Why Everything We Think We Know About Spies Is Wrong (PDF)

1 **Why Everything We Think We Know About Spies Is Wrong** Elyse Graham Explores the Mundane Yet Dangerous World of Espionage During the Second World War / September 25, 2024 \[1\] In the movies, spies are usually ripped hunks who carry lots of gadgets, like James Bond and Jason Bourne. That's...

1 **Why Everything We Think We Know About Spies Is Wrong** Elyse Graham Explores the Mundane Yet Dangerous World of Espionage During the Second World War / September 25, 2024 \[1\] In the movies, spies are usually ripped hunks who carry lots of gadgets, like James Bond and Jason Bourne. That's rarely the case in real life, however. When the Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA, was established in haste at the outset of WWII, the spies tapped to join were librarians, professors, and researchers quite literally pulled from college campuses. \[2\] They proved to be uniquely suited to the job of discerning intel buried in mountains of documents, traveling to far-flung archives in occupied territories and weaseling their way in, and generally slipping under the radar as the bookish types they were, in order to gather and deliver highly sensitive information. Some of them were sent to learn the real rules of spy craft at the training schools of the Special Operations Executive, Britain's clandestine intelligence agency. \[3\] Some of the instructors there were burned agents who had returned from the field; others had never been agents themselves but had expertise in other fields that turned out to be remarkably useful for spy craft. The school's first explosives instructor was Bill Cumper, a boisterous character who walked around with his pockets full of bomb parts and "a detonator behind his ear as if it were a cigarette." Cumper was an army engineer who knew, as all army engineers do, that the world has two kinds of engineering journals: civil engineering journals, which explain how to build bridges, and military engineering journals, which explain how to blow up those same bridges. 2 \[4\] Paul Dehn, who taught propaganda, worked in civilian life as a reporter and movie critic. After the war, he wrote the screenplays for the movies *Goldfinger*, *The Spy Who Came In from the Cold*, and *Murder on* *the Orient Express*. Ralph Vibert, a lawyer, used his courtroom experience to teach students how to hold up under interrogation. Peter Folis, an actor, taught cover stories and disguises. And Nobby Clark, a wilderness survival instructor, used his experience with fighting poachers when he taught students how to become poachers themselves. A good poacher must know a variety of ways to set snares for rabbits, to stalk birds, to knock out fish, to hide his tracks so the authorities can't find him. Clark threw in instruction on how to set traps big enough to catch human beings. \[5\] SOE schools often had shelves of selected spy fiction available for students to read in their free time. The message seemed to be that, in the absence of a more established form of schooling, students could pick up tips on how to be spies by reading spy novels. SOE-approved titles included Helen MacInnes's *Assignment in Brittany* (1942), about an intrepid English spy who goes undercover in France; Geoffrey Household's *Rogue* *Male* (1939), about an intrepid English hunter who finds himself hunted by, and who then hunts down, a Hitler spy; and John Buchan's *The Thirty-Nine* *Steps* (1915) about an intrepid English amateur detective who foils a German invasion of England. \[6\] These novels favored high romance over the low practicalities of spy craft; yet they also managed to understate its dangers. As the students who moved through Beaulieu would come to learn in the field, the reality was far deadlier. Nora Inayat Khan, who at one point was the only uncaptured radio operator in all of Paris, was shot, together with three other women agents, in the Dachau concentration camp. Vera Leigh, who was a couture garment maker in civilian life, and whose instructors praised how nimble her fingers were when she wired up explosives, died a horrible death in the Natzweiler concentration camp, where a camp official injected her with a paralyzing agent and then threw her, alive, into a furnace. Andrée Borrel and Diana Rowden, two other SOE agents, died in the same way. One staffer estimated that half of the women who infiltrated France for the SOE died in action, and their deaths were often so cruel and degraded that no novelist would use the stories. \[7\] As a result, agents often carried suicide pills---so-called L pills, made from potassium cyanide---to give themselves an easier death than the Nazis would. As a general rule, you could have either a weapon or a cover, but not both; being caught with a gun or a knife, to say nothing of some 3 hybrid shoe-dagger-radio from a spy novel, would give the lie to whatever innocent cover story an agent might give her interrogators. But you could carry a newspaper and keep in your head the knowledge of how to fold it into a weapon. You could carry a matchbox and hope that your combat instructor was right about being able to use it to disarm a gunman. And you could carry a little rubber-coated pill in the lining of your handkerchief---and hope that, when the moment came, you had time to take it. \[8\] It might seem like a self-evident fact: spies don't act like spies; they act like normal people. But in novels and movies, which had furnished the students with all they knew about spy craft, spies *don't* act like normal people; they act in ways designed precisely to satisfy the expectations that an audience brings to a spy story. Perhaps that's why, again and again, the training at Allied spy schools stressed the difference between spy craft in fiction and in real life. \[9\] If you're a spy, and you want to use a secret passphrase to identify yourself to someone you're meeting in a park or on a street corner, you shouldn't choose a passphrase like "The black falcon flies at midnight," because everyone who overhears you will know you're a spy. They've all been to the movies. Instead, you should choose something belligerent, because then the call-and-response will seem like some loser picking a fight on a bad day. A real password exchange between spies might go: "Nice hat, chump." "What the hell's your problem?" \[10\] This was just one of many lessons on the real lives of spies that filled the curriculum at Beaulieu, which was designed to be dense, specific, and relentlessly practical. Instructors would have to counter popular ideas about spy behavior at every turn while training these spy craft novices, setting out guidelines from their first moments undercover---to potentially their last. \[11\] An agent, regardless of whether she is working in a neutral or an occupied country, should set about assembling a network of informants from the day she enters the field, the instructors at Beaulieu told their students. Most informants don't know they're informants, so the network should appear, even to its members, to be an innocent scandal society of people who like to gossip and are in a position to hear the latest stories: for example, bankers, café staff, clergymen, doctors, dressmakers, hairdressers, hotel staff, launderers, mail carriers, railroad employees, shopkeepers, or telephone operators. If the agent is *very* bold, she might make an informant of a police officer. 4 \[12\] The agent's method should not be to drill her informants with questions about sensitive topics---how gauche, how obvious---but rather to encourage "careless talk." Trifling gossip over cups of *café national*, the famously terrible rationed coffee of Occupied France. If she wants to know something specific, but doesn't want people to notice her asking questions, she should simply make incorrect statements while in the company of experts. Her companions will correct her, especially if they're men. \[13\] The scoops she gets from her informants will help her to survive, help her fellow agents to survive, and help the Baker Street Irregulars back home figure out exactly how to wage their irregular warfare. If the Germans roll out new planes or guns, what's new in the design? (No detail is unimportant. The British were able to distinguish different enemy air squadrons by counting the blades in the propellers.) Have more trains been moving through town recently? Have the police suddenly suspended the civilian use of some roads? Are lots of new soldiers in town? Are soldiers in town complaining about their leave being canceled? (Those last details might indicate preparations for a military strike.) \[14\] Women had a reputation for performing well as couriers, so the SOE and the OSS often reserved this role for women agents. Women didn't need to explain to the Gestapo why they weren't off fighting; women faced no danger of getting caught in a *rafle*, one of the periodic raids in which the Gestapo seized the local men who happened to be out on the street and put them on a train to work in some German factory; and women could carry around bulky baskets, big enough to hold, say, a twenty-pound radio transmitter, since a layer of vegetables atop their real cargo was enough to show they were simply out shopping. \[15\] (Once, a courier in France named Maureen O'Sullivan, while she was moving the radio to a new location on her bicycle, was standing at an intersection when a Gestapo agent leaned out of the window of a nearby car, gestured at the weekend suitcase leashed to her bicycle, and demanded to know what was in it. She gave him a dazzling smile and replied, "I've got a radio transmitter and I'm going to contact London and tell them all about you." He scolded her for joking: "You're far too pretty to risk your neck with such stupidities," and went on his way.) *Adapted from* [[Book] [ and] [ Dagger:] [ How] [ Scholars] [ and] [ Librarians] [ Became] [ the] [ Unlikely]](https://bookshop.org/a/132/9780063280847)[] [[Spies] [ of] [ World] [ War] [ II]](https://bookshop.org/a/132/9780063280847) *by Elyse Graham. Copyright © 2024* []