Book and Dagger (Beach Reads)

The U.S. joined World War II in 1941 after the attacks on Pearl Harbor.

What was the state of American intelligence services vis-a-vis other members of the Allied forces when the U.S. entered the war?

When the U.S. entered the war, the United States had no standing spy agency.

And they had to try to assemble one, a working spy agency equipped for war as quickly as they possibly could.

And William Donovan, who was put in charge of putting together the OSS, just in advance of Pearl Harbor, actually, but he was a lawyer and he had the bright idea of saying, look, we need an instant bank of expertise in every subject in the library.

And as a lawyer, I know that you have to do the reading before you actually go to court.

Why don't we just get librarians themselves to be our spies? Why not just recruit professors and librarians to become sort of the core body of our new spy agency? It was a ridiculous idea, but miraculously it worked.

In fact, it worked so well that it became the basis of how modern spycraft is done everywhere.

And just to be clear, the OSS, which you mentioned, is the precursor to the CIA.

That's absolutely correct.

And look, other spy agencies in other countries, they had the equivalent of what in the OSS was called R&D, research and development.

These were engineers and chemists and other scientists who made bombs or who made, you know, a tracking device that you could put in your shoes, something like that.

This was a type of spycraft or a type of spy technology that existed in other countries.

But the OSS also had research and analysis, which instead of hiring scientists, had humanists, had philologists and historians and economists and psychologists and sociologists.

art historians, you know, doing the work of trying to find out information from books, from papers, from other published sources.

This was the origin of open source intelligence, OSINT, which, it turns out, can find out 90% of what an intelligence agency needs to know, even before they start bringing in secretly acquired sources.

You talk about a handful of scholars turned spies in Book and Dagger, and I wanted to zero in on two of them just for the purposes of this conversation.

So let's start with Sherman Kent.

How would you describe Kent as a person? And I would love if in your answer, you could share his experience of a certain natural disaster in New Haven, Connecticut.

So Sherman Kent is a wonderful character for this purpose.

If you're writing a movie, generally you need to have a hero who is the only person who can solve this particular problem.

And I do think that Sherman Kent was almost the only person who could solve the problem that faced the OSS, which is that the military had never worked with professors and librarians before.

And they just didn't think that the work these tweed-wearing scholars came up with could help them to win a war.

Sherman Kent, he was a historian at Yale before he joined the OSS, and he was actually the perfect man for his job, because his job entailed in part trying to convince the military to listen to what these Tweedy professors were saying.

And Kent, even though he was himself a Tweed-wearing professor, really should have been a drill sergeant.