~ research notes from non-fiction books I’ve recently read ~ for the benefit of all researchers and dedicated, informed citizens
Book and Dagger ~ How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of WW2 by Elyse Graham
Definition of Intelligence: “The world’s least glamourous people for the world’s most glamourous profession.”
1941. After Pearl Harbour, the U.S. radically changed its foreign policy of avoiding scuffles perceived as being relevant to Europe and other places beyond America.
They [scholars and librarians] went to training camps and “covered every aspect of spy craft: how to withstand interrogation; how to memorize someone’s appearance without resorting to useless descriptions like ‘normal height’ or ‘average face’; how to write in code; how to steal and alter identity documents; how to fight; how to kill quietly.”
President Truman created the OSS (Office of Strategic Services, nicknamed Oh So Social for all the drunken parties they had) on America’s entry into the war in 1942. After the war ended the OSS was briefly dissolved —for fear of how it could harm America from within. Shortly thereafter the CIA was formed.
CIA: Unelected, centralized government-funded and approved agency of intelligence. It gave a place for a segment of the human population to think in spy, to live spy, long term. It’s how their brains are wired. The combined efforts spawned a vast array of sneaky, lying tactics, actors in a long play, a blooming of black roses, let’s say. They had a big library of secrets and dirt.
Parties in Georgetown, WA, galore. Dissolved in 1945. “We don’t want to risk having an American gestapo.” This was just as Operation Paperclip was developing. The era of secrets—top secrets—began a long time ago.
Previous incarnation of OSS was the Office of the Coordinator of Information.
1942. The frontline became libraries and librarians recall “coming to work and finding that the map library had suddenly become top security area protected by 24-hour armed guards”. America’s supply of global maps was woefully small back then.
What made a great spy wasn’t gadgets; what made a great saboteur wasn’t bombs. It was cleverness, cunning, an ability to believe in the power of small acts of rebellion.” (p199)
For decades, college students followed tunnels that led straight from the seminar room to the CIA. Among intelligence agencies like the CIA the phrase “P sources” – short for professor source – used to be code for the professors and university administrators who recruited on their behalf. For a time, Ivy league schools supplied a disproportionate amount of new employees of the CIA, according to the CIA’s in-house journal Studies in Intelligence (p292)
For much of the second half of the 20th century, intelligence agencies recruited in large numbers from departments of English, History and the social sciences—and they still relied on professors in those departments to help turn data into usable intelligence. Humanities scholars moved in the hidden world of spies, and spies, in turn, shaped major institutions in the humanities. (p292)
The world was incredibly fortunate (lol) that the United States was able to turn its greatest advantage at the start of WW2, its lack of a standing intelligence service, into its greatest advantage. That advantage came from innovation: because they weren’t tied down by established ways of doing things, the professors and librarians of OSS, and the refugees who joined them, were able to create something new. They became the scholars who invented modern spy craft. (297)
Jonathon Swift: “Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect.”
Washington Post Feb. 99 “When Seeing and Hearing isn’t Believing”: “Digital morphing—voice, video and photo—has come of age, available for use in psychological operations. PSYOPS, as the military calls it, seek to exploit human vulnerabilities in enemy governments, militaries and populations to pursue national battlefield objectives…” [Note: Whitney Webb’s observation that Americans have not cottoned on to the fact that they themselves are also considered “enemies” and are also being subjected to the same dirty warfaring techniques the American military has used on people overseas.)
The Yale library–and a young English professor–would serve as a cover for a secret agent who would “go abroad ostensibly to acquire books for the library, but actually to gather intelligence”. (intro xii)
OSS recruited 100s of “mild mannered professors and oddball archivists and restless librarians”.
Europeans had been developing spy craft for centuries so the Americans, knowing they could not beat them at their game, found an intelligence resource that other countries in the war were underestimating. (intro xiv)
The 900 secret agents in the Research and Analysis (R&A) were called the “Chairborne Division”. The war may have been fought on battlefields but it was won in libraries. (intro xv)
The power of power from down below.
The library rats of the OSS approached problems differently than their enemy counterparts, the Nazis. They saw military intel in newspaper society columns, maps to unfamiliar cities in phone books, trash, enemy newspapers, railway rate schedules, vacation photographs of buildings the OSS wanted to burgle or demolish, and many more.
Pearl Harbour attack on Dec. 7/41 showed Americans they had no intelligence infrastructure. Recruits had no idea how to “spy” and, like their instructors, probably gleaned what they could from spy novels and radio programs, and movies. Later on from TV.
Just how do you teach women and men who held ordinary jobs—teacher, professor, librarian, secretary, hospital technician—to suddenly become saboteurs, prison interrogators, undercover agents, resistance cell liaisons, etc?
Spy school courses fell into 5 categories: cryptology, criminal skills like burglary, sabotage, how to kill, psychological warfare, recognizing enemy police officers and intelligence agents, and secrecy. (p39)
OSS operatives whom the Gestapo captured had to be able to hold out under interrogations for 48 hours, not because there was any chance of rescue but so their underground allies had the time they needed to safely relocate.
In England in the 1940s, England assigned an upper class mystery writer and screenwriter to the position of interviewer of potential female secret agents.
Students became couriers, saboteurs, recruiters, propagandists, whisperers seeding conflict.
A Woman of No Importance — the Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II by Sonia Purnell
Back in 1953, “morale generally at the CIA was low, with one in five officers leaving in 1953 alone. Many believed their bosses did not know what they were doing and wasted a “shocking amount of money” on failed missions overseas, which were falsely claimed as successes. (sound familiar?) To the outside world the CIA represented the highest form of public service and an omnipotent muscular force intent on subverting and sabotaging Communism. But insiders claimed that “incompetent people were given great power and capable recruits were stacked like cordwood in the corridors”. (p300)
Operation Paperclip, “the code name for the wholesale recruitment of former senior Nazis on the grounds that however barbaric their conduct in the war they also ranked as the ultimate anti-Soviets. The U.S. Army’s intelligence operation had taken on the Butcher of Lyon himself, Klaus Barbie. Men who had been responsible for the torture and deaths of so many […] were now being spirited away from their war crimes tribunals to safety” by the U.S and were paid handsomely by the American government. (p301)
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the Lillooet Gazette 