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The History of Literature
668 Book and Dagger - The Scholars and Librarians Who Became Spies and Fought the Nazis (with Elyse Graham) | Jane Austen Turns 250
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- [00:02]
Jack Wilson
The History of Literature Podcast is a member of the podglomerate Network and Lit Hub Radio.
- [00:09]
Nadia Yada
Welcome to Nadia Yada island, next on Nadia Yada Island.
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Sarah Elmsley
I knew I deserved so much more, so I left.
- [00:18]
Jack Wilson
I finally switched to Metro and got what I was looking for.
- [00:22]
Nadia Yada
Get one line for only $25 a month with autopay. Just bring your phone to Metro and experience all the data you want on the largest 5G network. That's nada. Yada yad. Only at Metro by T Mobile. First month is $30. Bring your number and ID offer not available if with T Mobile with Metro in the past 180 days.
- [00:40]
Jack Wilson
Hello. Jane Austen turns 250 years old this year. Happy birthday Queen. And what happened when some of the most bookish people on the planet entered a world of espionage? Could that be you? Someday, dear listener. That's all coming up today on the History of Literature. Hello everyone. Welcome to the podcast. I'm Jack Wilson. Happy 2025 for all who celebrate. Does anyone not celebrate a new year or recognize it at least? If you're stuck in the past, come and join us, my friends. We've all crossed over and it's not bad on this side of the calendar. One good piece of news over here in 2025 is that Jane Austen turns 250 this year. A nice round number I can remember when she was just a wee Lass of 225. So what does this mean? Hopefully it means we'll get a lot of books about Ms. Austin coming out this year and that means new guests with new ideas and new things to share with History of Literature podcast listeners. Shakespeare's First Folio anniversary. Turning 400 brought a lot of that, if you recall. We'll see how this all shakes out for the beloved Jane Austen and her fans. In the meantime, we are getting some think pieces and some planning. Here's a taste of what's coming up. Canterbury Classics is hosting a reading challenge. Attention Janeites, they say in all caps, read all six this year in honor of the birthday. And there will be some Jane inspired activities too. They haven't announced these activities yet, I don't think, but they've given a preview on their Instagram account. Try your hand at some needlework is one of them. I might have to tell my dad about that one. My dad, before he retired from teaching high school, which he did for over 35 years and never missed a day of class, not a single day. He was the iron man of his school district. My sister and I were worried with someone with that much commitment to teaching. We were worried when he was approaching retirement.
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Elise Graham
We were worried about what he would.
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Jack Wilson
Do, how would he spend his time. We had all these ideas for classes he could take and trips he could go on, different things to different ways to stay busy. And he said, well, I'm not worried about that. And we said, well, what do you mean? What are you going to do? And he said, well, I'll focus on my hobbies. I remember my sister saying, hobbies? You don't have any hobbies. What hobbies? She wailed. And he said, oh, sure, of course I have hobbies. What hobbies are those? And he said calmly, oh, leather work. Leather work. He's never done leather work in his life, as far as I know. Putting on his belt, maybe that's about his clothes and putting on his shoes. Although I don't know if his belt is actual genuine leather. Maybe back or if he even wears a belt. Some of his shoes are probably leather. Maybe back when he was a Scout he did some leather work. He was an Eagle Scout back there in Wisconsin. Anyway, turns out he's kept quite busy in his retirement. Running errands, playing some golf when his shoulders feeling okay, generally enjoying life. Maybe needlework could give him a little boost. Okay. Also on the list of the Jane inspired activities as presented by the Canterbury Classics Instagram account is our Read a nonfiction book about Jane. That's a good idea. Plan a summer picnic and shop for a Regency romance at a local bookstore. All good ideas. Writer and editor Sarah Elmsley was on to this 250th all the way back in 2022. Jane Austen's 250 birthday. 250th birthday is December 16th, 2025, she wrote. And I'm thinking about throwing a party sometime that year. Would you like to celebrate with me? Sarah Elmsley has a track record of this. She celebrated L.M. montgomery's 150th birthday when that came about. And on December 16th of last year, she celebrated Jane's 249th birthday. In 2022, she celebrated Jane's 247th birthday. And in 2023, nothing that I could find. Screw you, Jane Austen. 248. Ho hum. Who cares? 247, 249 and 250 are the big ones, apparently. I wonder if Jane Austen noticed that snub that Sarah Elmsley Superfan forgot her 248th birthday. Kind of like Molly Ringwald in Sixteen Candles. And maybe then Jane moped around a bit before finally going out and finding some dashing young man to occupy her attention. Just like Molly Ringwald. And of course, now that I think of it, Sarah Elmsley probably knew that this would happen. And like John Hughes or God or a master puppeteer, maybe she orchestrated the whole thing. With omniscience omnipotence, we can look forward to a new Jane Austen novel, Experts and expectations sometime soon. Strictly Jane Austen Tours is ready for the semi quincentennial. Oh, how we are positively aflutter with excitement, they say. Here at Bath's most ostentatious travel company. Austentatious. Well, you can guess how that was spelled. A, U, S, T, et cetera. They are brewing up a delightful storm of plans, they say. Austin themed tea parties and costume balls, shopping, social dances, taking the waters and oh gentlemen, Gentleman, Dear listeners, those of you who are gentlemen would be Darcy's if you are a single man in possession of a good fortune and you happen to be in want of a wife, I would recommend checking out one of these Strictly Jane Austen Tours. The female to male ratio must be something like 2 to 1 or 50 to 1000 to 1. The ratio might be infinity. To you, Mr. Darcy. Be dashing, be courteous, be kind. Library Thing, an online forum for readers, has a post where readers have been discussing their plans for the 250th. Anisha Inkspill kicked things off by giving her plans. She's going to read all six books this year, and she's currently listening to an abridged adaptation of Emma. Martha Jean says I'll probably continue through my boxed set of the BBC adaptations while ironing. Not sure if that was meant to be ironic. No pun intended. Anisha Inkspell also noted she replied that she also had some movies and box sets lined up and some other Jane Austen books, including Clare Tomalin's biography Jane Austen A Life and a Memoir, A Memoir of Jane Austen and Other Family Recollections by James Edward Austen. Leigh Lilith Cat chimed in to say Bitch in a Bonnet with a link to a book called Bitch in a Bonnet Reclaiming Jane Austen from the Stiffs, the Snobs, the Simps and the Saps by Robert Rhodey, author of the Sugarman Bootlegs and Fag Hags. Bitch in a Bonnet is of course not to be confused with Sarah J. Makowski's book Bitches in Bonnets, Life Lessons from Jane Austen's Mean Girls. And so we head into 2025, steaming toward the great birthday of a very great writer, doing our best to honor her. I suppose we'll have a few podcast eps ourselves. That Bonnet Wearing Bitch. I can't. Who wrote this script? She deserves it. Why do we have to call her that? My goodness. I can't believe there are two books with that title. That Bonnet Wearing Genius. That's my take. Genius in a Bonnet. Which is why I don't have a book deal. I suppose Genius in a Bonnet doesn't have that kind of catchiness to it. Genius in Jeans would be catchy. If only Jane Austen would have worn more denim, I'd have been in business. Moving on. Speaking of book lovers, Elise Graham has found a great historical niche to explore. A nook and cranny, let us say. Somewhere dim and quiet, surrounded by high shelves filled with dusty old tomes. The scholars and librarians of the 1940s who were called into action by a country, the United States, that was squaring off against the Nazis, but did not have an intelligence agency. So where did the leaders look for intelligence? They looked for it in intelligent people. Imagine that. Not soldiers trained in the dark arts of espionage, but outside the military to subject matter experts. People who knew things or knew how to pull information from books. Could that have been you, dear listener? I'm assuming that you are a book lover as well. Could you have have signed up for this? Could you have gone through the training, done the travel, and executed some dangerous ops? Elise Graham is here to explain what happened to the quiet and unassuming when this happened to them. We'll have that story after this.
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Sarah Elmsley
What's the best time of day to get a deal? All day with Jack in the box's all day. Big deal meal. You get to choose from four entrees like the supreme croissant and five tasty sides, plus a drink starting at $5. So hurry in or take your time. You've got all day at Jack. Every bite's a big deal.
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Elise Graham
Okay. Joining me now is Elise Graham, who is a historian and professor at Stony Brook University, a flagship university in the SUNY system. She holds degrees from Princeton, Yale, and MIT and has learned how scholars whisper, speak, scheme, launder information and guard secrets. How delicious. She's here today to discuss her new book.
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Jack Wilson
Book.
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Elise Graham
And how scholars and librarians became the unlikely spies of World War II. Elyse Graham, welcome to the History of Literature.
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Amelia Posanza
It's a pleasure to be here.
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Elise Graham
So your book begins with an incredible quotation that I thought I would repeat just to kick things off here. It says, Mr. Roosevelt called me to Washington and asked me to draft a plan for a new intelligence service. Cut to fit global war, you will.
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Jack Wilson
Have to begin with nothing.
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Elise Graham
He said, in effect, we have no intelligence service. And that was in the late summer of 1941. So the world was already at war. America was on the verge of entering the war, and we had no intelligence service. That was a quote from General William Donovan. So let's start there.
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Jack Wilson
What did he do next?
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Elise Graham
And we'll get into the OSS and.
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Jack Wilson
What exactly that was.
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Amelia Posanza
So, yeah. In July of 1941, Roosevelt appointed William Donovan, who was a Wall street lawyer, to take charge of starting up a new intelligence service. The United States didn't have a standing intelligence service at the start of the war. Donovan's great innovation was he realized we couldn't really catch up to other countries in terms of intelligence infrastructure, intelligence experience. You know, the English were sending poets in doublets and roughs to spy on rival courts back in the Elizabethan era. The French are doing stuff during, you know, in the court of the Sun King, that sort of thing. The United States, the last. The Black Chamber, which was sort of the last dedicated office for decrypting foreign communications that was closed down after World War I. The Secretary of State said, gentlemen, do not read each other's letters. That was kind of the justification for closing this down. So the United States had to start from something close to nothing. Donovan, being a lawyer, knew that the first thing that you have to do when you make a decision is to go to the literature, do the reading. So he found people in libraries, in classrooms, in universities, who were used to going to the literature, to doing the reading. He recruited professors and archivists and librarians to become spies. And sort of ridiculously, it worked. They not only were outstanding spies during World War II, but they created what is now the basis of modern intelligence.
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Elise Graham
Yeah, I mean, we're so used to using the word intelligence as kind of a synonym for spycraft that it does. It jumped out at me that actually he was looking for intelligent people who. That had a kind of intelligence in terms of language abilities or historical knowledge, or ability to read and analyze texts.
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Amelia Posanza
And subject matter expertise. You know, the easiest way to get sort of master a world of subjects that all need expert attention is to just pull the experts out of where they are, which is the libraries and the universities. There was in the oss, which is the organization that he created, the predecessor to the CIA, there was a branch called Research and Development R and D. And this was a known kind of office in other intelligence agencies. It employed engineers and scientists who did things like make cool gadgets or build bombs. You know, the James Bond Q sort of stuff.
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Elise Graham
Right, right.
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Amelia Posanza
What Donovan did was he created a branch that was novel in other, you know, other intelligence agencies didn't have something like it. Research and analysis. And instead of pulling the professors of the sciences out of the universities, it employed the professors of the humanities. People who knew how to pull information out of the most unlikely possible texts. People who knew how to go through a library and pull out pieces of information that even the librarians didn't know was there. People who knew how to work other people for information, because that is something. Libraries are not just places to store information. They're not just places to find information. They're also places to hide information. As anybody who spent a lot of time in the archives knows, there are lots of things that aren't necessarily on the catalog or there are things that people who want special access to a set of documents. They may try to conceal the fact that those documents are there. There may be some cataloging problems. In the National Archives, a lot of the women who worked for the oss, their names aren't in the finding aids because the people who created the finding aids didn't think about the fact that agents were also women. They would just write down the names of men. So the papers are there, but they're harder to find. These are things that book rats, that library lizards are perfectly accustomed to dealing with. And it's the sort of thing that a spy needed to deal with during World War II because many of them had to go abroad and, for example, get maps or books or scientific journals that were published in German and not available in the United States, had to acquire those things and send them back home.
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Elise Graham
Yeah, that's one of the great things about your book, is that, you know, you take these library rats and you call them at one point, mild mannered professors and oddball archivists and restless librarians.
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Amelia Posanza
Librarians, yeah.
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Elise Graham
But then they're. They're sent into these exotic locales as if they are kind of in a James Bondian world.
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Amelia Posanza
Yeah, absolutely. One of the things about going undercover is it really helps if you can perform your cover as competently as the spycraft. So let's say one character in the book, he's a real person. His name is Joseph Curtis. He was sent to Istanbul. Istanbul was neutral, but Turkey acquired neutrality in the war by allowing everybody's spies to operate openly in Turkey, more or less. So there were 17 different spy agents operating openly at Istanbul at the same time. It was a. Where everybody was presumed to Be a spy. Joseph Curtis went there undercover as a Yale professor named Joseph Curtis, which is what he actually was. He was a literature professor. He specialized in Renaissance literature. And he went there and he said, oh, I'm just collecting books for the Yale library. He was supposed to actually be collecting documents that would be useful for the war. There were lots of newspapers and books and other things that were available in neutral countries that weren't available in Allied countries. Things that might have been of use to people who were sort of doing strategic planning in the war. Now, it turned out, through a sort of twist of fate, that Joseph Curtis didn't wind up performing this exact role. He wound up building an X2 branch. That is, he was in charge of double cross operations. He was in charge of hunting down German spies and then turning them so that they worked for the Allies, which is about as far as you can get from a cozy little library in New Haven. Yeah, but he did it very well. But the thing was, his cover was himself. That was one advantage that librarians had, that they had an excuse to be going around and asking questions and looking for documents, because that was just their job. And also that they were the last people you would ever expect to be spies.
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Elise Graham
Right. So I have actually have my own brush with the oss. My great uncle was born and raised in Wisconsin, but his mother was from Austria, and he was fluent in German. And he used to tell us stories about how he would interrogate Germans and expose their lies based on their accent or words that they used. And he'd say, well, you say that you grew up on such and such street in Berlin, but you can't really be from there because you'd pronounce a certain word this way instead of that way and that kind of thing. And it really struck me that here was a guy who, you know, I think he just signed up for the war. And they were able to identify that he had this skill and provide him with some training and then use, in effect, what was kind of almost like a superpower is how it seemed to.
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Jack Wilson
Me when I was a young boy.
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Elise Graham
Anyway, and put it to some good use.
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Amelia Posanza
Language skills and local knowledge were incredibly valuable. There was even a training camp called Camp Richie, where a lot of people who had grown up in Europe and had become sort of refugees at the start of the war trained to go right back into Europe and work as sort of a different kind of spy. They weren't working for rna. They were moving with the troops and interrogating civilians in the towns that they reached for Tactical knowledge, not strategic knowledge. That's all the ability to look closely at the words that someone is using and to make inferences about it. These are skills that serve you well in the classroom and also extremely well in intelligence.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah.
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Elise Graham
And you gave some examples of the kind of things that the bookish types were ferreting out. And there was military intelligence that they could draw from the newspaper, society columns and maps to unfamiliar cities that they located in phone books. And then you have one that intrigued me. Potentially devastating enemy vulnerabilities in humble items like ball bearing.
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Amelia Posanza
Oh, yes, ball bearings. Well, how much time do you have? Let me. Let me get a moment to gather my thoughts.
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Elise Graham
Okay.
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Amelia Posanza
I actually. I purchased some World War II ball bearings. I became a big, big fan of the ball bearing subplot of World War II. All right, so one of the things, for example, I'll come at this indirectly. One of the things that they got abroad and then sent home was industry directories. For instance, an industry directory for Berlin. And if you say, what's the use of a Berlin industry directory? It would be used, for instance, to find the addresses of factories that produce ball bearings. And if you're asking, why do they need the addresses of factories that produce ball bearings? Ball bearings were used to manufacture fighter planes and tanks and gun carriages and all the moving parts of Hitler's war machine. If you bomb a factory that makes fighter planes, you've only disabled the factory that makes fighter planes. But if you bomb a factory that makes ball bearings, you've disabled all the factories that use ball bearings to make other things, including the factory that makes fighter planes. So there's a whole subplot of World War II that consists of trying to get control of ball bearings. There's another element to this, which is that it's actually preferable a lot of the time, rather than bomb that factory to get the workers to sabotage it from the inside, because that's a much more effective way of attacking the machines. And also, there are far fewer civilian casualties. But the point is, it's that kind of the thinking about ball bearings that came from the economists who worked for research and analysis for this new branch. So this came from sort of unconventional thinking that was part of the unconventional warfare of the OSS during the war, and it was incredibly effective.
- [24:39]
Jack Wilson
Right.
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Elise Graham
So how did you find these stories? What kind of research were you able to do?
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Amelia Posanza
Well, I spent a lot of time in the National Archives. Obviously, I read a lot of books that were about and by people who had worked in RNA during the War. There were letters, there were archives. I even did a little bit of gumshoe work myself and followed in the footsteps of the people I wound up focusing on in the book, which is sort of a small, connected group of people whose stories say something about the adventures of all. I think there were about 900 scholars who wound up working for R and A and more librarians.
- [25:20]
Elise Graham
Let's take a quick break, and then we'll hear about three of our library rats turned spies. Okay, we're back. So the reason why I wanted to talk to you is because I think a lot of listeners to this podcast are probably people who maybe enjoy a good spy novel here and there, but are probably consider themselves to be a little more on the bookish side of things, rather than the adventurous international, global traveler side of things. So I just love this idea that there are literature professors and librarians who were helpful to the effort and who actually were in great danger in going on these missions. So let's start with Area B and what the OSS recruits learned there.
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Amelia Posanza
Right. Well, after you joined the oss, you'd be sent to a spy training camp. You might be sent to an English spy training camp. More often, you were sent to one in the United States. Some were sent to Camp X in Canada. Anyway, the English had spy training schools that were incredibly posh. They were in country manners and had housemasters and servants and stuff. The Americans had camps with tents in national parks. A totally different experience. But the English sent over their fighting instructors to teach the American spies how to fight. So you, as a professor, as a librarian, you'd be learning how to do the kind of close combat that leaves the other person not injured but killed. We still have the fighting manuals that these guys wrote, and it would teach you. I mean, look, if you were a spy in World War II, you could have either a cover story or a weapon, but you couldn't have both. If the Gestapo arrests you and you're carrying a lipstick that turns into a gun or a shoe that turns into a radio transmitter, they know you're a spy. So you were taught how to use your wits to survive and how to use ordinary objects as weapons. How to kill someone with a newspaper, and there's instructions on how to do that in the book. How to restrain someone with their own trousers, how to do certain holds on somebody that they would find it unbearably painful to break out of. I asked one of the administrative assistants in my department to try some of the wrist holds on me, and she almost broke my thumb. It was fantastic.
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Elise Graham
Wow.
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Amelia Posanza
So, yeah, you were a mild mannered professor. Yes. You'd be wearing tweed. Yes. You hadn't necessarily done anything more adventurous than cut the pages on an old book, but you would be learning how to do this incredibly dangerous stuff. And these were skills that these guys carried for the rest of their lives. Sherman Kent, one of the characters in the book, used to sometimes mid conversation, show someone how he could fold a newspaper to turn it into a deadly weapon. Or he carried for the rest of his career after going through the training camp, he could throw knives so well that people said he could throw a knife better than a Sicilian.
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Jack Wilson
Yeah.
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Elise Graham
I mean, it really must have been something for these people who are not expecting this in their lives, and then suddenly they're crawling through the woods and learning how to sneak up on a sentry and how to kill quietly and writing in code and just doing all of these things. But I guess there was an attitude of my country needs me, and there are a lot of people who are going off to fight and this is just going to be the way that I myself am able to contribute to the war effort.
- [29:15]
Amelia Posanza
It was out of a spy novel, partly because the people who were putting together the camps and organizing the training themselves only had experience of spycraft through spy novels a lot of the time, or sometimes spy movies. So somebody would come up to you. This happened to Joseph Curtis, one of the three people in the book. The head of his department comes up to him in his department in Yale and says, listen, you need to go to the Yale Club in New York City tomorrow. You need to wear a purple tie. There will be a man there. He'll be smoking a cigarette. When he sees you, he'll put it out. He has a message for you. And that's how it would start. Somebody would come up to you. You'd get a call in the library, or somebody would. A government person would come and interrupt you during the class that you were teaching or during a campus football game. Somebody would use the fact that there were lots of alums wearing suits crossing campus. They wouldn't notice. Another guy in a suit would come to you at your office, say, listen, you're being recruited to be a spy. Next thing you know, they say, okay, just go to the Baltimore train station. You'll see a man with a red carnation. Again, these are all details out of a spy novel, but that's what they knew. To paraphrase the historian Robert Darton, literature doesn't just reflect upon history. Literature causes history. And then suddenly you're learning how to restrain a guy with his own trousers and kill him with a newspaper. It must have been an absolutely astonishing experience. And another element of this experience was that, one, a lot of people were being recruited, which means that you sometimes saw someone from your own department and had to pretend you didn't know him. Right. And two, the reason you had to pretend you didn't know him was that everybody was there under false identities. You didn't tell people at the spy camp who you really were, because what if one of you got caught? Maybe he would say the names of everybody that he had trained with.
- [31:02]
Elise Graham
Yeah.
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Amelia Posanza
So you would be there sort of under a false name, under a false identity. Yeah. Your department, you know, the guy in the next office over in your department is training beside you, but you pretend you don't know each other. It must have been a very surreal experience.
- [31:18]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
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Elise Graham
Okay, so let's dig into the story of Joseph Curtis. Why was he tapped on the shoulder? Who was he? And what skills did they think that he would be able to bring to the effort?
- [31:31]
Amelia Posanza
So Joseph Curtis was very much a hot house flower. He was from Connecticut. He was born and died in the same house, which you can only do if you're very poor or very wealthy. He was very wealthy. He went to Yale for undergrad, then for grad school, then became a professor there, which is something that Yale does. He lived on campus. He had a very genteel, very cozy, very safe little life of letters. And then he was pulled out of that life, trained as a spy, and thrown into war. Istanbul. One of the things that Joseph Curtis had going for him was that he had an identity that would work well as a cover identity. When he went to Istanbul, the COVID was, I'm a Yale professor. I am collecting books for the Yale library. Nothing to do with the war. Also, Joseph Curtis, not to put too fine a point on it, but his own students never remembered. Never remembered him after his classes. It's been said by directors of the CIA that the best spy is someone who even a waiter wouldn't notice. And Joseph Curtis, although a delightful person, as far as I can tell by reading his scholarship, was someone who nobody would notice. He managed to get through a career in wartime Istanbul, a place where everybody was presumed to be a spy without anybody suspecting that he was a spy. After he came back to Yale, despite the fact that he had been away during the war, nobody thought that he had been away to be a spy. He goes up for tenure, and he almost doesn't get tenure because Yale Is like, listen, during your mysterious absence during the war that we're not going to question. You haven't done any publishing. So I'm afraid we can't give you tenure. The CIA had to kind of call Yale's president and say, listen, you've got to give this guy tenure. I can't tell you what he was doing, but he got tenure. But it was dicey.
- [33:21]
Elise Graham
What exactly was he doing?
- [33:23]
Amelia Posanza
Well, like I said originally, he was supposed to be doing bibliographic detective work, document hunting, but things sort of collapsed for the OSS branch in Istanbul because the director of the branch thought that he was James Bond. I know James Bond wasn't in yet, but he was doing all of these things that you do if you're a spy in the movies, but not in real life. He was sleeping with his sources. His sources were enemy agents, et cetera, et cetera. His cover was blown so thoroughly that every time he walked into a nightclub or a casino, the band would start playing a song called Boo Boo Baby, I'm a Spy. A very thoroughly blown cover. It's a good song, by the way. I had it re recorded and put on Spotify. If you. If you listen to it, it's got some rhythm. It's a good song. So they had to sort of rebuild the branch from the inside. They got rid of everybody who was burned or who was a liability or who was acting like a movie spy instead of a real spy. And Joseph Curtis wound up with the job of building the double cross section of the office. Double cross is, ideally, if you are running an intelligence service, you don't actually want to destroy the enemy's spy networks. You want to make them work for you without the enemy knowing about it. Which means that you have to identify and turn enemy spies. This became Joseph Curtis's job, and rather surprisingly, he was extremely good at it.
- [34:49]
Elise Graham
One of the things I took from your book is that he was able to use stories as a weapon. So how exactly did that work?
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Amelia Posanza
Well, there are a lot of areas of spycraft that rely on weaponizing stories. One of these is whispering. You had to be trained in order to be a whisperer. It was a special kind of spy. And actually, the head of all of the whisperers for the Allies was called the master of Whisperers, which is kind of wonderful.
- [35:14]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
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Amelia Posanza
There are instructions on how to do whispering properly. To summarize it, it worked exactly the same way that Twitter works today, which.
- [35:22]
Elise Graham
Is a little alarming, but a lot of disinformation.
- [35:26]
Amelia Posanza
Right. So ways to be A whisperer. You shouldn't repeat the whisper all of the time. You should say it once and allow other people to carry it for you. You should design the whisper so that it's conceivable, it's plausible, and it's also hard to falsify. A whisper shouldn't be abstract. It should be as specific as possible. And the best way to convey a rumor is to tell it in the form of a story with a point. The reason I'm telling you all of this, by the way, isn't because Joseph Curtis was a whisperer, but because whispers were among the things that were given to enemy agents. Enemy agents had to give intelligence back to their own spy masters. That was part of the deal. And so you had to figure out what information to give turned agents to give to their spy masters. You could give them chicken feed, which was sort of useless, but true information that was used in order to satisfy the higher ups and build their credibility. And you could also give them whispers. So, for example, in late 1933, the best way to convey a rumor, they said, was to tell it in the form of a story with a point. So in late 1933, they started to whisper that Heinrich Himmler, who was the head of the ss, was planning to unseat Hitler in a coup d'etat, and that as he was preparing for this, Himmler had put out, like, a stamp that had his face on it so that Germans would get used to seeing his face and sort of subconsciously start to look to him as the leader. And that even though this coup was tabled for later, the stamp had already been put out. And so the way that you would spread this rumor that Himmler was planning to unseat Hitler was that you would go to places that sold stamps and say, I want the Himmler stamp. It's a rare stamp. It's very valuable. I'll take every Himmler stamp that you have. Now, there weren't really Himmler stamps, but that got all of the. What's the word for it? Philatelists, Stamp collectors. Yeah, that got. There's a story, there's a point to it, which is that this is a valuable stamp. And suddenly everybody is whispering this to. To one another. Yeah, it's very effective.
- [37:32]
Elise Graham
They're saying to each other, you know, I'm trying to get my hands on a Himmler stamp. And you know why there's such a shortage, don't you? It's because he's got some designs on taking over the top spot. And you kind of get them to spread that story around and hopefully create some division in the ranks.
- [37:52]
Amelia Posanza
So to be really effective at disinformation, you have to have a strong understanding of how stories work. And this is also an area in which humanists were already very well trained.
- [38:03]
Jack Wilson
Right.
- [38:04]
Elise Graham
Okay, let's move on to Sherman Kent, a smart mouthed history professor. What was his background and how did he end up in the OSS and what did he end up doing there?
- [38:18]
Amelia Posanza
Kent was actually friends with Joseph Curtis. He was actually the perfect man for the job. He was a historian at Yale, he worked in Washington as a leader of analysts in research and analysis. He wound up being the head of research analysis for all of Europe and Africa during the war. And he was the perfect man for this job because his job entailed, in part trying to convince the military to listen to what these tweedy professors were saying. Remember, this was a new kind of intelligence branch and there's no particular reason that the military should listen to these guys.
- [38:51]
Elise Graham
Yeah, the military, they've probably been in the military for 20 years and say, well, I know what I need to know and I've never had to listen to someone like you before. And here you are, you're new to this and you've spent your life at a university or sitting in a library somewhere, so how could you possibly have anything of use for me?
- [39:13]
Amelia Posanza
Yeah, someone comes up and they say, listen, I've been reading the social register for Berlin and I have ideas about troop movements or hey, I think that you should focus on ball bearings instead of, you know, airplane factories. That's going to be a challenging conversation. Yeah, but Kent, even though he was himself a tweed wearing professor, could have been a drill sergeant. He was brilliant, but he was always looking for a fight. When he was teaching, he would throw chalk past the heads of his students, which they don't let us do anymore. As I said, when he went to a spy training camp and learned to throw daggers, he became so good at it that for the rest of his career he was famous for being able to grow a knife better than a Sicilian. He was a man of superb and outrageous profanity, which meant that he could talk to generals in their own language. All the work of the professors and librarians would have been nothing if he hadn't been their spokesman. So this is something that he was extremely good at. And actually after the war he wound up leaving academia and joining, he became the head of intelligence analysis for a new agency called the CIA. He just loved to fight so much that he wanted to stay in it for the rest of his life.
- [40:19]
Jack Wilson
Yeah.
- [40:20]
Elise Graham
Okay. And we come to the archivist. I hope I get the pronunciation correct. Adele Kyber. Kyber.
- [40:27]
Jack Wilson
Okay.
- [40:29]
Elise Graham
And who was she? And please do mention that she went to my alma mater, or she worked at my alma mater, University of Chicago, of course.
- [40:40]
Amelia Posanza
So, Adele Kyber, she held a PhD in Latin from the University of Chicago. Back in those days, it was more difficult for a woman to become a professor. So what she became after she got her PhD was a professional archive hunter. She would hop from archive to archive, earning money by taking photographs of rare texts for scholars back home in the States who did not, in those days, before the Internet, have any other way of seeing those texts besides visiting the archives themselves. By the time she was recruited by the oss, she had been doing this for almost a decade. She was actually recruited when she was doing some work at the University of Chicago. So, outstanding library indeed. They should be very proud to have her.
- [41:23]
Elise Graham
You give a list of some of the things that she had proven herself to be good at doing, and finding texts to photograph for microfilm was one of them. And if you could maybe just run down, I think you call it breathtaking. And I agreed. The things that she had been finding in Europe and in other places that she was able to capture with these photographs.
- [41:47]
Amelia Posanza
Of course, I'll mention first that she was in Stockholm. She was working undercover. She was telling people. She told people different things, but one of the things that she told people was that she was collecting books for the Library of Congress in the United States. So nothing to do with the war. She's just replenishing the library's holdings. Sweden was also neutral in the war, but it obtained its neutrality by following an opposite deal from Turkey. So Turkey was allowed to be neutral provided that all the spies could operate in Turkey. Sweden could remain neutral provided that none of the spies operate in Sweden. So it was still very dangerous for her to be working as a spy in Stockholm, particularly because the police in Stockholm were affiliated with the Gestapo. While she was there, though, she acquired and secretly sent home on microfilm documents that included industry directories, trade magazines, railway schedules, German newspapers, atlases, maps, technical journals, German newsletters that were on a restricted list and only went to certain vetted subscribers. Underground resistance literature, privately printed books, books that had been printed by underground presses, books that the German government had designated secret books and pulled from circulation. Current newspapers as well as back copies dating back to 1940. Publications on, for example, aeronautics, banking, bibliography, electronics, governance, finance, international relations, labor law, legislation, metallurgy, mining, politics, regulations, Shipbuilding, statistics, synthetic petroleum, and scientific publications of every description, some of which went, for instance, to the library in a little place in New Mexico called Los Alamos. So she was very busy. She was actually the most productive document hunter working for the Allies during the war. She sent home those Berlin industry directories that were used to identify factories that made ball bearings. She, frankly, got hold of lots of things that she should not have been allowed to get access to. She was very, very good at working her sources. And she worked with bookstores that were allied with the Germans, which meant she must have convinced them that she, too, was allied with the Germans secretly. And she seems to have gotten herself invited to some parties that would have allowed her to make sort of diplomatic contact with the enemy. So not bad work.
- [44:07]
Elise Graham
Yeah. I was going to ask how she pulled that off, because when you say that list, it seems like it, you know, anybody who has some sort of insight into what it is that she's taking off the shelf and microfilming would be alerted. But it sounds like maybe she was able to find people who thought that she was assisting one side or the other in the war, and she was able to use that to get them to look the other way.
- [44:37]
Amelia Posanza
Yeah. So from the letters and things that she has in the National Archives, it seems, first of all, like she presented a different version of herself to everybody that she interacted with, the version that would be most appealing to them. So the German bookstores thought that she sympathized with the Germans. She worked with the Norwegian underground. She, of course, did sympathize with the Norwegian underground. She employed some, I guess, illegal Norwegian refugees as translators in her own unit. She understood that there are a lot of different places where you can get a certain kind of text that the government wouldn't necessarily think about while they were censoring those texts or pulling them from the shelves. So if you want a medical text, you could look in a veterinary library and see if it's there. Not just in a medical school library. She did make frequent use of a medical school library, but she also worked the veterinary libraries. She went to little sort of rare bookstores where you might find a text sort of washed up on the shores of that bookstore that everybody had forgotten about. She was really outstanding at collecting a tremendous amount of literature while making absolutely nobody suspect that she was doing this.
- [45:52]
Elise Graham
I guess that makes a lot of sense that she's looking. The first place you would think to look is not the place where it's going to be, because that's where it's been suppressed. But if you have the third or fourth place you might think of, that's the place that hasn't yet been gotten to.
- [46:08]
Amelia Posanza
Exactly.
- [46:09]
Elise Graham
The list of things she got outside of the war was, I found breathtaking as well. She had love letters from Henry VIII to Anne Boleyn and manuscripts that date back to the lifetime of Christ. She really sounds like a remarkable person who had a remarkable career.
- [46:28]
Amelia Posanza
Yeah. So those are things that are available in the Vatican archives. And those archives are just an example of her ability to work people. In order to work the archives, you could only look at something if you had the permission of somebody in the church. There was an instance before the war where she was looking for a particular book, and the attendant told her, you can't possibly get that. We don't let anyone see that. You would need permission from the cardinal. And she said, okay, let me talk to the cardinal. The attendant said, oh, no, no. Like, you don't. You don't rate the cardinal. And so she took out her card which said, Ms. Adele Kyber, Hollywood, California, which is very deliberate. She grew up in Los Angeles. She was the daughter of screenwriters, and she knew sort of the magic of the word Hollywood. She sent that card up to the cardinal. He immediately sent for her, saying, oh, please come, let's talk about Hollywood. She entertains him for an hour or so with talk about Hollywood. He asked her whether it was true, as he had heard, that Los Angeles has a wall around it like the Vatican City. And I can't imagine what she said in reply, but I like to think it was something cheeky like, yes, that's why it's so hard to break into the film industry. Anyway, she charmed him, and she got permission to see the needed book. So that's just an example of how necessary it is to have people skills in order to find information that's buried in the archives. And, of course, she winds up deploying this brilliantly during the war.
- [47:56]
Elise Graham
Right. So you say that these people would ultimately help lay the foundations of modern intelligence, which we've talked about. And then you say they also transformed American higher education when they returned after the war. So I guess now we're talking about not just the three that we've discussed, but the hundreds of people who came out of the academia and the libraries and worked for the oss. What was their impact on American higher education?
- [48:26]
Amelia Posanza
Well, they developed new fields, such as area studies. Part of this was deliberately in cooperation with the CIA and with the American government. The reason that people like Kyber needed to go abroad and get documents was that American libraries were not very well stocked when they went into the war. You end up having people in the New York Public Library sort of working feverishly in order to pull usable information out of atlases that had been published before the time of Herman Melville. At the time that the US Entered the war, there were two complete sets of maps of all of Japan. In the United States there were. So that was one reason that useful wartime information had to be pulled out of incredibly unlikely documents by the poor library rats working in the New York Public Library. And the. They were locked in the basement of the Library of Congress Sometimes.
- [49:20]
Elise Graham
Yeah. And the government at that point was not saying, as they might have after World War I, well, now we can close all this down. But there was the Cold War. And so it was thinking, we need to have language experts and we need to have texts and we need to have subject matter experts and engineers. And all of those things are going to be necessary in our Cold War effort.
- [49:45]
Amelia Posanza
That's right. The situation during World War II, or part of it was just getting the information that they needed to conduct the war in the first place. So, for instance, when the Allied forces wanted to invade North Africa, they didn't know what they would see when they got there. One of the victories that these libraries helped them to achieve was looking through maps of North Africa and things like street directories for Casablanca, that sort of thing, giving them eyes on the ground. In the days before Google Maps. This is what you'll find when you land. These are. This is where the Red Cross office is going to be. These are all of the railways out of town that you're going to need to capture. Just things like that, tactical information like that after the war. The Cold War is developing a large portion of the professoriate former spies. One of the things that they do, of course, is their own students become CIA recruits. A lot of people who went into the CIA during the 1950s and 1960s were, you know, they had been students in classes of. In majoring in literature or majoring in history. And then they were pulled aside, said, hey, how would you like to serve your country in a different way? And this starts a career in intelligence. But another thing that the professors do is they develop new fields like area studies. This is where professors at a certain school or in a certain discipline will completely master the field of Soviet studies, for example, learn what's happening in the Soviet countries, speak the language, have a kind of cultural competency that will be useful, not for tactical purposes, which is knowing where the railway station is, knowing where the Red Cross station is, knowing what is likely to happen when you're on the ground, but rather for strategic purposes, being able to plan, sort of like in a chess game, what will happen if you do what the best course of action is to take in this conflict.
- [51:34]
Elise Graham
Right, right.
- [51:35]
Amelia Posanza
Another thing that happened was the US Government invest tremendously in stocking American libraries after the war with things that might be needed if another global conflict was to arise. One of the things that struck me during the writing of the book was that this is a story that has a lot to teach us about today, just in the sense that libraries are very embattled right now. But libraries aren't just centers of community and education. They're something that's integral to national security. And we learned that at a great cost 80 years ago during the war. It's something that's worth remembering today. Other things that the professors did, they developed this sort of expertise in being able to read a document, 30 Ways to Sunday into fields like the history of the book, which takes great interest in the materiality of texts and also a sort of ethical interest in recovering lost worlds. That I think has something to do with the tremendous losses of the Holocaust. The CIA invented the. The MFA program. That's not even much of an exaggeration, and it's not a conspiracy theory. They thought that it would be useful to have intellectuals abroad come to the United States, come to a place like Iowa. They would learn American values. They would learn how to certain principles for writing, like show, don't tell, so that they wouldn't write socialist novels of ideas. And then they would be sent back home with their American ideas to become the intelligents of their country. It's not bad, you know, as a plan. It's an expression of soft power, that sort of thing. But it is kind of a. You know, it's interesting to think about the way that excellent writing is taught and its relationship to intelligence. The CIA also promoted certain kinds of modern art in the museums. You know, that's not to say that there's anything wrong with those kinds of art. It's just that they're one form of wonderful art. What, Jackson Pollock, that sort of thing. It's wonderful. It's fantastic. My. My mentor used to go and look at a Jackson Pollock and kind of cry. And he was very surprised when I told him, oh, yeah, the CIA really promoted his work during the second half of the 20th century. And then he said, well, I don't know if, you know, I've Been responding very emotionally to his work. It's worth responding emotionally to. But the idea that this is the trajectory of where painting has always been going. This is the best painting because it is the most American painting, because it's the most honest painting. It is sort of, it's honest about being paint on a canvas. All of these things are true. But again, it's not socialist realist art. And that was part of the point, right?
- [54:14]
Elise Graham
There's a freedom to it, a feeling of liberation. Okay, so you are an academic yourself and you are your professional life. You're surrounded by other academics. Can you imagine a situation today when academics could be called upon to go through what the OSS recruits did?
- [54:36]
Amelia Posanza
Well, I think that every bookworm dreams of this situation.
- [54:41]
Elise Graham
Do you think they could do it? If they were asked, is our generation of academics, would they be up to the task?
- [54:48]
Amelia Posanza
I think that they could. I mean, look, the saying was, gentlemen don't read each other's letters. And it's gentlemen don't read each other's letters. But scholars do read each other's letters. They're good at it, they enjoy it. They understand backstabbing, they understand chicanery. I think that they were surprisingly well equipped for all of the black arts of spycraft. And I think that they would remain so today. Of course, intelligence today requires other competencies. Digital skills, for example. Although the principle, Sherman Kent's idea, was that 90% of what an intelligence service would need to know is available not in secret documents, but out in the open in publicly available documents that nobody has read. That was his theory during the war. That was a theory that he proved after the war in kind of a disastrous incident where he got a bunch of Yale professors to spend the summer in the Yale library reading publicly available documents and finding out US military secrets. It was disastrous because this got leaked to Congress. And then they thought that Yale's professors were working for the Russians. A CIA agent showed up at the Yale library and tried to confiscate the entire library. It was eventually sort of talked down from that. It is, it remains true today that a lot of intelligence gets accidentally revealed, for example, on Instagram, in the background of somebody's picture. You know, so that idea of open source intelligence, operations, security, you know, these are still concepts that were present in World War II and are extremely important today. And also there are probably a non trivial number of. First of all, I'm sure that there are professors who work in anthropology or area studies who have connections to the CIA. That doesn't stretch my imagination at all. But also, rumor has it that to this day, the CIA does recruiting at the American Library association conference every year, so they still know where the good stuff is.
- [56:53]
Elise Graham
Okay, well, the book is called Book and How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II. Elise Graham, thank you so much for joining me on the History of Literature.
- [57:06]
Amelia Posanza
Thank you.
- [57:12]
Jack Wilson
Okay, that's going to do it for.
- [57:15]
Elise Graham
This episode of the History of Literature.
- [57:16]
Jack Wilson
My thanks to Elise Graham for joining me and to Amelia Posanza of Lavender Public Relations and a former guest on our show for bringing Elise's book to our attention. We'll be back next week. Speaking of Amelia Posanza, you might recall her love for Herman Melville. Well, we have an episode all about Herman Melville on the calendar, then a mysterious episode that's going to arrive after that one. I won't even spoil it by previewing the subject, but I'll tell you that that will be on Thursday of next week. We go to Chicago and visit the Little Review, kind of the little literary magazine that could after that. And then we explore Shakespeare's tragic art within Expert. I'm Jack Wilson. Thank you for listening and we'll see you next time.
- [58:42]
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen
What role do books play in shaping who we are? Find out on the Five Books, the brand new podcast hosted by me, Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Each week I sit down with acclaimed Jewish authors to discuss the top five books that have shaped them. Hear from notable guests like Booker Prize finalist Yael van der Vowden and literary influencer Zibby Owens as we delve deep into what it means to live as a Jewish American today. Join me and listen to the Five Books wherever you get your podcasts.