Sterling Memorial Library welcomed Elyse Graham GRD ’15 for a lecture and Q&A session about the history of academics and spies uncovered in her new project, as well as Yale’s deeper history with the CIA.
Alex Geldzahler
Alex Geldzahler, Contributing Photographer
Yale professors saved the world during World War II, Elyse Graham GRD ’15, a history professor at Stony Brook University, believes.
On Wednesday, Graham spoke to the Yale community about her new book, “Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II.” She discussed the unlikely link between academia and the espionage of the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS — the precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency — conducted during World War II. Many scholars, including Yale faculty, were then recruited as spies because of their academic backgrounds.
According to Graham, her book is about “World War II, Yale University and the true story of how librarians saved the world.”
Graham spent an hour discussing the book’s focus as well as the historical context behind how ordinary professors and staff at universities around the nation found themselves as agents carrying out complicated and dangerous work in service of their country.
When World War II broke out, the United States found itself missing critical information, including maps, reference books and guides to foreign locales. To cultivate this knowledge, the OSS turned to libraries and their caretakers to become agents in a global spy network.
“Only ordinary people could fight this kind of fight — the kind of people who Hitler would dismiss or overlook, like women or professors,” Graham explained. “They were perfectly positioned to run sabotage campaigns.”
Hidden away in library books were critical, public pieces of information. Graham proved this by passing around various books dating back to the 1940s, some of which included government secrets and maps used to plan complex military operations. Viewers were invited to consult the same fragile books to better understand the research undertaken by OSS-recruited agents.
Graham touched on the specialized information that professor-turned-spies would need to learn, including how to kill with only a newspaper and what to do if you were captured in enemy territory. One book she procured for her lecture and passed to the viewers was inconspicuously called “Kill — Or Get Killed.”
Another was a small, pocket-sized copy of “The Great Gatsby,” which was given to troops as a form of entertainment. This decision was responsible for the novel’s great success after the end of the war.
World War II, she claims, “was fought on the battlefields but won in the libraries.”
Her book centers on the lives of three academic-spies, two of whom came from Yale University. First, Graham gave us the story of Joseph Curtiss, Yale College class of 1923 and Graduate School class of 1926, an English professor who was bored with his New Haven life. Following his recruitment, he operated in Istanbul, where he attempted to convince Nazi agents to double-cross their homeland or defect.
She also touched on Sherman Kent, Yale College class of 1926 and Graduate School class of 1933, another Yalie spy, who rose to prominence at the CIA and was dubbed the “father of intelligence analysis,” and Adele Kibre, an archivist tasked with obtaining secret documents for the United States.
Graham admitted, “Yale really was that big of a deal to winning WWII.”
These academics were occasionally asked to murder as part of their espionage duties, as Graham chronicled. In the book, she explains how a Yale alumnus might reason differently with the task of murder than, say, a Harvard or Princeton agent.
To her Yale audience, Graham emphasized the long history behind the school’s ongoing relationship with the OSS and CIA today, as “Yale loves keeping secrets.”
Towards the end of the lecture, Graham turned her attention to the role of libraries during times of war –– advocating for the preservation and protection of these institutions. The knowledge that proved critical in fighting in the War, major secrets and general information could be found in publicly available books by those with the patience to read them.
Michael Printy ’94, Head of the Humanities Group and Librarian for Western European Humanities, explained how Yale’s archives and collection of primary sources are closely related to the material found in “Book and Dagger.”
“It was totally worthwhile. It was fabulous and a delight,” Margot Clark-Junkins, another writer, said of the event.
The event was held in the Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall, located at 120 High St.
This post was originally published on here
