Book Review: ‘Book and Dagger,’ by Elyse Graham

BOOK AND DAGGER: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, by Elyse Graham

The world of spying is traditionally divided into two categories: human intelligence and signals intelligence, known as humint and sigint.

The first is composed of secrets (variously defined) obtained from individuals and organizations with or without their knowledge. Sigint is the technical gathering of information through intercepted messages: letters, telegrams, telephone calls and, latterly, emails, texts and the swirling blizzard of electronic communication.

But these two pillars are themselves founded on and feed into the far less glamorous work of intelligence analysis: sifting through huge amounts of data to establish a clearer picture of an enemy (or ally), his plans and dispositions. Some of this material is obtained clandestinely, but much of it is combed from open sources, painstakingly studied, marshaled into concision and then passed on to spies, soldiers and politicians.

This is the least exciting part of espionage, not so much cloak-and-dagger as filing cabinet and index card, a network of hidden spies burrowing in the background: The work is time-consuming, complex, frequently thankless and vital to the efficient functioning of a modern intelligence system.

Elyse Graham, a historian and professor at Stony Brook University, has set out to rescue some of the worker bees of intelligence from obscurity by exploring their contribution to victory in World War II. She passionately argues that many of these fact-gatherers and analysts were not professional spies, but American academics, scholars, liberal arts professors, historians, librarians, anthropologists, artists, bookworms and art experts. Hers is a plea for a better understanding of the role played in espionage by the book, the imagined story, the artist, the writer, the humanities and the “library rats” who study them.