Book and Dagger: How scholars and librarians became spies during World War II
37 comments
·January 17, 2025null
grajaganDev
The CIA largely recruited only from Ivy League universities well into the 1980s.
neilv
I wouldn't be aware of any secretive recruiting, like in the article or the movies, but the first time I bumped into them was actually at an Ivy job fair, where they were publicly recruiting CS nerds.
I went by their table out of curiosity, or to see if they were giving away any schwag. Because who wouldn't want a "CIA" pen, even if it didn't shoot tranquilizer darts.
Since I was a very nerdy kid, I gave the people at the table my resume, while probably forgetting to make eye contact. There was zero indication of them having any interest in talking with me, so I left.
But, maybe because I'd started working very young, my resume looked a lot better than I did, and they must've later glanced at it.
As I was later leaving the job fair, about to enter the elevator, this CIA representative comes bounding across the room at me, shouting to get my attention. Then she asked if I could come in the next day for an interview.
If I did the interview, they must've mind-control drugged me to forget it. But I did retain a nerdy kid story about being chased by a CIA agent. Still no schwag.
ajcp
Now it's mainly BYU...
cushychicken
Turns out having firsthand experience living abroad, plus airtight foreign language skills, is quite valuable to intelligence agencies. (The fact that they don’t really drink or do drugs makes them a nice cultural fit, too.)
Paraphrasing a sarcastic comment from Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character in Charlie Wilson’s War: “What a wild fucking idea: our spies should probably speak the same language as the people they’re spying on.”
Lest anyone hammer on the LDS for this: missionaries as spies is not a novel concept nor exclusive to Mormons.
seatac76
I chuckled at this. Tried to find an article that came out recently about why Mormons make good spies but couldn’t unfortunately.
Der_Einzige
The creator of civit.AI, the largest AI porn website/huggingface for diffusion models, is a Mormon and he felt the need to tell me this quickly when I spoke to him.
I knew what he was really telling me, lol.
grajaganDev
They will have to compete with the FBI.
PittleyDunkin
I saw a photo pop up a few months back from a hiring fair at Yale. I guess Skull and Bones isn't pulling them in like it used to.
whimsicalism
there are definitely actively people going to Yale that are going to the CIA, I actually think Yale is a more common one
paganel
It goes to very recent times, almost all Arabic&Islamic departments in the US universities (the ones that matter, anyway) have a link to either the CIA, the State Department or even the Department of Defense. Needless to say, the same used to apply to Slavic Studies departments (and I bet it still does), see the infamous Victoria Nuland [1]:
> She earned a bachelor of arts degree from Brown University in 1983, where she studied Russian literature, political science, and history
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Nuland#Early_life_and...
warner25
> I bet it still does
I'm not sure why anyone would expect otherwise. This also extends to a lot of computer science and engineering departments. Not just through funding research and recruiting graduates, but a formal pipeline for students to get their education paid for in exchange for years of service in a Federal position requiring a security clearance and working on cybersecurity (kind of like ROTC or attending a service academy). It's not at all secret, and should probably be more well-known as an option for current or future college students. Here are the participating universities: https://sfs.opm.gov/Academia/Institutions
I'm also a career Army officer (product of ROTC myself) that has been sent to graduate school, as have many of my peers, with an obligation to bring that education back for additional years of service in positions that require it. At any given time, we have hundreds (thousands?) of active duty officers on college campuses all over the country.
coliveira
> the same used to apply to Slavic Studies departments
Yes, of course it does, look where the people in the State Department and related positions in foreign policy come from.
Der_Einzige
As someone who works in AI right now, I’ve rest assured that Langley and ft Meade have deeply co-opted and infiltrated most AI labs, with the goal of doing targeted surveillance of individuals who they worry are capable of the “lone wolf” AI disasters that the less wrong folks talk about. I unironically thinks it’s some glowies jobs at Langley or ft Meade to make sure no one at openAI, anthropic, etc is doing like gain of function research or bioweapon manufacturing with LLMs.
If the IC isn’t doing what I am describing, they’ve dropped the ball and probably ought to be doing it…
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rayiner
American academia is still full of spies and foreign agents: https://www.propublica.org/article/why-russian-spies-really-...
pvg
Butina's vector into anything resembling actual spying was American political advocacy groups and their surroundings, which includes some of academia. What's the parallel to what's being described in the article (American academics who did intelligence work during WW2)?
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grajaganDev
It is pretty wild that now 99% of spying is done through a keyboard.
HUMINT has become very difficult due to ubiquitous automated physical surveillance, social media and DNA.
To credibly run HUMINT, the agent must have a strong backstory.
The people doing the vetting also work for intelligence agencies with unlimited funding.
alganet
Is it?
If you lived your entire life exclusively around "spies", would you be able to tell? (don't think too much about it).
aleph_minus_one
> If you lived your entire life exclusively around "spies", would you be able to tell?
Yes: basically every large website is spying on you. :-)
grajaganDev
Yes - there is very little HUMINT happening nowadays. The end of an era.
I am going to pass on addressing your hypothetical question.
alganet
If spies were obvious and visible in a way that we could see their intelligence work, they would not be spies, they would be diplomats.
Do you get my point? If there is non-cybernetics human espionage activity, you are not supposed to see it. To people unaware of it, it looks like it doesn't exist.
In this scenario, all this shit about spies (movies estabilishing their personas, tall tales, especulations) is nothing but misdirection.
The espionage holy grail is not perfect tech, is perfect misdirection. Of course, the concept exists, but nothing is perfect.
Both of our discourses are hypothetical, we can't offer any proof. On what grounds can you dismiss mine? (don't worry about it, I don't want to win an argument).
metalman
Mao said that the first step in a succesfull revolution, was to kill all of the librarians and then famously (silent im) killed or re-educated all of the acedemics, with instructions to rebuild all modern technology and knowledge useing the chinese language and invent a whole new vocabulary for science and engineering but useing accepted international measuring systems, and latin for biology, called that one "the cultural revolution" The resulting edifice, now proving to be quite secure from outside observation. Early "travel writers" functioned as reliable spies, with many of them bieng, young, out of work,recent science graduates. Even Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle has hints. One of the bigest secret's the British maintained was determining a countrys hydrocloric acid production capacity, and as still the worlds most used industrial chemical is a reliable proxy measurement of a countrys total industrial capacity. The final piece to the British empire was the invention of the escapement, which gave them the abilty to out navigate anyone else, and thereby co-odinate military actions and concentrate forces where and when there targets were vulnerable. The current information wars are floundering due to a greater and greater difficulty in getting anyone to believe anything and are instead amusing themselves with cat memes, which the chinese residents of "red book" are demanding as proof of bieng a tictok refugee, which if provided ,they then offer to act as there personal spy.
quickthrowman
> Mao said that the first step in a succesfull revolution, was to kill all of the librarians and then famously (silent im) killed or re-educated all of the acedemics
Mao also said “We should kill all the sparrows” and then tens of millions of Chinese people died during the resulting famine.
jeffbee
I also remember when magazines didn't crash your tabs.
Anyway 3 Days of the Condor is a pretty good film.
charlieyu1
[flagged]
underseacables
Maybe for some but not all. China absolutely threatens Chinese Americans and their families - remember the Chinese police department's in America - but not sure that it is everyone.
DiscourseFan
[flagged]
23B1
And those graduates also subsequently make their way into the IC.
Der_Einzige
It’s telling the the comment you’re responding to, the best comment in the thread, is flagged and dead so fast.
They are clearly co-opting university departments around the nation to prevent left wing revolution or any meaningful anticapitalist stuff from happening. This has happened since at least the 1960s and a significant amount of the dumbest parts of “wokism” was planted by the IC into academia.
I’m so fucking tired of having to listen to yet more academic post modern neo Marxism from folks who are obviously connected to the IC. We know that you only use this rhetoric to knee cap actual “revolutionaries”.
DiscourseFan
my take is significantly more nuanced; orthodox Marxists aren't really very interesting nor do they have a good concrete understanding of things. Those French thinkers, particularly Derrida, have a legitimate response to "revolutionaries," and its not his fault that his philosophy was co-opted by the IC. For his part, I know scholars who are certainly outside that world, who are very radical and take a great deal of influence from him.
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calvinmorrison
Now the top spies against us are all Academics!