Librarians-turned-spies helped fight the Nazis by using their information-gathering and organizational skills as a weapon during World War II.
These secret agents collected everything from local newspapers and trade magazines to underground resistance pamphlets, technology manuals, economic reports and geodetic surveys.
"They weren't the James Bond kind of spies, but more undercover, under-the-radar spies," says Kathy Pice, author of "Information Hunters: When Librarians, Soldiers and Spies Teamed Up in Europe During World War II."
"They were there to collect what today we would call open source materials. So magazines, newspapers, materials like industry directories, as well as anything that could give insight into the planning and strength of the enemy," Pais explains.
Librarians possessed skills that made them suitable for the job.
"Librarians, and research librarians in particular, are trained to be information managers," says Cato McBride Mohn, a library media specialist who researched agent librarians in the field.
“It's not so much that these librarians were trying to direct the course of the war... They were trying to take the information coming from these occupied territories and organize it in a way that would be useful to military commanders and other people. involved in making those decisions," she says for the Voice of America.
Pais, a retired professor of American history at the University of Pennsylvania, became interested in the subject after learning that her father's oldest brother was one of the spies.
Reuben Peiss, a librarian at Harvard University, was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services - America's first intelligence agency - at the start of World War II, which lasted from 1939 to 1945. Like many librarians and academics drafted into the war effort, Peiss spoke several languages.
"My uncle Reuben Pais knew German, French, Italian. He immediately understood Portuguese. (…) So to be able to look at a newspaper, a magazine or a book and know what it says was extremely important, as well as being able to make a quick judgment about that,” says Pice. “No one suspects that librarians are doing anything threatening, so they're really good intelligence agents. They're kind of hidden in plain sight.”
Although there were many women librarians in the United States at the time, it was mostly men who helped with the war effort, Pais says. The US government recruited librarians mostly from colleges and universities, where women found it difficult to get jobs.
Still, at least one female recruit who was denied a job in the highest academic echelons excelled in her role as a spy.
Adela Kibr, who earned a doctorate in medieval linguistics, was among the first academic spies to use photomicrography - photographing documents and sending the film back to her bosses for analysis.
"Sometimes being a woman gave them a little more believable deniability and they could get access to places that maybe men couldn't," says McBride Mohn. "In her case, for example, she developed really strong connections with the Danish resistance movement and their underground press, and used those channels to smuggle books and articles out of Nazi-occupied territories.”
Spies were generally stationed in neutral cities, where they collected publications produced by the enemy. They subscribed to German periodicals that contained articles on military rockets and atomic weapons. Some argue that the information gathered by these academics contributed to America's Manhattan Project, helping to speed up the development of the world's first atomic bomb.
Still, Pais and McBride-Monch are skeptical.
"I don't think librarians have discovered much that would be useful for the Manhattan Project," says Pice.
"If you look at post-war opinion, there's a debate about how much of what they took was valuable," adds McBride Mohn.
But their efforts had some long-term effects. When the war ended, some of these same agents documented and preserved the newspaper and book collections looted by the Nazis. Collecting missions enabled American research libraries to become renowned repositories of international material.
"One of the things that is really interesting that comes out of this whole effort is that it raises the profile of American research universities in terms of their holdings of European manuscripts or other documents that are primary sources of information," McBride Mohn says.
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