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Book and Dagger: How scholars and librarians became spies during World War II
How scholars achieved some of the most consequential intelligence victories of the twentieth century
In his two postgraduate years at Oxford, Pearson had learned how to mix the perfectly blended cocktail of imitation and deference that English aristocrats responded to, and so as head of X-2 became the primary channel through which this invaluable intelligence made it to the American brass (even as his airs got under Kim Philby’s skin). Perhaps it’s time for Hollywood to tell the story of the scholars and archivists who made victory possible, set in a reading room or in front of a wall of card-catalog shelves.Hitler and the Nazis, of course, predicated not just their rule but their epistemology on excluding the ideas and work produced by those of “inferior” races and ethnicities. Dozens of naturalized Americans and refugees from Hitler’s empire (like the Romanian statistician Abraham Wald, whose equations showed the Army Air Corps how to better armor its planes) enter Graham’s story, making crucial contributions to intelligence gathering and analysis.
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