Speaker 1: This story contains adult content and language. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 1: She was very good at her job, and she refused
Speaker 1: to tell her superiors her methods, even though they sent
Speaker 1: her letters begging, like, just tell me how you're doing this,
Speaker 1: tell me how you're finding this, and she never told them.
Speaker 2: I'm Kate Winkler Dawson, a nonfiction author and journalism professor
Speaker 2: in Austin, Texas. I'm also the co host of the
Speaker 2: podcast Buried Bones on Exactly Right, and throughout my career,
Speaker 2: research for my many audio and book projects has taken
Speaker 2: me around the world. On Wicked Words, I sit down
Speaker 2: with the people I've met along the way, amazing writers, journalists, filmmakers,
Speaker 2: and podcasters who have investigated and reported on notorious true
Speaker 2: crime cases. This is about the choices writers make, both
Speaker 2: good and bad, and it's a deep dive into the
Speaker 2: unpublished details behind their stories. Did you know that some
Speaker 2: of the most effective American spies during World War II
Speaker 2: were librarians and archivists and history professors. Some were locked
Speaker 2: in the basement of the Library of Congress analyzing documents.
Speaker 2: Those documents were being gathered by academics sneaking around Europe
Speaker 2: under the Noses of the Nazis. Author Elise Graham tells
Speaker 2: me the story at the center of her book, Book
Speaker 2: and Dagger, how scholars and librarians became the unlikely spies of.
Speaker 1: World War II.
Speaker 2: When you are at at dinner party, are meeting new
Speaker 2: people and they say, we're an author. What kind of
Speaker 2: book was this? What do you say, Because it's certainly
Speaker 2: not a quick summary. It's what are the themes and
Speaker 2: what makes the book important you think and relevant to
Speaker 2: an audience.
Speaker 1: Now, so what would you say the book is about? Say,
Speaker 1: this is a history of the OSS, which we as
Speaker 1: a precursor to the CIA, which came together very quickly
Speaker 1: in the wake of Pearl Harbor. At this time, the
Speaker 1: United States didn't have a standing intelligence agency, and so
Speaker 1: William Donovan, who was the head of the OSS, had
Speaker 1: to pull together a working spy agency very quickly. And
Speaker 1: an intelligence agency, as the name might suggest, requires a
Speaker 1: lot of intelligence, a lot of information people who understand
Speaker 1: how to find facts and collect them and turn them
Speaker 1: into something that's usable strategically or tactically. In short, he
Speaker 1: needed to become an instant expert on every subject to
Speaker 1: the library, and the best way for him to do that,
Speaker 1: it turned out, was to simply raid the library for recruits.
Speaker 1: So he pulled all of these librarians out of their
Speaker 1: libraries and professors out of their classrooms, and they became
Speaker 1: the spies who worked during World War Two. And the
Speaker 1: innovations that they brought to the field of spycraft were
Speaker 1: so profound that they laid down the basis for modern intelligence.
Speaker 2: I've not done a book on spies. I had researched
Speaker 2: pretty heavily a book on female spies during the Civil War,
Speaker 2: and they were the most unlikely. Of course, we always
Speaker 2: say that the most unlikely people who you would never suspect,
Speaker 2: And you know, these were women that were transporting secrets
Speaker 2: in their boots as they're riding across the country. And
Speaker 2: I've always wondered what the background of a spy is,
Speaker 2: So what is it now? Do you know what a
Speaker 2: typical background for a CIA agent would be?
Speaker 1: Is it law enforcement or what is it? You know,
Speaker 1: I don't know what the typical background for a CIA
Speaker 1: agent would be today, although rumor has it that the
Speaker 1: CIA still does recruiting at the annual American Library Association conference.
Speaker 1: I think you were right when you said that when
Speaker 1: we hear about a spy, we always wind up saying, Oh,
Speaker 1: that's the last person that I would expect, because that's
Speaker 1: exactly who's demanded of a spy. In the movies, you know,
Speaker 1: spies are these ripped hunks who are always carrying around
Speaker 1: lots of gadgets and wearing tuxedos. But in real life
Speaker 1: a gadget or a weapon would blow somebody's cover. A
Speaker 1: tuxedo or having everybody in the western HEMMI sphear know
Speaker 1: your drink order would make you a really ineffective spy.
Speaker 1: These spies, librarians and professors were chosen precisely because they
Speaker 1: would be overlooked. They were the world's least glamorous people
Speaker 1: for the world's most glamorous profession, and somehow they made
Speaker 1: it work really well. Now, what makes a good spy?
Speaker 1: Back then, if you think about the sort of person
Speaker 1: who succeeded in the OSS after being pulled out of
Speaker 1: their library, Carol, we might think of somebody like adel Kiber.
Speaker 1: She got her PhD at the University of Chicago. She
Speaker 1: was studying classics so she could speak different languages and
Speaker 1: work in the archives. Back then, women couldn't become professors
Speaker 1: very easily, so she got a job sort of self employed,
Speaker 1: going from archive to archive across Europe taking pictures of
Speaker 1: rare texts to send back home to professors in the States.
Speaker 1: There are still people who will do that for you
Speaker 1: at various archives. They'll take pictures of the material and
Speaker 1: send them to you for a fee. They could usually
Speaker 1: make about seventy dollars an hour. It's a pretty good job.
Speaker 1: But she became along the way O Way really really
Speaker 1: good at getting, you know, documents that were hard to get.
Speaker 1: Once she went to the Vatican Archives, where in order
Speaker 1: to look at anything you need permission from a church official.
Speaker 1: She asked to find this one hard to find document.
Speaker 1: The attendant said, well, no, you can't get that. You
Speaker 1: would need permission from a cardinal to get that. And
Speaker 1: she said, then send me to the nearest cardinal. And
Speaker 1: he was appalled. But then she took out a card,
Speaker 1: an introduction card that you might stand up to someone,
Speaker 1: and it said adel Kaiber, Hollywood, California, because she had
Speaker 1: grown up in Los Angeles, and she sent up that
Speaker 1: card of introduction to his eminence and he immediately sent
Speaker 1: the attendant back down with the message, oh you're from Hollywood, Come, come,
Speaker 1: let's talk. She went up there and she amused the
Speaker 1: cardinal with an hour and a half of conversation about Hollywood.
Speaker 1: I don't know everything that was in the conversation, but
Speaker 1: I do know that he asked her whether it was
Speaker 1: true that Los Angeles, like the Vatican, is surrounded by
Speaker 1: a high wall. And I don't know her answer, but
Speaker 1: I like to think she said something like yes, that's
Speaker 1: why it's so hard to break into the film industry.
Speaker 1: But my point is afterward she got permission to see
Speaker 1: the text. You know, a lot of the time we're
Speaker 1: working in the archives, it's not as simple as just
Speaker 1: looking up something in the library catalog. You need to
Speaker 1: work people, or you need to be aware of ways
Speaker 1: to get at an item that aren't as simple as
Speaker 1: just walking through the door and asking for it. And
Speaker 1: she was extremely good at that, which was why after
Speaker 1: World War Two started, someone who had previously employed her
Speaker 1: in this job, who is now working for the OSS
Speaker 1: called her up and said, have I got a job
Speaker 1: for you? And she jumped at the chance. It was
Speaker 1: like she had been waiting all of her life to
Speaker 1: do this. And it says she had, or at least
Speaker 1: she had been training all of her life to do this.
Speaker 1: She was learning how to be a spy without knowing it.
Speaker 1: She became the most productive document acquisitions expert working for
Speaker 1: the OSS. She sent home mountains of material, a lot
Speaker 1: of it, stuff that she really should not have gotten
Speaker 1: access to, underground newspapers, books that the Germans had designated
Speaker 1: SEQ books and pulled from circulation, German periodicals that only
Speaker 1: went to people on vetted subscriber lists. We don't know
Speaker 1: her methods, but we know that she got all of
Speaker 1: this incredible stuff and she sent it back to the
Speaker 1: United States, and you know, it wound up in all
Speaker 1: sorts of places. It wound up in Washington helping people
Speaker 1: to make strategic wartime plans. It wound up in the
Speaker 1: library at a little place in Los Alamos.
Speaker 2: So for Adele, just to simplify from my own mind, here,
Speaker 2: she is looking for documents that are either housed in
Speaker 2: Germany or documents that are German based documents but they're
Speaker 2: held other places.
Speaker 1: Is that right? Yeah, she was working as an undercover
Speaker 1: agent in Stockholm. Stockholm was neutral, but it wasn't impartial.
Speaker 1: That is, Stockholm had an agreement with the warring countries
Speaker 1: that it could remain neutral only if no spies operated
Speaker 1: in Stockholm, so it was very important for her to
Speaker 1: remain undercover. Besides which, the Swedish police had trained with
Speaker 1: the Gestappos, so if she had been captured, she would
Speaker 1: have been open to possibly Gestoppo style beatings and interrogations.
Speaker 1: You know, all kinds of things like that. She got
Speaker 1: and secretly sent home on microfilm, All kinds of documents
Speaker 1: that she really shouldn't have gotten. Access to. Railway schedules,
Speaker 1: German newspapers, atlases, maps, technical journals, German newsletters that were
Speaker 1: on a restricted list and only went to certain vetted subscribers,
Speaker 1: underground resistance literature, privately printed books, books that have been
Speaker 1: printed by underground presses, books that the German government had
Speaker 1: designated secret books and pulled from circulation. She got current newspapers,
Speaker 1: back copies dating to nineteen forty, industry directories, trade magazines,
Speaker 1: railway schedules, publications on aeronautics and banking, and bibliography and
Speaker 1: metallurgy and mining, basically scientific publications of every description, and
Speaker 1: a lot of this was much more useful from an
Speaker 1: espionage perspective than you would think when you first heard
Speaker 1: what it was like, take one of those industry directories.
Speaker 1: What would be the value of getting a Berlin industry
Speaker 1: directory for nineteen forty two. Well, one of its uses
Speaker 1: would be to find out the addresses of factories that
Speaker 1: produced ball bearings. And if you're asking what's the point
Speaker 1: of getting factories that produce ball bearings getting their addresses,
Speaker 1: the answer is that ball bearings were used to manufacture
Speaker 1: fighter planes and tanks and gun carriages and all the
Speaker 1: other moving parts of Hitler's war machine. If you bomb
Speaker 1: a factory that produces fighter planes, you've just bombed a
Speaker 1: factory that produces fighter planes. But if you bomb a
Speaker 1: factory that produces ball bearings, you've potentially disabled all of
Speaker 1: the factories that produce ball bearings and that produced tanks
Speaker 1: and that produce things like that. There's a huge subplot
Speaker 1: of World War two that just consists of trying to
Speaker 1: get control of ball bearings. But what I'm trying to
Speaker 1: say is Kuyber was acquiring, at the request of the OSS,
Speaker 1: all of these documents, all of these books that not
Speaker 1: only were hard to get, but also the value of
Speaker 1: which wasn't immediately obvious. And the reason she was being
Speaker 1: asked for them was because of professors back home in
Speaker 1: the States who were working, for instance, in the basement
Speaker 1: of the Library of Congress, who were using their knowledge
Speaker 1: as humanists or social sciences, as economists and so forth
Speaker 1: to say, hey, hang on a second, I think that
Speaker 1: if we bomb the ball bearing factories, we can have
Speaker 1: a much bigger effect than if we simply bomb the
Speaker 1: airplane factories. Well, that was going to be my next question.
Speaker 1: How did she know what to even look for? Did
Speaker 1: the OSS give her guidance? But it sounds like the
Speaker 1: people in America were giving her guidance who had background
Speaker 1: in this sort of thing. Yes, they sent her requests,
Speaker 1: although she also found items on her own that she
Speaker 1: sent over. So she made friends with the Norwegian underground,
Speaker 1: for example, and she would send photographs in secret publications
Speaker 1: from them.
Speaker 2: When we talk about the personal life of these folks,
Speaker 2: and we're starting with Adele, did she have a husband
Speaker 2: or kids or you know, family that I'm just wondering
Speaker 2: if she if she was able to tell anybody what
Speaker 2: she's doing.
Speaker 1: So she didn't have a husband, she didn't have kids.
Speaker 1: Seems to value her freedom, which maybe we can understand.
Speaker 1: But also when other women who did have a husband, kids,
Speaker 1: so forth, came home from the war and they had
Speaker 1: been working in espionage, they were very very good at
Speaker 1: not telling their families what they had been up to.
Speaker 1: You know, they would have cover stories. There was one
Speaker 1: woman who much later wrote a memoir. She had been
Speaker 1: working at the spy training school near London. It was
Speaker 1: called Beauley, and she told her family that she was
Speaker 1: working for the Ministry of Agriculture and Fish, and they
Speaker 1: believed that for many, many decades after she went home.
Speaker 1: One of the people in the Soe, the British equivalent
Speaker 1: of the OSS, who did recruiting, actually preferred to recruit
Speaker 1: women because he thought that women are capable of a
Speaker 1: kind of He used the phrase lonely courage that he
Speaker 1: thought men were less capable of, because men have wives,
Speaker 1: they have secretaries, they have a friend at the pub
Speaker 1: that that they want to gossip to, whereas women are
Speaker 1: kind of accustomed to having their labor be invisible yea,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of unthanked, and they can when necessary
Speaker 1: turn that into a strength.
Speaker 2: Well, I thought you were going to say that he
Speaker 2: would insinuate that women are more duplicitous than men, a
Speaker 2: little sneakier.
Speaker 1: Maybe we're sneakier. I would definitely say that academics are
Speaker 1: sneakier than other people. They're very accustomed to subterfuge, to
Speaker 1: gathering gossip, to that sort of thing. I think that
Speaker 1: it's not much of a stretch to say that a
Speaker 1: lot of these guys found themselves very much at home
Speaker 1: in the world of spycraft after they were sent to
Speaker 1: the training camps and taught how to kill people with
Speaker 1: folded newspapers.
Speaker 2: I will say, you cannot pin this comment on me,
Speaker 2: but I have spoken to many male investigators who say
Speaker 2: how many times the male criminal has been fouled by
Speaker 2: his interest in sex. Yes, that's a whole other level
Speaker 2: of influence that women can have over men. So yes,
Speaker 2: I absolutely I think that's in the Civil War time
Speaker 2: another reason why both sides Union and the Confederates were
Speaker 2: able to utilize women. So Adela doesn't have a family
Speaker 2: or she doesn't feel pressure to disclose anything, and she's
Speaker 2: able to kind of move along on her own. Tell
Speaker 2: me your source for her. Did she write letters or
Speaker 2: was it a book or what happened? So she was
Speaker 2: exchanging letters constantly with her superiors, and also there were
Speaker 2: lists of texts that she was sending home for record keeping.
Speaker 2: A war produces a tremendous amount of documentation, so it
Speaker 2: was possible to find in the archives, in the National
Speaker 2: Archives in Maryland a tremendous amount of paperwork describing her adventures.
Speaker 2: I will mention parenthetically that getting at her papers the
Speaker 2: National Archives in Maryland is more difficult because the Finding
Speaker 2: Aid Forss documents was put together by OSS veterans after
Speaker 2: the war, and even though they did a good service
Speaker 2: to history, but they forgot to record the names of
Speaker 2: women along with the names of men in a lot
Speaker 2: of cases. So the documents are there, but you will
Speaker 2: not find her name in the find Aid. You have
Speaker 2: to kind of know that it's there and get the
Speaker 2: help of librarians to get you to it. I know
Speaker 2: the irony is not lost on you that you were
Speaker 2: writing about a woman whose job was to dig up
Speaker 2: every piece of information she could and now you are
Speaker 2: struggling to find documentation on this woman whose job was to,
Speaker 2: you know, find all of this information.
Speaker 1: So was she your most not interesting character?
Speaker 2: But is Adele the one that you connected with the
Speaker 2: most or is there someone else that we're going to
Speaker 2: talk about that you felt even kind of closer to.
Speaker 1: I really appreciated Adele, and for me she represented partly,
Speaker 1: you know, it was a serious war, It was it
Speaker 1: important war. It was also the case that for Adele
Speaker 1: and women like her, and my grandmother, who worked in
Speaker 1: intelligence was one of them, the war was an opportunity
Speaker 1: to have more power and more freedom than would have
Speaker 1: been available under any other circumstances at that time.
Speaker 2: Yeah, I mean we often hear about when menly for war,
Speaker 2: you know, the women are at home and they're acquiring
Speaker 2: new skills and you know, arning new things. And of
Speaker 2: course we know about the baseball leagues, you know that
Speaker 2: started popping up, and then when they come back, it's
Speaker 2: hard to realize that things will go back to normal.
Speaker 2: I know that this is for a spy story. Some
Speaker 2: of your information would have been limited. Do we have
Speaker 2: any idea how many female spies were out there?
Speaker 1: You thought it was just maybe more women than men.
Speaker 1: So the OSS itself was thirty five percent women. I
Speaker 1: couldn't say off of the top of my head how
Speaker 1: many of them were active undercover agents. But it was
Speaker 1: the case that undercover agents were often preferred to be
Speaker 1: women because if you had someone who was in occupied France,
Speaker 1: let's say, if they were a man, then they might
Speaker 1: get swept up by one of the raids that the
Speaker 1: Germans sometimes performed, where they would take all of kind
Speaker 1: of all of the men who are on the streets
Speaker 1: and you know, get them over to Germany to work
Speaker 1: in the factories or something like that. They wouldn't do
Speaker 1: that to the women. Or these were often kind of
Speaker 1: cities of widows. The men had all been taken away
Speaker 1: to work in the factories or to fight or that
Speaker 1: sort of thing, and the people holding the fort were women.
Speaker 1: So who would notice another woman walking around, especially one
Speaker 1: who had say a basket on her bicycle that you know,
Speaker 1: had vegetables poking out of it, even though it was
Speaker 1: actually carrying a radio that sort of thing. Yeah, women
Speaker 1: had sort of a better cover given the circumstances during
Speaker 1: World War Two a lot of the time.
Speaker 2: Now you know, now we have the Internet, she could
Speaker 2: scan stuff in and send it and it could be encrypted,
Speaker 2: and you know, there's I think ways to safely send documents.
Speaker 2: But this would have been snail mail, right, How would
Speaker 2: she have gotten these documents back? To the United States
Speaker 2: or wherever they were going safely. I know she's in Sweden,
Speaker 2: but still there must have been some kind of monitoring
Speaker 2: from the Germans about stuff like this.
Speaker 1: All sorts of different methods, a big one with something
Speaker 1: called the diplomatic pouch. That is, it was possible for
Speaker 1: embassies to safely send documents or microfilm back home, and
Speaker 1: that was sort of a privilege that everybody gave everybody
Speaker 1: else's embassies. That isn't to say that embassies were completely
Speaker 1: safe this whole mission during World War Two in I
Speaker 1: think Washington, where the OSS secretly broke into the Spanish
Speaker 1: embassy and took photographs of the documents inside of its
Speaker 1: safes using the help of some criminals. Back home in
Speaker 1: the States, they found a guy in New York who
Speaker 1: was sort of kept out of jail because he always
Speaker 1: helped the FBI to break into whatever safe the FBI
Speaker 1: needed to break into. But that's a whole other story. Yeah,
Speaker 1: diplomatic pouch was a big one, but people used all
Speaker 1: sorts of sneaky methods to get documents across borders. During
Speaker 1: the war, there was a case where documents were secretly
Speaker 1: being ferried out of an occupied country in a Nazi plane,
Speaker 1: and they kept the papers sort of in the plane's breaks,
Speaker 1: so the Nazis would actually fly it over the border. Wow.
Speaker 1: Necessity is the mother of invention.
Speaker 2: Did you get a sense from any of the letters
Speaker 2: from Adele to her supervisors or whoever that she was
Speaker 2: in danger at any point she scared or felt like
Speaker 2: she was going to get caught at some point.
Speaker 1: I'm sure that she must have felt that way. I mean,
Speaker 1: the place where she worked, which was the American legation,
Speaker 1: was being observed. It was right next door to the
Speaker 1: German legation to begin with, but also there were people
Speaker 1: wearing plain clothes constantly standing on the other side of
Speaker 1: the road and taking pictures of the building. I mean,
Speaker 1: it was very obviously being surveilled, which makes it all
Speaker 1: the more remarkable that she managed not to come under
Speaker 1: suspicion of being a spy. She did have what was
Speaker 1: known as cutaways, which is people who would meet someone
Speaker 1: on her behalf so that she never met the other person,
Speaker 1: or boys who would pick up deliveries at bookstores, that
Speaker 1: sort of thing. But I get the sense that she
Speaker 1: was actually very good at controlling her fear and getting
Speaker 1: things done. You know, like one of those I don't
Speaker 1: know lady detectives in a BBC show who goes into
Speaker 1: the village and, you know, figures out that the vicar
Speaker 1: murdered everyone and sets things right and then adjusts her
Speaker 1: hat and gets on the train to the next village.
Speaker 1: She really does give me that give you that impression.
Speaker 2: Little Jessica Fletcher from Murder She wrote vous.
Speaker 1: Exactly, Yes, I'm getting Jessica Fletcher vibes. Okay, cozy mysteries. Okay.
Speaker 2: So do we get the sense that the Germans did
Speaker 2: the exact same thing that we did, or other countries
Speaker 2: that our allies did.
Speaker 1: No, Actually, the United States was inventing something new when
Speaker 1: it recruited all of those professors and librarians to the OSS.
Speaker 1: The professors and librarians they worked in a branch of
Speaker 1: the OSS called Research and Analysis, also known as the
Speaker 1: Chairborn Division. Now there was another branch of the OSS
Speaker 1: called Research and Development, and those guys were it was
Speaker 1: a well known kind of branch in any spy agency.
Speaker 1: It was the people who made bombs, who made you know, poisons,
Speaker 1: that sort of thing, spy gear, weapons, That was a
Speaker 1: well known type of branch in a spy agency. But
Speaker 1: research and analysis, bringing in humanists, bringing in social science, right,
Speaker 1: getting them to do their thing in the service of spycraft.
Speaker 1: That was something new, and it wound up being so
Speaker 1: successful that it changed the course of espionage. I mean,
Speaker 1: we've been talking about ways of secretly, you know, bringing
Speaker 1: messages from one place to another. I know that during
Speaker 1: World War Two there was also a group of women
Speaker 1: who would carry secret message. They would dress like nuns
Speaker 1: and carry secret messages in their rosaries. But the great
Speaker 1: innovation of research and analysis was something that Sherman Kent.
Speaker 1: Another character in the book says, which is that ninety
Speaker 1: percent of what a spy agency needs to know they
Speaker 1: can get from public sources. They don't need to consult
Speaker 1: secret sources at all. It's just that And this is
Speaker 1: the big secret of life. Nobody does the reading. So
Speaker 1: if you do the reading, every professor knows this. They
Speaker 1: go into class. The students haven't done the reading. They
Speaker 1: could tell who has. If you do the reading, you're
Speaker 1: already ahead of everybody else. So there was one instance
Speaker 1: during World War two. This is a story that William
Speaker 1: donnovan liked to tell, and it's apparently true. There was
Speaker 1: a woman, a countess, American by birth, very lucky by marriage,
Speaker 1: and she was traveling by train from you know, an
Speaker 1: occupied country to an unoccupied one. The gestoppo pull everybody
Speaker 1: off of the train to search them to make sure
Speaker 1: that they're not spies, and the Countess when she went
Speaker 1: to the restroom in the train, she had taken a
Speaker 1: newspaper and sort of you know, pulled off the pages
Speaker 1: and set them down on the seat so that, you know,
Speaker 1: in order to keep her dignified bottom from being contaminated.
Speaker 1: But that means that when the gestappo were searching everybody,
Speaker 1: she had, unbeknownst to her newsprint on her bottom. And
Speaker 1: so the Germans got very excited because they thought that
Speaker 1: they had discovered this new way, you know, for Allied
Speaker 1: spies to transmit information. And she was finally able to
Speaker 1: prove to them that it was just newsprint from a newspaper.
Speaker 1: They were very upset and put her back on the train.
Speaker 1: And Donovan would always finish the story by saying they
Speaker 1: were so excited about the newsprint on her bottom that
Speaker 1: they forgot to check the lining of her purse, which
Speaker 1: was filled with documents for the oss. But the actual
Speaker 1: punchline to the story is the newspaper itself. The professors
Speaker 1: who were working in the basement of the Library of
Speaker 1: Congress figured out all kinds of ways to read newspapers
Speaker 1: from occupied Europe, newspapers from neutral countries, things like that
Speaker 1: to get information on troop movements. They were able to
Speaker 1: figure out whether the Germans were amassing troops somewhere or
Speaker 1: whether they were planning to make a strike somewhere, using
Speaker 1: things like you know, frothy little mentions of military men
Speaker 1: in town in the society pages. They were able to
Speaker 1: use tables of railroad rates and study the changes in
Speaker 1: railroad rates in order to find out where the Germans
Speaker 1: were moving. Various kinds of materials, which is to say,
Speaker 1: you know, they actually they read the newspaper, They read
Speaker 1: industry directories, they read novels, they looked at you know,
Speaker 1: they looked at all kinds of things that you would
Speaker 1: normally not consider to be texts that would have any
Speaker 1: relevance for espionage, and they found them to have incredible
Speaker 1: value in planning the war effort.
Speaker 2: Now, was there a way to connect Adele to some
Speaker 2: event that helped us in the war, like you know,
Speaker 2: from the Civil war times, I read about a woman
Speaker 2: who was able to sneak out a message that essentially
Speaker 2: gave the Union a heads up of when the Confederacy
Speaker 2: was going to attack. It gave them like a two day,
Speaker 2: you know, warning, which was invaluable. They were able to
Speaker 2: directly connect it to the woman. Is there a way
Speaker 2: to do that with Adele or was it just sort
Speaker 2: of all of this context that helped overall that she
Speaker 2: was sending.
Speaker 1: I can give you a pretty good one. The Germans
Speaker 1: wanted the neutral countries like Sweden to believe that it
Speaker 1: would be a terrible thing if the Americans won the war.
Speaker 1: They very badly wanted Swedes, for instance, to believe that
Speaker 1: Americans were ruffians who had no concept of culture, that
Speaker 1: if they won, they would tear down the libraries and
Speaker 1: concert halls of Europe, And so they sent all of
Speaker 1: these cultural ambassadors to Sweden. They believed in soft power,
Speaker 1: which is an important thing to be able to flex
Speaker 1: professors and little round glasses to give lectures, and conductors
Speaker 1: to wave their batons over performances of the magic flute.
Speaker 1: But they also made sure that their scientific and technical
Speaker 1: journals flowed into Stockholm's libraries and universities without interruption. Now,
Speaker 1: German technical journals, German scientific journals, these were not getting
Speaker 1: to the United States, right. You do not send your
Speaker 1: scientific work to a country that you're warring with, particularly
Speaker 1: if both you and they are racing to get the
Speaker 1: proper recipe for an atomic bomb. The things that Adele
Speaker 1: sent home included tons and tons and tons of German
Speaker 1: scientific periodicals, particularly German scientific periodicals in the fields of
Speaker 1: sort of engineering and metallurgy and atomic physics, which are
Speaker 1: the fields that are necessary for building an atomic bomb.
Speaker 1: Many of the journals and articles that she sent home
Speaker 1: found their way into the library at a little place
Speaker 1: New Mexico called Los Alamos. That seems to be to
Speaker 1: be a very valuable contribution and something that not many
Speaker 1: people would have been able to do.
Speaker 2: Personality wise, what kind of person do you think Adele was?
Speaker 2: Obviously she was very bold, and she was aware of
Speaker 2: what the consequences would be. Actually, before you get to
Speaker 2: her personality, what would the consequences have been if she
Speaker 2: had been caught, you know, smuggling out something or accessing
Speaker 2: something she shouldn't have.
Speaker 1: Is this a death penalty? Thing depends on who caught
Speaker 1: her to be perfectly honest. I mean there were German
Speaker 1: spies operating in Stockholm as well. You know, the Swedish
Speaker 1: police might have simply interrogated her very harshly Gestapo style.
Speaker 1: One hopes that they wouldn't have passed her along to
Speaker 1: the Gestapo, But the Swedish police were aligned with the
Speaker 1: Gestapo and had trained with the Gestapo, so that's not certain.
Speaker 1: The best outcome that she would have had would have
Speaker 1: been to be confined in a kind of camp in Sweden,
Speaker 1: along with sort of air force personnel who had downed
Speaker 1: in Sweden. They were kept in the country and not
Speaker 1: sent home to their respective militaries. That would have been
Speaker 1: the gentlest possible outcome for her, But a lot of
Speaker 1: spies died in terrible ways during World War Two. They
Speaker 1: were poisoned, they were brought to German camps and had
Speaker 1: the most terrible possible fates. It was not a safe
Speaker 1: occupation by any means.
Speaker 2: Were these camps in Sweden where you're talking about, you know,
Speaker 2: air force pilots or whoever going down and being kept
Speaker 2: there where she might have gone, I'm sure not humane,
Speaker 2: more humane than obviously the German concentration camps. What were
Speaker 2: those like, do you have any idea, I mean, was
Speaker 2: it like being in solitary confinement in the United States
Speaker 2: or what would it be like.
Speaker 1: I think it would be along the lines of a
Speaker 1: sort of Japanese and tournament camp in the United States.
Speaker 1: So nothing close to what the Germans had come up with,
Speaker 1: but also not happy lodgings.
Speaker 2: Okay, personality wise, what's the sense that you got from
Speaker 2: her you reading her letters or did she talk about
Speaker 2: anything personal?
Speaker 1: So Eugene Power, who's the guy who wound up working
Speaker 1: for the OSS giving her the call? Right? She was
Speaker 1: at the University of Chicago at the time. Maybe he
Speaker 1: found her in the University of Chicago library where you
Speaker 1: could call a scholar who was working. He said that
Speaker 1: she jumped at the chance to be a spy. He
Speaker 1: said that she had enjoyed reading spy stories when he
Speaker 1: knew her before the war, that she always seemed to
Speaker 1: him to be a fem fatale sort. I hate that price. Look,
Speaker 1: I took that to be in a non sexual way
Speaker 1: and just as a kind of dangerous woman. A dangerous woman. Yes,
Speaker 1: I think the best word for her is resourceful. I mean,
Speaker 1: she had a job hopping from archive to archive across Europe,
Speaker 1: finding rare texts and taking photographs of them for scholars
Speaker 1: who didn't want to make the trip and might not
Speaker 1: be able to get those items. She was very good
Speaker 1: at using what was available to her to get access
Speaker 1: to texts. And also I think that she knew that
Speaker 1: she was the sort of woman who appealed to men
Speaker 1: who think, one that they're attracted to smart women and
Speaker 1: two that they're smarter than the women they're attracted to,
Speaker 1: which is a dangerous combination in a man. Yeah. I
Speaker 1: think that she had been waiting by the phone, you know,
Speaker 1: so to speak, waiting for something, anything, and when she
Speaker 1: got that call, she jumped at the assignment. As he said,
Speaker 1: I think it was grand for her that she was
Speaker 1: going to be a terrible danger at any moment. She
Speaker 1: was very good at her job, and she refused to
Speaker 1: tell her superiors her methods, even though they sent her
Speaker 1: letters begging like just tell me how you're doing this,
Speaker 1: tell me how you're finding this, and she never told them.
Speaker 2: As we wrap up Adele's story, where does her career end?
Speaker 2: Does it end with the end of World War two?
Speaker 2: And she goes back to Chicago and goes back to
Speaker 2: work or what happens to her.
Speaker 1: The end of World War Two. She doesn't get married.
Speaker 1: She goes back to the life that she loved, which
Speaker 1: is traveling around and now free Europe taking photographs of
Speaker 1: rare texts wow, acting as a bibliographic detective. She goes
Speaker 1: back to the life that she loved.
Speaker 2: And she just lives to a ripe old age and
Speaker 2: becomes obscure in history because she was a spy.
Speaker 1: And that's what happens with spies. That's about right now.
Speaker 1: The guy who probably helps to train her in England,
Speaker 1: if she did her training in England, which I think
Speaker 1: she did. Selwyn Jepson. He wrote detective stories after the
Speaker 1: war about female detectives who had trained to be spies
Speaker 1: during the war. You know, I think there's a lot
Speaker 1: of the personalities of the women that he trained in
Speaker 1: his detective stories. I highly recommend reading them as just
Speaker 1: a document of how the women he interacted with sort
Speaker 1: of thought through problems and reasoned morally with things, which
Speaker 1: is much more in the way that a villain who
Speaker 1: is doing good would reason through things than you know,
Speaker 1: some shrinking violet damsel to be rescued.
Speaker 2: Tell me about one of your other main characters Sherman Kent,
Speaker 2: so the description I think is hilarious. A smart mouth
Speaker 2: history professor who rose to become the head of analysis
Speaker 2: all of Europe and Africa, smartmouthed I like that already.
Speaker 1: I like Sherman. I think Sherman Kent was kind of
Speaker 1: a knife too sharp for his sheath. He was a
Speaker 1: history professor at Yale. He could have been a good
Speaker 1: drill sergeant, but he wound up in an Ivy League
Speaker 1: school and maybe he was a little restless there. Right,
Speaker 1: He would throw chalk past the heads of his students
Speaker 1: if they weren't paying attention, which they don't let us
Speaker 1: do anymore. He gets recruited by the OSS at the
Speaker 1: start of the war. He's sent to a spy training school.
Speaker 1: The book has a lot of information about the things
Speaker 1: you learn in spy training schools, and he learns how
Speaker 1: to throw knives, among other things, and he's delighted with this,
Speaker 1: and he learns how to throw daggers better than a
Speaker 1: Sicilian is the phrase that follows him around for the
Speaker 1: rest of his life. He also learned how to fold
Speaker 1: a newspaper to make it into a deadly weapon, which
Speaker 1: later in life he would stop mid conversation and show
Speaker 1: people how to do this. You know, just a man
Speaker 1: who had knives as comfort objects. That's who Sherman Kent was.
Speaker 1: Now Sherman Kent stayed in Washington rather than going abroad.
Speaker 1: He became one of the leaders of research and analysis.
Speaker 1: This group of librarians and professors who are working, as
Speaker 1: I said, in the basement of the Library of Congress,
Speaker 1: among other places, and reading all of these novels, and
Speaker 1: reading these newspapers and reading these industry directories and coming
Speaker 1: up with intelligence guidance for the war effort. I mean,
Speaker 1: like real strategic analysis to tell the war's leaders what
Speaker 1: they should do next, where they should strike, what conditions
Speaker 1: the military will find if it goes ashore in some
Speaker 1: town in North Africa, etc. Et cetera, et cetera. Calculating
Speaker 1: the amount of armor that needs to be put on
Speaker 1: the sides of planes to make sure that they come
Speaker 1: back safely, but don't weigh too much, that sort of thing.
Speaker 1: All of that is within RNA's purview. Sherman Kent comes
Speaker 1: up with as saying that ninety percent of what an
Speaker 1: intelligence agency needs to know it can get from public sources,
Speaker 1: not secret sources, which I think remains true to this day.
Speaker 1: He becomes the head of intelligence analysis all of Europe
Speaker 1: and Africa. But more than that, like I said, RNA,
Speaker 1: the Chairborn Division was something new in the world of intelligence.
Speaker 1: It wasn't normal for military types to be listening to
Speaker 1: tweety professors who were telling them what to do. Part
Speaker 1: of Sherman Kent's job was to speak on behalf of
Speaker 1: those tweety professors to the military, to speak to generals
Speaker 1: in their own language. And this is something that Sherman
Speaker 1: Kent could do better than anybody else, because among his
Speaker 1: other attributes, he was a man of superb and outrageous
Speaker 1: profanity who was prepared to go sort of toe to
Speaker 1: toe in terms of inventiveness of speech with any general
Speaker 1: that he might talk to. All of the insights of
Speaker 1: the professors would have been nothing if Sherman Kent hadn't
Speaker 1: been there to talk on their behalf, and he did.
Speaker 1: That's amazing, you know.
Speaker 2: I think about one of my books, American Sherlock, which
Speaker 2: was about a forensic scientist who could not figure out
Speaker 2: how to talk to juries who oftentimes you know, had
Speaker 2: very little, no education, and he for a very long time,
Speaker 2: tried to use three syllable words and was very scientific,
Speaker 2: and he kept losing cases because people didn't understand what
Speaker 2: he was talking about. Sherman reminds me of maybe the
Speaker 2: interpreter that Oscar Heinrich needed to really simplify it, and
Speaker 2: finally Heinrich got it. But Sherman, it sounds like it
Speaker 2: was just tailor made to be the person to disseminate
Speaker 2: this information. And that was my question is maybe this
Speaker 2: sounds silly, but did all of the military leaders take
Speaker 2: this seriously? I mean, did they really make big decisions,
Speaker 2: life changing decisions based on what these geeks in the
Speaker 2: basement of the Library of Congress were really saying. Did
Speaker 2: they ever question their logic that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, there was. It took time for them to come
Speaker 1: around to it. But the you know, the outcomes of
Speaker 1: the research of ur and A turned out to be undeniable.
Speaker 1: So RNA's first sort of big test was the invasion
Speaker 1: of North Africa. You know, their insights, their data, their
Speaker 1: strategic guidance was used to plan the invasion, which went
Speaker 1: way way better than the best projects of anybody who
Speaker 1: was helping with that. And so you know, they passed
Speaker 1: that test. Now, it was a big test, and it
Speaker 1: had all of the elements of kind of a test
Speaker 1: in school in the sense that they were you know,
Speaker 1: you had people who were doing the reading. You had
Speaker 1: all night study sessions where these you know, sort of
Speaker 1: binders of material were being put together by people who
Speaker 1: I'll say it again, they were locked in the basement
Speaker 1: of the Library of Congress, not allowed out until they
Speaker 1: had successfully invaded North Africa because the military was afraid
Speaker 1: that they might give away some detail of the invasion
Speaker 1: if they were allowed to go home. I don't know
Speaker 1: if you've been in the basement of the Library of Congress,
Speaker 1: but nope, it's this huge labyrinth. It's this extraordinary place.
Speaker 1: I think there might be people from World War two
Speaker 1: still wandering around in there, you know, they just haven't
Speaker 1: found their way to the doors back out. But anyway,
Speaker 1: so there were all night study sessions and then there
Speaker 1: was the final exam and they aced this thing. Right.
Speaker 1: That was really the turning points not just for the war,
Speaker 1: but a turning point for R and A as well,
Speaker 1: because they had proven how effective they were. After that,
Speaker 1: they were taken much more seriously by the military.
Speaker 2: If I understand sort of the way that this works,
Speaker 2: and I barely do. It is that the Shermans of
Speaker 2: the world were requesting documents from the Adeles of the world.
Speaker 1: Is that the simplified way this goes. That's about right, yes.
Speaker 1: And Sherman was doing some detective work of his own
Speaker 1: back in Washington, like he knew the kind of information
Speaker 1: that they would need in order to do strategic planning,
Speaker 1: and the question was where am I going to get
Speaker 1: that information? Not always from Adele. There was one instance where,
Speaker 1: you know, the smallest things could make a difference. They
Speaker 1: needed to know something about railroads in North Africa. They
Speaker 1: needed to know about railroads in North Africa in the
Speaker 1: most detailed possible way. And the best way for me
Speaker 1: to explain why this sort of thing should be important
Speaker 1: is to point out that during the Normandy invasion, the
Speaker 1: Germans could very easily have come over to the Normandy
Speaker 1: coast and wiped out the Allies and what was already
Speaker 1: a very difficult landing. And one of the reasons that
Speaker 1: they didn't was because, in the hours after the Normandy
Speaker 1: invasion had started, a code phrase went out over French
Speaker 1: radio and French members of the resistance civilians went out
Speaker 1: and over the next few hours destroyed more than nine
Speaker 1: hundred sections of railroad personally so that the German reinforcements
Speaker 1: couldn't derive. Knowing where railroad sidings are what you can
Speaker 1: do in order to damage them permanently or temporarily, where
Speaker 1: the different railroads lead, you know, in order to stop
Speaker 1: a division from coming from this direction or another direction.
Speaker 1: That can be really important in wartime or if you're
Speaker 1: making a landing. Knowing which railroads you need to destroy
Speaker 1: in order to prevent German reinforcements from finding you or
Speaker 1: protect so that you can go to another city. This
Speaker 1: is all very important, but especially in the era before
Speaker 1: the Internet. Knowing in really good detail about every railroad
Speaker 1: siding in North Africa, you can understand how that would
Speaker 1: be difficult. It happened that Sherman Kent's a friend of
Speaker 1: his told him that a Moroccan railway engineer was visiting
Speaker 1: him and would he like to come and talk to him.
Speaker 1: So Kent, you know, he got dressed up in his
Speaker 1: tweed and his bow tie, and you know he came over,
Speaker 1: puffing his pipe and said, oh, I'm beguale professor, I'm
Speaker 1: kind of interested in North Africa for non intelligence reasons.
Speaker 1: Can I ask you a few questions about the railroad
Speaker 1: sidings in Morocco just to clarify, just to clarify if
Speaker 1: it's not intelligence.
Speaker 2: At all, Yes, it's not spycraft at all, I promise, okay.
Speaker 1: And as Kent said at his memoir, instead of dropping
Speaker 1: dead at the mention of so sensitive a subject, the
Speaker 1: guy actually gave not only gave him all the information
Speaker 1: that he needed, but Kent became so bold as to
Speaker 1: bring out like this questionnaire that he had put in
Speaker 1: his bag, and the guy just filled out, you know,
Speaker 1: kind of this comprehensive information on Moroccan railroads. And Kent
Speaker 1: immediately immediately went to his office it was about ten
Speaker 1: PM by then, and called a general and said, I
Speaker 1: have this information about Moroccan railroads. And the general said,
Speaker 1: I expect for you to get that information desk before sunrise.
Speaker 1: So no sleep for Sherman Ken that night. But that
Speaker 1: was how vital the information turned out to be. So
Speaker 1: there were people who were kind of or you had
Speaker 1: members of R and A who were kind of taking
Speaker 1: measurements at railway stations around Washington in the middle of
Speaker 1: the winter because they were trying to figure something out
Speaker 1: about the way that the metal would expand or contract
Speaker 1: in the Russian winter. I bore you with all of
Speaker 1: this stuff, but nothing is insignificant in the end, no
Speaker 1: detail is unimportant. You're not just dropping these bombs on
Speaker 1: top of people. There are so many other ways to
Speaker 1: win a war, and better ways. I mean, look, bombing
Speaker 1: is one thing, but the real you know, the real
Speaker 1: coup is if you can get people on the ground
Speaker 1: to do sabotage. Because if you bomb a factory, you've
Speaker 1: just damaged the roof. Most of the time. You want
Speaker 1: to damage the machines, and furthermore, you want to damage
Speaker 1: the most important machines, and furthermore, you want to damage
Speaker 1: them in a specific way that makes them hard to repair.
Speaker 1: So the real trick was getting people who were factory
Speaker 1: workers in Norway to carry pocketfuls of sand into factories
Speaker 1: and destroy them in a very specific way that was
Speaker 1: laid out by engineers working for the Allies, and in
Speaker 1: a way that they had plausible deniability. I didn't do
Speaker 1: that to the machine. It works, just got gunked up.
Speaker 1: Don't know what to do, mister, mister Haraguy in charge.
Speaker 2: Now you mentioned a memoir, and that was going to
Speaker 2: be a question, how do we know so much about
Speaker 2: Sherman because we know Adele didn't have a memoir, she
Speaker 2: had letters and stuff. So was this a braggert on
Speaker 2: the page? Essentially? Was this a vanity project for him?
Speaker 1: Well, he did write a memoir. It didn't get published,
Speaker 1: although the unpublished memoirs are in his papers at the
Speaker 1: Yale University Library, and it's a thrilling read. Okay. He
Speaker 1: wound up going into the CIA after the war, and
Speaker 1: he became actually a very important person in the history
Speaker 1: of what we call sort of intelligence studies. He set
Speaker 1: it up as something like an academic subject, the same
Speaker 1: way that art history is a subject or the history
Speaker 1: of the book. He really wanted to make the CIA
Speaker 1: to make sure that its methods, the comprehensiveness, the objectivity
Speaker 1: of methods of academic analysis. He set up the CIA's
Speaker 1: in house journal, Studies in Intelligence. All of which is
Speaker 1: to say that when you are at academic and you
Speaker 1: reach the end of your career, you have what's known
Speaker 1: as fest shrifts written about you. People write papers in praise,
Speaker 1: you know, in praise of you or in your honor,
Speaker 1: and put them together in a book that's not really
Speaker 1: done anymore. I'm just trying to describe the flavor of
Speaker 1: the time. I was wondering if you and I were
Speaker 1: going to be up for that. I guess not. You're
Speaker 1: not going to be in fest shrifts now, But that
Speaker 1: used to be a thing, and you would, you would
Speaker 1: write a memoir, you know, And he wrote a memoir.
Speaker 1: It is, as I said, very interesting reading. But he
Speaker 1: was such a character that lots of people wrote about him,
Speaker 1: you know, his eternal quid of chewing tobacco, his red suspenders,
Speaker 1: his outrageous language, his facility with throwing knives. I mean,
Speaker 1: he really was kind of a one of a kind
Speaker 1: character who fit absolutely perfectly into the of the OSS
Speaker 1: during the war and helped to guide the CIA in
Speaker 1: the decades afterward.
Speaker 2: And like Adele, I'm assuming lived a ripe old age
Speaker 2: and was not poisoned by cyanide and his coffee at
Speaker 2: some point.
Speaker 1: That's right, he wasn't poisoned by cyanide. He lived to
Speaker 1: a ripe old age. You know. He was one of
Speaker 1: the editors I think of studies at Intelligence, and he
Speaker 1: loves to gore the subpar work of people who sent
Speaker 1: in bad articles. He tried to go back to He
Speaker 1: tried to go back to Yale after the war, and
Speaker 1: I think that it just bored him. You know, he
Speaker 1: had just been helping to run a war. He had
Speaker 1: been helping to run a spy you know agency, he
Speaker 1: had been a spy master. And then he goes back
Speaker 1: to Yale and the kids still aren't doing the reading,
Speaker 1: but they're not even in positions of enough authority to
Speaker 1: make the fact that they're ignorant interesting. So he turns
Speaker 1: around and goes to the CIA. But he does one
Speaker 1: thing after the war that was kind of a mistake
Speaker 1: that's interesting, which is he wanted to prove what he'd
Speaker 1: always been saying, which is that ninety percent of what
Speaker 1: an intelligence agency needs to know it can get from
Speaker 1: public sources, not secret sources, as long as you do
Speaker 1: what nobody else does and do the reading. So he
Speaker 1: got a group of history professors at Yale to spend
Speaker 1: the summer in Yale's library reading through public documents like
Speaker 1: newspapers and coming up with the answers to all of
Speaker 1: these US military secrets. And they succeeded, and they put
Speaker 1: together a report and they gave it to the OSS
Speaker 1: and it somehow got into the hands of Congress and
Speaker 1: then into the hands of the President, and everybody was
Speaker 1: very upset because they thought that it proved the Yale professors.
Speaker 1: He told the Yale professors to pretend they were working
Speaker 1: for Russia. So when they put together this report, it
Speaker 1: looked like they were putting it together for Russia. Oh gosh, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: That wasn't You're right, that is underline not smart. So
Speaker 1: you know, so, oh, Yale professors are working for the Russians,
Speaker 1: and you know, there was a big scandal, and everybody
Speaker 1: got in a lot of trouble, and a CIA operative
Speaker 1: showed up at the Yale Library and tried to confiscate
Speaker 1: the library's entire contents.
Speaker 2: Was this the Red Scare like McCarthy era? I hope not,
Speaker 2: for his sake. That's not when this happened.
Speaker 1: I think it was a little before then. But they
Speaker 1: tried to confiscate the library's entire contents. He was persuaded
Speaker 1: to only take the papers of the historians involved, but
Speaker 1: Kent did prove that he was right.
Speaker 2: The historians did succeed, So well, there you go. He's
Speaker 2: luck he didn't get thrown in jail or worse. Yeah, okay,
Speaker 2: do we want to tell me a little bit about
Speaker 2: Joseph Curtis, you know, just like the short notes on him,
Speaker 2: because I know he was a significant character for you.
Speaker 1: Also, Joseph Curtis a Yale professor. Again, look, Yale is
Speaker 1: a very sneaky and secretive place, and it produces a
Speaker 1: lot of spies. Apparently, I can't change that. That's just
Speaker 1: a historical fact. So he was studying early modern literature
Speaker 1: at Yale. He was a professor. He'd gone to Yale undergrad,
Speaker 1: then Yale for grad school, then become a professor there.
Speaker 1: Very much a hot house flower, you know what I mean.
Speaker 1: He had a very safe, very cozy, little life of letters.
Speaker 2: I've never heard that analogy before. A hot house flower.
Speaker 1: A hothouse flower. He had grown up in a greenhouse,
Speaker 1: you know, he had always been protected and oh got it.
Speaker 1: And then he was pulled out of that world, trained
Speaker 1: as a spy and thrown into wartime Istanbul where he
Speaker 1: was given the job of tracking down German spies and
Speaker 1: turning them into double agents. So it was very much
Speaker 1: a sink or swim situation for him, and remarkably he
Speaker 1: turned out to be good at his job. He turned
Speaker 1: out to be so good at his job that he
Speaker 1: had a non trivial effect on the outcome of the
Speaker 1: Norman dy invasion. And he was a literature professor right well.
Speaker 1: So one of the conceits of the book is something
Speaker 1: that that advisors do tell to PhD students, which is,
Speaker 1: your dissertation is an autobiography. There's something about what you
Speaker 1: choose as the subject for your dissertation that says something
Speaker 1: about you, or it's a question that you're trying to
Speaker 1: figure out the answer to a as a person, because
Speaker 1: it has something to do with your own nature, your
Speaker 1: own character. Joseph Curtis wrote his dissertation about astrologers in
Speaker 1: the early modern period, and his conceit, and I think
Speaker 1: he was correct, is that astrologers were really detectives. That
Speaker 1: was the role that they performed in society. They found
Speaker 1: out the answers to questions, they found missing objects. People
Speaker 1: came in and said, you know, is my wife plotting
Speaker 1: to kill me? You know? Or am I going to
Speaker 1: become a widow anytime soon? Those are not suspicious questions
Speaker 1: at all. If somebody had blackmail information about someone else,
Speaker 1: you'd go to the astrologer to kind of get the
Speaker 1: black mail documents back. So he was talking about, you know,
Speaker 1: the life of a bibliographic detective, of a kind of
Speaker 1: scholar who solved mysteries but also was in touch with
Speaker 1: something like real magic. Not that he thought that astrologers
Speaker 1: were working with real magic, but they surrounded themselves with
Speaker 1: the symbols of magic. They had brazen heads that were
Speaker 1: said to talk to you know, to give oracular advice,
Speaker 1: and they wore velvet caps and you know capes, and
Speaker 1: you know, we're said to summon angels or devils. You know,
Speaker 1: I think this was kind of the perfect life of
Speaker 1: a scholar to have this kind of drama together with
Speaker 1: all of your books. And he got to live that life.
Speaker 1: He went to wartime Istanbul. He worked in what was
Speaker 1: called Double Cross, which was the counter espionage section of
Speaker 1: the OSS. He was tracking down German spies, turning them
Speaker 1: into double agents. He was involved look in Sweden. Sweden
Speaker 1: could stay neutral because it had made an agreement with
Speaker 1: the warring countries that no spies would operate in Sweden.
Speaker 1: That's why Kaiber had to operate undercover. But Istanbul was
Speaker 1: neutral because Turkey had made a deal with the warring
Speaker 1: countries that it could remain neutral if everybody's spies operated
Speaker 1: in Turkey openly. There were seventeen different intelligence agencies operating
Speaker 1: in Istanbul. Everybody in that world was presumed to be
Speaker 1: a spy. You had hundreds of people working as professional whisperers.
Speaker 1: There's a section on whispering in the book, which is
Speaker 1: a very specific way that you spread rumors. Right, you
Speaker 1: have to be trained to do it. You were not
Speaker 1: allowed to spread rumors or whisper unless you had been
Speaker 1: trained to do it, and the rules for whispering are
Speaker 1: in the book. But in this world he was so
Speaker 1: successful as kind of one of the leading figures in
Speaker 1: the oss branch, nobody suspected him of being a spy,
Speaker 1: despite the fact that everybody was presumed to be a spy.
Speaker 1: He had a cover story as a professor. He was
Speaker 1: also supposedly a book collector, just innocently collecting books for
Speaker 1: Yale's library, but in fact he was doing something totally different.
Speaker 1: And even though his students would you know, the student
Speaker 1: at the university that he taught classes at, would make
Speaker 1: jokes about which of their professors had put another body
Speaker 1: in the Bosphorus this week. You know that they said, oh,
Speaker 1: all of our professors are spies too. They not only
Speaker 1: didn't think he was a spy, but they didn't remember
Speaker 1: him afterward. There was a CIA head once who said
Speaker 1: a spy is the sort of person who can't get
Speaker 1: a waiter's attention in a restaurant. And that was Joseph Curtis.
Speaker 1: You know, he was just unmemorable, even though he had
Speaker 1: very secretly, you know, a very adventurous heart. You know,
Speaker 1: I find serial killers to be the same way.
Speaker 2: Every serial killer I've ever written about is sort of
Speaker 2: like kind of disappears into the wallpaper, is the way
Speaker 2: they're described, that sort of a seemingly innocuous, you know,
Speaker 2: anonymous person who you would never suspect of anything.
Speaker 1: Maybe that's the success ones. Maybe the ones who don't
Speaker 1: disappear into the wallpaper are caught after just one murder
Speaker 1: and they don't get to be a serial killer. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it could be.
Speaker 2: How does one turn a German spy into a double agent?
Speaker 2: That can't be easy. He must have been very persuasive
Speaker 2: or what. There are all kinds of methods that you
Speaker 2: could use. I don't have any of them to hand.
Speaker 1: Half of the trouble is tracking them down, and then
Speaker 1: you figure out whether you want to turn them into
Speaker 1: a double agent, whether it would be better to convince
Speaker 1: them to defect, because defections can have an effect on morale.
Speaker 1: It's a very dangerous and very necessary area of spycraft.
Speaker 1: But the real trick with double cross is this, to
Speaker 1: the extent possible, you do not want to destroy the
Speaker 1: enemy's intelligence service. You want to keep the enemy's intelligence
Speaker 1: service and their intelligence networks in place and get them
Speaker 1: all working for you. So you convince them that you
Speaker 1: guys are going to win and that you will give
Speaker 1: them a break after you win. You convince them that
Speaker 1: they're going to get a little bit more money, you know,
Speaker 1: if they work for you.
Speaker 2: Timing is probably very important too. I mean, the closer
Speaker 2: you get to the end of the war and it
Speaker 2: looks like the Germans are not going to do well,
Speaker 2: it's probably easier to convince people to switch sides.
Speaker 1: Oh. Absolutely, people were positively, you know, jumping at the
Speaker 1: chance to not be seen to be a Nazi toward
Speaker 1: the end of the war. And people were so ashamed
Speaker 1: after the war in Germany of what they had done
Speaker 1: that there was a huge, huge wave of suicides by
Speaker 1: Germans at the end of the war, just all kinds
Speaker 1: of suicide. It was tragic because parents would do it
Speaker 1: to their children, they would have families died together. So,
Speaker 1: you know, the Nazis wound up being their own victims. Yeah.
Speaker 2: Kind of to wrap this up, when we go back
Speaker 2: to the geeky academics, and I say that freely because
Speaker 2: I am one of those, and so are you, why
Speaker 2: do you think they didn't get their due? Why aren't
Speaker 2: there just one thousands of books written about them, like
Speaker 2: the books of you know, the spies that worked all
Speaker 2: the way back. I mean, there's a wonderful book Alexander
Speaker 2: Rose wrote about Washington spies. You know, we know all
Speaker 2: TV series, we know things that have happened. Is it
Speaker 2: because they are locked away in the Library of Congress
Speaker 2: and they don't have like exploding bombs in their back pockets?
Speaker 1: Or you know, why don't we know more about these people?
Speaker 1: I think that one of the elements is this that
Speaker 1: we're accustomed to a kind of spy story that has,
Speaker 1: you know, a guy wearing a tuxedo looks amazing Henry
Speaker 1: Cavill type running across rooftops with a gun in one hand.
Speaker 1: And that's not really how most spycraft takes place. Now
Speaker 1: for you and me, there's a real romance to the
Speaker 1: world of books, right. We understand that scholars love gossips.
Speaker 1: They love to read old letters for a reason because
Speaker 1: the old letters are full of secrets. We love stabbing
Speaker 1: each other in the back, we love subterfuge. I don't
Speaker 1: do that just for the record listeners, but we can
Speaker 1: understand very easily how the things that these professors and
Speaker 1: librarians did could fit very easily into the world of spycraft.
Speaker 1: But that might not, you know, but you need to
Speaker 1: sort of love books first and understand that librarians are
Speaker 1: real information workers and how easily that fits into the
Speaker 1: world of intelligence to be able to spin up, maybe
Speaker 1: in your head, a kind of plot that fits with
Speaker 1: the real life plots that these guys were living out.
Speaker 1: One way that I've thought about how the librarians and
Speaker 1: professors fit into the war is this, when a crisis comes,
Speaker 1: then you fall back on your training. What you have
Speaker 1: is what you bring to the war. So the English
Speaker 1: had these spy training schools that were incredibly posh. They
Speaker 1: were these country manners and at housemasters and servants and
Speaker 1: that sort of thing. Because they were English, that's what
Speaker 1: they knew, so that's what they fell back on. The
Speaker 1: Americans trained their spies in these muddy camps with tents
Speaker 1: in national parks where they were teaching people how to
Speaker 1: do quick draws like cowboys because they were Americans, so
Speaker 1: of course they trained like cowboys. The Norwegians were out
Speaker 1: there on skis. The French resistance robed liquor stores, drank
Speaker 1: the wine and then turned the empty wine bottles into
Speaker 1: moloktov cocktails. Because they're French. They fought as the French
Speaker 1: do now. The librarians, when the war came, also fell
Speaker 1: back on their training, and it turned out to be
Speaker 1: unexpectedly exactly what modern intelligence needed. These guys have been
Speaker 1: training to be spies to work in intelligence for all
Speaker 1: of their lives, and they never knew. Then the war came.
Speaker 1: They were recruited into spycraft and it was like, my god,
Speaker 1: I can swim, like I can do this. I've been
Speaker 1: practicing my whole life. That's incredible. It would be great
Speaker 1: to see more more spy stories about that element. Partly
Speaker 1: because I'm a great lover of dark academia and love
Speaker 1: to see it wherever I can. But also because this
Speaker 1: is a story that teaches us that libraries themselves are important,
Speaker 1: you know, not just as centers of education, not just
Speaker 1: as centers of community, but as places that train the
Speaker 1: very readers who become valuable intelligence agents later on, and
Speaker 1: as centers that are essential to national security. The value
Speaker 1: of the humanities, the value of the social sciences, that's
Speaker 1: something that is back under debate, and it's a shame
Speaker 1: that it is because the humanities teach us, among other things,
Speaker 1: to work with data that has a lot of holes
Speaker 1: in it, data that is ambiguous, and that's kind of
Speaker 1: the data that you have to work with, for example,
Speaker 1: in a wartime situation. Wars aren't controlled experiments. That's why
Speaker 1: the humanists turned out to be so good at wartime analysis.
Speaker 1: They were used to working with the kinds of data
Speaker 1: that you find yourself dealing with in warfare.
Speaker 2: If you love historical true crime stories, check out the
Speaker 2: audio versions of my books The Ghost Club, All That
Speaker 2: Is Wicked, and American Sherlock, and Don't Forget There are
Speaker 2: twelve seasons of my historical true crime podcast Tenfold More
Speaker 2: Wicked right here in this podcast feed, scroll back and
Speaker 2: give them a listen if you haven't already. This has
Speaker 2: been an exactly right production. Our senior producer is Alexis M. Morosi.
Speaker 2: Our associate producer is Christina Chamberlain. This episode was mixed
Speaker 2: by John Bradley. Curtis Heath is our composer. Artwork by
Speaker 2: Nick Tooga. Executive produced by Georgia Hardstark, Karen Kilgariff, and
Speaker 2: Danielle Kramer. Follow Wicked Words on Instagram at tenfold more Wicked,
Speaker 2: and on Facebook at Wicked Words Pod