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.
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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 spycraft at the training schools of the Special Operations Executive, Britain’s clandestine intelligence agency.
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 spycraft. 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.
It might seem like a self-evident fact: spies don’t act like spies; they act like normal people.
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, that wilderness survival instructor who tended game on the king’s estate, 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, which was reportedly one way he fended off poachers at Sandringham.
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 expy; and John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps (1915), then England’s most famous spy story, about an intrepid English amateur detective who foils a German invasion of England.
These novels favored high romance over the low practicalities of spycraft; 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.
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 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.
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 spycraft, 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 spycraft in fiction and in real life.
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?”
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 spycraft novices, setting out guidelines from their first moments undercover—to potentially their last.
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.
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.
Even the classic spy tropes, like invisible ink and secret codes, had to take the most prosaic of forms. The easiest forms to overlook.
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.)
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.
(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.)
Radio operators would give coded messages to couriers, and the couriers would deliver them to their associates. The women at Beaulieu learned how to write messages in code and invisible ink, so that they could leave letters in a “letter box” in a library or a bookstore or the forest for associates to find. They learned how to write “Innocent Letters” that appeared to be innocent billets-doux or picture postcards or reminders to do the shopping. They learned more about paper and ink than many archivists do in a lifetime.
If you want to write with invisible ink, you should use plain matte paper and a dip pen, making sure the nib never scrapes the page. You can make good invisible inks from alum powder (tell a pharmacist you have aching feet), lead acetate (you have swollen joints), or ammonia (you want to clean jewelry); or, in a pinch, you can spread Vaseline on a page, let it dry, set the page on top of the Innocent Letter with the Vaseline facing down, and apply your pen to the page on top.
Boffins at Liverpool University worked on devising ever more elaborate invisible inks, but here, as in most other aspects of spycraft, simplicity and shrewdness beat spy-fiction science. The enemy can’t find a secret message on a page they don’t look at, so crumple up a “blank” sheet with invisible ink on it and throw it next to some tree in the woods like an old food wrapper. Use handwriting instead of a typewriter, since a motivated sleuth can track down a specific typewriter. No need for a color-changing microdot to tell you whether an envelope’s been opened; just tip in some cigarette ashes, as if you were smoking as you wrote.
If you encrypt your message with a cipher, you don’t need a personal Enigma machine; you just need a book. Include in the letter a five-digit number—37016, for instance—that will tell your correspondent (who has agreed in advance on what book to use) the page (61), line (7), and first n number of words (3) to read as the secret message. If you don’t have two copies of the same book, you can just commit the same poem to memory, then use a more complicated system involving keywords from the poem to encrypt your message.
Once again, even the classic spy tropes, like invisible ink and secret codes, had to take the most prosaic of forms. The easiest forms to overlook.
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Adapted from Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II by Elyse Graham. Copyright © 2024. Available from Ecco, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.