Book and Dagger
How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II
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- CHF 14.00
Beschreibung des Verlags
The untold story of the academics who became OSS spies, invented modern spycraft, and helped turn the tide of the war
At the start of WWII, the U.S. found itself in desperate need of an intelligence agency. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS), a precursor to today’s CIA, was quickly formed—and, in an effort to fill its ranks with experts, the OSS turned to academia for recruits. Suddenly, literature professors, librarians, and historians were training to perform undercover operations and investigative work as part of a new WWII intelligence effort—and these surprising spies would go on to profoundly shape both the course of the war and our cultural institutions.
In Book and Dagger, Elyse Graham draws on personal histories, letters, and declassified OSS files to tell the story of a small but connected group of humanities scholars turned spies. Among them are Joseph Curtiss, a literature professor who hunted down German spies and turned them into double agents; Sherman Kent, a smart-mouthed history professor who rose to become the head of analysis for all of Europe and Africa; and Adele Kibre, an archivist who was sent to Stockholm to secretly acquire documents for the OSS. These unforgettable characters would ultimately help lay the foundations of modern intelligence and transform American higher education when they returned after the war.
Thrillingly paced and rigorously researched, Book and Dagger is an inspiring and gripping true story of espionage about a group of academics who helped beat the Nazis—a tale that reveals the indelible power of the humanities to change the world.
This riveting work of WWII history reveals:
From Academia to Espionage: The untold story of how literature professors, librarians, and historians were recruited into the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) and trained in the black arts of spycraft.Declassified Histories: The true stories of operatives like Joseph Curtiss, who turned German spies into double agents, and archivist Adele Kibre, on her secret mission in Stockholm, drawn from newly released OSS files.The Chairborne Division: A fascinating look inside the Research and Analysis branch (R&A), the OSS’s intellectual engine that transformed how intelligence was gathered and helped win the war from libraries.The Birth of the CIA: How this unlikely group of scholars laid the foundations for today’s Central Intelligence Agency, forever changing the world of espionage.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This entertaining survey from historian Graham (You Talkin' to Me?) depicts how a love of books helped the Allies win the war against Nazi Germany. Graham profiles a half dozen of the "hundreds" of "mild-mannered professors and oddball archivists and restless librarians" who were recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA's precursor, which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created at the start of the war because the U.S. was "utterly outmatched" in spy craft by both its allies and its enemies. These "humble drudges" with a "superhuman resistance to boredom" were tasked with reading through enemy newspapers, telephone books, railway schedules, photographs, and trash. Graham spotlights Sherman Kent, a Yale history professor who compiled exhaustive studies of North Africa's railways; Adele Kibre, an archivist who embedded as a spy in neutral Sweden, where she recorded Third Reich newspapers and books on microfilm, which she sent back to Washington, D.C.; Varian Fry, a graduate student at Columbia University who provided U.S. visas to more than 1,500 refugees in Paris, including Hannah Arendt; and undercover art historians who helped track down artworks stolen by the Nazis. Enriched by Graham's exuberant prose ("They acted as sleuths, tracking the oleaginous smell of paint and blood from murdered households to gutted archives... to stables and cellars and mines"), this is a colorful salute to some of WWII's more bookish heroes.
