Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II
"a dramatic reading of how wars are fought and intelligence used."
Elyse Graham illuminates a little-known aspect of American intelligence operations in WWII, the use of archivists, professors, and librarians as spies. These "mild-mannered professors and oddball archivists" didn't attract attention and were able to get all kinds of essential information as well as engaging in trickier spycraft. Graham takes us through their training and missions, introducing us to particular agents, such as professors Joseph Curtiss and Sherman Kent and archivist Adele Kibre.
More than that, she paints a broad picture of U.S. intelligence and propaganda efforts. She's done careful research on how agents were chosen and trained, giving colorful examples. Her writing is vivid, feeling more like a spy novel than an archival history, as seen in this description of Curtiss, more character than professor:
"Curtiss wasn't the type of man you'd look at twice, either to admire him or to size him up as an opponent. Hell, he wasn't the kind of man you'd look at once. "
The dramatic scenes work well to tell the story, but the line between actual and imaginary is blurred throughout the book. Writing about Adele Kibre, the archivist charged with tracking down newspapers, maps, and books that could be used by the military, there is both solid history and evocative story.
"It's easy to imagine Kibre strolling up to a bookseller to explain her new job at the Library of Congress. Perhaps, if she was asking about a particularly sensitive book, she would pretend to be nervous. Maybe she'd be asking for one of the presentation copies of Mein Kampf that Hitler gave to top-ranking members of the Nazi Party."
Maybe, but maybe not. More disturbing are factual errors, specifically in sections dealing with the development of the atomic bomb. Lise Meitner, who discovered nuclear fission and first wrote about it with her physicist nephew, Otto Robert Frisch, is correctly said to have fled Germany in 1938, but Graham calls it "a terrifying train ride to Stockholm" when in fact, the train out of Berlin went to the Netherlands. This is a minor nit but the next factual error is much greater.
Otto Hahn, the chemist Meitner had been working with in Berlin, did run some experiments that he wrote to her about, worried that something very wrong was happening since the results made no sense to him. Meitner had a flash of insight and realized that instead of chipping off heavier elements, as Hahn expected, the atom itself had been split. Hahn refused to believe Meitner, so he did not, as Graham claims, publish "a series of papers announcing 'the splitting of uranium'" in 1939. Meitner and Frisch were the ones to publish the pivotal paper. Hahn's papers were all about the work he and Meitner had done for many years on the "transuranics," the heavier elements they thought they were chipping off from the atom and how his new experiments did not invalidate that work as Meitner insisted.
As many have done, including the recent Oppenheimer movie, Graham follows the revisionist history spread by the German physicists after the war that they could have built a bomb themselves, that they were working on it. In fact, they were doing no such thing as Meitner herself reported from her interactions with Hahn and as was made even more clear in the secret recordings of the German scientists' conversations after they were captured. They were working on a nuclear engine, for nuclear power, but hadn't gotten very far even with that. It makes better drama to tell the story of the heavy water plant in Norway with a possible German bomb in the background, but it's not better history.
Still, Graham is covering a lot, from stolen books to stolen art to propaganda. She weaves all the strands together into a dramatic reading of how wars are fought and intelligence used. One just wishes that the research could be completely trusted. That is, after all, essential in a book about academics and their unappreciated skills.