2024-07-10
Bookworms become spooks in this engaging study of wartime American intelligence.
Spies aren’t always James Bond types, historian and Stony Brook professor Graham notes; some of the earliest members of the World War II–era OSS were literature professors, librarians, and researchers whose common denominator was bibliomania. Founder William Donovan, a lawyer and a passionate book collector, inaugurated a division called Research & Analysis, which “represented something new in the world of spycraft,” its scholarly staff charged with researching subjects thoroughly before action was taken. One of Graham’s heroes, a formidable woman named Adele Kibre, “dark-haired, wicked-eyed, a classicist by training,” logged time in Stockholm acquiring European publications for OSS analysis, including, thanks to her wooing various Nazi officials, plenty of books and papers from the Third Reich. All of Graham’s bookworm subjects trained in the dark arts of assassination and disguise, and while many operated in plain sight of the enemy in neutral countries such as Sweden and Turkey, others went deep undercover. Some are relatively well known, such as the assessors who examined stolen Nazi art to return masterworks to their homes. Others figure in the history of scholarship but are little known today, such as the egomaniacal anthropologist Carleton Coon, whose racist theories gave aid and comfort to Nazi theorists but who served in the OSS all the same. Of all the figures in the book, Kibre is the centerpiece, and Graham does good service by highlighting her work and skills, which included concocting whatever persona appealed most to whomever she was dealing with. Graham closes with a note about how some of the scholars helped shape the successor CIA, and she makes a good case for studying the humanities as both an instrument of learning and a weapon of war.
Bibliophiles with a taste for cloak-and-dagger work will enjoy this lively book.
