Wars Are Won By Stories

( US DEFENSE / AP Photo )
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Brooke Gladstone: This is On the Media's midweek podcast. I'm Brooke Gladstone. We are living in history all of the time. Nevertheless, there are some times that seem more historic than others, like now, when academics and artists and even librarians have come under attack. I mention that particular sign of these times because I just read a new, delightful book by historian Elise Graham, professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, called Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II. The book is a breezy and enthralling read but assiduously footnoted for those who might question her very compelling argument that without this unheralded corps of peculiar recruits, that war might very well have been lost.
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Elise Graham: The library is full of stories about spies, but none of those stories are about spies in the library.
Brooke Gladstone: [chuckles] You say that the war was won on the front lines, but it was won with books.
Elise Graham: We often think of World War II as the physicists' war. Soldiers were out fighting on the battlefield, and then it was finally won by a bunch of physicists in New Mexico who dropped an atomic bomb. That itself was a successful misinformation campaign.
Brooke Gladstone: How so?
Elise Graham: In early 1945, a fellow named Henry DeWolf Smyth was called into an office in Washington and asked if he would write this book that was about a new kind of weapon that the US was developing. The guy who had called him into his office, Vannevar Bush, knew that by the end of the year, the US was going to drop an atomic bomb that had the potential to end the war, but also that as soon as it was dropped, everybody was going to want to know what is this weapon, how was it made, and so forth. Smyth accepted the assignment.
It was published by Princeton University Press about a week after the bomb was dropped. It explained how the US made the bomb, but it told a very specific kind of story, the Oppenheimer story that you see in the movies, where a group of shaggy-haired physicists figured out how to split the atom and fission, and all of this stuff. The thing is, the physics of building an atomic bomb is, in some respects, the least important part. More important, if you actually want to make the thing explode, is the chemistry, the metallurgy, the engineering that were left out of the story.
The book was published the way it was so that it would satisfy people's curiosity but not give other countries the information that you actually need to build a bomb. It was a misinformation campaign, the very last one of the war, and the most successful because it still utterly dominates the way that we think about how the bomb was built and how the war was won.
Look, the physicists did amazing things, but this wasn't just the physicists' war. It was also the historians' war, the book collectors' war, the artists' war, the professors' war. The war was fought on battlefields, but it was won in libraries.
Brooke Gladstone: You know, we think of James Bond, we think of Jason Bourne, suave or brutal but you show that the OSS's Research and Analysis Branch were recruiting people who were very different.
Elise Graham: These spies, these librarians and professors during World War II, they were chosen precisely because they would be overlooked. Some of them were working in the basement of the Library of Congress, reading all of these documents and pulling out unlikely kinds of intelligence from them, but a lot of them went undercover, and nobody suspected them of being spies. Rumor has it that to this day, the CIA does recruiting at the annual American Library Association conference.
Brooke Gladstone: [laughs] Now, you touch on so many characters in your enthralling narrative but there are three you return to again and again, Joseph Curtiss, Sherman Kent, and Adele Kibre. Your book starts very cinematically with the recruitment of the very unlikely Curtiss.
Elise Graham: People who were in charge of recruiting spies into the OSS at the beginning of the war often didn't have much experience with spycraft themselves. They drew on spy stories to tell them what to do, so being recruited as a spy during World War II often was very cinematic. Someone came up to Curtiss and said, "Listen, you need to go to the Yale Club in New York City tomorrow. Wear a purple tie. You're going to see a man who's smoking a cigarette. When he sees you, he'll put it out. He has an important message for you." Curtiss went, and that's how he got recruited. At the beginning, drawing on spy stories was really all that they had to build up an intelligence agency.
Brooke Gladstone: Why Curtiss in particular?
Elise Graham: Curtiss was a professor of early modern literature. He taught Renaissance stuff, Shakespeare. Even though Yale has a great tradition of charismatic lecturers, Curtiss was the sort of guy who wouldn't be able to get the attention of a waiter. Students didn't remember him later on. If you're going to send someone behind enemy lines as a spy, it is useful that this is someone who nobody would look at twice, not the kind of guy who's wearing a tuxedo and everybody knows takes his martini shaken not stirred.
Brooke Gladstone: Why was he assessed as having the right stuff?
Elise Graham: When you go undercover, it's important that you be as competent in your cover as you are in the spycraft. Joseph Curtiss's cover was going to be he was going to Istanbul in order to collect books for the Yale Library, which meant he had to be competent in collecting books. Of course, in the meanwhile, he was tracking down German spies and turning them into double agents, but that's definitely not the kind of thing you would expect someone like Joseph Curtiss to be doing.
Brooke Gladstone: He was sent to supposedly neutral Istanbul just as whatever spying that was going on there by the Allies was falling apart.
Elise Graham: The OSS branch in Istanbul was falling apart because the guy in charge of it thought that he was in a James Bond story. He was sleeping with his sources, and his sources turned out to be enemy agents. His cover was blown so thoroughly that every time he walked into one of the city's nightclubs, the band would start playing a song called Boo Boo Baby, I'm a Spy.
Brooke Gladstone: [laughs]
Elise Graham: That was Lanning MacFarland. Curtiss actually tracked him down. He got tired of not being contacted. Maybe MacFarland was hanging on to his own jobs by his fingernails, people were getting fired from the Istanbul outpost left and right, whatever the case, Curtiss was given a surprising new job, which was to build a counterintelligence operation that would find enemy agents, turn them into double agents, and would also spread propaganda, rumors, misinformation. He turned out to be surprisingly good at it. I know that there's a lot of lying and backstabbing in academia, but this is something else altogether.
A lot of what he did relied on the right story, a rumor. This is a lesson in the power of stories themselves. As the poet Robert Frost said, "Unless you've learned to master the metaphor, the metaphor will master you." You will wind up, unintentionally, spreading rumors for the enemy unless you know how those rumors work. You will wind up being gulled by an enemy agent who's convincing you he's not an enemy agent unless you know the way that he's put his own cover story together.
Brooke Gladstone: Tell me how these unlikely agents were trained.
Elise Graham: You're a professor, you're a librarian, after you joined the OSS, you'd be sent to a spy training camp. The English had these spy training schools that were incredibly posh. They were in country manors and had housemasters and servants. The Americans, meanwhile, had these camps with tents in national parks where they would learn how to do quick draws like cowboys. You'd be standing in a muddy field and there would be a fighting instructor.
The English sent over their combat training instructors, teaching you how to use ordinary objects as weapons. You'd learn how to use somebody's trousers to restrain him, or how to fold a newspaper in such a way that it turns into a deadly weapon. You would learn if you were a woman, how to use a makeup compact as a knuckle duster. The assumption was that you'd be out in the field with only your wits to protect you.
Brooke Gladstone: I was really struck by the meticulous creation of persuasive pocket litter.
Elise Graham: As a general rule, you can have either a weapon or a cover but not both because if the Gestapo catch you with a gun or a knife, you're not going to be able to persuade them that you're an ordinary civilian. Everything on your person, including the stuff in your pockets, should agree with your cover. Your toothpaste, your breath should smell like the toothpaste in the area that you're supposed to be from. If there are grains of tobacco in your pockets, they need to be tobacco that is sold in the place where you're from. I mean, it was really, really specific.
Brooke Gladstone: Let's move on to another notable character you return to again and again, Sherman Kent. Less Caspar Milquetoast and more Humphrey Bogart maybe.
Elise Graham: He was a tweed-wearing history professor at Yale. He was brilliant, but he was always looking for a fight. When he was teaching, he would throw chalk past the heads of his students, which they don't let us do anymore. If a student was yawning, he would throw the chalk right into the student's mouth.
When he gets recruited, he goes to a spy training camp the same as everyone else. He learned how to throw daggers and he became so good at it. For the rest of his career, he was famous for being able to throw a dagger better than a Sicilian. That was the phrase that was said about him. Sometimes he would stop mid-conversation with someone and show how he could fold a newspaper into a deadly weapon.
He didn't end up going into the field. He wound up going to Washington, where he worked in intelligence analysis, also known as the Chairborne Division. This is professors of literature and history and economics who are pulling out of these incredibly unlikely sources, novels and newspapers, and street directories strategic intelligence that can be used to fight the war.
All the work of those professors and librarians would have been nothing if Sherman Kent hadn't been their spokesman. What he was trying to persuade the military of was that most of what an intelligence agency needs to know can come from public sources. In the right hands, paper can be more effective than bombs. It could tell the right reader what factory should be bombed to stop the production of ball bearings.
It's more useful to stop the production of ball bearings than to stop the production of fighter planes because ball bearings are used to create fighter planes. How do you know what factory? By comparing minute fluctuations in railroad rates and then you find its address by looking at a street directory. It was really adventurous and imaginative reading in the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress that allowed the Allies to come to these insights. You could see why intelligence analysis proved so powerful as a weapon of espionage why it became the basis of modern spycraft.
However, none of that is actionable unless you can convince the military that what you're pulling out of a street directory is actually useful. That was Sherman Kent's job, or at least part of his job. He would fight with the generals on behalf of his analysts and he would say, "Listen, what these guys are coming up with is actually useful."
Brooke Gladstone: Read some of that dialogue.
Elise Graham: The dialogue is invented.
Brooke Gladstone: You're so good at it. I know that in some cases you plainly say you're extrapolating what the conversation might have been. You'd take the known character of Sherman Kent and his skeptical higher-ups and how he may have dealt with them. Imaginary but it's very persuasive.
Elise Graham: Kent's meeting a general while the OSS and the military are jointly scouting strategic locations for an invasion of North Africa. The general goes, "Look, Professor, I'm sure your work is impressive to undergraduates scratching their pimples but I'm fighting an actual war. Stop sending me reports. I won't read them. My men are giving me everything I need."
"Everything you need will be thousands of coffins if you don't read this. Would you rather read reports or obituaries?" "What the hell is this?" "It's a telephone directory for Casablanca." "You brought me a telephone directory?" "Just take a look inside, why don't you? These are street addresses for every Casablanca business you need to sabotage or occupy, material de chemin de fer." That's railway equipment. "Societe Francaise des Munitions de Chasse, de Tir et de Guerre." That's French for munitions factory.
"Hold on. Who says we're landing in Casablanca?" "No one told me. I figured it out. That's what working at Intelligence means. Your boats are practically named sink me offshore of Casablanca. I can imagine the armies waiting there have figured it out too." I wanted to give a bit of the flavor of exactly what Sherman Kent was giving as value added to this operation.
Brooke Gladstone: Now talk about Adele Kibre.
Elise Graham: Kibre had, without knowing it, been training all of her life to be a spy. She had a PhD in classics from the University of Chicago. Because women couldn't really go into the professoriate in these years, she became a professional archive hunter, hopping from archive to archive across Europe, earning money by taking photographs of rare texts for scholars back home in the States.
By the time she was recruited by the OSS, she had been doing this for almost a decade. Kibre became the most productive document acquisitions agent working for the Allies. She was working undercover in supposedly neutral Sweden. Sweden could continue to be neutral as long as no spies operated in Sweden, so Kibre had to work completely undercover. Furthermore, Sweden tilted in the direction of the Axis. The Swedish police had trained with the Gestapo so this was actually still a very dangerous place to be a spy.
She acquired and sent home on microfilm not just industry directories and trade magazines and railway schedules and German newspapers and atlases and maps and technical journals, but stuff that only went to vetted subscribers who were sympathetic to the Nazis. A massive number of documents that went all over the world on behalf of the Allies, including into the library at a little place in New Mexico called Los Alamos.
Brooke Gladstone: In Adele, you actually have a kind of movie spy. She used charm. She used guile. She also used the technique you describe of saying something wrong in order to be mansplained the secret reality.
Elise Graham: Kibre was aware that she was the sort of woman who appealed to men who think two things at the same time. One, that they're attracted to smart women, and two, that they're smarter than the women they're attracted to, which is a very dangerous combination. The records indicate that Kibre changed her persona to suit the people that she was talking to. When she was trying to get documents from professors. "Oh, I myself got a PhD at the University of Chicago. I'm a very professorial person."
When she talks to people who were sympathetic with the Germans, she seems to have represented herself as being sympathetic with the Germans. When she was talking with very stiff Swedish type, she herself acted like a stiff Swedish type. She reflected what they wanted, which is very much a Hollywood thing, but also something that you really would expect from a traditional spy.
Brooke Gladstone: You were able to collect a lot of information on her, but you also found that a lot of other women who worked for the OSS were left out of these histories and that was about 35% of the OSS.
Elise Graham: That's right. In the National Archives, the finding aid for the OSS was put together with the help of OSS veterans. They did a great service to history, but they forgot to include the names of women. They are, however, in the archive itself, it just takes a lot more work to come across them. Partly because of this, history itself has forgotten a lot of these remarkable women who did incredible things during the war.
Brooke Gladstone: Among the experts were cartographers who'd looked through historical maps to make those legible for radar.
Elise Graham: You can't put boots on the ground unless you first put the ground under the boots. At the start of World War II, the US had just two sets of maps that showed all of Japan. The Army Corps of Engineers, which had been making most of the maps the military used, had a budget that provided for two cartographers. Because of this, during the war, making maps was a huge component of the work of research and analysis. Geographers passed endless hours sitting in the New York Public Library copying historical maps.
One map they used was a whaling map that the Wilkes Expedition published in the 19th century. It's a copper plate engraving. The surveyors got their measurements by firing guns from their ships and listening for the echo. Herman Melville used it while writing Moby-Dick. This is not ideal lumber for the age of radar, but the incredible thing is they made it work. This is another testimony to the value of having historians who understood the cartographical practices at the time, could compare it with what was current now, and then pull out of even a map, that seems that useless if you're flying planes around, information that could be used for strategic maps. It's a real testimony to the value of training people historically, because you never know what's going to be important in a crisis.
Brooke Gladstone: As you said, 90% of the information you need to know is in the open, if you know where to look and how to read it.
Elise Graham: That's right. They wound up training new people to become cartographers too. They particularly liked people who could play the piano because their fingers were especially nimble.
Brooke Gladstone: A lot of the work that these spies did revolved around changing the narrative. One very effective tactic involved "whispering".
Elise Graham: Whispering was a subspecialty of propaganda. You had to be trained in it specially. Not just anybody could do it. Now, you might think that spreading rumors means talking as loudly and widely as possible, but that's not true. The coordination of loose lips had to be as tight as the coordination of special forces. I'll tell you how it worked. The Allies put together rumors at something called the rumor factory. The head of this section had the enviable title master whisperer. The whispers would go out through strategic networks. In a given region, a chief whisperer would organize the whispers, give them to agents. They would give them to sub-agents. Mostly sub-agents were ordinary civilians. You could be a reliable sub-agent in a propaganda network and not even know it.
Okay, so the rumor factory classified whispers in two categories. One, smokescreen rumors that were designed to deceive the enemy about the Allied war position or the Allies' intentions, and, two, rumors that were designed to attack the morale of the enemy. There's one that goes, this is 1941 in Germany, "A woman in black committed suicide with a revolver on the steps of the Reich Chancellery," which is Hitler's headquarters in Berlin. "She held in her hand a newspaper announcing the death of her husband and son." This is to make people think about the despair of the German people.
There's one from February 1944. "Designs for a Fourth Reich flag have been seen in Switzerland." Not a Third Reich flag but a Fourth Reich flag, which is meant, I think, to make people think plans for a post-Nazi Germany are already being considered. Not just post-Nazi, but also this kind of endless, hopeless cycle of failed regimes. It was meant to demoralize people.
Brooke Gladstone: Do you see any of this tactic at work today?
Elise Graham: I think I see these same principles at work in how rumors gain traction online. For instance, there was a story during the summer that had to do with vice presidential candidate JD Vance and a couch. I'm not going to repeat its details. Somebody showed on TikTok pages from JD Vance's book Hillbilly Elegy, and they said, "Okay, on this certain page in chapter 11 in the first edition, there is this reference to something that JD Vance did with a couch. But you can see I have a later edition, and the publisher actually pulled it and they showed like a blank page.
I believed it at first that this was in the first edition so it was specific, it was concrete. I'm the sort of liberal who very well might have a copy of Hillbilly Elegy on my shelf, but if I did, it probably wouldn't be a first edition. It's an interesting story, which means that people will repeat it even if they know it's not true. The absence of evidence was itself evidence. Here's the blank page in the book."
Then, finally, there was something larger that people were getting out of it that had something to do with either JD Vance himself or about what publishers are apt to do in proximity to power. All of which is to say this is a perfect whisper. It turns out not to have been a whisper. It was just a joke that some guy made that caught fire, but you can see, using the principles of Whispering how this kind of rumor, if it was weaponized as propaganda, would work today.
Brooke Gladstone: The whisper campaigns during the Second World War were largely about demoralizing the enemy. Of course, one of the most famous coups pulled off by this corps of irregulars was Operation Mincemeat. British intelligence dressed up a corpse as a Royal Marine to deceive the Germans about an upcoming invasion.
Elise Graham: Compelling stories were at the center of many of the Allies' most successful operations. The Battle of Normandy relied on using these Hollywood actors and set builders and other film professionals that placed the central arena of the fight in Norway, hundreds of miles from where it really was in France.
Brooke Gladstone: The make-believe preparations were set largely in Scotland, and, basically, the camera was the German drones.
Elise Graham: The surveillance aircraft taking pictures as they flew overhead. They convinced Hitler the D-Day invasion wasn't happening while it was happening, that this was meant to distract him before they really hit Norway. They convinced him to ignore the evidence right in front of him and to hold a lot of his military strength in Norway, where he thought that the D-Day invasion was actually going to happen.
Then you mentioned the most famous deception operation of the war, Operation Mincemeat, which convinced the Germans to believe in a coincidence that was on its face, ridiculous, simply because it was a compelling story that this British Marine fell in the ocean carrying a suitcase of plans that showed the Allies planned to invade Greece instead of Sicily. The British worked up a whole background for this guy. He had pocket litter. He had a photograph of his fiancée Pam, an overdraft slip from the bank showing he had spent too much on the engagement ring for Pam.
Brooke Gladstone: They dropped the corpse so that it would wash up in Spain-
Elise Graham: -whom the Germans trusted. They successfully laundered the operation into a trustworthy source, which was also done with whispers. If you could get a whisper printed in a small newspaper, then a big respectable newspaper would print that the small newspaper was saying it, and then, suddenly, it was respectable. The same thing happens today when people get a story going on social media and, eventually, legacy media have to start covering it because it's become a story that people talk about. This is something that tells us about how important it is to teach people how stories work.
Brooke Gladstone: Do we have that kind of literacy about stories today? You say stories won the war, but the humanities now are under attack. Did we really get that message? Elise Graham: Before the war, US libraries were underfunded. They had very thin collections compared to what was available in Europe. After the war, both university libraries and public libraries were invested in heavily by the US government, which was determined to never be caught so badly lacking again. The US had learned the value of libraries not just as centers of community and education, but as something that's integral to national security.
Meanwhile, the CIA, among its many post-war adventures, invested heavily in Master of Fine Arts writing programs in places like the University of Iowa, bringing over intellectuals from all over the world. Amid the cornstalks of Iowa, they would learn the American way storytelling principles like show, don't tell, so that they wouldn't write socialist novels of ideas. I'm not saying this completely in favor of it, I'm just describing what's happening. The point is the US understood that storytelling is valuable, that libraries are valuable, that the humanities are valuable. These are some of the lessons that the US self-consciously brought away from the war. Of course, 80 years have passed since then and we've largely forgotten that lesson.
Brooke Gladstone: In your book, you highlight the world-changing contributions of the people that Hitler despised, the members of the French resistance that destroyed critical railways that helped turn the war, and all the people that he rejected who wound up being responsible for turning the tide of a war.
Elise Graham: Yes, I mean Hitler, he had an authoritarian regime. The thing about authoritarians is they have an incredibly limited outlook, an incredible need to conform, a conviction that anybody who's competent must share their exact way of thinking, which is a huge weakness. I wrote a piece for the Globe and Mail a while ago saying, Jamelle Bouie of the New York Times has said this better, that authoritarianism is a catastrophic military disadvantage. The US military and others have conducted tons of studies showing, for instance, that diversity is a big military advantage. It improves things ranging from resilience to unit cohesion, and more broadly, agile military thinking because they value outside perspectives, open debate, independent judgment.
During World War II, Hitler and his cronies were constantly hobbled by the fact that they excluded violently so many people who wound up contributing marvelously to the Allied side of the fight. Anyway, I write this piece and then a very belligerent guy writes to me and says, "What about the Spartans?" Okay, I didn't reply to him because I knew I didn't want to get in that fight, but I guarantee that everything he thinks he knows about the Spartans he got from the movie 300. The stories we tell matter. A ton of guys watched that movie and came away from it thinking, well, the best fighters are a small group of guys who have 12 packs and don't wear shirts, but in a totally straight way, and fight against these dark-skinned Persians using the power of their own conformity. They came away thinking that's how a good army works. The stories we tell matter.
Of course, the 300 guys should make their movie, but it's useful to have historians out there, too, talking about how it really worked. Movies, books, commentary, all of these things are in the end, stories. It's important to have a plurality of stories out there so that we can arrive at a better and more useful truth, including about what happened during World War II and how we won it.
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Brooke Gladstone: Elise Graham is a historian and professor at Stony Brook University and the author of Book and Dagger. Thanks so much for being here.
Elise Graham: Thanks for having me.
Brooke Gladstone: Thanks for listening to the On the Media midweek podcast. Listen this weekend to the big show when we'll basically be setting On the Media's table for our coverage of President Trump's second administration.
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