Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of WWII

This entertaining survey from historian Graham (You Talkin’ to Me?) depicts how a love of books helped the Allies win the war against Nazi Germany. Graham profiles a half dozen of the “hundreds” of “mild-mannered professors and oddball archivists and restless librarians” who were recruited by the Office of Strategic Services, the CIA’s precursor, which President Franklin Delano Roosevelt created at the start of the war because the U.S. was “utterly outmatched” in spy craft by both its allies and its enemies. These “humble drudges” with a “superhuman resistance to boredom” were tasked with reading through enemy newspapers, telephone books, railway schedules, photographs, and trash. Graham spotlights Sherman Kent, a Yale history professor who compiled exhaustive studies of North Africa’s railways; Adele Kibre, an archivist who embedded as a spy in neutral Sweden, where she recorded Third Reich newspapers and books on microfilm, which she sent back to Washington, D.C.; Varian Fry, a graduate student at Columbia University who provided U.S. visas to more than 1,500 refugees in Paris, including Hannah Arendt; and undercover art historians who helped track down artworks stolen by the Nazis. Enriched by Graham’s exuberant prose (“They acted as sleuths, tracking the oleaginous smell of paint and blood from murdered households to gutted archives... to stables and cellars and mines”), this is a colorful salute to some of WWII’s more bookish heroes. (Sept.)