February 6, 2025, 10:48am
In her new book, Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, scholar Elyse Graham explores the secret history of U.S. intelligence and lays out yet another reason why you should thank a librarian today: their top-tier spywork.
The nascent Central Intelligence Agency—then called the Office of Strategic Services (OSS)—had a lot of high profile help during World War II. Actors like Marlene Dietrich, Cary Grant, and Josephine Baker worked their connections to gain information for the Allies, ferret intel through Vichy, and tamper with German morale.
Ian Fleming, author of the Bond books, pioneered the nutty Operation MINCEMEAT while serving with MI-5. And Julia Child, who you may know better for her butter addiction, helped develop a recipe for shark repellent in her first life at the OSS.
But the intelligence game didn’t start so glamorous. Well before the organization got into fancy “operations,” an initial fleet of motley pencil-pushers were tasked with analyzing raw data. And as Graham’s book shows—and contra to Hollywood’s determined interventions—this kind of spy work was generally low octane. More puzzle-solving, less planting of bombs.
In a New Republic review of Book and Dagger, Greg Barnhisel observes that “humanists and their comma-hunting, cross-referencing, collecting, and cataloging ways” were especially suited to this kind of spying. Which is why the OSS sought out “librarians, archivists, mathematicians, and anthropologists” to do its first dirty work.
These were the so-called “chairborne,” of the Research and Analysis division. Hitler called them the Tintenritter, or “ink knights.”
*
Graham’s book follows a mess of hidden-in-the-stacks figures but focuses on a triptych of ink knights: the Yale English professor Joseph Curtiss, the University of Chicago classicist, Adele Kibre, and the Yale historian Sherman Kent. All three scholars had a special knack for finding the value in “information that others dismissed or ignored.”
For instance, the fascinating Adele Kibre—a reformed actress who held a Ph.D. in medieval literature—went to Stockholm on an OSS fact-finding mission in 1942. There she drummed up “photographs of underground newspapers…technical manuals…government statistics” and evidence “of air raids in Estonia and sabotage by the Resistance in Denmark,” among other classified files. Her document-gathering skills were so legendary that she frustrated superiors.
But in another history, Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers, and Spies Banded Together in World War II Europe, scholar Kathy Peiss wonders if her genius was really so rare. Here’s Graham again, writing in a 2021 piece for Public Books.
“…[Kibre] made herself a favored customer at local bookstores, made friends with local scholars, and obtained borrowing privileges from lenders that included Sweden’s Royal Institute of Technology, a civil statistics office, and a medical-school library. She subscribed to a lot of newspapers.”
What’s stronger than the sword? Apparently a humble aspect, a high tolerance for cocktail party talk, and a library card.
*
Pull the thread and it unravels. Back in the day, the intelligence community was riddled with careful readers. Maria Josepha Mayer, a cataloger, worked out of the Library of Congress in France gathering banned books “before the occupying German forces could seize them.” She reported to a poet: Archibald MacLeish.
Norman Holmes Pearson, a “tweedy” Hawthorne scholar, wound up starting the X-2 counterintelligence branch—because as Barnhisel has it, “analyzing ink and paper stock to determine whether an intercepted letter is real or a plant isn’t all that different from assessing which of several drafts of a Hawthorne story was the author’s final one.”
Historian Sherman Kent turned his “analytic doctrine and practice” to a sleek kind of project management. At the OSS, he had a reputation for “cajoling egotistic professors to work as teams.” And Joseph Curtiss pioneered a mission that was just called The Library Project.
Barnhisel, who is the author of two related histories, Cold War Modernists: Art, Literature, and American Cultural Diplomacy and Code Name Puritan, claims that the ink knights’ “pivotal contributions” could well have won the Allies the war. Not least because humanist thinkers “proved far more agile and able to process and react to contradictory information than the conformist, closed system the Nazis built.” Graham goes even further, writing “the war may have been fought on battlefields, but it was won in libraries.” I spy a vote for the liberal arts.
But also in the chairborne’s stacks, we find a portable mandate for today’s scholars. If you’re reading this, I bet you’re a comma-hunting card carrier, with interpretive gifts of your own. And in a world that runs on cruel chaos, one thing we can do is keep our heads.
Image via
