Stranger Than Fiction

December 2024

I Spy
by Dean Jobb

From the case against a high-ranking British agent who was branded a traitor to the Canadian-born Harvard professor touted as “history’s greatest spy,” here’s a roundup of three recent books that turn a spotlight on the shadowy world of espionage.

Anyone who doubts the pen can be mightier than the sword should read Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II (Ecco). Author Elyse Graham, a historian with degrees from Princeton, Yale, and MIT, tells the surprising and little-known stories of the bookish types—“mild-mannered professors and oddball archivists and restless librarians,” she calls them—recruited to help the Allies win World War II.

While some of these unlikely spies were sent into the field and trained to kill, most fought a shadow war using an unconventional weapon—information. “The war may have been fought on battlefields,” Graham boldly asserts, “but it was won in libraries.” William Donovan, a lawyer and war hero tasked by President Franklin Roosevelt in 1941 to build an intelligence agency from scratch, recruited hundreds of academics to the Research and Analysis branch of his Office of Strategic Services. They were dubbed the “Chairborne Division.”

Among them was Adele Kibre, the daughter of Hollywood set designers and holder of a PhD in Latin from the University of Chicago. She was “dark-haired, wicked-eyed, a classicist by training,” Graham reports, and her superpower was unearthing rare books and manuscripts from European libraries and archives, including the stubborn gatekeepers of the Vatican’s secrets. Before the war she crisscrossed the continent to photograph materials for the Yale Library and American scholars who were unable to travel. As a spy she was dispatched to neutral Sweden, where she collected and copied restricted Nazi publications and other materials of use to the war effort, devising ingenious strategies to avoid attracting attention to her many acquisitions.

One of the earliest recruits was Sherman Kent, a Yale history professor who “looked the part of a kindly campus professor” but “should have been a drill sergeant instead” (he was known to hurl pieces of chalk at students who fell asleep during his classes). He became the father of intelligence analysis, “the intellectual foundation of the present-day CIA.” Joseph Curtiss, another Yale man, was an unassuming English professor who was sent to Istanbul on an unscholarly mission to build a counter-espionage unit to recruit Axis spies as double agents. He wound up with the James Bond-like codename of Agent 005.

“So much of being a successful spy comes down not to fighting daggers or cool gadgets or ingenious stunts, but to classroom skills like paying attention, pattern-finding, puzzle-solving, and memorization,” the author argues. “It’s the kind of job a professor can excel at.” How important was information—and the people who knew where to find it—to the war effort? Graham cites an example: the Allies went to great lengths to obtain a German Enigma coding machine so they could eavesdrop on the enemy, unaware that plans and details of the typewriter-like device had been on file at the Patent Office in London since 1927.

Graham, who was born in Canada and whose grandmother worked in Canadian intelligence during the war, visited sites and scoured archives in Turkey, Austria, Stockholm, Britain, and across the US to research the book. Details of the challenges and dangers these scholars-turned-agents faced proved elusive, however, especially for women such as Kibre, whose roles were downplayed or unrecorded. While this is not surprising, given the clandestine nature of their work, Graham’s solution is.

When she faced gaps in the historical record, she simply invented scenes and conversations. “For the sake of continuity,” as she puts it, “I have included occasional imagined scenes in this book, which are always clearly identified.” Nonfiction writers often speculate about what their subjects may have said or done when the facts run dry, taking care to distinguish fact from conjecture. Graham, however, takes assumption and speculation to another level. Some of her imaginings run for several pages and include a description of Curtiss’s soul-searching as he prepares to kill an enemy agent—an assassination he was assigned, but there’s no evidence was ever carried out. Readers can decide whether injecting so much fiction into a work of nonfiction is a useful storytelling device or an unnecessary distraction.

Winthrop Pickard Bell was a graduate (Class of 1904) of Mount Allison University, a small liberal-arts school in the Canadian province of New Brunswick where I completed an undergraduate degree in history. He became a distinguished Harvard professor of philosophy, composed an ode to his alma mater that’s still sung during graduation exercises, and his wealthy family funded a fellowship that allowed me to spend a pleasant summer doing archival research. So I was surprised to learn that he was among the scholars who exchanged the safety of the Ivory Tower for risky missions as a spy.

Jason Bell (no relation) recounts Winthrop Bell’s exploits in Cracking the Nazi Code: The Untold Story of Agent A12 and the Solving of the Holocaust Code (Pegasus Books). Agent A12, as he became known, was “quite possibly history’s greatest spy,” the author claims, and “the first Western secret agent to fight the Nazis.” Bell dodged bullets in Berlin in 1919, in the chaotic months after the Armistice and returned to the fray in 1939 to publicly expose the Nazis’ genocidal plans—“Hitler’s Extermination Program,” he called it—years before the word Holocaust appeared in the press.

Bell was an unlikely secret agent. He was “loyal, honest, and fair,” Jason Bell writes, making him an odd fit for a job that demanded suspicion, stealth, and dishonesty. Born in Halifax, Nova Scotia, he was a member of the rowing team at Cambridge and was completing his doctorate at a German university when World War I broke out in 1914. Locked up as an enemy alien, he spent the war years polishing his German, teaching his fellow internees, and building a network of contacts.

When he was released in 1918, he briefed Canadian Prime Minister Robert Borden (a family friend) and Britain’s War Cabinet on the prospects for Germany’s postwar democratic government. Recruited into MI6, Bell returned to Berlin as a Reuters correspondent—the perfect cover, allowing him to nose around while sending intel to the British government. As he reported on the violent birth of the fragile Weimar Republic, he was privately warning the Allies to temper their demands that Germany pay restitution as punishment for starting the war. The population was starving, the economy was in shambles, and excessive demands would further destabilize the country. Bell had the ear of British Prime Minister David Lloyd George and the author presents convincing evidence that his intel softened the terms of the Treaty of Versailles.

Bell had less success when he warned of the rise of an antisemitic faction of right-wing conspirators—an alliance of bigots, warmongering industrialists, and out-of-work soldiers, soon to be known as the Nazis. His sleuthing foiled their plot to seize the Baltic states but his political masters refused to allow him to publicly expose the faction and its plans for a second world war and the extermination of Jews and other non-Aryans.

Bell’s career as a spy was brief. He left MI6 in early 1920 and landed a teaching job at Harvard. Hitler’s invasion of Poland in 1939, sparking World War II, was his chance to finally go public and expose the Nazi’s Final Solution in a Canadian magazine. The “code” Bell cracked was not an enemy cipher. His deep understanding of German history and politics enabled him to read between the lines of Hitler’s Mein Kampf to discern the German dictator’s horrific plans for global genocide.

Jason Bell, a philosophy professor at the University of New Brunswick, studied at the same German university as his subject and is the first researcher granted access to Bell’s papers, which document his long-secret exploits for MI6. His reconstruction of Agent A12’s espionage work is meticulous and Bell emerges as a quixotic figure who was not always saying what those in power wanted to hear. “Bell was the quiet hero who helped defeat the great evil,” the author writes, and his legacy “remains of crucial interest today, when antisemitism is on the rise and dictators dream of genocide.”

Charles Howard Ellis may be the most reviled spy you’ve never heard of. Dick Ellis, as he was known, was an Australian-born agent who rose to the top echelons of MI6 and helped the United States set up its intelligence service—the forerunner of the CIA—at the outset of World War II. He has the distinction of being MI6’s longest-serving agent, a career that spanned three decades, from the early 1920s to the Cold War. Today, however, a half-century after his death, his reputation is in tatters. He’s been condemned as one of the most despicable double agents in history, an equal-opportunity turncoat who fed information to both Hitler and Stalin and a traitor in the same league as the notorious British super mole Kim Philby.

Australian author Jesse Fink offers the first full-length biography of Ellis in The Eagle in the Mirror: The Greatest Spy Story Never Told (Citadel Press). It’s written “not as a traditional biography but as a sort of biographical cold-case investigation,” he explains at the outset. “The charges that Ellis was a traitor are scrutinized in an attempt to determine the truth about his guilt or innocence, once and for all.”

Fink, who has written extensively on sports and pop music and is the author of five previous books, faced a daunting challenge. “Ellis,” he notes, “was a complete mystery, a wraith.” Descendants and other zealous gatekeepers of the spy’s legacy denied him access to many of Ellis’s surviving personal papers. Much of the book, by necessity, is drawn from the memoirs of former colleagues and the work of other espionage experts and historians.

Ellis grew up in Sydney—not far from where Fink was living when he discovered his story—and fought on the Western Front during World War I. After being wounded several times, he was sent to Central Asia and was on the front lines as the Bolsheviks jockeyed for control of the region. An Oxford dropout, he spoke Russian, German, Farsi, and three other languages. He joined MI6 soon after the war, posing as a journalist or a Foreign Office employee as he gathered information and recruited agents in Berlin, Geneva, Vienna and Turkey.

Ellis was “one of the most remarkable secret service agents in the history of espionage,” noted British historian Phillip Knightley. “His adventures not only rival those of James Bond; he was James Bond.”

Fears that Ellis might be a double agent surfaced as early as 1940, about the time he was sent to New York City to help the Americans build an intelligence service. Fink guides his readers through a complex web of claims and counterclaims as captured spies, defectors, and double agents warn of a high-level traitor in British intelligence. Some sources identified the turncoat as “Captain Ellis” while others referred to a bent agent codenamed ELLI. Was this coincidence, proof of Ellis’s treachery, or an enemy plot to spread disinformation and neutralize one of MI6’s star agents?

The most serious allegations were lodged in the 1980s when journalist Chapman Pincher and spy-turned-author Peter Wright branded Ellis a traitor in tell-all books, creating a political uproar. In the 1987 bestseller Spycatcher, Wright described Ellis as “a venal, sly man” and claimed he was in the interrogation room when the master spy confessed to helping the Nazis and the Soviets. Wright’s unreliability—critics have condemned his book, with one branding it “implausible”—and the lack of evidence—Ellis’s purported confession has never surfaced—have ensured that the truth remains elusive. Fink deftly marshals the facts and sorts fact from fiction as he invites readers to decide for themselves whether Ellis was guilty or innocent.

Espionage is a world of smoke and mirrors, where deception and misinformation rule. Just ask Dick Ellis, who played the game and wound up a pariah. So perhaps it’s fitting that spy books tend to overstate the importance of their subjects. Are wars really won in libraries and not on the battlefield, as Graham claims? Plenty of veterans and military historians would scoff at the notion. Does Winthrop Bell, whose espionage career was measured in weeks, deserve to be ranked among the greatest spies in history? You be the judge.