The world of spying is traditionally divided into two categories: human intelligence and signals intelligence, known as humint and sigint.
The first is composed of secrets (variously defined) obtained from individuals and organizations with or without their knowledge. Sigint is the technical gathering of information through intercepted messages: letters, telegrams, telephone calls and, latterly, emails, texts and the swirling blizzard of electronic communication.
But these two pillars are themselves founded on and feed into the far less glamorous work of intelligence analysis: sifting through huge amounts of data to establish a clearer picture of an enemy (or ally), his plans and dispositions. Some of this material is obtained clandestinely, but much of it is combed from open sources, painstakingly studied, marshaled into concision and then passed on to spies, soldiers and politicians.
This is the least exciting part of espionage, not so much cloak-and-dagger as filing cabinet and index card, a network of hidden spies burrowing in the background: The work is time-consuming, complex, frequently thankless and vital to the efficient functioning of a modern intelligence system.
Elyse Graham, a historian and professor at Stony Brook University, has set out to rescue some of the worker bees of intelligence from obscurity by exploring their contribution to victory in World War II. She passionately argues that many of these fact-gatherers and analysts were not professional spies, but American academics, scholars, liberal arts professors, historians, librarians, anthropologists, artists, bookworms and art experts. Hers is a plea for a better understanding of the role played in espionage by the book, the imagined story, the artist, the writer, the humanities and the “library rats” who study them.
This was not solely a war of soldiers and scientists. “This was also the historian’s war, the book collector’s war, the artist’s war,” she writes. “It was the professor’s war.”
In June 1942, the Office of Strategic Services was founded by William “Wild Bill” Donovan — a lawyer, World War I veteran and keen bibliophile — to coordinate intelligence behind enemy lines. He immediately went hunting for recruits in the humanities and social science faculties of American universities to work in the Research and Analysis branch, people with the academic training (and patience) to gather facts as widely as possible, understand, refine and then assemble them into usable form.
The O.S.S. was the first spy agency with the resources and energy to analyze intelligence on an industrial scale: The work of Research and Analysis — mining nuggets of valuable information from a mass of factual rubble — would form the intellectual foundations of the future C.I.A.
The former secretary of state Henry Stimson once loftily pronounced that “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” As the author writes, “Gentlemen may not read other people’s letters, but scholars do. They’re good at it.”
Graham tells the story through three principal characters: Adele Kibre, an archivist with a Ph.D. in Latin from University of Chicago; Joseph Curtiss, a professor of English at Yale; and the Yale history professor Sherman Kent, a rambunctious, foulmouthed figure who favored red suspenders and could “throw a knife better than a Sicilian.”
While Curtiss gathered published material in neutral Istanbul under cover of collecting books for the Yale library, Kibre was dispatched to neutral Sweden (another espionage hotbed) to collect and photograph printed materials, including much about the Third Reich: propaganda, scientific and technical journals, an illegal pamphlet on how to desert from the German Army, privately printed books, atlases, directories, maps, telephone books, works on aeronautics, banking, synthetic petroleum, shipbuilding, statistics.
As chief of the Research and Analysis branch’s Europe-Africa division back in Washington, Kent was responsible for turning the mass of information into answers to specific questions: the optimal number of pellets in an aircraft shell, the percentage of synthetic rubber in German car tires, the precise length of the sidings on Moroccan railroads. This panning for precision was about as far from James Bond’s world as can be imagined, requiring an “almost superhuman resistance to boredom.”
Graham tells all this in jaunty if scattershot style, gleefully sliding into accounts of spycraft where the protagonists simply fabricated stories to bamboozle the enemy, such as the celebrated “Operation Mincemeat,” in which a dead body was invested with a fake identity and bogus papers to fool the Germans over the Sicily landings.
Sometimes, she fills in the blanks with speculative episodes, meetings and passages of dialogue. There is no need for fiction when the facts of wartime espionage are already barely credible.
“The war may have been fought in the battlefields, but it was won in the libraries,” she writes. This was the real genius of Allied intelligence: the employment of a vast range of gifted amateurs, “corkscrew thinkers” in Churchill’s words, many of whom emerged from the libraries to fight a war of paper, books and scholarship and — when it was all over — quietly shuffled back into the groves of academe.
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