.480 --> 0:08:57.520 a lot of this was much more useful from an 0:08:57.600 --> 0:09:00.559 espionage perspective than you would think when you first heard 0:09:00.640 --> 0:09:03.720 what it was like, take one of those industry directories. 0:09:03.760 --> 0:09:06.240 What would be the value of getting a Berlin industry 0:09:06.240 --> 0:09:09.960 directory for nineteen forty two. Well, one of its uses 0:09:10.000 --> 0:09:13.160 would be to find out the addresses of factories that 0:09:13.240 --> 0:09:16.199 produced ball bearings. And if you're asking what's the point 0:09:16.200 --> 0:09:19.520 of getting factories that produce ball bearings getting their addresses, 0:09:19.640 --> 0:09:22.040 the answer is that ball bearings were used to manufacture 0:09:22.120 --> 0:09:24.800 fighter planes and tanks and gun carriages and all the 0:09:24.840 --> 0:09:27.800 other moving parts of Hitler's war machine. If you bomb 0:09:27.840 --> 0:09:31.000 a factory that produces fighter planes, you've just bombed a 0:09:31.000 --> 0:09:33.679 factory that produces fighter planes. But if you bomb a 0:09:33.720 --> 0:09:37.120 factory that produces ball bearings, you've potentially disabled all of 0:09:37.160 --> 0:09:40.200 the factories that produce ball bearings and that produced tanks 0:09:40.400 --> 0:09:42.880 and that produce things like that. There's a huge subplot 0:09:42.920 --> 0:09:45.000 of World War two that just consists of trying to 0:09:45.000 --> 0:09:47.360 get control of ball bearings. But what I'm trying to 0:09:47.360 --> 0:09:51.120 say is Kuyber was acquiring, at the request of the OSS, 0:09:51.240 --> 0:09:54.840 all of these documents, all of these books that not 0:09:54.880 --> 0:09:59.079 only were hard to get, but also the value of 0:09:59.200 --> 0:10:03.120 which wasn't immediately obvious. And the reason she was being 0:10:03.160 --> 0:10:05.880 asked for them was because of professors back home in 0:10:05.920 --> 0:10:08.160 the States who were working, for instance, in the basement 0:10:08.200 --> 0:10:11.280 of the Library of Congress, who were using their knowledge 0:10:11.280 --> 0:10:14.720 as humanists or social sciences, as economists and so forth 0:10:14.960 --> 0:10:17.200 to say, hey, hang on a second, I think that 0:10:17.280 --> 0:10:19.840 if we bomb the ball bearing factories, we can have 0:10:19.880 --> 0:10:22.480 a much bigger effect than if we simply bomb the 0:10:22.520 --> 0:10:25.360 airplane factories. Well, that was going to be my next question. 0:10:25.440 --> 0:10:27.360 How did she know what to even look for? Did 0:10:27.400 --> 0:10:30.320 the OSS give her guidance? But it sounds like the 0:10:30.559 --> 0:10:33.440 people in America were giving her guidance who had background 0:10:33.440 --> 0:10:36.040 in this sort of thing. Yes, they sent her requests, 0:10:36.400 --> 0:10:39.880 although she also found items on her own that she 0:10:40.000 --> 0:10:43.040 sent over. So she made friends with the Norwegian underground, 0:10:43.080 --> 0:10:45.960 for example, and she would send photographs in secret publications 0:10:45.960 --> 0:10:46.439 from them. 0:10:46.840 --> 0:10:49.760 When we talk about the personal life of these folks, 0:10:49.800 --> 0:10:52.120 and we're starting with Adele, did she have a husband 0:10:52.240 --> 0:10:54.559 or kids or you know, family that I'm just wondering 0:10:54.600 --> 0:10:56.520 if she if she was able to tell anybody what 0:10:56.600 --> 0:10:57.160 she's doing. 0:10:57.559 --> 0:10:59.920 So she didn't have a husband, she didn't have kids. 0:11:00.040 --> 0:11:03.439 Seems to value her freedom, which maybe we can understand. 0:11:03.600 --> 0:11:07.120 But also when other women who did have a husband, kids, 0:11:07.200 --> 0:11:09.079 so forth, came home from the war and they had 0:11:09.080 --> 0:11:11.920 been working in espionage, they were very very good at 0:11:11.920 --> 0:11:13.960 not telling their families what they had been up to. 0:11:14.360 --> 0:11:16.199 You know, they would have cover stories. There was one 0:11:16.200 --> 0:11:19.400 woman who much later wrote a memoir. She had been 0:11:19.440 --> 0:11:24.200 working at the spy training school near London. It was 0:11:24.240 --> 0:11:27.559 called Beauley, and she told her family that she was 0:11:27.640 --> 0:11:30.760 working for the Ministry of Agriculture and Fish, and they 0:11:30.760 --> 0:11:33.440 believed that for many, many decades after she went home. 0:11:33.840 --> 0:11:37.720 One of the people in the Soe, the British equivalent 0:11:37.760 --> 0:11:42.319 of the OSS, who did recruiting, actually preferred to recruit 0:11:42.320 --> 0:11:45.319 women because he thought that women are capable of a 0:11:45.440 --> 0:11:48.400 kind of He used the phrase lonely courage that he 0:11:48.440 --> 0:11:51.760 thought men were less capable of, because men have wives, 0:11:51.800 --> 0:11:54.160 they have secretaries, they have a friend at the pub 0:11:54.240 --> 0:11:57.920 that that they want to gossip to, whereas women are 0:11:58.000 --> 0:12:01.080 kind of accustomed to having their labor be invisible yea, 0:12:01.160 --> 0:12:04.520 you know, sort of unthanked, and they can when necessary 0:12:04.600 --> 0:12:05.720 turn that into a strength. 0:12:06.040 --> 0:12:07.319 Well, I thought you were going to say that he 0:12:07.360 --> 0:12:10.960 would insinuate that women are more duplicitous than men, a 0:12:11.000 --> 0:12:11.839 little sneakier. 0:12:11.920 --> 0:12:14.920 Maybe we're sneakier. I would definitely say that academics are 0:12:14.960 --> 0:12:19.079 sneakier than other people. They're very accustomed to subterfuge, to 0:12:19.160 --> 0:12:21.480 gathering gossip, to that sort of thing. I think that 0:12:21.520 --> 0:12:23.320 it's not much of a stretch to say that a 0:12:23.320 --> 0:12:26.080 lot of these guys found themselves very much at home 0:12:26.120 --> 0:12:29.000 in the world of spycraft after they were sent to 0:12:29.040 --> 0:12:31.120 the training camps and taught how to kill people with 0:12:31.160 --> 0:12:32.160 folded newspapers. 0:12:32.559 --> 0:12:35.480 I will say, you cannot pin this comment on me, 0:12:35.840 --> 0:12:39.760 but I have spoken to many male investigators who say 0:12:40.360 --> 0:12:44.840 how many times the male criminal has been fouled by 0:12:45.080 --> 0:12:48.079 his interest in sex. Yes, that's a whole other level 0:12:48.120 --> 0:12:51.320 of influence that women can have over men. So yes, 0:12:51.400 --> 0:12:54.200 I absolutely I think that's in the Civil War time 0:12:54.280 --> 0:12:58.480 another reason why both sides Union and the Confederates were 0:12:58.800 --> 0:13:02.520 able to utilize women. So Adela doesn't have a family 0:13:02.720 --> 0:13:05.400 or she doesn't feel pressure to disclose anything, and she's 0:13:05.440 --> 0:13:07.360 able to kind of move along on her own. Tell 0:13:07.360 --> 0:13:09.880 me your source for her. Did she write letters or 0:13:09.920 --> 0:13:12.319 was it a book or what happened? So she was 0:13:12.360 --> 0:13:17.040 exchanging letters constantly with her superiors, and also there were 0:13:17.160 --> 0:13:20.959 lists of texts that she was sending home for record keeping. 0:13:21.000 --> 0:13:24.960 A war produces a tremendous amount of documentation, so it 0:13:25.000 --> 0:13:28.520 was possible to find in the archives, in the National 0:13:28.600 --> 0:13:34.360 Archives in Maryland a tremendous amount of paperwork describing her adventures. 0:13:35.120 --> 0:13:38.880 I will mention parenthetically that getting at her papers the 0:13:38.960 --> 0:13:42.920 National Archives in Maryland is more difficult because the Finding 0:13:42.960 --> 0:13:47.360 Aid Forss documents was put together by OSS veterans after 0:13:47.400 --> 0:13:49.840 the war, and even though they did a good service 0:13:49.880 --> 0:13:53.320 to history, but they forgot to record the names of 0:13:53.360 --> 0:13:55.839 women along with the names of men in a lot 0:13:55.840 --> 0:13:58.400 of cases. So the documents are there, but you will 0:13:58.400 --> 0:14:01.160 not find her name in the find Aid. You have 0:14:01.240 --> 0:14:03.000 to kind of know that it's there and get the 0:14:03.040 --> 0:14:05.480 help of librarians to get you to it. I know 0:14:05.760 --> 0:14:08.120 the irony is not lost on you that you were 0:14:08.160 --> 0:14:10.679 writing about a woman whose job was to dig up 0:14:10.679 --> 0:14:12.960 every piece of information she could and now you are 0:14:13.280 --> 0:14:16.800 struggling to find documentation on this woman whose job was to, 0:14:17.000 --> 0:14:18.520 you know, find all of this information. 0:14:18.800 --> 0:14:22.040 So was she your most not interesting character? 0:14:22.160 --> 0:14:24.800 But is Adele the one that you connected with the 0:14:24.840 --> 0:14:26.760 most or is there someone else that we're going to 0:14:26.760 --> 0:14:29.080 talk about that you felt even kind of closer to. 0:14:29.520 --> 0:14:33.520 I really appreciated Adele, and for me she represented partly, 0:14:33.920 --> 0:14:35.920 you know, it was a serious war, It was it 0:14:36.000 --> 0:14:39.040 important war. It was also the case that for Adele 0:14:39.080 --> 0:14:41.680 and women like her, and my grandmother, who worked in 0:14:41.680 --> 0:14:46.160 intelligence was one of them, the war was an opportunity 0:14:46.200 --> 0:14:48.600 to have more power and more freedom than would have 0:14:48.640 --> 0:14:51.560 been available under any other circumstances at that time. 0:14:51.880 --> 0:14:55.200 Yeah, I mean we often hear about when menly for war, 0:14:55.840 --> 0:14:58.400 you know, the women are at home and they're acquiring 0:14:58.520 --> 0:15:00.840 new skills and you know, arning new things. And of 0:15:00.840 --> 0:15:03.080 course we know about the baseball leagues, you know that 0:15:03.240 --> 0:15:05.840 started popping up, and then when they come back, it's 0:15:05.840 --> 0:15:08.360 hard to realize that things will go back to normal. 0:15:08.680 --> 0:15:11.360 I know that this is for a spy story. Some 0:15:11.520 --> 0:15:13.400 of your information would have been limited. Do we have 0:15:13.440 --> 0:15:16.560 any idea how many female spies were out there? 0:15:16.640 --> 0:15:18.440 You thought it was just maybe more women than men. 0:15:18.800 --> 0:15:22.720 So the OSS itself was thirty five percent women. I 0:15:22.760 --> 0:15:25.080 couldn't say off of the top of my head how 0:15:25.080 --> 0:15:28.120 many of them were active undercover agents. But it was 0:15:28.200 --> 0:15:31.440 the case that undercover agents were often preferred to be 0:15:31.560 --> 0:15:35.720 women because if you had someone who was in occupied France, 0:15:35.840 --> 0:15:38.480 let's say, if they were a man, then they might 0:15:38.520 --> 0:15:40.680 get swept up by one of the raids that the 0:15:40.720 --> 0:15:43.840 Germans sometimes performed, where they would take all of kind 0:15:43.840 --> 0:15:45.440 of all of the men who are on the streets 0:15:45.480 --> 0:15:47.760 and you know, get them over to Germany to work 0:15:47.760 --> 0:15:50.000 in the factories or something like that. They wouldn't do 0:15:50.040 --> 0:15:52.440 that to the women. Or these were often kind of 0:15:52.520 --> 0:15:55.520 cities of widows. The men had all been taken away 0:15:55.520 --> 0:15:58.440 to work in the factories or to fight or that 0:15:58.480 --> 0:16:02.080 sort of thing, and the people holding the fort were women. 0:16:02.280 --> 0:16:05.120 So who would notice another woman walking around, especially one 0:16:05.120 --> 0:16:09.320 who had say a basket on her bicycle that you know, 0:16:09.560 --> 0:16:12.160 had vegetables poking out of it, even though it was 0:16:12.200 --> 0:16:15.080 actually carrying a radio that sort of thing. Yeah, women 0:16:15.160 --> 0:16:19.240 had sort of a better cover given the circumstances during 0:16:19.280 --> 0:16:20.760 World War Two a lot of the time. 0:16:21.000 --> 0:16:23.240 Now you know, now we have the Internet, she could 0:16:23.240 --> 0:16:25.720 scan stuff in and send it and it could be encrypted, 0:16:25.720 --> 0:16:29.280 and you know, there's I think ways to safely send documents. 0:16:29.520 --> 0:16:31.760 But this would have been snail mail, right, How would 0:16:31.800 --> 0:16:33.760 she have gotten these documents back? To the United States 0:16:33.840 --> 0:16:37.760 or wherever they were going safely. I know she's in Sweden, 0:16:37.840 --> 0:16:40.320 but still there must have been some kind of monitoring 0:16:40.360 --> 0:16:41.920 from the Germans about stuff like this. 0:16:42.400 --> 0:16:44.840 All sorts of different methods, a big one with something 0:16:44.880 --> 0:16:47.600 called the diplomatic pouch. That is, it was possible for 0:16:47.680 --> 0:16:53.120 embassies to safely send documents or microfilm back home, and 0:16:53.160 --> 0:16:56.120 that was sort of a privilege that everybody gave everybody 0:16:56.120 --> 0:16:59.440 else's embassies. That isn't to say that embassies were completely 0:16:59.480 --> 0:17:02.560 safe this whole mission during World War Two in I 0:17:02.560 --> 0:17:06.840 think Washington, where the OSS secretly broke into the Spanish 0:17:06.920 --> 0:17:09.959 embassy and took photographs of the documents inside of its 0:17:10.040 --> 0:17:12.800 safes using the help of some criminals. Back home in 0:17:12.840 --> 0:17:14.720 the States, they found a guy in New York who 0:17:15.359 --> 0:17:17.639 was sort of kept out of jail because he always 0:17:17.640 --> 0:17:20.560 helped the FBI to break into whatever safe the FBI 0:17:20.640 --> 0:17:23.600 needed to break into. But that's a whole other story. Yeah, 0:17:23.680 --> 0:17:27.399 diplomatic pouch was a big one, but people used all 0:17:27.440 --> 0:17:31.480 sorts of sneaky methods to get documents across borders. During 0:17:31.480 --> 0:17:35.320 the war, there was a case where documents were secretly 0:17:35.480 --> 0:17:41.440 being ferried out of an occupied country in a Nazi plane, 0:17:41.960 --> 0:17:44.920 and they kept the papers sort of in the plane's breaks, 0:17:45.240 --> 0:17:47.840 so the Nazis would actually fly it over the border. Wow. 0:17:48.119 --> 0:17:49.600 Necessity is the mother of invention. 0:17:52.840 --> 0:17:55.480 Did you get a sense from any of the letters 0:17:55.760 --> 0:17:58.720 from Adele to her supervisors or whoever that she was 0:17:58.720 --> 0:18:01.280 in danger at any point she scared or felt like 0:18:01.280 --> 0:18:02.879 she was going to get caught at some point. 0:18:03.240 --> 0:18:05.600 I'm sure that she must have felt that way. I mean, 0:18:05.640 --> 0:18:09.360 the place where she worked, which was the American legation, 0:18:10.080 --> 0:18:12.879 was being observed. It was right next door to the 0:18:12.920 --> 0:18:16.879 German legation to begin with, but also there were people 0:18:17.280 --> 0:18:20.480 wearing plain clothes constantly standing on the other side of 0:18:20.520 --> 0:18:22.720 the road and taking pictures of the building. I mean, 0:18:22.720 --> 0:18:26.720 it was very obviously being surveilled, which makes it all 0:18:26.760 --> 0:18:29.359 the more remarkable that she managed not to come under 0:18:29.359 --> 0:18:32.240 suspicion of being a spy. She did have what was 0:18:32.280 --> 0:18:35.959 known as cutaways, which is people who would meet someone 0:18:36.080 --> 0:18:38.439 on her behalf so that she never met the other person, 0:18:38.560 --> 0:18:41.399 or boys who would pick up deliveries at bookstores, that 0:18:41.480 --> 0:18:45.199 sort of thing. But I get the sense that she 0:18:45.400 --> 0:18:50.080 was actually very good at controlling her fear and getting 0:18:50.119 --> 0:18:52.720 things done. You know, like one of those I don't 0:18:52.760 --> 0:18:57.400 know lady detectives in a BBC show who goes into 0:18:57.440 --> 0:19:00.560 the village and, you know, figures out that the vicar 0:19:00.640 --> 0:19:03.679 murdered everyone and sets things right and then adjusts her 0:19:03.720 --> 0:19:05.520 hat and gets on the train to the next village. 0:19:05.560 --> 0:19:08.480 She really does give me that give you that impression. 0:19:08.119 --> 0:19:11.040 Little Jessica Fletcher from Murder She wrote vous. 0:19:10.920 --> 0:19:15.520 Exactly, Yes, I'm getting Jessica Fletcher vibes. Okay, cozy mysteries. Okay. 0:19:15.680 --> 0:19:18.480 So do we get the sense that the Germans did 0:19:18.480 --> 0:19:20.680 the exact same thing that we did, or other countries 0:19:20.720 --> 0:19:21.520 that our allies did. 0:19:22.080 --> 0:19:25.960 No, Actually, the United States was inventing something new when 0:19:25.960 --> 0:19:29.080 it recruited all of those professors and librarians to the OSS. 0:19:29.480 --> 0:19:31.879 The professors and librarians they worked in a branch of 0:19:31.880 --> 0:19:35.919 the OSS called Research and Analysis, also known as the 0:19:36.000 --> 0:19:39.159 Chairborn Division. Now there was another branch of the OSS 0:19:39.200 --> 0:19:42.840 called Research and Development, and those guys were it was 0:19:42.880 --> 0:19:45.639 a well known kind of branch in any spy agency. 0:19:45.680 --> 0:19:49.199 It was the people who made bombs, who made you know, poisons, 0:19:49.280 --> 0:19:52.280 that sort of thing, spy gear, weapons, That was a 0:19:52.359 --> 0:19:55.600 well known type of branch in a spy agency. But 0:19:55.680 --> 0:20:00.640 research and analysis, bringing in humanists, bringing in social science, right, 0:20:01.160 --> 0:20:03.840 getting them to do their thing in the service of spycraft. 0:20:04.119 --> 0:20:06.440 That was something new, and it wound up being so 0:20:06.480 --> 0:20:10.080 successful that it changed the course of espionage. I mean, 0:20:10.160 --> 0:20:12.920 we've been talking about ways of secretly, you know, bringing 0:20:13.000 --> 0:20:15.200 messages from one place to another. I know that during 0:20:15.200 --> 0:20:16.960 World War Two there was also a group of women 0:20:16.960 --> 0:20:19.520 who would carry secret message. They would dress like nuns 0:20:19.800 --> 0:20:23.440 and carry secret messages in their rosaries. But the great 0:20:23.480 --> 0:20:27.240 innovation of research and analysis was something that Sherman Kent. 0:20:27.760 --> 0:20:30.600 Another character in the book says, which is that ninety 0:20:30.640 --> 0:20:33.360 percent of what a spy agency needs to know they 0:20:33.359 --> 0:20:35.760 can get from public sources. They don't need to consult 0:20:35.800 --> 0:20:38.359 secret sources at all. It's just that And this is 0:20:38.400 --> 0:20:41.280 the big secret of life. Nobody does the reading. So 0:20:41.640 --> 0:20:44.000 if you do the reading, every professor knows this. They 0:20:44.040 --> 0:20:46.239 go into class. The students haven't done the reading. They 0:20:46.240 --> 0:20:48.560 could tell who has. If you do the reading, you're 0:20:48.600 --> 0:20:52.280 already ahead of everybody else. So there was one instance 0:20:52.359 --> 0:20:54.800 during World War two. This is a story that William 0:20:54.800 --> 0:20:58.239 donnovan liked to tell, and it's apparently true. There was 0:20:58.480 --> 0:21:02.679 a woman, a countess, American by birth, very lucky by marriage, 0:21:02.720 --> 0:21:04.959 and she was traveling by train from you know, an 0:21:04.960 --> 0:21:09.360